One of the most important metrics in your digital marketing tool belt is your Conversion Rate.
This metric tells you what’s working and what’s not. Though it’s simple in theory, in practice… not so much. Consistently finding ways to increase your conversion rate can be challenging and will require testing.
Focusing on these 5 best practices for your conversion will ensure you’ll be heading down the right path from start to finish.
5 Tips to Boost Your Conversion Rate
1—Cut the Clutter
Don’t over complicate your designs and be sure to look at your “offer” (your landing page, site, email, ad etc.) as a whole prior to posting.
Be intentional with design decisions and er on the side of simple rather than busy designs. If the user’s eye is distracted with too much imagery, they may not see the main CTA, and may not purchase.
Busy features on a site are typically too distracting, hard to follow, and may increase page load time all of which lead to lower conversions. Keep designs simple, clean and to the point as much as possible.
2—Make Your Message Unquestionably Clear
Like visual imagery, verbal messaging should be clear and focused.
Think of your offers as your digital “elevator pitch” and the goal, of course, is to get the user to convert. Guide them there with direct, confident messaging.
What does your product do? How will the user benefit from purchasing? What does the user miss out on by NOT purchasing?
Keep in mind that you should always have enough information that the user won’t be left with any questions.
Give them just enough information where they can convince themselves they need this product. Preemptively answer questions, address concerns if possible too. Find the balance between too much and too little messaging for your brand.
3—Use Strength and Confidence
Use confident, active voice commands attention to catch your audience’s eye. That means clear Calls to Action with dependable facts. Always use your active voice for high converting pages.
Use strong SEO terms for your market to be able to find you (click here to learn more about SEO). Users who find your product through an organic search tend to be much more likely to convert.
4—Make The Value Clear
Consumers convert at a higher rate when they can’t deny the value of the product—that means the value your product should always be a key selling point.
Focusing on making the value straightforward and understandable will lead to more positive conversion results.
5—Elicit Excitement Using Urgency
Strike while the iron is hot, the last feature worth focusing on to boost conversions is your offer’s overall sense of excitement, positivity, and even better, urgency.
Get the user excited for your product and tell them they need it now. Excitement can outweigh doubt when shopping online and urgency will compel them to purchase now. It’s a winning combination!
As long as the scarcity or time constraint for your offer isn’t BS then it will typically help with conversions. It may seem obvious but, DO NOT LIE about this type of stuff, that’s not a good look if people catch wind. Dishonesty with promotions is a sure fire way to get bad reviews, so keep specials changing!
- If you’re a small company and there is only a limited time to take up a particular offer, USE THAT on your product, on landing pages, or even in ads.
- If your product or service has sold out in the past let your audience know it could happen again.
- If you have tons of stock of a particular item, add a freebie gift for a limited time and promote that.
All of those options offer urgency for your audience.
Adding an aspect of the offer to make the user feel special increases excitement. Time based, or quantity based specials tend to yield higher conversion rates that offers without them, so try it out!
Now, Let’s Talk Testing.
So I’ve given you a few key aspects that can boost conversion rates, but the key here for your brand will be finding exactly what works for your audience. To do that, you need testing.
Testing is essential in order to adequately make decisions on feature changes. It provides insight on how specific features affect the customer’s likelihood of purchasing or engaging with content.
With so many variables, expect that you’ll have a few iterations of key design elements like your images, copy, and maybe even your colors. In fact, you should always try to have a few ever-so-slightly different options running and being tested against each other.
When building variations of your current offers to test be sure to keep changes to a minimum so you can accurately pinpoint winning features/ copy/ placement/ imagery etc.
Too many updates between your offers will give inconsistent data. Test variations of 1 feature change at a time. You may be VERY surprised and which versions do better than others and also at what huge affects a subtle change can have.
Let the data show you what your customers truly want. Let that data inform your design choices to continue to hone in and create the most effective elements for your offer. Statistics get stronger with a larger group of participants, so know that this data may fluctuate with a smaller group at first, this is normal.
