Conversion rate optimization is the process of optimizing your campaign’s visuals or copy, as well as your landing page elements to maximize the number of users that visit your site. This is the next step to converting the highest number of users to your site.
In terms of inbound marketing, CRO refers to optimizing only your landing page. This is essential because it enables you to achieve higher profits from your incoming traffic with no additional costs. Check out what you can do to boost your chances and turn your visitors into customers.
1. Start with data analysis
Analyzing data is the first step you need to take when starting web page conversion rate optimization.
Like in every aspect of Internet marketing, data analysis is the foundation of making conclusions and estimations on what needs to be changed or what elements could be improved. Conversion optimization is an analytical process too, so the numbers are the things you will need to work on.
Be clear about your goals
Obviously you must be clear about the goals you want to achieve. It doesn’t matter if you want to reduce the bounce rate, gain more sales, or improve the the user’s experience on site. Try to define what elements are the most important for your business. Ask yourself some questions:
What are the actions you’re expecting from users to do once they reach your website?
How can you define an improvement? A +10% in revenue, +5% in sign ups to the newsletter, longer time spent on site or more conversions?
The reason for asking these questions is simple, as the next question you will have to ask yourself shortly after – what can be done on the website to achieve these goals?
Analyze the data
If you’ve set goals and made annotations, it’s time to get to analyzing the pieces of data you have.
- find entry points and exit points – try to spot the most popular entry points of your website. Entry points are the landing pages users start their interaction with your website. As the opposite to entry points, the exit points are the landing pages on which the users are leaving your website
- analyze conversion funnels – try to spot the bottleneck of your users’ conversion path or the pages which have user leakage, in order to find the weak spots of your website
After that, you will be able to spot which pages bring you the most conversions and which pages are your weak spots and need to be optimized urgently. It would also be highly useful to make notes and annotations to have a point of reference for your historical results.
2. Improve the landing page’s copy
The reason why a landing page is highly convertible, or has a high bounce rate, is determined by it’s copy. The users make the decisions of when to make an action you want them to do in real time. Thus, the information you provide the them with is very important. Try to:
- focus on the page’s relevancy – try to be clear about what you have to offer and maintain the relevancy between your keywords, product or an ad copy
- speak your user’s language – provide complete information about your product and it’s features
- show the benefits – state the benefits that users will receive when signed up
- build trust and credibility – add your clients’ testimonials
- use a call to action – encourage users to finalize the sign-up process
Remember to keep your landing page as simple as possible. Never stop looking for opportunities that can make your landing page even more simpler. Use only the most important information and don’t distract your users with unnecessary elements.
3. Improve the design
If the copy is the element that providing the information, the design is responsible for experience the user will meet when visiting your web page. The better impression your website makes, the better the chance is that the user would convert. Try to focus on:
- easy navigation – provide clear navigation to support natural and intuitive flow on your website
- different colors – try to use different colors, if your brand let’s you do that
- multimedia content – you can use a video or presentation, but remember to be brief and accurate about your product
- don’t overdo your design – be sure to provide fast loading times to improve the overall on-page experience
4. Provide post-conversion experience
Try not to leave your users alone. Post-conversion experience is not an element of optimization, but is important from the customer service point of view. Try to build relations with your new clients and ensure, that they made the right decision and that working with you is a good investment.
- offer a support – show, that you’re always ready when needed
- add your contact information – suggest following you on your social media pages
- try to build relations – ask for email subscription
- dispel user’s potential doubts – provide know-how content or case studies
5. Don’t stop testing
Conversion rate optimization is a never ending process. It’s about making a data-driven hypothesis, testing and choosing the best option and testing again. If you want to achieve your goal, you should always make the right considerations , in order to make progress and minimize risks. Try to:
- test one change at a time – don’t try to measure the impact of changing multiple elements on the landing page, as the results could guide you to false conclusions
- put your test in a longer time frame – longer testing periods will give better statistical significance and will marginalize error threshold caused by daily traffic variations
- analyze data in the scale – don’t finalize your test until you have achieved a minimum number of 100 unique visitors on your landing page
