10 Ways to Improve Your Website with CRO

Driving traffic to a website has become more popular than it was a few years ago, as more and more business owners have begun focusing their attention on their websites. Businesses are realizing a simple digital truth: if they can successfully build traffic to their products, they have more potential leads they can convert and ultimately, close more deals/sell more products. This works quite well and has helped many businesses achieve success. However, there is more to a digital marketing approach than just driving traffic. Even though basic website traffic has worked for many companies, it takes more than just a digital presence to drive sales.

It’s called Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO for short. CRO has been the secret ingredient successful companies implement on their websites to achieve excellent results. CRO, it can be the difference in a business’s digital marketing plan; the catalyst which propels a business to the next level. In this guide, we’ll be going over the different ways through which you can improve your website using Conversion Rate Optimization.

If you are looking for a way to generate faster results, get more from your existing traffic source, and expand your leads, keep reading. We’ll cover everything “CRO” in this article!

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Your conversion rate is the estimated number of visitors that complete the desired action when they visit your website. An example of such action from a visitor may include checking out a product, signing up with their email address, or downloading a particular file. These actions all mean you have converted your visitors into prospective customers!

Conversion rate optimization is the process through which you increase the number of conversions that you get on your website. This is done by strategically improving various components of your website, including your content and the site’s overall design/layout. This improvement is done in a way that makes your website more appealing and attractive to customers. You want them to fall in love with your website! If you work with a sales team you need to make sure everyone works alongside you, agrees with and understands this redesign.

The end goal of CRO is to increase your revenues, reduce cost and labor, increase value from leads, and generally grow your business.

CRO will take place on every page of your website that visitors interact with. Landing pages, about us pages, the home page; all these and more are included in your CRO implementation. CRO ensures that all these pages are structured in a way that moves your visitors to make a purchase or other desired action.

This is why you need to master different types of optimization.

Some of the strategies we will cover in this article are:

• Finding the best language to use in communicating with customers
• Building better forms
• Explore your user journey by working to improve your conversion funnel
• Improving the readability of your text
• Adding incredible visuals to important aspects of your website
• Carrying out A/B testing, throw in some CTAs
• Adding customer reviews
• Including a responsive live chat
• Always adding value to customers

Why does CRO matter?

Conversion Rate Optimization can double your results with the same traffic you’re currently getting to your website. This makes it a more preferred option to spending money on P.P.C ads and other forms of digital marketing. You can easily generate more sales by just improving various aspects of your website! This means you have a higher chance of converting more leads with every marketing step that you take, even those outside of your website. Even if you spend money on ads in a bid to get more traffic, your CRO will improve your results and bring back a larger return on your investment. This clearly shows that you need to place a huge focus on building your Conversion Rate Optimization as it holds the key to more effective marketing. It comes in as a great option without you spending unnecessarily on ads, saving your time, cost, and efforts at the same time.

You should know that incremental improvements add up. Let’s observe a scenario where you are selling a product for $40 on your website and you’re getting a total of 1000 visitors per month. Out of all these visitors, only 50 make purchases which means you get a total of $2000 per month. From these results, your conversion rate is 5%. You decide to optimize your website and your conversion rate increases to 8%. This means that out of 1000 visitors, 80 people are now making purchases, resulting in sales of $3200 per month. You can observe here that your sales have taken a spike, with an increase of $1,200 per month. This shows that without increasing the number of visitors you get per month, you can increase your conversion rates and make more monthly sales. This is a perfect example of how Conversion rate optimization can drastically boost the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and grow your business.

10 Ways to Improve your CRO

1. Find the best language

Your content plays a huge role in your conversion rate. How you choose to communicate and connect with your visitors matters a lot. It is, however, important that you find out what problems most of your visitors are having. One way to do this is to come up with a buyer’s persona. This helps you know the right approach to take in solving your visitors’ problems. What you can now do with that information is begin to generate different ideas with which you can address these problems. Once you have developed your ideas, you can use them to build an engaging and interesting piece of ad copy content on your site. Tools like Google Analytics will help you find out what keywords are trending so you can include them in your content.

 Think about it; no one likes to read a content that doesn’t speak to their lives! This is why you need to ensure that your ad copy communicates and resonates well with your readers. 

A very good example of this is found on “I Will Teach You to be Rich,” a book by Ramit Sethi. Sethi came up with an effective way of communicating with his audience by tapping into their feelings. This is how he gets his readers to keep reading every single detail on his website. This has worked well for him, as he became a New York Times best-selling author by utilizing this simple strategy. He was able to connect with his reader’s feelings of awkwardness, speak to them, and influence their decisions.

 2. Build better forms

Using different forms for your website’s content is a great strategy. For example, you can use short forms when the products you’re selling don’t require many details; products that are not overly intricate or expensive. Keep it short and straight forward! You want visitors to catch the most important pieces of information within the shortest possible period of time. However, you need to ensure that your content is engaging enough, with internal links to improve conversions.

Long forms contain a higher word count than short forms. The length of the posts helps you explain, among other things, the credibility of your business to readers. Long forms are the most shared type of content on the internet as it gives you more room to expand on your brand. More information means more understanding; with more understanding readers will be able to build deeper connections with your brand.

Long forms are recommended for more expensive products. You need to go into every single detail and ensure that customers understand what they’re about to spend big bucks on.

When you’re trying to decide which form to choose between the two, you should consider what type of product you’re selling and how it affects the public.

It’s also important to keep your forms as simple as possible. You should always maintain clarity when writing content for your website. You don’t want to talk about things that are unnecessary or uninteresting to your visitors. Make your content understandable by getting straight to the point. If you’re going with a long-form style, make sure to break it down into different sections which will be easy for users to access.

A very good example of this is found on Uber’s website where they section their form into two: one for drivers and the other for riders.

 This simple strategy makes it easier for visitors to use the website and use Uber’s services. This strategy has proven to capture 3× the number of leads than before its implementation.

3. Explore your user journey

A conversion funnel is the various processes a visitor goes through from the initial visit to your website until they finally get to complete an action. These are the different guides that your visitors go through from your landing page to the page where they’re converted. (Buys a product, subscribes to your newsletter, etc)

The goal of this funnel is to take your visitors through the different aspects of your website that have been well organized and optimized. It presents them with different options along the way which are meant for various purposes that are related to one another.

What makes it a funnel is the fact that the customers gradually reduce as they reach the final stage of conversion. This is why each stage must be more engaging and persuasive than the previous one. Your conversion funnel focuses on how you can improve these pages one by one and ensure that you increase the number of conversions.

Your user journey is the most important aspect of your conversion funnel, and you need to improve it. There are a lot of reasons why customers visit your online store, and if you are unable to provide them with what they want, then you don’t get to convert them. A good way to get rid of bottlenecks in your user journey is to understand what the target audience wants. Know the problems they are facing and how your products can be of help. Find out, what questions do they ask the most, and how can you get them used to your products and services.

4. Improve the readability of your text

Increasing your conversion rates isn’t just about creating and implementing engaging content. You will be limited to the number of conversions if your content is not reader-friendly. This is why it is highly recommended that after you have written your copies and blog posts, you improve their readability. Reading books and novels usually take a lot of time, so it is expected that readers calm down to digest the information. But when it comes to websites, readers are looking to grab the information within the shortest period. This is why you should ensure that they get the most out of your website’s content.

A lot of factors affect the readability of your content. The type of fonts used, the font size, the background colors, and how you arrange your content, to mention a few. The type of spacing you use matters, a lot. People don’t like breaking through unnecessary walls of text. Even when you have good content, it might be too bulky for visitors to read.

This is why you need to highlight your text when necessary. You can also use lists to structure and organize content, as they are easy to scan through. Try using fonts that are clear and not too big or small. Making small changes like this can help you build more qualified leads.

5. Add incredible visuals

Most people won’t buy a product if they can’t see what it looks like. The visual representation of your product matters a great deal when it comes to conversion. Most people prefer to touch and feel every aspect of a product to be double sure that it’s what they want. However, they can’t do this online, except for saas products, so it’s in your best interest to put a lot of effort into the visual representations of your product. A good image does the job of interpreting the ideas you have already written in a way that customers will easily understand. This is where high-quality photography and outstanding graphics come into action.

It is bad practice to use images of poor quality to sell your products. You must use the best quality you can, as this plays a major role in increasing conversions. You should also make sure to add as many pictures as possible. Use different styles and different angles. You can select a sample size and follow it up with smaller samples. Make sure the visitors have a lot of interesting images to look at while they’re on your website. If possible, allow users to zoom in and have a more detailed look. Try using pictures that best describe your products, not some random stock photos. This simple update can double the number of conversions on your eCommerce website.

6. Test Everything

A/B testing has been known to be one of the most important tools in increasing website traffic. It doesn’t just increase the traffic you get to your website, it significantly boosts your conversion rates. A/B testing is done to improve the various functionalities on your landing page. It is what powers a landing page. The reason most landing pages fail at converting leads is the owners build them with assumptions. They don’t focus on user experience! This is why it’s important to carry out A/B testing. You need to do it from time to time, as the needs of customers will vary over time. The process of testing your landing page or pricing page is more of a split-testing process. This includes using two different pages for a single product, but changing certain elements on each and analyzing what works and what doesn’t base on the comparison of conversion rates from each page.

One of the most important things to change is the layout of your website. This has to do with the arrangements and overall structure of your content. You can slightly displace your copy to the right-hand side of a page and also to the left-hand side of the second page. Then you test which one works the best. One of the most powerful tools you can use to test run your landing pages is Crazy Egg, software built specifically for testing.

The next thing to test is the offer customers get when they carry out a particular action on your website. (e.g subscription popup). Since you don’t know what your visitors want, it’s best to test different offers on each page. You can also change your headline and other aspects of your copy. Tweak the wordings a bit and see what works out. Another important aspect to analyze is your call to action. You can alter the background colors, font style, font size, and position of the CTAs. Try playing around with your landing page until you have a page that works better than the other one. If you feel you need to work with more variables then you can try out multivariate testing.

7. Include CTAs

Call To Actions (CTA)s are a part of your landing page you need to focus on. This is what dictates the action the customer takes after going through your whole website. It’s like crossing a bridge;you need to make sure that the bridge is strong enough! Now,remember, you have already successfully convinced the visitors to travel your website enough to find your CTA’s. Once visitors get there, you don’t want them to waste time deciding whether to click the CTA or not. This is why you need to make sure that you address the customer’s needs. Customers are people, just like you. This means they will try to find out if your product solves their problems. It also involves knowing what things customers want to avoid. So you need to fix a balance between their needs and what they don’t want. Tryto make sure visitors see the CTAs as soon as possible; Urgency is the best way to convince a visitor to buy your product. Doing this can help you turn the micro-conversions into macro-conversions.

Once you’re able to achieve all of this, there’s a higher probability of you increasing your conversion rates.

8. Add reviews if you have them

Adding reviews to your website is a great way of building trust and credibility for your business. People buying online will mostly lookout for product effectiveness before adding their payment methods. This is why they read reviews about a product before deciding whether to buy it or not. A good way to accelerate this process? Make reviews visible on your website! Put them in a position where visitors can easily locate them. You should ensure that your reviews are well arranged, and well structured, for better reading. You can use bullet points to highlight the various benefits past customers have gotten your product. Adding a few statistics to show customers the statistical significance of your website is another good strategy.

It is important to make your reviews as honest as possible. You don’t want to put out only the good sides of your products as customers will see this as a red flag. This is where your ratings come in. Add a feature that makes it possible for each review to have a rating. Doing this works well in giving you a higher rate of conversions based on trust in your product and brand honesty.

9. Chatbots and live chats are known to help

If there’s one thing customers always look for, it’s fast service. Nobody likes to be delayed when they need something done. This is why it’s better to keep visitors actively engaged while they are waiting for a reply. There are times when customers will run into a particular problem,and they need someone to help them out. A good way to address this issue is to have a chat feature installed on your eCommerce website. This can appear in the form of a chatbot that has been programmed with the likely questions that most customers will ask. You should incorporate a live chat feature to support this chatbot, as customers don’t really like unrelated automated replies to important issues. You can use live chats to better explain the products to customers, assist customers with answers to questions not programmed in the chatbot, and to make your customer service more personable and effective. A good chat feature can seriously boost your conversion rates. You can also make chatting available on various social media platforms; they are very fast and effective at reaching customers

10. Value Value Value

It’s one thing to get a visitor to buy a product and it’s another thing to get them to come back. Retaining customers is very important to your business; agood way of doing this is to provide value.

Most customers will test out a bunch of websites to see which one works best. You can make yourself stand out by always providing value to your customers. This is done by paying attention to what they want and putting in your best effort to meet their needs. Even though the other strategies mentioned above are quite effective in boosting your conversion rates, providing value is the most important piece of the puzzle. This is why you need to make it your number one priority. You can offer free trials to show customers the authenticity of your products. This works quite effectively in increasing your number of conversions.

Companies that focus on giving out values will always get more customers, even with little effort. This is because value builds a long-term commitment between you and your customers. They won’t need to think too much before buying your products in the future

 Final thoughts

In case you are still wondering how or when to start with Conversion Rate Optimization, the best answer is to start as soon as possible. There are CRO Specialists (like us!) to help you get started.

CRO is a concept that’s easy to understand but requires some hard work before you can achieve your conversion goals. Come up with a strategy and start testing it out. Look out for content and design that your customers react to well, as well as changes that generate positive results for your business.

By implementing effective CRO strategies, your website will work for you, your business will boom, and your sales will soar!