Improve Your Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of web visitors who take the action you want them to take.

There are two basic changes that have been proven to improve conversion rates. I’ll tell you about them below.

First, here are a couple of basics  to make sure you’re ready to succeed.

What’s your conversion rate?

Say you have 100 visitors each day at your website:

Say that you want your visitors to buy a product from you. Each day, an average of two visitors do this.

You have a conversion rate of 2%.

If you bring 200 visitors to your site every day and keep the same conversion rate, you will get four sales each day.

However, if you keep getting 100 visitors and you double your conversion rate to 4%, you will also get four sales a day. Then if you increase your visitors to 200, you’ll have eight sales a day.

Improving your conversion rate can make a big difference in your revenue.

Measuring conversions

Neil Patel has a funny (but still very informative) post on How to Improve Your Conversion Rate by 50% in One Day. The point is that you might have a higher conversion rate than you think, if you are not measuring conversions correctly.

Decide what a conversion is for you and make sure that you are tracking those conversions. Examples of conversions you can track online:

• ecommerce sales
• appointment bookings
• downloads of ebooks
• requests for demos
• acceptance of a sales call

When you track your conversions, you can see what works well when it comes to conversions, and what doesn’t work so well. Capturing offsite conversions is more challenging, but it can be done.

Make sure you are actually tracking your conversions effectively before you start working to improve your conversion rate.

Now here are the two big things that are proven to increase your conversion rate.

Make it easy

One of the things that is proven to improve conversion rates is making it easy to buy or book.

Yesterday I went to buy a stock image. I just wanted to buy one image, but they wouldn’t sell it to me unless I logged into my account. I hadn’t been to that stock image site for a while, so I had to ask for a password reset. They made me run through three screens of crosswalk photos before they would email me a link to reset my password.

When I got logged in, I couldn’t buy one image. I had to buy a bundle of credits equal to the cost of three images. After that, they didn’t take me back to the image I had chosen, so I had to search for it again.

I would have been happy to go somewhere else. I will never recommend that website to anyone. I did actually buy from them, but I won’t do so again. They just made it too hard to make the purchase.

Here are some website changes that can increase conversion rates:

• Have fewer fields on your forms.
• Pre-populate fields.
• Offer easy check out options like PayPal.
• Offer multiple easy check out options.
• Make sure your booking or buying process works smoothly.
• Let visitors stay logged in.
• Allow visitors to repeat transactions easily.
• Put quick links to conversion on every page, above the fold.

Test your calls to action and find out if there are pain points or friction you can remove.

Reduce distraction

Another change that research supports, when it comes to improving conversions, is cutting down on distractions. Do you want people to book an appointment? Make sure that the page for that action is directed entirely toward booking an appointment.

Do you need to have eight booking options? Must you include your privacy policy on that page? Is the collage of five high resolution photos really contributing? What about the links to profiles of a dozen doctors, only three of whom are accepting new patients? Or the snazzy location search tool that brings up no options at all for half the people who use it?

Do we really have to talk about videos?

Have a simple sales page focused on a single conversion point. You can link to that page from other pages that contain lots of other content, but keep your sales page simple.

We can help you update your website to increase conversions. Contact us to begin the conversation.