Driving high quality traffic to your website is an art in itself, but once a potential customer arrives on a landing page, the battle is only half won. An optimised conversion funnel is a great way to maximise your ROI from marketing efforts, and can be the difference between making a healthy profit and barely breaking even.
If you have a website, you have a conversion funnel in place. You might not be using it to its best ability, but it’s there.
A conversion is simply the completion of a specific action, which, in most cases, is a sale, but not always. And your conversion rate is a good indication of whether your website is working as hard as it should, effectively engaging and convincing your audience to take the next step.
CRO is is achieved through content enhancements, split testing, and workflow improvements, and results in highly-qualified leads, increased revenue, and lower acquisition costs.
According to Econsultancy, only 22% of businesses are happy with their conversion rates. So, we have some work to do. Here’s a run down of the basics you need to cover:
Define your site’s goals
Before you set out on your VRO journey, you want to determine which website goals you want to measure conversions and optimise for. These goals can include any action that generates value for your business, like:
- Page visits
- Form submission
- Link clicks
This can be done on Google Analytics and allows you to track visitor behaviour, for example, how many users are clicking on a call to action (CTA).
Collect and analyse visitor data
When working on CRO, it’s best to avoid assumptions or estimations and rely solely on the data. Once you have collected quantifiable data, you can use it to create more accurate user personas. The combination of data and your ideal user persona will help guide insightful tests to better understand what content works on your website and what doesn’t.
Some of the data that you should absolutely track to understand your visitors is:
- Traffic sources
- User behaviour once on your pages
- Bounce and abandonment rates for pages and forms
Assess your current conversion funnel
Before you try to fix what’s broken, make sure you understand what a typical user journey on your website looks like. Once you’ve collected data to give you an idea of where visitors are hesitating and dropping off, you can match this to your user journey and identify the gaps. Assess what your site currently does to move potential customers through the stages of the sales funnel – how are you trying to lead them to a conversion? Why do you think so many are dropping off at a certain point?
It’s important to keep in mind that a drop off at each stage is completely normal. For example, eCommerce stores experience an average of 69.23% abandoned cart drop-offs.
Optimise the layout of your critical pages
If your conversion rates aren’t improving with small tweaks, you may need to consider more radical changes to your web pages. Altering the design and layout of a page according to User Experience best practices, based on case studies that reveal how people tend to use websites, can help. Tools like heat maps and scroll tracking can offer you deeper insights on how your visitors actually behave on your website, helping you create pages that visitors love to engage with. You want your site navigation to be simple and seamless.
Sales copy is king
Your conversion rate often comes down to how persuasive your website copy is, and a number of studies show that making even the smallest improvements to your copy can improvement your conversions hugely.
All that most customers desire is a simple solution to a problem. If your copy can make potential customer desire your company’s solution, getting them to convert is a much easier process. So don’t underestimate how valuable a good copywriter is to evoke this desire.
Optimising your conversion funnel can be a slow and challenging process, but when you take the time to understand your audience and learn what they need in order to become customers, you can see a vast improvement in conversions and, in turn, ROI.
If you aren’t satisfied with your current conversion rates, get in touch with us. We’d love to see how we can help.