Conversion rates are the ultimate goal from any online marketing campaign.

That is a fact.

And therefore…

Every digital marketer SHOULD…

Try to understand, track, and increase their conversion rates in order to have a successful website.

That’s all good…

But what is a conversion rate, first?

Well, we can define a conversion rate as the percentage of visitors who take the action you are waiting from them such as making a purchase, filling in a form, making subscriptions etc.

The QUESTION now is:

What is the average conversion rate to aim for?

Also…

What actions to take in order to help boost visitors’ conversion?

Well…

To begin with and as an answer to the first question…

Everything that goes around 2-5% is typically, considered the average.

According to WordStream, the standard average conversion rate goes around 2.35%.

It’s been also shown that the top 20% of websites, in a determined niche, have a conversion rate of 5.31% or more.

Therefore, to be amongst the top 10% in your niche, you SHOULD be aiming for at least 11.45% as a minimum conversion rate.

Why Conversion Rates Are that Important?

Conversion rates is an important parameter to track which will help you measure how successful is your marketing campaign. It will help you decide whether to carry on with it or to just stop wasting your money.

Marketers launch their online marketing campaigns for different goals like getting their audiences to sign up for their services, filling out lead gen forms, collecting visitors emails, or buying their products or services…

In other words, every marketing campaign is launched to get audiences to take some specific actions and eventually to earn money from it.

How to know that you marketing campaign is that successful or not?

Pretty SIMPLE…

Through Conversion rates!

The more people that are taking action and converting the more successful will be your campaign.

When you find that you conversion rate is going very low, you will have to rethink your marketing actions. Similarly, when your conversion rate is going high, you’ll have to keep with what you’re doing.

The GOLDEN TIP…

Keep tracking your conversion rates to find ways to increase them and never say is too much work.

For effective marketing campaigns…

You should ALWAYS be looking for what makes your visitors convert and where they bounce and take actions ACCORDINGLY…

Some of the ACTIONS, however, that I would DEFINITELY RECOMMEND you to take are as follows…

1. Adding Social Proof to Your Website

Always back up what you’re claiming with proof to give it credibility. Don’t expect your audience to automatically believe what you say without proofs.

Many researches have shown that social proofs help improve customer trust and thus the website’s conversion rate.

When it comes to making purchases online…

Researches have shown that 97% of buyers do search and consult reviews before making any purchase.

Also…

It’s been shown that 83% of buyers are more likely to trust reviews than ads to make purchases.

A GOOD EXAMPLE of social proof power on people is…

that of WikiJob whose conversion rate has increased by 34% by JUST adding testimonials to their website.

There are different ways to add social proof to your website such as:

• Adding customer reviews: Almost all successful ecommerce websites dedicate a section to customer reviews. Researches have shown that 93% of buyers look at online reviews before making any purchase.

• Including case studies: Case studies will also help position as a trustful business. They can be published on your website in form of blog posts or stories.

• Using social proof pops-up: To show your users behaviour, you can add a pop-up notification to your sales page. Below are some screenshots from Sleeknote to get an idea what a social proof pop-up can look like.

2. Go for Short Forms to Improve Your Conversions

Let’s IMAGINE…

You came across an interesting ecommerce website with interesting offers at great prices…

The only issue?

HOWEVER is…

In order to sign up or get more information, you are REQUIRED to fill up a long form for that.

It may be very important for you as website owner to use long forms to gather the most possible information about your customers.

At the same time, HOWEVER, let’s imagine how annoying this can be for a visitor to have to fill up a long form to just get a simple information or buy a product or service.

Therefore…

Shortening your forms is the best way for you to reduce your buyers frustration and help lower your bounce rate.

Whether it’s a special offer or a signing up for a newsletter, always keep your forms short.

A good example is a test led by Marketo whose conversion rate passed from 10% with a longer 9-field form to 13.4% with it reduced to only 5 fields.

To shorten your forms, you can proceed as follows:

• Focus on collecting essential fields first: Use your forms to gather essentials only. For other information, you can go for other ways such as emails, follow-up calls, or surveys.

• Use third-party accounts: You can add the option for your visitors to sign up thru accounts like Google to help them avoid entering their information each time and thus make it easy for them to conclude their purchases.

3. Keep it Simple (KISS)

You can also reduce the length of your forms to make the buying process more convenient for potential customers.

To increase conversion rates, you can simplify the user experience.

People are much more attentive today than they were 10 years ago.

Etsy conducted an experiment to improve user experience.

They added hidden 160kb images to deliberately slow down certain mobile pages.

The results…

They noticed a 12 percent rise in bounce rates.

It is important to keep the process simple beyond UX design and loading speeds. 67 percent of users will abandon a form if they face any complications completing it.

In order to keep things super simple, here are some ways to follow:

• Offer Clear instructions: Where should they click? What information should they provide? What information should they enter to find the right size/color?

• Make Your CTA Clear: Have the buttons properly placed. It should be easy for customers to access and modify the shopping cart. Even for the most experienced user, the next step in the purchasing process should be easy to find and edit.

• Do Not Offer Too Many Choices: While it may seem tempting to give too many options, sometimes this can be detrimental. Do not confuse users. Keep it simple. To help them navigate the options, you can add filters.

4. Do NOT Require From Your Customers to Log in

You maybe have heard of the famous $300 million button story.

For those who have not, it basically says that customers don’t want spend too much time signing up and logging into websites when they only want to purchase a product.

One customer said that he was not looking to get into a relationship. “I want to purchase something.”

This holds true for the majority of e-commerce websites.

Customers may leave if they are required to log in before making a purchase.

A study from Baymard Institute showed that 37% of customers will abandon their checkout if they have to create an account. This same study found that 38 percent of e-commerce websites didn’t offer temporary accounts to users before they placed their orders.

For something so easy, why risk a lower conversion rate?

Here are some ways to get around the login requirement:

• Guest Shopping: Allow your customers to shop as guests without having to create an account.

• Clear Instructions Are Required: Let users know that they don’t need an account to make purchases with your company by adding a “Checkout as Guest” clickable button.

• Make Fields Optional Mark sign-up or login fields as “optional” to make it clear that users have the option to purchase as a guest.

5. Try to Always Meet Your Customer Expectations

It’s not enough to have a great product. You can increase your conversion rate by thinking about what you can do to meet the expectations of your customers.

PwC’s future CX report surveyed 15,000 customers and found that one in three would abandon a brand they love after just one negative experience. According to the same study, 92 percent of respondents would forget about a company after only two or three bad experiences.

According to some reports, as high as 66% of customers don’t recall the last time a brand exceeded their expectations.

These are some tips that will help you meet and exceed your customers’ expectations.

• Test Your Ideas: Use user testing tools to find out what customers like or dislike, before you make major changes.

• Get Feedback From Your Customers: Offer a reward to encourage them to share their experiences with you.

• Try User Testing Platforms: You can invest in user testing platforms such as Userlytics, Maze and TrymyUI. Heatmaps can be used to determine what appeals to repeat or first-time visitors, and which areas are covered up.

After you have all this information, you can edit your website to meet user expectations.

You can make the user experience as pleasant as possible to increase conversion rates.

6. Do Not Forget to Look Beyond the Initial Testing Results

A/B Testing is the foundation of most successful marketing campaigns. But that’s not all.

Business Insider reports that the market demand for A/B testing software will surpass $1 billion by 2025.

You need to go beyond the initial testing results in order to increase your conversion rates. One change may lower your conversion rate, but might increase the spending power of the users who converted. Even if your conversion rate has dropped, this change can be considered a positive.

Similar to the above, you might make some adjustments that will increase your conversion rate but cost less. You can undo any changes that have been made or make another attempt.

You’ll learn more about your business by doing more experiments. 77% of marketers run A/B testing across their websites regularly with 60% of those tests being conducted on landing pages.

To increase conversion rates, you should continue to tweak your website based upon your data.

This is how you can tell which results from testing are important and which ones to ignore.

• Pay Attention and Monitor Your Revenue. Not only should you be paying more attention to conversions, but also how your tests impact your bottom line.

• Use a Holistic Approach to Your Testing Results

• Tests with a Large Sample Size: To ensure that your results are reliable, you should run your test with a sufficient sample size.

7. Data Backed Decisions Help Increase Conversions

It’s obvious that you need to make some changes. But what type of changes? It doesn’t matter if you’re doing A/B testing or trying out a new user interface to improve your conversion rate.

Data-backed decisions are important.

The demand for more data driven decisions is increasing. 91% of companies believe that data-driven decision making is important for the future growth and success of their business. Businesses that use big data have seen a 7-8% increase in profits, along with a ten percent decrease in costs.

You might be tempted to copy others or add your own ideas based on what is trendy. Do not do this. Instead, you should use Ubersuggest to find out what works for your site.

To find keywords that are relevant to your industry, you can try Ubersuggest’s Keyword Tool.

To find gaps in your website’s optimization, you can also use Ubersuggest SEO Analysis Tool.

Here are some other things you can do to make data-driven business decisions.

• Consider Trends When Analyzing Your Data: Do not get too focused on the numbers. Take a look at what trends are happening in your industry, or in other areas that may have had an impact on your results.

• Do Not Look at Everything: While it is easy to be distracted by all data points that relate to your website, you should only pay attention to the ones that are most important to your business.

• Get Inputs from Other Departments: Before you make major changes, get in touch with other departments to find out if they agree with your proposal.

8. Do an SEO Audit

Even though you can offer the best user experience, users will not find your site if it is slow or doesn’t get indexed by Google.

Your conversion rate will increase as the number of visitors and visits to your website increase. The first-ranked webpage on Google has an average CTR of 31.7%. Only 25% of users make it to the second Google page, and this doesn’t include clicks that may occur beyond the first page.

You can improve your SEO to get more clicks, rank higher on Google and convert more customers.

This is easy to fix. Perform an SEO audit.

This will allow you to identify what is preventing your website from ranking higher. You can then fix each issue one-by-one to increase your organic traffic and improve conversion rates.

Are you unsure how to conduct an SEO audit? Don’t worry! Here’s how:

• Get a Tool. There are many tools that can be used to do SEO audits. These are some of the most popular options: Search Engine Optimization Analyzer, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest.

• Hiring an Agency or an SEO Expert: You have the option to hire an agent or pay for an SEO expert to conduct an audit.

• Do it Yourself: To get started, you can refer to this The Ultimate Guide to Running an SEO Audit.

9. Personalize and Localize Content

Who doesn’t like content that is tailored to them?

Data from Accenture shows that 91 percent of consumers believe they are more likely shop with brands who offer relevant offers and recommendations.

SmarterHQ research shows that 72 per cent consumers only engage with personalized messaging.

These statistics prove the power and importance of localized, customized content. They should not be taken as a given.

Here are some ways to provide localized and/or personalized content

• Share Relevant Content: Share relevant content with customers that are at the same place in their buyer’s journey.

• Personalize Your Offers: Personalize discounts and offer unique discounts to customers based on their location or customer behavior.

• Local SEO optimization: To reach more people in your area, optimize your website and content for SEO.

These actions can build customer trust, increase recurring visits, and ultimately increase your conversion rate.

10. To Drive Conversions, Add a Live Chat

Let’s say a visitor likes your product. The visitor wants to purchase it but has one question. They are unable to convert right away because of this.

What can you do to help them?

You can add a live chat option on your website.

Studies show 38 per cent of people purchased after having a positive interaction with a chat agent. Additionally, chatters spend 60 percent more on each purchase than non-chatters.

It’s easy to set up a live chat function today, given the number of paid and free tools on the market.

Chats with live chats are a great way to answer customer questions, resolve complaints, and track orders. Your imagination is the only limit.

This are some examples of a livechat.com chatbots:

The best thing? This option doesn’t require you to hire staff. Bots can be used to answer repetitive questions, and the feature can also be programmed to provide other resources if the question isn’t answered immediately.

You’ll save money while also making sure that your customer is happy. What happens when a customer feels satisfied? Customers are more likely to buy from you!

These are some tips to set up live chat:

• Make an Investment in a Chat Software: To create custom scripts to answer user questions, use a tool such as ZenDesk.

• Decide How your Website will Use Live Chat: Will it be used to provide better customer service? To make it easier to buy products? To answer commonly asked questions?

 To determine which method has the greatest impact on conversions, you might try different chat versions.

To Sum It Up

Your marketing plans can be more effective if you increase conversion rates.

There are many free tips and tricks that can help improve the user experience of your website, simplify the user journey and increase conversion rates.

It’s not necessary to do all of these things at once.

You can choose one or two strategies that you want to test, then run A/B tests to see which ones work best and adjust accordingly. You’ll eventually get a better understanding of your target audience and how to increase conversion rates without spending too much money.

Recommended reading : Meta Descriptions That Are Worth clicking – Expert Writing Tips!

(Featured Image Credit(free) : wallpapercave)

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