In the online marketing sphere, the metrics are the essential elements to determine the results of the campaigns.
The metrics will give you the real idea about whether or not your online marketing campaigns were worthy enough to generate the results that you were aspiring.
Without metrics, everything related to digital marketing is in the marketers’ mind. Everything that we say before the campaign is our interpretation of the market not proved by the results.
You can anticipate like what is the age range would be the most buyers, which gender would be the major buyers, and which geographical location would be the most profitable. However, the results would be the ultimate authority to lead you to reality and provide a reality-based perspective to make informed decisions for your digital marketing activities.
Most of the times, marketers seek to bring more traffic to a website or bring engagement to a social media post to create awareness and let users know about the brand.
Then, after awareness, marketers try to pursue those prospects and convert them as consumers and returning visitors to their websites.
In the end, the goal is achieved, and conversions are made online. However, how long can you keep doing performing the same thing and expect improved results?
Since your techniques and campaign start to deliver, certainly you would expect more website traffic, which gives more leads and in comparatively lower investment. That’s when conversion rate optimisation comes into the picture.
As just more than 20% of companies are happy with their conversion rates, conversion rate optimisation become crucial yet essential for companies to sustain their profit margins.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion rate optimisation is the process of enhancing the rate of visitors converting as customers. It is a process of optimising ensuring that maximum people who are visiting the website like your business and convert as buyers.
The process of conversion rate optimisation is a holistic approach where you deeply analyse the past results, current market trend, your target consumers and edit your website to generate maximum conversions.
Moreover, try to align your other marketing activities like social media and email marketing campaigns, that bring customer to the buyer’s journey and convert them as buyers in the end.
For example, you are currently receiving ‘X’ number conversions. Now some visitors still add your products to cart, but very few people complete the payment and purchase the product.
So, your objective is to edit your website or product description so that users get excited enough and trust your product and finally purchase it.
In this example, the objective is to find out why people leave their information on the checkout page, but fewer end up purchasing it. It might be possible that your checkout procedure is complicated, there is a better option in the market, your pages load extremely slowly, the user forgets about adding your product to cart and left the website or the product description on your website is not persuasive enough.
So, your job is to determine how to make the remaining users complete the purchase and ensure that more people don’t end up leaving your website after adding the products to the cart.
This is what conversion optimisation is all about.
What are The Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation
Better Understand Your Users
For any business, it is essential to understand the consumers and comprehend what is going on inside their minds while they interact with your website. Find out what are their expectations and how they respond to your website.
Once you find out, align your designing and advertising activities to serve the users and provide an excellent user experience.
Even though you run a thorough research and in-depth analysis about your ideal consumers, but through conversion rate optimisation, you can have a closer look at consumers’ behaviour.
Then, understanding the users will give you a clear roadmap of how to develop a refined buyer persona, how to target those customers and make them perform your desired action.
Increase The Value of Your Website
Conversion rate optimisation can help your website become the best arsenal of your online marketing activities.
Since you are improving conversations on your website, you are enhancing the value of your website and making it conversion magnet for your business.
Once you optimise the user behaviour of the website, everything like images, content or videos that are present of the site will serve a purpose and contribute towards more conversions on the website.
Get More Sales
The ultimate objective behind any business activity is to generate more sales and make money, and conversion rate optimisation has the power to skyrocket your sales to a whole new level.
Through rigorous research for conversion rate optimisation, you have identified and rectified the areas that were holding the visitors to become consumers. Now, you have made a bridge for your business to achieve thriving success online.
You will get more conversions at a quick rate, which is excellent for your ROI. Means, you will get better profits and more consumers at an affordable price.
The cost per lead for your business would dramatically be improved in your favour. You would spend a lot less money on acquiring customers for your business, so the overall amount spent on the conversion would be optimised, which is the objective of conversion rate optimisation.
Get More Organic Traffic
When you are optimising your website for better conversion rate, you are indirectly also helping your website for getting more SEO value.
More conversions are only possible when your website gives excellent user experience to its users who would stay more on your webpage, find out more about your brand and eventually buy your stuff.
This way, the users would click more on your search engine result pages and spend more time on the website’s pages. Hence, Google would observe less bounce rate, so conclude that the website is serving well to the users. Therefore, your website’s ranking would be improved and brought up in the SERP in due time.
How to Improve Conversion Rate
To get all the benefits for your business through conversion rate optimisation, here are the techniques that you can execute.
Understand The Interests of The User
The metrics in Google Analytics panel can surely give you the idea of where users are coming from, where they are spending most of the time on your website, which web pages have got more clicks, and what are the number of leads and conversions on the website.
However, these 3rd party tools cannot showcase what actually happens just after the user lands on your webpages.
How they feel after landing on the website, where is their focus lie and what buttons and text that they refer the most while scrolling your webpages are crucial information.
So, to get an idea about these minor yet valuable engagements, you can generate heatmaps report that would tell you everything that you know about the user behaviour on your webpages.
Heatmaps will clear your confusion through different colouring parts of the page to tell you where users skip, stop and read your content.
Moreover, it will show which areas do the users focus the most so you can determine the ideal place for the CTA buttons to get maximum conversions.
To get all of these ideas, you can try different heatmap tools like Crazy Egg’s Heatmap tool, Mouseflow, and Inspectlet.
Run A/B Test
Through A/B testing, Barak Obama raised an extra $60 million. Let that number sink in.
So, after getting the heatmap for your website, you would know almost everything about user behaviour. So you can decide to have a couple of things to edit for your website.
However, you cannot apply all the changes in a single edit. Even if you do, you won’t get the clear picture of what made the users purchase your product and who was the actual winner.
So, to get more profound insights, you need to test all the ideas that you gathered from heatmaps and deploy them on different versions.
Then check which version of the website works the best for your business goals. You would know which variation of the design brought the maximum result.
Then, you can also decide to combine several high performing elements into a single page to get the conversion-magnet for your business.
However, remember to test as much as you can. As per a fact, companies that have successful conversions in a given year is performing 50% more tests online.
Ask Right Questions in the Form
It is a general belief among the self-proclaimed marketing gurus that lesser form field gives more conversions and high-quality lead. Well, that is not the case, as per this case study.
Your question in the form must be extremely relevant to the type of conversions you are aspiring to get.
If you are getting email subscribers, then no need to ask for mailing address and credit card number. Conversely, if you are selling an online course of sending goods through your eCommerce site, you need to ask for address and credit card details for better customer experience.
If you are asking too many unnecessary information, then users would feel bored and disinterested with your website because of the amount of effort they have to make to act.
So, the ideal practice is to ask for as less information as possible from the visitors while they are performing a particular task.
Use High Contrast Colors for CTA Buttons
Your CTA buttons must be prominent in your landing pages, and it must be appealing enough to grab the user’s attention whenever they are scrolling through your page.
Based on the colour palette of the user interface, try implementing contrast colours. In fact, HubSpot has noted that green and Red colours of CTAs improve conversions on the webpage by 30%.
Introduce Scarcity
To improve the conversion rate on your website, let users know that the offer is available for very less time.
Give them a reason why the visitors must take action now instead of after a few days.
You can add discount codes or other introduce valuable add-ons to make people buy instantly from your device.
You can also depict the limited stock message and show how many stocks are left at the moment to let people indirectly know that they would miss the product if they don’t act quickly.
People avoid the feeling of fear of missing out, so if you can show that what they miss if they don’t take instant action, you will get more conversions.
Moreover, if something is rare, that makes it more valuable explicitly, and the product’s rarity will encourage your users to instantly grab the offer and perform the conversion on your website.
Add Social Proof
In the era of the digital world, businesses and products which are reviewed and acclaimed the most would thrive.
To make your users believe in your brand, they must know that you are subject matter expert and you know what you are doing for your clients.
So, ask your existing customers and clients to write testimonials and share their experience of working with you on your webpages.
You can add these testimonials in your webpages to let customers know that people love your work and they believe in you.
You can also apply for different certifications or upload awards and recognition to show the credibility of your skills. Through awards and recognition, your business would appear as the authority and can influence people’s buying decision.
You can also add trust badges of the leading websites to show the authenticity of your venture.
Add Chatbot Support
Chatbots are your sales executives who work for 24×7 and 365 days by entertaining users queries and providing real-time solutions at a quick rate.
They would streamline the user experience and give information that users expect to make them feel comfortable and eventually convert them as consumers.
37% of user expect to get chat support to solve all their queries in an emergency. If a brand uses the chatbot, the brand’s website visitors would 10x more likely to click the content and 5x more likely to engage. (Source)
Even though you have uploaded terms and conditions or FAQ pages, very few people go there and actually read all the points listed on the page.
At that time, the chatbot would be the helping hand and users would feel that the website is sincere enough to give them chatbot support. Users would think that there is someone always available for them and address their questions.
Improve Website Experience
The 1-second delay of the loading speed of your pages can cause a 7% drop in conversion rates. (Source)
So, ensure that users can seamlessly access from anywhere and anytime. Verify that your website works appropriately through mobile phones too to cover more audience for your business.
Conclusion
Let me know in the comments about what do you think about the conversion rate optimisation and which general practice that you follow for your website’s CRO activities.
