You’ve Put in the Money… So WHERE Are Your Conversions!?

Your website is your pride and joy. It’s the first point of call for potential customers and it is essentially your online equivalent of a business card. Just like a business card is placed into potential prospects hands with a solid handshake, your website is put in front of users when it is optimised with some fantastic onsite content, a smooth user journey and easily accessible information.

To be able to make users interact, your website should quickly and effectively give prospects an understanding into your business, and why it is different in comparison to all the competitors out there. With the fast-moving, ever-growing and increasingly competitive landscape of the 21st Century, your website is at the core of your digital marketing campaign and a fundamental ingredient to conversion success.

Does Traffic Mean Money?

For many business owners, the point of their website is to create e-commerce transactions, meaning conversion rates are a key metric to success for their business. Having that online presence to draw in relevant traffic and genuinely interested users is one thing, but if these users aren’t converting and you aren’t seeing an increase in online sales, then what exactly is the point?

Regardless of whether or not your website is e-commerce or not, there are a whole host of ways you can be putting in the work to get new prospects and eventually, convert them into qualified leads. It’s not just about adding something to a shopping cart, it’s also about when users sign up to an email newsletter, completes a contact form or pops over to your various social media channels to give you a like and a follow.

Whilst these interactions may not result in an instant sale for your business, they are vital stepping stones to creating a business-user relationship online, giving them more value than you ever knew they had.

There’s one issue here. Businesses are spending all their time and money in developing their website. We’re talking design, development and paid advertising to draw in more traffic. While that’s all well and good, if you attract these users onto your site but don’t have things in place to increase conversion rates, you’ll be left disappointed when you aren’t achieving the desired ROI that your business deserves.

Success Starts with CRO

And no, we don’t mean get an office bird. Luckily for business owners such as yourselves, crafting your website into a conversion machine isn’t as hard as you may think. To start seeing some success, you need to familiarise yourself with the CRO process. CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation. This is a disciplined process that can get you converting users into buyers, and buyers into retained customers. It isn’t as daunting as it sounds, it just consists of keeping a close eye on the little details on your website, then figuring out ways it can subtly yet effectively influence these factors and therefore user behaviour.

Wondering what can make a difference to your CRO? Let us enlighten you…

Page Load Speed

3 seconds. 3 seconds is all it takes for a user to decide if they’re going to stay or bounce from your website. If your pages are loading anywhere over 3 seconds, you’ll probably lose a potentially lucrative customer.

Users are constantly on the go, accessing your website and content through mobile devices and tablets. Whilst this is great for business exposure and traffic as people are always browsing on their phones, it also gives you a narrow window to grab their attention and most importantly, keep it.

How can you achieve peak conversions? By ensuring your website is fully responsive and optimised for different types of devices. Responsive actually takes on two different meanings here:

Responds quickly to user interactions – this is the first and most obvious form of responsiveness. If a user is navigating through your site, it should respond quickly and efficiently to their prompts.

Optimised for mobile use – since mobile users are on the go, their time is precious, which means they have less time to waste sitting and waiting for pages to load. Got a mobile page load of 7 seconds? This is enough to increase your bounce rate by over 30%.

Clear Call To Action

You can start to achieve best practice CRO with clear CTA’s (Call To Action). CTA’s consist of anything such as a contact us message, or directing users to a particular landing page that completes their user journey.

While the majority of websites end in a CTA, many of them are not clear or distinct enough to serve any purpose, meaning they take up valuable space on your site and are not compelling enough for users to pay them any attention. Instead, your CTA should grab the attention of your audience and urge them to click it. Include buzzwords and phrases such as “limited time only” or “contact us now” to subtly stress that urgency to click.

Got a compelling and engaging CTA? Expect to see your conversion rates reaching new heights.

Safe. Secure. Reliable.

If a user can’t trust your website, how can they trust to buy anything from it or provide their personal information? When it comes down to it, having a secure website will help users to trust you and to feel comfortable in buying your products or services. Google is on a mission to penalise any websites without a security certificate, meaning users will be presented with a warning if they try to enter an unsecured website. This means wasted opportunity.

Having an SSL security certificate is a tiny but mighty element that you should invest in to make the necessary changes to your website. Afterall, you really don’t want to go upsetting Google…

The Proof is in the Social Pudding

So you’re looking to build trust and boost your brand value and awareness? Sadly, your word of mouth won’t be enough to convince users. In this modern day, users need to see other users having great experiences before they can be fully convinced.

This means getting as many good reviews on as many channels as possible. We’re talking Facebook reviews, Trustpilot reviews, Google reviews, the works. Reviews add the essential social-proof that your business is legitimate in a world where users are always sceptical.

Got some fantastic 5 star reviews that show your business in a positive, beaming light? Give them pride of place on your website. Show users from the get-go that our brand is the real deal.

Cut Down Those Contact Forms!

Contact forms give you a direct window to reach out to your audience and convert casual browsers into promising leads. One of the problems that we see on many websites is that these forms are far too lengthy. This can cause users to lose interest and abandon.

As we’ve said, users time is precious. By keeping your contact forms short and sweet, they can give you their details and open up a doorway to a potential conversation and in turn, a relationship.

Here’s some tips to help our contact forms convert:

Trim them down and only ask for the bare minimum of information. Forms with just 3 fields get conversion rates of at least 25%
Don’t split forms into multiple columns. It makes them look too elaborate
Only ask one question per row
Get rid of Captcha. It can be off-putting to some users
Don’t ask them for their phone number. Nobody likes giving this out and if you show users that you want it, they may assume that you want to bombard them with nuisance calls.

Time to Consult on Colour

Let’s be real, it’s all about aesthetics nowadays. When you’re designing your website or looking at rebranding, you’ll have to make some important aesthetic decisions to ensure the success of your website, and the overall experience your customers have.

Whilst you of course need to make sure you choose colours that coincide with your business branding, you also need to make sure you choose appropriate colour schemes that not only flatter brand colours, but create a welcoming, inviting and pleasing experience for your users.

One of our top tips is to make sure that you don’t neglect your website buttons. Choose special colours for these to help them stand out. By drawing users eyes to these buttons, they’ll be more likely to click and convert.

Picture Perfect

As any restaurateur will tell you, the first bite is always taken with the eye. As cliche as this may sound, it speaks volumes of truth when it comes to how people react to your websites imagery. Presentation is an important first step to take when creating a satisfying user experience, and incredible imagery is needed to showcase your products properly.

We’re human beings. We’ve evolved to make snap judgements on something based on its appearance. Afterall, this helps us to gauge what is safe and what isn’t! Poor quality imagery doesn’t reflect well on a brand or business, therefore you have to make sure your product is visually appealing to your products which means no skimping on photography!

Short & Sweet Content is King

It’s understandable that if you’re leaders in your industry, you’ll be brimming with interesting facts and information that you want to share with your readers. However, less is more when it comes to creating high quality content.

You can still brag about your amazing employees, express your opinions and share your wealth of knowledge, just keep it short, simple and to the point. Time-poor web users will be able to get all the information they need without sacrificing their precious seconds. Break content up into shorter paragraphs, make it as digestible as possible.

Combining this with an engaging CTA is a mixture for success.

It’s Time to Achieve Conversion Catharsis

Once your website has mastered all of the above, you can expect your website to flourish and your conversion rates to soar. This is a lot for a business to manage on their own, which is where Digital Ethos come in.

We have years of experience in helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to grow online, and our expert team of digital marketing enthusiasts can work on your campaigns to get you to where you need to be.

Contact us today and achieve your dream business goals!