(Or in other words – keep people onboard your site and hopefully buying).
We’ve all heard of search engine optimisation (SEO), but what about conversion rate optimisation (CRO)? The art of converting browsers into new customers and buyers.
CRO has gradually crept to the forefront and is now equally as important to an operational site as SEO. Indeed – you can be sure that if you’re not optimising, but your competitors are – then you’re missing out.
Here are some great ways to improve your conversion rates sooner rather than later
1 Split-Testing
Also known as A/B testing, this is testing different variations on the site against others, to see which performs best. For example – imagine the site’s called venuehotelsUSA.com. It has over 5,000 hotels on its books.
Some sections are specifically coded to the area:
Title: <<Location>> Hotels, NY | VenueHotelsUSA.com
H1: <<Location>> Hotels
And for the purposes of testing – some were changed to be ‘near’ the area:
Title: Hotels near <<Location>>, Rochester, NY | VenueHotelsUSA.com
H1: Hotels near <<Location>>
So the H1 tag in example 1 is a specific location. And in example 2, it’s venues near the location
Developers monitored the progress, and noted a much-increased rise in traffic thanks to their changes, ultimately resulting in double the traffic per month on a regular basis.
This in itself isn’t a ‘cure-all’ answer, as good conversion rate optimisation requires more solid underpinning, but it’s a good way to begin the process, combined with other suggestions below.
2 Site Personalisation
Personalise the site to each visitor – make it relevant to them. You’ve visited sites before, where a banner’s popped up, offering you a discount? All you have to do is sign up to their mailing list to claim it. That’s personalisation.
Another version is to offer different products to different customers, based on their shopping choices. Stores like Amazon do this well – you buy a product, and it ‘suggests’ other things you may like to go with it. And it shows you what other customers are buying after they’ve bought the same thing too. That’s personalisation.
If this is something you’d like to try, good resources to research include the following:
Optimizely: Similar to Evergage (below) it makes it simple to develop or create pages based on traffic sources. Those in the know reckon it’s similar to Evergage, but perhaps doesn’t offer such robust personalization options.
Evergage: Perhaps the simplest of them all to use. Segmenting audiences is fairly easy using a ‘point and click’ editor.
Personyze: This is the one if you’re looking to offer different users different products. It contains advanced e-commerce features (although it’s not simple to use).
3 Dynamic Landing Pages
Different traffic source will require different landing pages. Your customers come from all kinds of places, so to ‘grab’ them with the most tailored landing page for their requirements.
It’s fairly simple to create several versions of the page, customised with different colour, images and headlines for different sources. Try Unbounce.
4 Dynamic Pricing
An intent-driven sale is one where the customer comes specifically to you, to buy a product. But what about the customers who are browsing several outlets, looking for a great deal?
These customers will be looking for the retailer with the best price, the best returns policy and the cheapest delivery costs. So what do you optimise for? Is it revenue? Conversion? Straight profit? Or are you more interested in building long-term customer relations?
For larger e-commerce merchants who deal in volume (for example, over $500,000 through to $10 million) – simple optimising price for conversion is the best choice.
A couple of suggested platforms include:
Wiser: Good for businesses with over $1m plus in revenue, this software is easy to use.
AppEagle: Not great for retailers selling across multiple channels, but it would suit a retailer with an Amazon-focus.
Response Time
Did you know – if you call a lead just 5 minutes after they’ve contacted you, your chances of connecting with them again are up to 100 times greater than if you leave it for half an hour? So yes – how quickly you follow up on a lead can have a major impact on whether you close the deal.
For higher value sales, the personal touch is always best, but if that’s not possible, an automated solution is way better than missing the moment.
Any good email marketing software should have auto-responder features as standard – try something like Mailchimp or Aweber.
Here’s a great study from Lead Response Management showing some stats and just how important response time can be.
Speed
Many people don’t realise their page speed can be improved, but it’s vital, as even a one-second decrease in loading time, can result in a conversion drop of 7%!
The following resources allow you to check the speed of your website:
Pingdom:
GTMetrix:
Google Page Speed: For developers, Google offers a page speed API that will let you build speed testing into any single one of your apps.
If possible, the best way to optimise the speed of the page is to reduce the amount of code on the site. Or alternatively, upgrade to a faster platform (like Angular.js). This can be very fast indeed, but requires skill and isn’t for beginners.
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