Achieving high conversion rates through conversion rate optimization (CRO) requires a combination of creativity, hard work, and extensive experimentation. It can often feel like taking shots in the dark, which is why having clear guidance on what works best can be invaluable.
This guide to CRO draws on years of experience helping clients from various industries develop systematic and repeatable strategies to enhance conversion rates. This article provides an easy-to-follow guide for measuring, testing and optimizing conversion rates for your website.
The guide also includes examples of best practices that can help you achieve your goals. With this straightforward approach, you can increase your conversion rates and enjoy greater success running your website.
1. Establish Your Goals
To start your conversion rate optimization journey, it’s crucial to define your website’s goals and the specific actions you want visitors to take that will generate value for your business. Once you have identified your goals, you need to evaluate visitor behaviour against them.
There are several common conversion goals you can set for different web pages, such as page visits, form submissions, clicks on links or elements, and custom conversions. Using performance data and consumer insights, you can create goals tailored to your unique requirements and track visitor behaviour to optimize your website and improve conversions. For example, if you want to evaluate the performance of a CTA button on a landing page, you can create a goal for it and monitor its effectiveness.
2. Complete Competitor Analysis
Performing a competitor analysis is crucial to gaining a competitive edge over your rivals. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses allows you to highlight your unique selling points and strengths while addressing their weaknesses. Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind that potential customers will research their options before making a purchase, including checking out your competitors. By conducting a competitor analysis, you can put yourself in your customers’ shoes and objectively evaluate your strengths and weaknesses against your competitors. This enables you to focus your efforts on ensuring that your website and product range are the best available options for potential customers.
3. Optimise Landing Pages
To improve your conversion rates, consider optimizing the layout of your critical pages. If you’ve made repeated efforts to improve your conversion rates without success, it may be time to introduce a radical change in your page design and layout. You can use insights from visitor data and best practices to guide these changes.
By leveraging tools such as scroll maps, mouse tracking, and click maps, you can gain insights into how visitors interact with your website. With these insights, you can create a page that is more engaging for visitors and more likely to drive conversions.
4. Enhance User Experience On Your Website
To enhance user experience on your website, it’s important to make site navigation simple and seamless. A well-designed navigation system ensures that visitors can easily find the information they are looking for and navigate through your site without confusion or frustration. This means organizing your site’s content in a logical and intuitive way, using clear and descriptive labels for navigation links, and avoiding clutter or excessive complexity. By keeping site navigation simple and intuitive, you can improve the overall user experience and encourage visitors to spend more time on your site.
To optimize your website for conversions, it’s crucial to remove all friction from the user experience and make it seamless for visitors to understand how to buy from you or take other desired actions. This means simplifying the user journey as much as possible, ensuring that key information and calls to action are prominently displayed, and minimizing distractions or unnecessary steps in the conversion process. By making it easy and intuitive for visitors to take action, you can increase the likelihood that they will convert immediately, leading to higher overall conversion rates and improved business outcomes.
5. Test Everything!
A/B testing is one of the most methodical ways to make data-backed optimizations to your website pages and reduce the risk of negative impacts on conversion rates. When making changes to your pages, it’s important to track and assess their impact before deciding if they are effective. A/B testing enables you to compare your hypotheses against the original version of a webpage to determine which version positively impacts conversions. By doing this, you can confidently deploy the winning version universally, relying on visitor behaviour to inform your decision rather than making assumptions. This data-driven approach helps to ensure that you are continually improving the user experience and maximizing conversion rates on your website.
Conclusion
Improving your conversion rate is a crucial step in increasing your marketing ROI. By converting more visitors, you can drive a higher impact on your top line from your existing traffic. The tactics outlined above are an excellent starting point for strategically improving your conversion rates. However, it’s essential to keep in mind that some tactics may be more effective for your business than others. To ensure success, it’s important to define your goals, gather data, and continuously run objective tests to determine what resonates with your target audience. By taking a data-driven approach and continually optimizing your conversion strategy, you can achieve sustainable growth and drive better results for your business.
