For most marketers, your website has one primary goal: conversion. All other efforts, from building a social media following to raising brand awareness are really branches of the conversion tree. While each marketing performance metric is important in its own right, at the end of the day it’s your conversion rate that matters most. How can you improve conversion rates online? There’s no single quick fix, but here are five proven tips to help you get started. Take a moment to record the current rates of your most important conversion points. Then adopt these strategies, track your results, and watch as you improve conversion rates.
1. A/B Test Online to Improve Conversion Rates
Most marketers tweak their landing pages in an effort to improve conversion rates. However, many make consecutive changes instead of conducting an A/B test. Test landing pages by creating a PPC ad that sends users to two unique landing pages. Make each ad identical other than the landing page. Or test your Call to Action by trying a new color, font, or updated phrasing to measure the effect of this update.
Run the test for at least a week to see which page results in an increased conversion rate. Then nix the loser, find another variable, and conduct your next A/B test to improve conversion rates even more. Remember, you can run an infinite number of tests, but only test one variable change at a time.
2. To Improve Conversion Rates, Stop Speaking in Latin
Test the readability score of each page on your website. Believe it or not, even tech giants and B2B moguls should try to keep their reading comprehension levels under the 8th-grade standard. Though visitors may still be able to understand tougher reads, clear, concise writing will definitely improve conversion rates for any website. Avoid using overly technical terms to explain your product or service. Simple language typically works best and keeps the reader more engaged.
Extensions like Yoast or programs like Microsoft Word can help you locate lengthy sentences and passive tenses. Spotting “difficult” words is harder. Try this trick: search for “ion” and “ent” on each page. These words have a Latin origin and are good candidates for replacement. Style expert William Zinsser explains why:
“How do those Latin words do their strangling and suffocating? In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in -ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in -ent—like development and fulfillment. Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something. Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.”
Swapping these words for simpler structures and action-packed verbs makes a big difference. Visitors who don’t trip over your words will arrive at the conversion point with ease. Once there, the firm understanding they’ve earned will give them the confidence they need to convert.
3. Show Your Face
It’s no secret that brand trust leads to improved conversion rates. One of the most effective ways to build that trust is to “humanize” your brand. This won’t be a one-step process. To feel personally connected to your brand, consumers will need to feel that human element during each interaction. Try these humanizing tips:
- Add photos of employees to your About Us page. Include friendly headshots of executives along with mini-bios.
- Take the time to interact on social media. Social scheduling is a great time saver, but a quick comment or reply can transform your entire social persona into an interactive experience.
- Share behind-the-scenes photos of product development or employees hard at work.
- Have a company blog? Show the names and headshots of authors to connect them with their work.
- Send consumers a handwritten note from their sales rep or the CEO. There’s no need to pen thousands of notes by hand—digital handwriting can do the hard work for you.
4. Offer Free Shipping
If you’re a purveyor of physical products, this tip is for you. A study by Rejoiner found that 56% of eCommerce shoppers abandon their carts because of “unexpected costs.” The biggest one? Shipping and handling fees.
Try offering a free shipping option to cart abandoners to win them back. Automated marketing campaigns can deliver personalized messages to shoppers after they’ve left items in their cart for a specific period of time. Monitor results to see if shipping rates are killing your conversion rates.
5. Speed up to Improve Conversion Rates
What’s the average load time for your home page? Your service page? What about the dedicated landing pages you’ve created for your PPC ads? Lagging load times could be sabotaging your conversion rates. Use SEMrush, Google PageSpeed, or another speed analyzer to learn your average load time. Remember: mobile matters. When gauging your times, consider these facts from Google-owned DOUBLECLICK:
- The average mobile load time for sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections.
- 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
- Sites that load in 5 vs 19 seconds observe 25% higher ad viewability, 70% longer average sessions, and 35% lower bounce rates.
Once you’ve identified a speed issue, how can you get things moving? Start with these five ideas from Hubspot:
Increase Conversion Rate Results With These Speed-Boosting Tips:
- Optimize Images: Webmasters often upload huge images, then scale them down with CSS. They don’t realize that the browser still loads them at the original size. That means a 1000 x 1000 pixel image that’s scaled down to 100 x 100 will use 10x more loading time than it needs. Save on loading times and improve conversion rates by scaling before uploading.
- Browser Caching: Enabled browser caching allows you to temporarily store some data on a visitors’ computer. That way, they don’t have to wait for all site data to load every time they visit your page. Caching lets your computer “remember” certain items so they don’t have to reload each time you visit a specific webpage
- Compression: Think of compression like turning your site into a .zip file. It makes a big difference to load times. In fact, according to varvy, compression can knock off up to 70% from your HTML and CSS files! That’s a ton of data visitors won’t need to download.
- Optimize CSS: Each little bit of wasted data adds up, continually slowing down your site until its snail-pace speed starts scaring away visitors. Get rid of unnecessary code and minimize CSS files. This will delete extra spaces from the code to ensure files are as small as possible.
- Keep Scripts Below the Fold: Javascript files are capable of loading after the rest of your page, but if you put them all before your content, they will load before your content does. The solution is simple—place external Javascript files at the bottom of the page, just before the close of the body tag.
Related: Smart Strategic Marketing: Reduce Cycle Time With These 5 Tips
As you work to improve conversion rates, remember these wise words from statistician Karl Pearson: “That which is measured improves.” If you don’t already rely on a detailed spreadsheet to track your KPIs (including macro and micro conversions) today is the day to start. Use A/B testing whenever possible and compare your results to past efforts as your strategy evolves. Which of these tips do you plan to try to increase conversion rate results? Comment below to let us know!
Fintech Marketing Strategy: 10 Ways to Build Your Financial Brand
Financial services marketing has traditionally been a somewhat bland business offering—at least as far as consumers are concerned. But that's exactly why modern-day marketing tactics have had to adapt—to meet people's ever-changing needs. Fintech answers that call in...
The Essential Guide to Car Dealership Marketing
For auto industry marketers, there have been some important changes to negotiate over the past year. COVID-19 caused a decrease in sales and changed car dealership marketing habits. But there's good news. As the world begins to "reopen," more people will be looking to...
Geo-Targeted Marketing: What is it and How Can it Help Your Brand?
Location, location, location. You may have heard this phrase from a realtor emphasizing the value of a house or building based on its whereabouts. But did you know it can also apply to your brand's marketing strategy? Geo-targeted marketing, aka location-based...
These are all excellent tips. I am a sucker for free shipping, and tend to by more if I can get to a free shipping threshold lol
Tons of great advice here. I love the yoast readability tool so much.
These are really great tips! I love free shipping and always prefer shops that send their products without the shipping fees.
Free shipping is a really great way to attract customers. Those shipping costs really add up overtime. I also have to agree with keeping language simple. It can get really annoying trying to read when the wording is more complicated than it should be.
some great tips here that I really should be trying out for myself
Number 3 is so important. People would like to chat with other people, and when you show personality for your brand, it means more to prospects.
I love free shipping! I love Amazon for that very reason!
Great tips there. I should be running more A|B Testing on my site
I definitely agree with making things easier to understand! Sometimes things being too technical can scare people off. I also love free shipping, and think that it may even give people an incentive to buy something!
I have emptied a cart because of unexpected costs before. Free shipping is def. a good incentive!
This is great information. I love the show your face tip. People want to see the person behind the product.
I love free shipping when I am shopping online. I also like things to be concise and to the point without having to search to hard for what I am looking for. Customer support is another thing that is important to me.
I am so thankful for the readability score part of this post. I have always scored low – but couldn’t figure out why – and now I know!
Writing is not my forte to begin with (I’m a food photographer not an author!) so at least I know now what causes the score to go up or down! Thanks for this valuable info!
This is such a detailed tips! I agree that conversion rates are important part to how your website looks to attract business.
These are great tips! Fast and easy to read are definitely key!
I think it’s important that you think about how your website looks. It helps drive customers and it makes them stay as well.
Free shipping will always win my business. That is why I love having Amazon prime
Oh yes, when companies have free shipping, I jump all over that! I also love fast websites.
Easy to read is always better. If there is too much lingo, I lose interest FAST.