Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide
Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide – Boost Website Sales By 50%
Table of Contents
If you have a team of marketers or a team under you that is responsible for marketing, and you’re looking to increase sales on your website, then this article is for you. After reading this article, you will learn what conversion rate optimisation is.
You’re also going to learn about the conversion rate optimisation formula which you can use to optimize your marketing activities (yes, there is a formula!) and then I’m going to walk you through the conversion rate optimisation processes. This is based on practical, real life experience of conversion optimisation that I’ve run with various companies, big and small.
And at the end of this video, you would learn actionable tips that you can take back to your team and your organisation, and you can start implementing on your websites.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
When people land on your website, they usually come to you through SEO, PPC, social media or other channels, even television. Most websites are not configured in a way that would ensure that when people land on the website they go all the way through to the final thank you page.
Conversion rate optimisation is the process that ensures that you get traffic from expensive PPC campaigns, social media campaigns, television ads or PR activity to your website, the subsequent process by which you ensure that they get through the various pages on you website to that final ‘thank you’ page where they then convert and give money to your organisation. This process is what conversion rate optimisation is about.
So, conversion rate optimisation is complimentary to web analytics. Web analytics is going to tell you what is happening on your website. It’s not going to tell you why those things are happening. It’s not going to tell you why people behave in certain ways on your website. The ability to know why people behave in the way they behave, and the ability to make sure you are able to nudge and trigger people’s behaviour towards what you want them to do on your website, that is conversion rate optimisation. It’s about getting people to buy and removing all the hesitation, all the friction points, all the drop off points from your website and getting them to convert.
Doing that for eCommerce is one thing. Conversion rates optimisation for B2B website is also different. So, there is no one-size-fits-all approach: it’s more of a process of encouraging people to download that white paper, register for that webinar, and all these other activities that will lead them into talking to your sales rep. Conversion rate optimisation for eCommerce website that have a physical presence, a brick-and-mortar store is again different, because sometimes your conversion is not necessarily for people to buy on your website.
You create content on your website that encourages people to go into the physical store. Therefore, eCommerce should not just focus on converting on the website, because sometimes conversion happens when you’re able to nudge people to go to the actual store to complete their purchase. They might buy more because they will have access to more products and services and there’s less competition for their attention. What I mean here is that when people are shopping online, they won’t necessarily buy more than what they came for, but when they come into your physical store you will be able to upsell, cross sell and really get more engagement and higher value purchases from them.
So all these activities combined together, that’s what conversion rate optimisation is all about. And it’s a sad thing that a lot of marketing budget is wasted because organisations don’t pay attention to conversion rate optimisation. We spend a lot of money on SEO and PPC, but if you look into some marketing teams, and you look for a conversion rate optimisation expert, the role is often missing.
However, you can’t just focus on the top of the funnel acquisition process and then expect people to magically convert on your website if you don’t pay attention to how to guide the through the purchase journey. We’ve seen organisations that have spent millions of dollars and pounds on website redesign projects without a single person responsible for conversion rate optimisation. It’s often ignored because senior managers are largely unaware of the importance of conversion rate optimisation.
Conversion rate optimisation is also the process of reviewing your website to understand where people are dropping off from. When you go into a website, you see why people come to the website and you see particular pages that are called exit pages that make people drop off from their purchase intent on your website.
Conversion rate optimisation focuses on identifying those problem spots on your website and making sure that they are fixed and the only way to fix this problem spots in some instances is to run A/B testing. A/B testing is an approach where you create two variations of a landing page to see which one performs better and then ensuring that the page that performs better is the final page that people see. This is what conversion rate optimisation is about.
Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide, Step 1: Identifying Causes of Low Website Conversion
With some websites, the navigation is a problem, so when people get to your website they’re confused, they just click around, get confused, and then leave. Another problem may be in your call to action. When you don’t tell people what you want them to do on your website and you assume they know what to do, that’s when you lose their business.
When they’re confused and they’re not sure what you want them to do, what actions you want them to perform, they leave. Another problem with most websites is the content. Some websites focus too heavily on text, on some websites the videos are not engaging or the images are stock photos, rather than purposeful shots.
All this, combined with a lack of a systematic approach or a systematic plan to direct people to do what you want them to do on your website, means you are likely to have a problem converting them into paying customers.
This problem is very widespread because if you look at most website redesign projects, they’re designed by people who don’t necessarily understand conversion, they don’t understand the psychology of online sales. There’s an art to how people engage with website content if you want to nudge them to do what you want them to do.
So these are the problems that often cause low conversion on a website. If you’re looking to increase your conversion, then you have to look at implementing a clear conversion rate optimisation process which I’m going to talk about next: the conversion rate optimisation formula. The number one thing you want to achieve on your website is conversion. And for you to achieve conversion, you first need to pinpoint people’s motivations for being on your website.
Generally speaking, people are motivated to buy a specific product or service. If they don’t have motivation to buy, no matter what you do, no matter your website design, no matter your content, they will not buy. So, once you’re able to nail down your product motivation and your website motivation, and then you’re able to communicate that motivation: this is one of the most important things in the conversion rate optimisation formula.
The next thing you need to think about is friction. When you approach a conversion rate optimisation, you need to start thinking about all the friction that might stop people from buying on your website or from your organisation more generally.
Another thing you also need to look at is anxiety. This includes all the things that make people anxious. Anxiety doesn’t necessarily happen before the purchase. People can purchase from you and then experience buyer’s remorse, an anxiety that can be so strong it actually makes them return the products ordered. So, it’s one thing to encourage people to convert but if you’ve not dealt with the anxiety that they have, before and after the purchase, their experience might not be a good one and they might not come back to your website.
Another thing you need to consider when you’re looking at conversion rate optimisation is incentive. People are giving you money to buy something on your website, they’re expecting something in return. They will get something in return but it’s how you communicate what they’re going to get in return for exchanging their money, their hard-earned cash, for your product or services. How you explain and highlight this on your website will impact on your conversion.
All of the above are the core components of your value proposition. The value proposition is different to a unique selling proposition (USP). Value proposition is being able to communicate to people the value from a cost and benefit perspective that they will get from purchasing your product or service. The main conversion here happens in people’s mind.
Once someone has decided, in their mind, to buy something from you, then whatever happens on your website can either boost or speed up that process or cause them friction and lead them to not completing the purchase. So, conversion starts in the mind of your customer and the number one thing you need to understand when you’re looking at conversion rate optimisation is that customers want engagement.
They don’t like to be marketed to, but want to be engaged in a conversation: customers enjoy companies that communicate with them. So if you’re looking to increase your conversions, it’s better for you to look at your customer as people not just numbers, or just something to be manipulated.
Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide, Step 2: Conversion Rates Optimisation Process
Any conversion rate optimisation process starts with analytics insights. You look at the analytics of your website, you identify your ‘problem’ pages and then you continue by doing usability testing and gathering further UX insights. This will help you understand the ‘why’: why people are not converting on your landing pages. After you’ve combined the analytics insights and usability testing data, you then go further to design your landing pages.
By designing those landing pages you then proceed to conduct A/B testing on the landing pages that you’ve designed and evaluating the testing results. And then after you finish the conversion rate optimisation from an A/B testing perspective, you then implement the winning result pages. That inevitably will then increase your conversion on your website. However, hat doesn’t mean you stop there. You need to continue the process of understanding how customer behaviours change and how you can motivate people when they land on your website to that final conversion you want to achieve with them.
Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide, Step 3: Using Conversion Rate Optimisation Best Practices on Your Website
The number one thing you want to do is ensure that you’re attracting qualified traffic. If you have a website and you’re attracting people that are not your target audience to your website, there’s no way that you’re going to get conversion. There is no way that sales are going to increase on your website because you’re basically sending the wrong people to your website. Even if you optimise your website for the right traffic in terms of the right target audience, if the wrong audience ends up on your website, they are not going to convert.
So, I want you to go to your website, talk to your PPC agency or your PPC person or your social media person, have a good conversation and understanding that they are really sending the right kind of traffic to your website. If they are, for example, targeting broad term keywords, broad terms that target people who are not really in that conversion mode, people who are not ready to buy, they might be your customers but maybe they’re just still researching their options.
If you send that kind of traffic to a landing page and you’re expecting conversion to be high, then you’ll be disappointed. Although they are your target customers, they’re not really ready to buy and they are only on your website because of the type of keywords (broad term) that you’re using to send people to that page there in their research phase. So what I want you to do is make sure you map out the pages that you send people to.
If you’re looking to send people to pages. where you don’t expect them to convert, you just want to create awareness about your products and services, then you want to use a cheaper channel maybe like social media or a very inexpensive channel, like SEO, to push traffic, to help raise general awareness about your product.
Then when you get to the conversion stage, you want to make sure that the keywords that are sending traffic to your website are actually sending the qualified type of traffic, so that these customers – when they land on your landing pages – are ready to buy and all the pages in the funnel are structured in such a way as to nudge them towards that final conversion. To increase conversion on your landing page, whatever page it might be, I strongly recommend adding video content because video content is known to increase engagement and it will also help communicate your products and services better than text content.
Make sure that you have some form of video content on those landing pages or even external to those landing pages. When people then land on those pages, that video content will have done a lot of work to communicate your value proposition, to remove those friction points and this will ultimately increase your potential of conversion.
Focus on macro conversion
A lot of conversion rate optimisation enthusiasts out there focus primarily on click-through rates from one page to the other. This is a baby step in conversion rate optimisation, because it can be misleading. If you’re thinking: ‘Oh, we increased conversion because 600% of people move from this place to this place’ you are not really seeing the bigger picture, because if that conversion doesn’t really add money into the bank, then it’s called a micro conversion.
When you’re thinking about conversion rate optimisation, you want to focus your energy on the entire checkout funnel. So, when people say conversion rate optimisation don’t settle for the approach where the focus is just conversion from one page to the other and everybody’s screaming, “Yaaay, we won.” No! You have to focus on the macro conversion – the conversion to that final sale ‘thank you’ page, the order confirmation page and, ultimately, the money from the sale reaching your bank account. That is what conversion rate optimisation is about: it’s not about fancy data and metrics that don’t really put money in the bank.
So, one thing I want you to look at, if you’re already doing conversion rate optimisation, is what your overall approach to CRO is. Is it leading to money in the bank or is it just a fancy green arrow pointing up that is not really adding value to your bottom line?
Create bespoke landing pages
So, one of the things that I would recommend is to have a dedicated landing page for expensive PPC campaigns. So, if you’re sending expensive traffic to your landing pages, you want to make sure that that page is tailored exclusively for your page search efforts. Then you can use your SEO landing pages for the customers in the research stage, people that just want to be aware of your product and services, and they’re not really ready to buy. They will come naturally through SEO to get that awareness, through videos on Google search result pages.
You want to make sure that to get the best value, your PPC page have dedicated landing page to get the best results, so that will be different to your SEO page. These two groups of customers will not convert the same way, so their journeys on your website should not be the same. So, if you’re looking to really improve website conversion, you want to start thinking about creating bespoke dedicated pages for your important traffic, your qualified traffic.
If you are new to this, conversion rate optimisation is not something you just do once and forget, it’s an ongoing process. The same way you spend money on acquisition ongoing, the same way organisations need to kind of work on improving the conversion of their website.
Another best practise that I want to highlight is that you want to make sure that you’ve optimised your page header and sub-header, because that’s one of the key things that people are going to see when they land on your landing page. You want to review all your landing pages and make sure that the title and text in your PPC campaign or other expensive acquisition channels matches your page header and sub-header.
This will ensure that there’s that seamless, continuous transition for customers that click on your page from your PPC or other paid channels, their thought process will be continuous, there will be no ‘shock’ that they clicked on something the Google Ads says and then the landing page says something different and they won’t be confused. So, you want to maintain that chain of thought in your customers’ minds. Make sure you have a very well-optimised landing page headers and sub-headers. You also want to make sure that you optimise the call to action on your pages, and you want to also optimise the navigation.
Bad navigation will cause problems for people that are navigating your website towards your conversion goal because they will be confused. If your website is clunky, for your customers it’s just like driving around town and their sat-nav is not working: they’re just going to go around in circles and they’re not going to get to their destination quickly. But if you have a very good navigation on your website and a very good call to action, people will know that okay, this is what this page wants me to do and this is how I get from this page to that page.
That will then ensure that they have a smooth journey from when they arrive to your website to that final conversion and that ‘thank you’ page. You can also go one step further and optimise your ‘thank you’ page to make sure that they come back again. So, the navigation should be structured in a way that ensures people don’t have to think. The whole thing should incorporate the ‘don’t make me think’ principle, that’s where the customer is coming from. Make sure your navigation doesn’t make your customer think: make it easy for them.
You also want to optimise your pricing.
Say for example, you’re offering discounts and you’re running a promo. You want to make sure that this is visible on your landing pages. Sometimes we have this perception that people are not bothered by price, but this is wrong. If you have a competitive advantage over your competitor from a pricing perspective, you want to make sure that that is really, really visible on your landing pages.
Make sure you accentuate this and say, “Okay, we are X cheaper than the other people.” This way your customers will know that, okay, if they buy from you, they’re getting a discount or if not a discount but they’re getting value and they’re saving money. The essence here is showing your customer that you are saving them money, so they know that they are getting more value buying from you rather than buying from your competitor(s). So make sure you review your pricing and make sure that if there’s any way that you can be more competitive from a pricing perspective, you highlight that on your landing pages.
And even if you’re looking to future discounts or promos that you’re going to run you want to include that on your landing pages, so your customers know that, okay, at such and such time, we’re going to be running a promo. This way you’re encouraging them to come back. You can further support their return by encouraging them to set up an email alert. So, they put their email into your website and when those discounts come live, you can then email them directly and nudge them back.
This way you’re not spending money to acquire these customers any more because you’ve already collected their email address, so when the discount goes live, you can then bring them back to your website directly. So, look at that and make sure you implement it. This would definitely increase your website conversion.
People only buy from people they trust. Lack of trust is a friction, so make sure you add a trust symbol and social proof. People love Amazon because they trust Amazon. If you buy something from Amazon and you don’t like it, irrespective of the amount you spent, you are guaranteed that if you call their customer service and you want to return the product because you don’t like it or because you ordered it by accident, Amazon has that credibility that they would take back the product and you even get free shipping to return the product.
This is a social proof that builds trust. So if you’re looking to improve and increase conversion on your website to get that big sales figure that you’re looking for, you want to make sure that people can trust you. Do everything that you can do on your website to increase trust.
Trust can come in terms of payment. People want to be sure that when they put their credit card details on your website that their credit card information is safe, that your organisation is secure, and that their details won’t be sold or their privacy won’t be infringed in any way, shape or form. If you go to a funny website and you don’t trust the website, you’re definitely not going to put your credit card details in that website because you’re not sure about what you’re going to get.
Trust is very, very important if you’re looking to increase websites sale. It sounds fluffy, but trust me, trust is important. So, make sure you use symbols, icons or other components on your website that will reassure your customers and highlight that your organisation can be trusted.
My name is Femi Olajiga, I’m a Digital Marketing Strategist with over 13 years’ experience in digital. Contact me, if you need assistance with conversion rate.
