There are over 1.7 billion websites hosted on the internet. With so many businesses relying on their online portal to stay afloat, conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is vital.
Once you’ve nailed SEO, it’s critical to convert visitors to your website otherwise all the effort and money you spend getting them there is for nought.
That hurts!
To cheer you up, consider this: customers that don’t convert are your most important customers – they show you where CRO is needed.
Because the digital landscape evolves, marketers need to intermittently tweak web strategies and envision broader activities which encompass digital marketing activities across multiple touch points.
According to Google, today’s consumers are goal-orientated and don’t want to waste time looking for information. They’re already typing questions into search engines.
The onus for brands is to ensure consumer questions are answered swiftly. Then you have to convince visitors to purchase your products. This is where CRO strategies come to fruition.
Your brand should have a unique value proposition and demonstrate you are trustworthy. What’s more, your conversion optimisation strategy needs to tie-in with your brand objectives.
For example, if you’re looking to secure loyal customers, build a community that has a common interest. Keep your customers informed through content, newsletters, email, social media updates and events.
However, the important thing to remember about CRO is that your strategy should focus on the customer journey. CRO is not solely about optimising the pages on your website but delivering an overall user-experience (UX).
Combine CRO and UX Strategies
CRO and UX go hand-in-hand. CRO can be used to improve the usability of your website and great UX leads to more conversions.
It is important to remember that the priority of search engines is to deliver websites to end-users that not only provide the information or products they need, but also deliver an enjoyable shoppable experience.
Visitors should be able to navigate your website with ease – especially on mobile. They want to be able to find information they want easily and intuitively know how to take the next step.
CRO dictates UX. It enables you to glean a deeper understanding of how visitors use your website and shows you what is preventing them from pressing the buy button and checking out.
When you nail UX across your omni-channel platforms, you move customers deeper into your sales funnel.
The first place to start is by optimising your home page and landing pages. If you’re already getting traffic through your landing pages, you already know where your visitors are in the customer journey.
Ask yourself the following:
- Are you answering the right questions at the right stage in the customer journey?
- Are you showing visitors where to go next?
- Is there enough evidence on your website and social media networks to convince consumers you are trustworthy and sell quality products and services?
- Where are the obstacles on your website?
To eradicate sticking points, it’s important to understand what internet users want from a website. Or more importantly, what they don’t want.
This is what they don’t want:
Pop-ups: This is hardly surprising. Pop-up ads are disruptive and often irrelevant. 73% of consumers disapprove of intrusive ads. Google doesn’t like them either.
Slow speeds: Google insights indicate that 53% of websites are abandoned if they have not loaded in three seconds. On mobile, the most you get is five seconds. If your bounce rate is high, your SEO ranking will suffer.
Complicated checkout process: A study by Splitit reveals that 87% of online shoppers jump ship if the checkout procedure is too complicated. Consumers do not want long-winded checkouts so don’t ask for details other than the essentials.
Understand your audience
If the key to improving CRO is providing a good UX, it’s important to know what your customers need. What are their motivations, pain points, online behaviours and attitudes?
Whilst the wealth of web analytics can help you build a picture of your audience, they don’t lend much information to understanding your audience.
CRO and UX researchers confirm the best way to understand your audience is to interact with them directly. Give your visitors a platform and they are more likely to express their opinion.
Customers want a two-way conversation. Oftentimes, browsing a website can feel one-sided. A survey conducted by Salesforce reveals that 54% of customers say brands need to transform how they engage with customers.
Social media has played an important role in bridging the gap between brands and consumers. Invite consumers to complete a short survey in return for a reward.
Chatbots are also becoming more commonplace. Although consumers prefer to speak with humans rather than automated messages, chatbots are changing the expectations of consumers.
Remember that visitors want information fast. Now that artificial intelligence is improving, “conversational chatbots” are becoming more useful and less frustrating.
Gartner predicts that 85% of online interactions will take place without contact with another human. The company predicts automated live chat and self-service options will become the norm.
Installing a live chat encourages your customers to speak with you. These interactions are valuable sources of information and help you to understand exactly what your customers need.
You should be using this information to craft a content strategy and improve the UX of your website. As a result, you should expect to see a significant improvement in your CRO.
Optimise for Mobile-First
With Google taking a Mobile-First approach, brands have no choice other than to follow suit. Your entire website strategy has to be optimised for small screens.
According to Google, the majority of searches are conducted on mobile devices even when a desktop is probably nearby – such as in the home or at work.
When optimising your website for mobile devices, you need to identify with visitors from the first moment. The lack of landscape does not allow for long introductions.
The headline of the page should get straight to the point. What information can users expect to find on that page?
Whilst siders, banners and menus only take up a small section of a webpage on a desktop, these are the first things you see as a mobile user. Do they provide sufficient information?
To engage visitors from the first moment, sliders and banners should be optimised with relevant information.
UX experts also recommend adding tools and processes that make using mobile phones easier. Consider adding the following:
- Search filter: Consumers that want information quickly will typically use the search tool so position the search filter in a fixed menu bar at the top of the screen.
- Provide synchronised payment options: Not all customers feel security measures are good enough on mobile phones and prefer to input credit card details from their desktop. Give buyers the option to finish payment on another device without having to go through the entire payment process again.
- Add a zoom-in feature so buyers can examine images closely
- Enable vertical and horizontal orientation
The move to the Mobile-First index will also have a significant impact on your content strategy. Even if you have a responsive website that turns in a decent performance on mobile devices, you will probably need to tweak your existing content.
Make your content scannable
Content not only has to provide relevant information. It also has to be engaging. Whilst content should be well-written throughout, the most important aspect is that it’s scannable.
Statistics reveal that time-conscious internet users only spend an average of 15-seconds reading your content – especially consumers in the consideration stage.
Ironically, this is the stage when brands typically offer the most information in order to cover all the points. The strategy to capture attention and provide sufficient information is to highlight the most relevant information so that it stands out on the screen.
The Mobile-First index has made content distribution something of a paradox. Long-form content continues to achieve the highest ranking in search engines, but people do not want to read a 2000-word feature on a mobile device.
Creating scannable content enables you to overcome this problem. Other than including relevant information in subheadings, also use images to tell a story, highlight key text in bold and include bullet points, pull-quotes and H3-tags.
Crafting strong messages and effectively communicating your key selling points helps visitors to make a quick decision. Even if they are not ready to buy on earlier visits they should still feel as though they want to explore the next steps on your website.
With each step, your content should be trust and reinforce what consumers already know. When you connect with shoppers on an emotional level, they feel they have more control over their purchasing decisions and steer towards brands that resonate with them.
A fatal error with marketing content is to make it scream “BUY FROM ME”. Consumers are turned off by promotional copy because they don’t trust traditional advertising.
Whilst you will still get away with some marketing gimmicks such as FOMO (fear of missing out) – by creating scarcity and urgency – marketers have to be very subtle in the way you present sales content.
Provide social proofing
Consumer trust in brands is at an all-time low. The fact of the matter is that people trust what their peers have to say more than what brands tell them.
Whilst the most common forms of leveraging social proof is through testimonials, reviews and trust icons, too many brands have manipulated these trust factors to the point they are no longer reliable evidence.
In today’s climate, brands have to adapt testimonial strategies to earn social proof. The best methods of earning credibility are celebrity endorsements and influencer marketing because they also give you a path to a wider audience.
However, this path is an expensive one and often beyond the budget of small businesses. There are, however, cost-effective ways of earning social proof such as:
- User-generated content
- Offer your existing customers incentives to write reviews
- Publish reviews as content
- Create a survey and share the results
- Publish content on third-party websites
- Let people know how many people use your product
- Launch a referral program and encourage word-of-mouth advertising
- Encourage people to engage with you on social media
- Publish case studies
- B2B companies should advertise their customer logos
When consumers trust your brand, your conversion rates will improve organically. There is no need for aggressive advertising. All you really have to do is present the facts about how great your customers think you are.
Moving forward with CRO
Now you’ve reached the tipping-point in your digital marketing cycle and realised it’s time to move past the vanity metrics and start converting, you can see how you probably need to make tweaks to your website.
CRO is a process that needs to become intertwined with SEO and UX. It involves helping consumers feel as though they are in control when they visit your website.
When you analyse your website and fashion a buyer persona, you will probably find a number of easy fixes, even though executing them may be time-consuming.
On the other hand, if you are driving traffic, but nobody’s buying, investing the time to re-engineer your website and create a shoppable experience, will be time well spent.
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