10 Tips to Improve Your Site Conversion Rates

Having high conversion rates is what all businesses want for their websites. It also means the website is effectively designed in the way that attracts a great number of visitors to take the desired action, which, for most eCommerce sites, is to buy a product or service. As a result, the more visitors are converted into customers, the more revenue for your business.

While marketing strategies, such as SEO, Google ads, social marketing, try to drive more traffic to your website, conversion optimization plans play an important role in turning your site visitors into customers.

To improve conversion rates on your site requires thorough research about user behavior when visitors explore your website. That said, there are tactics that encourage more and more visitors to become your loyal customers. This article will outline 10 tips you can carry out to optimize conversion rate.

1. A/B testing

A/B testing (split testing) is the method that you create different versions of your page with some tweaks and test to see which works better with higher conversion rates. Due to the fact that your audience is unique, what you think works well might turn to be a bad choice when it comes to your audience. Therefore, the best way to figure out what works well and what needs further improvement is to do A/B testing.

To split testing, you can use Google Content Experiments of Google Analytics which is a free and easy to use tool.

First, set up your goal and the percentage of traffic you want to send to experiment. Then input the destination URLs of the original page you want to test and of other variations. You will be given an experiment code to add to your original page. When all is setup, you’re ready to run start the testing and see which is performing better.

2. Create urgency for immediate action

Urgency notifications like “There’re only 3 items left” or “The last day to get the discount” have proved to be effective in urging people to buy right away. When there’s a specific deadline or scarcity for special offers, people will tend not to delay but take the buying process immediately for they don’t want to miss out the chance.

However, be careful to choose a proper type of urgency depending on your products or services. For example, if you offer digital products which never run out of stock, using the statement saying something like “5 items left in stock” is not gonna work and can cause reverse effect to your business.

3. Show the benefits

A landing page that sells has not only good design but also excellent contents. Contents are what your customers will read and are your opportunity to persuade people why they should choose your products over the ones from other competitors. So, what are the key takeaways to create great contents for your website? Here are some:

• Show value proposition: What is value proposition? It is a statement of value you will give your customers. It convinces users how your products better solve and improve customers’ problems than similar offerings. Having a specific value proposition will help differentiate your company from other competitors, show your uniqueness and strengths. Also, visitors will find it easier to understand your company, your products, and to determine how your offerings will help them improve the situations.
• Great copy to make it easy to read: Once you have set up your value proposition, deliver it in a way that all visitors can read it and understand easily. This is very important as they are your potential customers and the target you want to communicate with. If your messages are written in terminological terms that only economy majored people can understand, you have failed in delivering your values to a lot of potential customers.
• More benefits, fewer features: Most importantly, people buy why you do it, not what you do it. This is consistent with the value proposition focus. Your customers are more interested in the benefits your products offer than the features. Let’s say one of your item has 20 features, many of which are similar to other products in the market but some of which are different. These don’t make much sense until you take advantage of the unique features to talk about the benefits your customers will get using your product with such advancing functionalities.

4. Use Call To Action

Each page on your website should be designed to serve a specific purpose and navigate users towards a desired action. In such situation, the presence of Call To Action (CTA) is to finalize the our navigation. CTA can be in the form of a link or a button, however; the latter is preferred and easier to draw the attention of readers. How to create good copy for these CTA buttons that optimize the click through rate and where to put them in a page are the concerns to provoke an immediate response from users.  

A CTA is usually an action verb that creates a sense of urgency like “Shop Now”, “Buy Today” or “Learn More”. The length of text should be short.

Moreover, pay attention to CTA colors of button and text. Each color has a unique meaning and evoke different feelings, and also choose the color that is in harmony with other elements in the page. CTA text should be a bit bigger than other text in the page to capture attention. In order to make your CTA button catch the eye, create a sufficient space around it to make it outstanding from the rest.

5. Offer proof

People won’t trust whatever you claim on your website if it seems unreliable. Therefore, information posted on your site should be backed up with sources.

• Testimonials: Customer reviews and ratings for your products should come from real customers and about the real experience they had. Internet users are clever and they can realize if such testimonials are real or just made up by your content team.
• Social proof: This is a great way to show visitors how many customers have bought and used your products. The more customers you have, the easier it might be to persuade potential customers to buy products from your company.
• Case studies: Real experience shared by other customers is the best evidence to show how your products benefit customers with their business.

6. Create relationship with customers

For many visitors, they don’t buy your products the first time they visit your site. Asking visitors for the purchase too fast might cause you to lose many sales. Especially, for high value products that request a thorough research process, you need to give your customers more time to make the final decision. To turn these visitors into your customers, it’s a need to establish a good engagement with them, make them commit and trust your brand.

For digital products, a demo version or free trial that allows users to try your products before purchase is a good idea to improve conversion. Besides, a blog with helpful articles providing insightful information about the industry and products is another engagement method to build trust of users in your site. Sometimes, sales do not come immediately, but require time and communication effort.

7. Easy & smooth checkout

With the extreme convenience the Internet offers to its users, customers nowadays are becoming less patient. What does this have to do with conversion rates optimization? When a visitor has picked his favorite items and proceeded to checkout, make it as easy as possible for him to pay for the products.

There are some tips you can use to improve the checkout flow. The first is to have a clear instruction, guiding what customers have to do in each step. As mentioned, people are very easy to give up complicated process. Once customers enter this flow, it’s not recommended that they have to figure out themselves how to purchase from you. The second point is to make users fill in as few fields as possible. In your signup form, instead of asking a lot of different fields, just request important information that you will ever need for further engagement. Signup via Facebook, Twitter, or Google account is another good choice to simplify the process.

8. Refund guarantee

People tend to be more willing to pay for your products if they can return and get the refund in case the products do not meet their expectation or something went wrong. Make sure the refund policy is well communicated so that your site visitors would feel more secure going with your business.

9. Sell more with Upsell & Cross sell

Upselling and Cross selling are to encourage your customers to buy more based on the previously purchased items. If done smartly, these methods can increase your revenue. Particularly, when a customer buys an item, your website will recommend related products that the customer might be interested in. Moreover, offering money-saving product packages can motivate people to buy more and as a result, you get more out of an average customer.

However, above all, customer experience is what that matters, so make sure these tactics are carried out carefully and are relevant to the items they relate to. Otherwise, customers will find your product recommendation irritating which might negatively affect their purchase.

10. Visitor retargeting

To recapture visitors that almost become your customers is an effective method to improve conversion rates. According to a research, 68.63% is the average cart abandonment rate of eCommerce stores. To win back a fraction of these visitors is a positive increase in your sales volume. A shopping cart is abandoned when a customer adds some items to the cart but then leave your site before check out selected items.

There might be some reasons for their going away, but it’s clear that they have the purchase intention at that time and you shouldn’t give up on them after only one attempt. In this context, you can set up automation emails sent after a few hours of abandoned cart with a CTA to help them finalize their purchase right away. Another way to recapture almost conversions is ad retargeting. You can use Facebook ads or PPC ads to show the ads of your site to the visitors who had previously came to your website. By viewing these ads, visitors will be reminded of your site and likely to return to finalize the purchase.

Conclusion

These are 10 tips to improve conversion rates. Hope these ideas can help you add more effective measurements to your conversion optimization plan. The tips don’t end here, if you have tried other methods and seen positive effect to your conversion, feel free to add them in the comments.