How to Optimize Conversion Rates; 10 great Tips & Tricks

Every website has a goal. You either want to sell a product or service or share information. To do all this, the first thing you need are visitors that visit your website. Ideally, these visitors convert into active visitors which means they, for example, sign up for the newsletter or purchase your product. This is the general concept of conversion which consists of soft conversion (signing up) and hard conversion (buying a product or service).

Now, you want to attract a lot of visitors that convert into paying customers and to do this you need to start with conversion rate optimization (CRO). This is the method of creating an experience for a website visitor with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers. Basicaly, you want to increase website leads and sales without spending money on attracting more visitors.

How do you do this? Here are 10 great tips & tricks to kickstart your conversion optimization:

1. Conduct some online surveys. Ask people via, for example, SurveyMonkey what they think about your site. Testing is key. To know if a site is truly compelling, brands must constantly test it to ensure that content is presented in a manner that resonates with consumers to produce optimum results.

Test for sticking points and optimize the choice of messaging, design of buttons, layout of forms and display of positive reinforcements like trust seals and privacy assurances. Even a small improvement at each stage of the process will pay big dividends.

2. Button colors! Consider the impact of different button colors that make the visitor want to sign up or buy. Orange buttons always work well and make sure they’re in the right place on your website.

3. Post lots of valuable content! Don’t worry about too much content as long as it’s readable and authentic.

4. Look at your competitors. See what you like about their site and find out what could work for you too. Visit your own site as your audience and compare it with the competition. Look at where they place buttons, how many posts they place a week, how they communicate with the visitor.

5. Optimize website layout. Try getting rid of useless information and arrange your pages in a logical order. Use, for example, a single column since people are happier scrolling down than sideways.

6. Optimize site navigation. Too many options on the site might be confusing, too few and people won’t be able to get where you want them to go.

7. Increase your site speed! Users begin to bail after 4 seconds – most will never come back if you take over 25.

8. Give people a great reason to buy or sign up. Nobody really likes to submit their personal information. However, if they get some freebies in return like an E-book, they’ll feel like it’s a good trade.

9. Set up a super easy sign up form. The longer it is the least amount of people want to fill in their info. Reduce your number of required fields. People begin to bail when they feel they are giving more personal information than they should have to. Again, make your sign up form buttons appealing. Consider changing the buttons from simply ‘submit’ to more of a call to action such as ‘get started today!’.

10. Give your customers as much information as you can. Don’t leave them wondering anything about your product, as that uncertainty will cause them to bail. This doesn’t mean, however, that you should repeat messages over and over again. Every piece of word should be valuable.

Please tell us how you’ve optimized your website!