Conversion Rate Optimization: How to Make a Profitable Website
See why you score low on conversion rates and how you can take it to the roof.
Many business owners, particularly online retailers, often suppose that when someone visits their page, they’re already planning on buying the product and they can easily convert them into a paying customer.
While that is the general gist, there are too many factors that could cause the visitor to hit exit and buy from another website. It’s OK if you’re not familiar with these hidden factors because this is where you’ll learn more about conversion rates and different optimization strategies.
First, let’s define conversion rate optimization.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization?
The act of improving your paid search advertisements, landing pages, and general website design to increase your conversion rate is known as conversion rate optimization (CRO). In simple terms, the idea is to have as many website visitors convert, or do the required action, as possible. As this happens, you boost sales profits without increasing your marketing costs.
Simply put, the conversion rate is the proportion of website visitors that finish a conversion. Therefore, if every visitor converts, the conversion rate is 100%. The conversion rate is 10% if just one of every ten visitors buys.
Why Is Conversion Rate Optimization So Important for Your Business?
No matter how you look at it, every business is about spending as little as possible to get the most customers who’ll buy your product. With website conversion rate optimization, you can make sure that these will happen for your business:
Boosting your revenue
A greater conversion rate doesn’t always mean higher costs. In reality, when you begin improving the various components of your website, your fixed costs and marketing stay untouched.
CRO allows you to avoid spending money on PPC advertisements and/or other digital marketing initiatives only to improve your website. You’ll discover that you’re paying little per client while generating more revenue.
Understanding your target base
CRO is all about making it easier for customers to discover what they want and simplifying the purchasing process. Once you understand what they want from your website, you can better adapt the customer experience and influence buyers to make those crucial transactions.
Getting customers cheaper
CRO must be your main focus if you’re attempting to drive traffic to your website so that you can convert more of those visitors into consumers. Let’s put it this way. You’re spending money on ads and marketing anyway, but with great website conversion rate optimization, you can convert visitors on their first session, saving you a lot of money on repeat campaigns.
Converting current visitors rather than attracting new ones
To boost the rate of conversions on your website, you may not need to bring in more visitors. Instead, concentrate on improving your website for current visitors and maximizing your present advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) initiatives.
Instead of relying only on new users, provide a fantastic user experience that engages them and motivates them to buy (and perhaps even refer others in their network to you).
When Does the Issue of a Low Website Conversion Rate Come Up?
Poor website conversion rates show that your web pages aren’t successfully influencing users to take action. In most cases, the following are the primary causes of a low website conversion rate:
- Bad user interface or design results in people leaving without taking a single step.
- A confusing message makes it challenging for visitors to figure out the value proposition and what to do.
- When visitors are asked to do too many things at once, they become overwhelmed and quit before taking any sort of action.
- The absence of social proof makes visitors question the legitimacy of the website or company.
- Website errors or technical difficulties that prohibit users from doing specific tasks.
- Low-quality traffic, or users that are not the suitable audience for your product.
To perform website conversion optimization and eventually increase leads and revenue for the company, it’s critical to assess and resolve these challenges.
What Are the Business Risks of a Low Conversion Rate?
We’ve already covered the benefits of conversion rate optimization for your business. But, it’s also important to discuss the downsides of a poor CRO strategy.
You don’t understand the customer
CRO techniques help you understand what customers like or dislike about your web design, products, and overall brand experience. In other words, they point out the flaws in your operation and you resolve them, getting more people to buy your goods.
But, with a low conversion rate, it means that you don’t understand the customers, their preferences, or their behavior. You also don’t know if any of your web design or marketing strategies are working well or not.
You’ll waste money and time
You undoubtedly already know that the cost of pay-per-click advertising, namely Google Adwords, is significantly increasing. Pay-per-click advertising isn’t the only thing increasing. Almost all forms of digital marketing currently cost more than they did six months ago.
As a business, you have no choice but to run these campaigns, but you want to at least get more people to buy your products. With a low conversion rate, you’re practically spending so much to gain so few customers.
You cannot compete with others
There are ever more e-commerce shops fighting for your business across the board. A few of them, such as Amazon, are only dumping other smaller shops. A low conversion rate means that competitors will steal prospects from you and leave you in the dust.
You’ll fizzle out in the long run
If you want long-term growth, you can’t keep attracting new customers because there are simply not enough of them. Instead, you have to turn one-time purchases into lifetime customers, so that you can consistently expand your customer base. A low conversion rate means that you’re gaining 2 customers on one end and losing 5 on the other.
What do you have to check with a low conversion rate?
At any point in your operation, you may feel that you’re not getting enough sales for the amount of visitors you bring in. That’s a huge waste of money and time, and it often goes back to several key issues:
- Website load speed. You should already know that the load speed of your site has a tremendous effect on your conversion rate. On retail websites, about 40% of customers hit exit if the site doesn’t load in 3 seconds. Plus, for every second that it takes to load, you’ll lose 4.42% in conversion on average.
- Checkout. Have you ever considered how difficult your checkout procedure is? In other words, how simple is it for people to buy from you? If the checkout procedure is overly tedious or hard, almost 87% of online customers will abandon their carts.
- Ad frequency. When the ad’s frequency rises too high, an issue known as ad fatigue might develop. This results in a fall in conversions because your key demographic is exposed to the same advertising repeatedly.
- Recent changes on your website. Making changes to the elements of your site can have a big impact on conversions. It’s just not about UI/UX. You may change the CTA, alter the menu, go for a heavier layout, or do anything else that will impact the visitor’s experience. It’s wiser to do some A/B testing before making the changes permanent.
- Responsiveness. In this day and age, if you run a non-responsive website, you’re an outdated player that doesn’t know 58.33% (more than half) of all traffic comes through mobile devices. So many of your visitors will be using a mobile device to view your website. In light of this, you must guarantee that your website’s mobile UX/UI design is flawless.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies.
An excellent website is interesting, simple to use, and offers practical ways for visitors to find what they’re after as quickly as possible. You’re losing customers if your website’s design is old or chaotic, features poor or unattractive content, or isn’t mobile-friendly. A few reliable techniques can help you develop or improve your website:
Create with the user in mind. Think like a visitor when designing your sites and put the most crucial information up front and make it simple to find. If there’s a particular call to action, make sure to make it clear and obvious. Making it as simple as possible for someone to find what they’re looking for and place an order.
Describe your unique value. When a customer reaches a product or service page, it’s time to highlight your unique value. A superb product description explains not just what the product is but also how the buyer would profit from buying it.
Don’t overdo CTAs & design elements. Your CTAs (Calls to Action) should be obvious and logical, but you shouldn’t bombard a visitor with too many of them. By overwhelming them with ads, banners, or a large number of buttons, you risk having the opposite impact and driving visitors away from your site.
Lead capture forms. Lead capture forms are basic but effective tools for gathering data (e.g. name, email. location) from site visitors and converting them into leads. They must be well-organized, easy to use, and strategically positioned on the site in order to be useful. In addition to gathering the data that is most crucial to your company, you need to tailor them to the design and style of your site.
Social Proof. Your marketing and sales activities may create trust, establish credibility, and eventually boost conversion rates by utilizing social proof. Here are a few basic uses of social proof:
- Including customer feedback and testimonials in your ads and site,
- Sharing how many clients, fans, or followers you have,
- Displaying awards, accreditations, and other certificates that prove your ability,
- Highlighting collaborations, media appearances, and other accolades,
How to Improve Conversion Rate Optimization and What Is Critical for the Growth of Orders
Besides some conversion rate optimization best practices that generally apply to all websites and businesses, several specific strategies can push customers to finish the ordering process and make the purchase:
Offering rewards
You may need to offer rewards to convert people to your site, whether they are recurrent customers or first-time visitors. Whatever their form, some of the strongest rewards are time-based since they build a feeling of urgency in buyers and subtly persuade them not to delay making a purchase.
You have several options to offer rewards:
- Free shipping. You can offer free shipping for all orders or just those that are above $X amount.
- Coupons. Another classic way to offer discounts or giveaways.
- Lower prices: You can lower the price to the sweet spot or even beat your rival’s pricing.
Allow guest ordering
While gathering customer data is beneficial for retention and cross-marketing, it could harm the first purchases if a visitor must sign up for a purchase. Remember that 24% of cart abandonments happen because customers are told to sign up. Wait for them to finish the purchase. After that, you can always ask them to sign up.
Autocomplete fields
Customers love it when they see you’ve already filled many fields on their behalf. That encourages them to fill in the remaining parts and head straight to payment. This is great for regular customers who want to feel that you already know them.
What kind of conversion rate experience does TRIARE have?
Over the years, TRIARE has worked with different retail and non-retail businesses to recognize their needs and offer conversion rate optimization services to meet them. First, the developer team gets in touch with the client to understand their specific challenges and then they closely monitor the client’s operation to identify the root of problems.
Then, TRIARE experts use all of the data to implement a series of CRO strategies that fit the client’s scalability needs and existing platform.
Conclusion
No business can survive without customers and with the growing competition in every sector, you want to retain the existing customers and keep converting new ones. Of course, if you don’t have much experience with conversion rate optimization, it’s better to find a reliable team of experts to handle it.
As an expert conversion rate optimization agency, we at TRIARE have a long track record of bringing more customers for the limited ad spend, helping companies expand their share in the market. We can do the same for you as well. Just get in touch.
