5 Easy Things You Can Do To Improve Your Conversions
A few days ago I shared the article on Twitter «5 Easy Things You Can Do to Improve WebsiteConversions Right Now» Search Engine Land and I honestly think it is good enough to translate it on the blog and add some observations of my own.
Testing is the foundation for improving your conversion rate, however this is usually easier said than done. It may be that you lack technical or executive support to implement a testing plan.
It may even be that a series of tests are being carried out, but you are with your arms crossed while the data is being collected.
While running a Test always offers the best guide for making decisions about which improvements to implement to increase conversions, collectively enough experiments have been conducted that some improvements can be made with practically no extensive testing.
You could say that there are certain rules of thumb that always tend to work for the better.
While you should always compare whether the impact of conversion rate changes is positive, the following changes tend to improve the number of visitors who complete a conversion goal.
1) Remove an unnecessary element from a Web Page
The fewer elements you have competing for the user's attention, the more likely the user will actually take the action we want, whether we are talking about filling out a form, making a purchase or making a phone call.
One of the best options we have is to remove an unnecessary field from our contact forms, since being honest, to NO ONE likes to fill out forms.
Review your forms and see if all the fields are absolutely necessary, useful, or at least if you could live without that information if it translates into more conversions.
If your forms are already short enough or you cannot remove any more fields, the ideal is to look for other possible unnecessary elements that are diverting the attention of users.
2) Reduce Page Loading Time
The longer your page takes to load, the less likely a user will complete the steps required to perform the expected conversion.
In the same way, users are less likely to revisit a website with pages that load slow, on the other hand, the loading speed has also been recognized by Google as one of the organic positioning factors.
There are no cons in making a page load faster, although as a personal advice I tell you not to go crazy about loading speed.
Are there codes that are no longer necessary in the source code of your pages? Is it totally necessary to use HTML to resize your images or could you just use a smaller image?
Try to leave the source code as clean as possible and also try to reduce the weight of the images, in most cases that is more than enough.
3) Add a Call to Action to your "Thank You" Page
I confess to this sin, many times we miss the opportunity to take advantage of our "Thank you" pages after a user completes a conversion.
Once a user is confident enough to make a purchase, contact us, etc. We must not waste the opportunity to ask you for one more action once the conversion process is complete.
Some Calls to Action that you can add to your "Thank you" page are:
A) Subscription to a newsletter
B) To follow the company's profile on Twitter or become a Fan on Facebook
C) Provide a discount coupon for the next purchase
D) Perform Cross Selling (If the user bought a new Ipod, for example, they can be offered a headset of higher quality than the standard ones)
Almost any Call to Action is better than simply saying "Thank you" without giving the user more options.
4) Replace a Text Block with a List
In the same way that a NO ONE he likes to fill out forms, either NO ONE enjoy reading long paragraphs of text.
Identify a page in your conversion funnel that contains a long text block and replace it with a list where only the main ideas and benefits are highlighted.
Among the reasons why lists are more effective than a block of text:
A) The lists are more effective to list the benefits, since each point is clearly differentiated.
B) The special format in the lists stands out much more than normal text.
C) Lists are much easier for people to scan by sight than a block of text.
Replacing a block of text with a list is not necessarily going to change your life, but it is very good from a user point of view.
5) Use Analytics to discover actionable points
The data offered by the different Analytics platforms is a gold mine to understand what is really happening with the users of our website.
The next time you look at your Analytics data, you might want to ask yourself the following questions:
A) What are the pages of the conversion funnel where more users go?
B) Among your main keywords, which one has the best conversion rate?
C) Would you need to modify or create a new page to meet user expectations?
D) In the case of an eCommerce site, does the site's internal search engine provide results relevant to user searches or does it need to be improved?
Let's not ignore your Analytics data, learn to really understand and exploit it.
