Turn Visitors To Paying Customers with Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion rate optimisation is crucial for businesses to maximise their digital campaigns. It’s not about the number of visitors that places them on top of the competition, but rather how many conversions they earn from the traffic.

As a digital marketing agency, we realise that it can be challenging for you to implement conversion rate optimisation. It’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy, and you have to consider multiple elements to tackle it.

But, once you successfully implement it, you can reap multiple benefits, including higher ROI, lower customer acquisition costs, and increased revenue. If you’re keen on gaining those benefits, then it’s the right time to learn this strategy, which we’ll cover in this article.

What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) refers to the process of optimising your site, social channels, and other online marketing campaigns in a way that appeals to visitors. The main objective of this strategy is to increase the number of visitors to take desired actions.

The desired actions may differ depending on the goals of your campaign. They can be form entries, purchases, or free trial submissions. Getting visitors to perform these actions requires your effort to get them to enter your conversion funnel in the first go.

If you’re unable to immediately get your visitors to enter your conversion funnel, the chances of them returning to accomplish the desired actions are slim. Hence, it’s important for you to get visitors hooked the moment they click on your site.

Micro vs Macro Conversion

There are two types of conversion, namely micro and macro conversions. These user actions have respective influences on your site’s success, and we’ll explain how they differ below: 

Micro conversions

Micro conversions refer to smaller actions that visitors take. These actions are auxiliary and have indirect results in generating revenues, but they’re important indicators of user interest and engagement with a site.

Some of the examples that belong to micro conversions include newsletter subscriptions, page sharing, account sign-ups, and many more. 

Macro conversions

Macro conversions are the primary actions that businesses want their visitors to take. These actions have a direct impact on an enterprise’s revenues or profitability, making them the ultimate goal that determines a site’s success.

Additionally, macro conversions involve several actions, such as making purchases, submitting for free trials, requesting demos, and many others. While macro conversions are an essential indicator of success, the role of micro conversions should not be overlooked.

What is a Good Conversion Rate?

The parameter of a good conversion rate is defined by your industry, niche, and traffic channel, amongst other factors. The benchmark for one business may be lower or higher compared to another business.

For instance, the average global conversion rate for the e-commerce industry is 2.5% in the fourth quarter of 2022. The niche within the industry will also determine the figure. The average conversion rate for the food and beverage sector is 4.6%, while the beauty and skincare sector is 3.3%.

You can determine whether or not your campaign is successful by comparing your conversion rates to those of your competitors. If you generate less than what you expect, then it’s time to optimise.

How To Calculate Conversion Rate?

As long as you know the formula, calculating your conversion rate is a simple process. You can divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors and multiply by 100 to get the percentage.

For instance, you’re running a campaign for an e-book download, and you use a landing page to attract potential customers. To determine the conversion rates, divide the total number of e-book downloads by the amount of traffic you drive and multiply by 100.

Let’s say the total number of e-book downloads is 200, and the amount of visitors is 6450. By this figure, your conversion rate is 3.1%.

What Are The Elements of Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation is not a one-size-fits-all approach. There are several elements that you should consider improving in order to increase the number of conversions from the traffic you generate.

Below are some of the elements you’ll encounter throughout the conversion rate optimisation process:

Landing Page Design

Landing page design refers to the visual and element structure of a landing page, including layout, colour scheme, typography, and white space, among other elements. The way that you design your landing page significantly impacts its ability to turn visitors into leads.

In order to successfully design a landing page that entices visitors to enter your conversion funnel, there are several things you need to consider, including:

• Clarity and simplicity: A clear and simply designed landing page helps visitors quickly grasp the value of your offer and take action. It entails a clear information hierarchy to navigate visitors through the page and find the call-to-action (CTA).

• Visual appeal: A visually appealing landing page makes a good first impression and keeps visitors engaged. You can design one by using high-quality images and a consistent colour scheme to reinforce the value propositions.

• Responsiveness: There is a high number of visitors accessing a site using web and mobile devices. It’s best that you design a responsive landing page that caters for any gadget types they’re using to increase engagement and conversions.

• Consistency: It’s essential that you design a landing page that consistently adheres to your branding and marketing campaign. This way, you can reinforce the value proposition and increase trust in your visitors. 

Site Structure and Navigation

Site structure and navigation refer to how a site is organised and how users interact with its content. It consists of a graph made up of different pages on your site and how they interact with one another.

The first step in organising a website is to establish its hierarchy. The hierarchy arranges category and subcategory pages in an orderly manner so that visitors can easily navigate the site’s content and find what they’re looking for.

Developing a well-organised site structure and navigation means giving your visitors a pleasant user experience. It’s an important part of conversion rate optimisation as they can find useful information and achieve their goals with the fewest clicks possible.

Page Speed

Page speed or load speed is a significant factor you need to consider for your site’s success. It affects your user experience, conversion rate, and search engine ranking. 

Faster loading times give visitors satisfaction while browsing through your site. On the other hand, slow load times irritate users, and they’re likely to leave the site. According to Semrush, the bounce rate triples if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Not only will slow loading times upset users, but they also negatively impact your conversion rate. It’s reported that a second delay in load times can reduce the conversion rate by 7%. When potential customers encounter difficulty within your site, they’re likely to look elsewhere without thinking twice.

Website Copy

Website copy has the power to verbally capture the attention of your visitors. It’s a way that you communicate with them by covering their needs in the solutions you offer. In order for you to effectively write website copy, you need to be clear and concise in your writing.

Using powerful and attention-grabbing words helps visitors easily understand your message and take the desired action.

Based on what we described above, the website copy is further divided into two sections:

1. Headline

A headline is the first thing visitors see when they click on your page. Headlines should immediately catch the attention of your visitors. If your headline is unattractive, chances are they won’t bother to scroll down and check the rest of your page.

For that reason, you need to ensure that your headline is written in the correct format. Keep your headline short and clear while remaining relevant to the products or services discussed on the page.

2. Body Content

Body content should clearly answer what’s said in the headline. The audience will want to know how your products or services can solve their problems by reading your site content. Therefore, ensure that you provide them with valuable information in this section.

However, you should write the information concisely and to the point. Your visitors are likely to be willing to spend time reading chunks of content. If they’re unable to find what they need in a few seconds, chances are they’ll close the page before reaching the bottom part.

Forms

Forms are an important part of the sales funnel. Using them allows you to collect data from potential customers, which empowers you to better analyse your target audience. However, you must optimise these touchpoints in order to entice your visitors to fill them out.

Let’s take a look at the following basics strategies for optimising your forms:

• Keep your forms simple: Forms that are too long overwhelm potential customers. They may leave the forms right away before reaching the final field. So, it’s always best that you keep them simple by only asking for the essential information.

• Use clear and concise language: Ensure that users understand what you’re asking for by using clear and concise language in your form fields and instructions.

• Optimise for mobile devices: Significant percentage of users browse the web through their smartphones. For this reason, you need to ensure that your forms are optimised for mobile devices.

Call-to-action (CTA)

Call-to-action is a request for potential customers to take the desired action. It could be anything, depending on the campaign’s objectives, from making purchases, scheduling appointments, and subscribing to the newsletter to availing of a service.

Writing a call-to-action should align with the website copy and entice potential customers to click on it. A successful call-to-action should also correspond to user psychology, which you can create by considering the following best practices:

Use action-oriented words

Action-oriented words have the power to lead potential customers to take action. There are several actionable words that effectively catch their attention, which you can choose depending on your goals.

Here are a few actionable words you can use:

• Get
• Submit
• Download
• Try
• Contact
• Grab

Evoke user emotions

A marketing strategy should appeal to the audience’s emotions. It’s how you want them to feel a certain way, and a call to action is the place to do it. Focusing on the audience’s emotions makes your call to action more powerful and increases the number of leads you earn.

Here are some of the examples you can try:

• “Don’t let this opportunity slip away!” – This call to action creates a fear of missing out.
• “Join the thousands of satisfied customers!” – This call to action evokes a feeling of trust and excitement.
• “Claim your free trial here!” – This call to action evokes a feeling of excitement and accomplishment.

Create a sense of urgency

The purpose of a call-to-action is to entice users to take the desired action. You can do so by adding the words “today” or “now” to any actionable verb. This way, your potential customers will be persuaded to click the call-to-action button right away.

What are The Advantages of Conversion Rate Optimisation?

Understanding and implementing the elements of conversion rate optimisation accordingly results in an increasing number of leads. This experimentation strategy helps you reach your site’s maximum potential.

What’s more, continuous site experimentation allows you to enhance user experience, reduce bounce rates, and increase search engine ranking. As a result, you’ll gain a series of advantages that foster your business growth, as listed below:

Improving Marketing ROI

Marketing ROI (Return on Investment) is a metric that determines the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It measures the return or profitability you earn on your marketing investments, such as advertising campaigns, site optimisation, content creation, and many more.

Conversion rate optimisation boosts marketing ROI in a variety of ways. First, it enables you to enhance the user experience (UX) on your website. Improved UX keeps users on the page and encourages them to take the desired action, ultimately increasing conversion.

Second, it provides data-driven insights into user behaviour and website data to help you identify areas for improvement. Using the insights, you can make informed decisions about your marketing budget allocations, potentially increasing your ROI.

Lowering Customer Acquisition Costs

Conversion rate optimisation helps you lower acquisition costs by making your site enticing for visitors to take the desired action. Eventually, this strategy leads to an efficient use of the marketing budget, as you earn more conversions from the same number of traffic.

Furthermore, conversion rate optimisation enables you to identify which types of visitors are likely to convert to paying customers. Subsequently, you can target these visitors more effectively and allocate your marketing efforts to the most promising leads.

Finally, optimising conversion rates foster customer loyalty. Customers who are pleased with your products or services are more likely to seek them out again in the future. As a result, you can generate leads without incurring additional costs.

Increasing Revenues

Boosting your conversion rates can significantly affect your revenues. With more visitors converting to paying customers by purchasing your products or availing of your services, you’ll earn higher revenues in the long run.

Previous efforts, such as higher marketing ROI and lower acquisition costs, have also resulted in an increase in revenues. Being able to combine those two will allow you to better allocate your budget and generate more revenue.

Overall, increased revenues are an advantage that you’ll earn when you continuously run testing on your site. You’ll be able to identify the areas of improvement that positively affect your company’s revenues.

What is The Conversion Rate Optimisation Process?

Conversion rate optimisation is a methodical approach to increasing the percentage of visitors who take desired actions on your online platform. The process is informed by past user behaviour, customer insights, and best practices.

Here are some of the basics process of conversion rate optimisation audit:

Audience Research

Audience research is a process of analysing user behaviour while interacting with a site. Using this method, you’ll understand your users’ preferences, pain points, and motivations as they encounter your brand.

Understanding the key elements of user behaviour – preferences, pain points, and motivations – enables you to identify areas of improvement. The insights give you the ability to provide users with a better user experience that eventually leads to higher conversions.

There are several approaches you can take to perform audience research, as listed below:

• Customer surveys
• Usability testing
• Data analysis
• Customer feedback
• Interviews

Optimisation

The data gathered during the audience research process can then be used to perform optimisation. The optimisation process entails improving several elements that influence conversion rates, such as landing page design, website copy, and CTAs, among other things.

For instance, you can redesign your landing page to improve user experience, write more compelling website copy that addresses potential customers’ problems and needs, and change your CTAs to entice visitors to take the desired action.

A/B Testing

There are no means of optimising your current conversion rate elements without testing them out. By testing how the changes perform, you can compare the original and updated versions and see which one generates the most conversions, known as A/B testing.

Split testing entails simultaneously releasing two or more versions of a variable to different segments of a site’s visitors. Later, the versions will be compared to see which one has the greatest impact on lead generation.

A/B testing takes all of the guesswork and subjectivity out of conversion rate optimisation. It emphasises experimentation to make informed decisions, with the A version serving as the original variable and the B representing a variation of the original variable.

Enterprises will be able to determine which variable is the winner by testing the original and variation variables. Following that, they can make changes based on the winning variant to optimise their site and increase marketing ROI.

Measurements

Measuring the number of conversions your site generates is efficiently done by using software like Google Analytics. This software helps you to track conversions within the respective goals that you set up.

For starters, you’ll need to determine what are your goals and input them into the software. Once you set up your goals, it will generate conversion-related metrics, including the total conversion and the conversion rates.

Other than measuring goals’ performances, this software can also set up goal funnels. Goal funnels refer to data visualisations that help you to identify where your users are dropping out of the conversion process.

Ongoing Adjustments

Making necessary adjustments is a part of conversion optimisation. It’s an approach to catering to your target audience by providing them with a satisfactory user experience. You can do so by relying on the statistics determining how your campaign or site performs.

If your conversion rate is lower than expected, modifying some of the elements should help. On the other hand, if your campaign or site is performing well, you can take note and implement the strategy for future conversion optimisation.

Mistakes To Avoid When Running Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion rate optimisation is one of the most effective methods for increasing conversion. Unfortunately, many businesses use this strategy without considering what could go wrong, wasting their time, money, and effort.

Save yourself and optimise conversions better by learning these common mistakes you should avoid:

Forgetting mobile devices optimisation

Some businesses may focus on developing outstanding sites, social channels, and other online marketing platforms while forgetting to optimise for mobile devices. It’s such a waste of opportunity, knowing that a significant number of visitors are browsing through their smartphones.

This high traffic coming from mobile devices is potentially converted to paying customers with mobile-friendly navigations. However, if the site is unsuitable for smartphone use, chances are visitors will immediately close the page and look elsewhere.

Avoid repeating the mistake by ensuring that your digital presence is responsive for mobile devices. You can do so by reconsidering the image sizes, copy length, page length, and many other factors that influence user experience while browsing through their smartphones.

Subjectivity over rationality

Rookie businesses might fall to making changes based on subjectivity; following what’s trending, relying on assumptions, or prioritising ego. Subjectivity should be something that enterprises put aside in optimising their conversion rates.

Data is everything when it comes to conversion rate optimisation. Hence, research is the first step in carrying it out. The research process allows enterprises to identify user problems and make hypotheses about the changes that can improve conversions.

On the other hand, relying on subjectivity will only add to the guesswork. When there’s nothing to measure, no one can guarantee that the changes will improve site performance. In the worst-case scenario, it’s possible that the changes would perform poorly.

Unsuitable website copy

While website copy has the power to entice potential customers, unsuitable website copy will only confuse them. Unsuitable website copy also looks unattractive and unprofessional, making potential customers leave rather than stay on your site to take desired actions.

If you’re unsure of how to write a suitable website copy, then learning from this article talking about copywriting techniques will be worth maximising your chances. But if you’re short in time, we’ll list down the key points of writing compelling website copy below:

• Write a killer headline
• Use powerful words
• Be more conversational
• Sell the benefits
• Tell an engaging story

Running multiple tests all at once

Running multiple tests all at once can poorly affect the analysis accuracy of each test. This is because each new element introduced into the experiment has the potential to influence the results of the others. 

The best example of this mistake is running multiple pop-ups and site designs in a single session. Rather than determining how users respond to elements, such pop-ups and site designs will irritate users and cause them to abandon the site without hesitation.

Instead, you can separate your tests into multiple sessions. Take note of the results, make the necessary adjustments, analyse how they perform, and run another test if needed.

Poorly designed website

A poorly designed website is the quickest way to make visitors leave. It’s because visitors expect a site to look visually pleasing, with all the information structured properly.

Tackling this issue requires you to implement UI/UX design. UI/UX design emphasises user interactivity and experience, resulting in an overall look that caters to your visitors’ engagement with your site. 

By focusing on your user experience, you can help visitors to find solutions to their problems on your site. This way, you can generate higher conversion rates.

Lacking persuasive CTAs

Call-to-actions (CTAs) are the final step that determines whether or not users take the desired action. Some businesses may have their website copy written thoughtfully, yet they lack persuasiveness in their CTAs and lose opportunities of earning leads.

Understanding basic psychology will help you avoid this mistake. Try to craft your CTAs in a way that evokes certain emotions from your users so that they’re willing to take the desired action immediately.

Common Conversion Rate Optimisation Challenges

Even though optimising conversion rates brings multiple benefits to your company, there may be some internal challenges that trouble you from implementing the strategies. Knowing that a company consists of different minds, then it may be not that easy to prevent them.

What are the common challenges, and how can you overcome them? We’ll delve deeper onto them below:

Politics and people

Politics and people shape the culture of a company. Some companies may have influential people who are hesitant to change for a variety of reasons. This, unfortunately, results in a stagnant growth of a company.

If some people within your company are unsupportive, you may want to educate them about the importance of this optimisation. Present them with a comparative analysis that highlights the gaps in your company’s current approach.

Always use facts and figures in your presentation. This allows individuals to gauge how the company can benefit from conversion rate optimisation, such as increased marketing ROI, lowered acquisition costs, and maximised revenues.

Structure to support CRO

Many businesses face difficulties when they lack a structured team to support their CRO efforts. This is particularly true, especially when CRO requires differing capabilities to support its success.

Digital marketing professionals, consisting of designers, SEO specialists, copywriters, and many others, have to work together to maximise conversion rates. They’re responsible for handling digital campaigns and mitigating issues that may arise.

In this case, you may want to consider hiring your team to support your CRO implementation. Else you can also collaborate with a reputable digital marketing agency that will deliver the work for you.

Insufficient budget allocation

Running conversion rate optimisation campaigns costs a substantial amount of money, especially with many businesses that are willing to spend more on their CRO. That makes the competition gets tougher and necessitates certain budget allocations to thrive.

To address this issue, you can examine the marketing ROI generated by CRO campaigns. By comparing what you invest and what you gain, you can determine which areas need to be adjusted.

Lack of the right tools

Lacking the right tools to optimise conversion rates may be prevalent in some businesses. The reason for this is that they may not know what approaches they need to measure and improve their campaigns. 

If you encounter a similar issue, you may want to consider opting for conversion rate optimisation services to get your campaigns streamlined. In turn, you won’t have to bother with choosing the right tools that work for your company’s growth.

Untracked macro conversions

Many businesses may overlook their macro conversions the moment they see a significant increase in micro conversions after performing A/B testing. While micro conversions increase visibility to potential customers, they are not revenue indicators.

You should avoid making the same mistake by keeping your macro conversions in mind – they’re your source of revenues, after all. Develop A/B testing that caters to macro conversions as well. This way, you can accumulate a large win after a string of small wins.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, conversion rate optimisation is worth its challenges. It’s a crucial aspect of digital marketing that significantly impact how you thrive in the market. It allows you to remain focused on your goals, innovate your approach, and embrace experimentation.

If you’re new in digital marketing, it’s fine to be unsure of how CRO works. You can repeat this article and grasp all the information at your own pace.

Else, if you need a hand, we’re here to help. Our talented digital marketing team will gladly work with you by providing conversion rate optimisation services to improve your leads.

Shoot us a message today! 

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