Conversion Rate is the percentage of traffic which your site converts into sales for eCommerce and enquiries for non-eCommerce sites. It is a key metric for judging the performance of your site as the higher your conversion rate is the more traffic arriving at your site are purchasing your products.
It makes sense to work on improving your conversion rate through Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) as it is hard enough in today’s online climate to bring traffic to your site, you need to make sure that the traffic you are getting has the very best chance of converting.
We have put together 10 fantastic tips to help you improve your conversion rate and make the absolute most from the traffic you are working so hard to bring to your site.
Recapturing Cart Abandonment’s
One of the biggest conversion leaks for an eCommerce site is the shopping cart. It is given that a percentage of users will abandon their cart. A way to help these users to convert is to redirect them back to their cart if the arrive back onto the site via re-marketing or email marketing. This presents the users with a second chance to convert and will hopefully prompt them to complete the transaction they had earlier abandoned.
Begin CRO Closer to The Money
Start your CRO work as close as possible to where your site takes money from the customer. Set up your checkout page to its absolute best then work backwards through the process from there, next optimising the cart page and then your product pages until finally you reach your homepage. The reason for doing this is a 5% increase in conversions on your checkout page is always going to mean more money in the till than a 5% increase in your homepage will.
Choose One Metric When A/B Testing
If you’re A/B testing on your website (and you really should be) choosing a single metric to judge your success of your test is the best way to decide which variation is the best. The reason for this is by judging using multiple success factors can often skewer results as signals can become mixed for each variation which makes making a clear decision difficult. For eCommerce sites revenue per visitor is normally a fantastic metric to use. To those experienced in A/B testing this may seem strange to judge off one metric but it will make your optimization decisions a lot simpler.
Focusing On the Customers Who Will Buy
It sounds like a really obvious statement but there are a lot of businesses out there who are trying to convert 100% of the traffic coming to their site. They look at their social metrics and see 800 visitors coming through twitter with an 80% bounce rate and think the immediately need to get that traffic to stick around. Now I am not saying it is a bad thing to try and keep that traffic on your site and make it convert but whilst you are working on this a smaller number of legitimate prospective customers are landing on your site and are not being focused on. The rule should be to focus on those who are most likely to convert first even if this number is a smaller section of your overall traffic.
Always Gather Feedback
Never be afraid to ask your visitors their opinions. Ultimately it is them who are going to convert so finding out their opinions and what is most likely going to make them convert is extremely valuable information to have. Visitors can give you information that statistics can never provide, the key is to channel the information and use it correctly. Do not ever base major changes off the opinion of one visitor but take every comment on board then make informed decisions based on the opinion of several visitors.
Making Sure Your Data Is Quality
CRO is no secret in the marketing industry or for that matter in the business world. It is always best to think that if you are looking at CRO for your business then your competitors are looking at CRO for theirs. So how do you get a head of your competitors in this department? One of the best ways to do this is by ensuring you are using the very highest quality of data available to you. This practise involves using the above tip and interacting with your visitors and gaining their opinions as well as making sure all the metrics you are tracking through platforms such as analytics are 100% accurate so you can make the decisions that matter with the very best information available to you.
Finding The Balance Between Testing More and Testing Less
Most companies are guilty of not testing enough and a lot of the companies who do test a lot are testing so many variables that the information they are gathering is often water downed due to the amount of variable data they have tested.
The best scenario is to be doing lots of testing on the variables that matter. How do you figure out which variables matter though? It is quite simple you test that as well, test focusing on set variables and see what works best. You can also imagine your site from a customer’s perspective which a lot of the time will provide the answers which you are looking for.
Don’t Be Afraid of Making Assumptions
Sometimes the very best CRO results are founded off the back of an assumption which has no data to back it up. I know that sounds strange but making an assumption and then trying to find the evidence to support these assumptions through testing can be a fantastic way to break down some of the barriers that people can find coming from the higher ups in the company.
Declutter Your Site
Not everything that is on your site will be helping conversions. Sometimes stripping your site back can be the best way to improve conversions as there is less distracting visitors from what you have brought them to the site to do and that is convert. Obviously this should be done with vigorous A/B testing, do not just start hacking things off your site as you could take away some of the attributes which are leading to the conversions you are currently receiving.
Another great reason for performing de-cluttering tests is that you can test without having to take the time to create anything new. Which makes this testing a very quick and easy tactic to use.
When Asking What Always Ask Why
Whenever you or a member of your team makes a suggestion for an addition or a change to the website always ask why that change should be made. This will allow you to focus on the ideas that will have the best impact as 90% of the time an idea suggested that doesn’t have a clear why answer for creating it is something that generally will not help increase conversions on the site. It will also save time and allow you to prioritise the changes that matter. You should always consider the impact to your overall SEO strategy when making any changes to your website as it may aid one aspect but then be detrimental to another.