Conversion rate optimization tactics come in handy for small and large businesses and companies alike. Conversions refer to that moment when a visitor responds to a call to action (CTA). A CTA can include: filling out a registration form on your website, opening an email that you sent, signing up for a giveaway, or buying a product. The formula is:
Conversion rate = Actions / Clicks
So it measures the number of users that converted (as a percentage) of the total number of site visitors. If your online marketing campaign is successful, your conversion rate will be too, making optimizing any weak areas essential.
To grow your business with digital marketing, tracking your conversions with the correct web analytics and conversion tracking tools will help you refine your marketing strategy, improve the effectiveness of your content, and identify the behavior of cart abandoners for stores.
You want your marketing efforts and content to generate as many conversions as possible, so your conversion rate will be high. We will identify why and where you may be lacking in the process, and provide you with tools and examples on how to optimize those areas.
Conversion Rate Optimization Tactics
Conversion rate optimization is different for everyone, and what works for a particular company or business may not work for you. CRO is a continuous process, not a one time thing. That’s why it’s necessary to personalize it, get in your visitor’s shoes, and follow the tactics below, then start all over again to uncover your next big opportunity. We’ve set up a list of 11 tactics we think are the best to optimize your conversion rate.
The very first step to this process is designed around an empathic mindset (towards your visitor) and is meant to improve your website without the extra guesswork. Get to know your customer better through the various types of tests we mention and utilize that information to then optimize the entire customer journey. The key question here is “why aren’t visitors converting?”, and the answer typically comes from research in the following areas:
1. Understand different visitor types and intentions
Conversion rate optimizations thrive when you find what drives people to your website. Set up one of these on-page surveys asking visitors to describe themselves and what brought them to your website. Keep collecting answers until you have a clear view of your visitor’s drivers (this can mean 100 answers for a smaller start-up business, or 5,000 for a slightly larger company).
Because only a small percentage of website visitors ever become your customers or join your email list, it’s important to gather the information from website surveys. The individual(s) running the survey can decide when the survey appears and to whom depending on the following targets:
- Target visitors by traffic source: The website survey can be directed towards only those visitors coming from a particular source such as a search engine, ad campaign, or social media.
- Target visitors by visit length or depth: The survey can be directed towards only those visitors who spend a certain amount of time on the site or visit a specified number of pages.
- Target by visit number: Many website surveys can target visitors based on the number of visits they’ve made to the site using cookies.
- Target by activity: The survey is targeted towards only those visitors who take certain actions, like attempting to navigate away from the website.
2. Ask the right questions
Good on-page surveys can be used to gather all types of customer feedback and have good conversion rate optimizations, but are only useful if you ask the right questions. Do not go with the standard questionnaire you see on every website, but instead rephrase a question or questions to get personal with your visitors. A good example of this is instead of asking “what are your hobbies?”, ask “what do you enjoy doing in your free time?” Sometimes just changing the wording for a question can have a huge impact on how it will be received.
To get you started, you can find a detailed list of the best survey questions to ask, the purpose of each question for your business, including examples and tips. Additionally, you can find seven samples of actual feedback forms that work here.
3. Focus on user personas
To understand exactly where else to apply conversion rate optimizations, you need to understand why people are reaching your website. If you treat all visitors the same, you won’t be able to tailor the user experience or prioritize the right messages for the demographics that matter most for your business. Ask your customers to describe in their own words what they’re looking for and why they need or want it (like a survey question where they fill in the answer manually versus clicking a multiple choice button). Then come up with new, creative, and fun ways to get in touch with visitors, since lengthy feedback forms do not drive conversions and qualitative feedback.
You can do this in the following ways:
- Offer various touch points – Touch points can also be considered interactions with the visitor. If we want to understand our visitors or customers, it’s essential to understand what those interactions are and where they take place in the customer journey. Including a contact page relevant to where your customers communicate with you more like on Twitter or through email is a great way to measure any improvements.
- Let the good and the bad in – Of course, touch points can invite interactions that are out of your control, such as bad reviews. In these cases, online reputation management tracking tools can help you treat negative reviews and comments accordingly. You or your team can focus your efforts on addressing negative customer experiences and website optimizations with tracking tools. After all, if your touchpoints worked well from the beginning, there may not be a reason for visitors to leave bad reviews. So improving the touchpoints you can control can improve the ones you cannot.
- Social media – Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook are all informal places where you can gather honest feedback from both your website visitors and potential customers. Ask questions and even set up social media questionnaires to get an opinion about a product, service, business, or even build user personas.
4. Give your landing page a touch-up
Many conversion rate optimizations focus on landing page optimization for higher conversion rates. Why? Because the landing page is the place where visitors decide if they want to convert. You can try this by creating two versions of your landing page – a short version and a long version.
- For the short version, take your basic landing page and only keep the necessary information. This version will remove distractions, directing the focus on the conversion.
- The long version can contain any information you want to include. To also keep all relevant information, but still have a compact landing page, you can include a chatbot from this list of the best 12 AI chatbots this year.
5. Perform A/B tests
A/B tests consist of a randomized experiment with two variables – A and B. For conversion rate optimizations, you can do different A/B testing for any instance where there are two or more variables to compare, or whenever you add or take away design elements. In the above case, randomly serving visitors two different versions of a landing page will measure the efficacy of the two designs. Either one may perform well, depending on each company or business, page elements, and many other factors. But the most important point to identify is which landing page traits give you better odds of converting the visitor.
Google Analytics is a good tool to use for A/B testing, but there is also a list of the best A/B testing tools you can use right now. Google Optimize is a great starting point for more advanced A/B tests. Designed for collecting precise and valuable data that can help your brand grow, these tools help you find the right design and content to publish on your site.
6. Give your website’s UX a touch-up
If you already set up a good website survey, you can gain customer feedback for conversion rate optimizations that lets you know what stopped them from converting on your site. You can then use the insights you gathered to optimize your website.
Ask yourself: does my website offer a positive experience to visitors throughout their customer journey? If the answer is no, then you need to create a seamless user experience. You can do this in the following ways:
- Incorporate white space – White space around text and titles increases user attention by 20%. The same rule applies for feedback forms as well. A form with extra white space makes it seem uncluttered and clean, leaving visitors wanting to fill it out. Take a look at this how-to guide for effective white space use to get inspired.
- Use the same tone of voice on every channel – email, social media, blog, and website.
- Use heat maps to quickly collect data on how visitors scroll through your website and spot UX improvements. Heat maps are visual aids to help you figure out exactly where you’re losing people’s attention or where you should focus visitor engagement. They’re a great way to track user behavior on an app, landing page, or website and see how each visitor interacts with pages and page elements. You’ll be able to see if extra white space really was effective.
7. Identify user-experience problems
You can ask visitors what exactly persuaded them to convert, but also what almost caused them not to to ensure good results for conversion rates. You can do this with a post-purchase survey if you’re an e-commerce business, for example, which can help you optimize your purchase path and increase sales. Ask new customers what almost caused them to not buy and turn the most common answers into changes on the website.
When you find out what persuaded your customers to convert, you can emphasize this for all other customers. Similarly, for those elements that almost stopped them, you can address these for potential future customers. You can take a look at this case study for how a post-purchase survey helped a website.
8. Gather and understand visitor’s objections
Find out what might stop potential users from continuing on your website. When you don’t know why your visitors are leaving, you can’t improve their experience and your conversion rate will suffer. You need to identify where and why visitors leave your website. You can start by identifying your high-traffic exit pages. You can do this with A/B tests and Google Analytics.
Your best option to find out why visitors are leaving though is by simply asking them. Create an on-page straightforward one-question survey asking them what stopped them from continuing. A good example of a question for new or trial users is “what nearly stopped you from signing up today?”, and more examples of survey questions can be found here for all types of users and visitors.
9. Exit intent pop-ups
Regardless of how annoying you may find them, a good conversion rate optimization tactic is an exit intent pop-up. Exit intent pop-ups are a good way to convince your visitors to do one last thing for you before they leave, and this will help visitors with future experiences.
Site overlays or side-bars are good options here, but again, need to be personalized according to customers and websites. HelloBar is a great tool when it comes to collecting feedback for exit intent pop-ups.
From personalizing a message with a visitor’s name or a specific product, to offering special discounts (10% off for signing up for emails), there are plenty of strategies, tips, and tricks you can use for exit intent pop-ups.
10. Be nice and promote positive experiences
Pop-up tools aren’t just a great resource for when a visitor leaves, but also for welcoming new visitors to your website and gathering feedback. Make welcoming messages and feedback surveys as personalized as possible for your customers and your website for best conversion rate optimization results.
Take a look at these 25 feedback widgets you can incorporate for user feedback. These can link anything from an on-site poll, a star rating, one-question surveys, to visual feedback and complex feedback analysis.
Marketers like to talk about the downfall of pop-ups. The truth is they still work, you just need to hyper-optimize them and provide a nice, homely experience for visitors so they’ll associate positive feelings with your brand based on this touchpoint.
11. Focus on trust and transparency
2020 was a scary year for many different reasons. Data breaches and phishing scams were among the threats we faced. This has made customers extremely wary of sharing personal information moving forward. To get these skeptical and cautious customers on your side, incorporate cybersecurity measures for your business. To improve site safety, and your conversion rate optimization results, you can:
- Review current data usage and make this information readily available, so viewers can learn what and if your site is tracking their data.
- Review data policies and provide opt-in options for your visitors.
- Alert visitors or customers every time you make changes to the privacy guidelines.
Conclusion
Never stop asking why. CRO provides an abundance of data that paints a picture of what does and doesn’t work, but it stops there. That doesn’t mean you should!
Since it can’t tell you what you need to improve or how to make the most of an opportunity, you need to go the extra mile to figure out why something works or doesn’t work.