Small Changes with Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Have a Big Impact on Your Business

Getting traffic to your site is only half the battle – once you have their attention, you need to push your audience towards converting. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t improve this process and lost a huge amount through lost traffic and abandoned carts. A huge 68% of people abandon their shopping carts when they’ve already been through the process of finding your site and looking through your products.

Fortunately, you can make small changes to your site that, cumulatively, make a huge difference to your conversions and ultimately the business’ bottom line.

Find Out Why People Aren’t Converting

Using tools like Google Analytics or Kissmetrics, you can find out where you’re losing your visitors. Are they mainly bouncing from the homepage? Are they getting turned off by your case studies? Or are they getting through to the last stages and then abandoning their carts just before they pay? This step is essential to understanding the weak points of your website and focusing your work on fixing the parts that are actually broken.

Once of our construction clients had plenty of traffic, but their visitors just weren’t getting in touch to arrange a quote or ask further questions. We looked at their traffic flow and page bounce rates, and found out their case study pages had the highest bounce rates – these pages were meant to convince and convert visitors, not send them elsewhere! Unfortunately, the images didn’t show off their work very well so we recommended professional interior photography for a few additional case studies. 3 case studies later, their goal conversion rate is up by 32% and goal completions on the site are up by 60%. A third of the people who convert now look at their case studies before deciding to get in touch.

Don’t Be Too Subtle

Visitors make a decision about your site in 0-8 seconds – you need compelling headlines and a decent landing page. While most people visiting your site probably aren’t ready to buy, you need to make sure that they understand what value you offer so that they remember you as a good seller for when they are ready. Offering useful information for the research stage and clearly stating your value proposition is essential in getting these visitors to come back.

Using a variety of media is a great way to communicate with people in their preferred format. Videos are one of the best ways to show off your products and their benefits – product videos increase conversions by 144%.

Once you have the content that you need, make sure that you have calls to action on each page and test your CTAs and banners to see what works best. Google’s In-Page Analytics lets  you see where people are clicking on each page, so check this information to continually update your site to give visitors exactly what they want.

Make Converting Easy

If a lot of people are leaving your site after loading up their cart, you may have an issue with your actual conversion process. People are fairly lazy online, so something as simple as filling out too many forms or not taking their preferred method of payment can make the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.

Shopping malls make buying extremely easy; they’re temperature controlled, the floors are even and clean, food is placed throughout the mall so that you don’t leave to go and eat, and you don’t have to think about your immediate environment at all. Your website needs to offer a similar experience – it needs to be easy to move from filling your cart to paying and confirming your order – the more interruptions you create, the more likely your visitor is to leave.

Do you:

• Ask for lots of marketing information (that you don’t really need to complete the sale)?
• Only take one form of payment?
• Charge more than the bare minimum for delivery?
• Use your standard web page layout for your ‘buy’ screens?
• Force people to set up an account with you before making an order?

Getting Conversion Right

Cards Against Humanity have a fantastic conversion process. Each separate piece of information is on a separate, minimal screen to reduce distractions, but you can see them at the top of the screen to make sure that you’ve put the information in right. The language at each step reinforces their brand and they don’t ask for any more information than they absolutely need. Marketing permissions are treated completely separately and explained clearly so people know what they’ll do with the information without any declarations about respecting privacy etc. 

Huff-Duffer increased their conversions by 25-40% by using a mad libs style format instead of a standard registration form. It asks the same questions as a usual form, the the format makes it a much more natural process. The site has a relatively simple design so it doesn’t need to be pared down too much, so this one simple change has had a huge impact on the number of sign ups. 

Not Another Bill offer quite an unusual service, so they use graphics to clearly show what they do. After you’ve seen it, starting the conversion process is incredibly simple and integrated into the general experience. 

They don’t quite use the mad lib format, but it’s not far too – you just have to complete sentences to make sure that they send you things that you’ll like. 

How Can I Improve My Conversions?

Your Conversion Rate Optimisation work depends on why your barriers to conversion, your users, and the state of your site at the moment. But here are a few facts to give you ideas and show you how much you can improve:

• Updating your website design can increase conversions by up to 33%
• Updating your website imagery can increase conversions up by to 32%
• Updating your copy to make it more action orientated can increase clicks by 93%
• Using pictures of people can increase your signups by over 100%
• Clearly stating your value proposition can increase your registrations by 128%  
• Making your call to action more prominent can increase conversions by 591%
• Adding reviews can increase conversions by more than 35%
• Redesigning your pricing page can increase conversions by 25%
• Adding testimonials increases conversions by 34%

How much would a 33% increase in conversions make for your business?