3 Tried and Tested Ways to Increase Conversions on Your Website.

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What is online marketing?

If you look up online, you’ll find every expert having their own definition of this term.

But in reality, online marketing is exactly what it reads. Marketing. Done online.

Similar to traditional marketing, the purpose is getting sales and leads for your business. The only difference is, since you’re marketing your product online, the platforms used for marketing are different.

What do you think is the first step to market your product online?

You need to have a presence online. It could either be a website. A blog. Or a social media page.

Once you’ve done that, you need to attract visitors. Because without traffic there cannot be conversions.

Some of the most common ways to market your product online is search engine optimization, social media marketing and paid search to generate traffic to your website.

With all these methods of marketing, driving traffic to your website is easy. But convincing website visitors to buy from you is where most marketers fail.

It’s easy to be lured by paid marketing because you see your website visitors increasing every day. It’s also easy for a greedy digital marketer to convince you that investing more money in paid marketing is the only way to improve conversions. But that’s not true.

Think about this.

There are 100 people visiting your website every day. But only 5 out of 100 buy from you.

Why are the other 95 people not buying from you?

What do you think is a smart way to improve conversions?

Doubling your investment in paid media, so 10 out of 200 people buy from you?

Or looking at ways to improve persuasion on your landing page?

The lazy marketer would say, double your spends.

But a wise investor knows, optimizing conversions is the most profitable

way to go.

What is conversion rate optimization?

Conversion rate optimization is a process of making improvements to your website, blog or even your social media pages. The aim is to improve conversions.

Thankfully, digital marketing lets you track everything. Careful analysis of the data tells you what you’re missing.

You can determine the optimal mix of elements to maximize conversions. In simple words, you get more conversions from the same volume of traffic.

Are you keen on trying this for your website?

Excited about increasing leads, conversions and ROI from your digital marketing?

Here are 3 things you should do on you website right now.

Step 1: Identify the Problem Areas

Start with a thorough audit of your website. This can be done using analytics, heat mapping and survey tools. They determine where visitors are losing interest, and where you should improve.

How To Use Google Analytics?

1. To clearly understand user behaviour on your site, you need to sync Google Analytics with your website.

2. Take a good look at the “Site Content” section. This gives you the key stats for each page. For example: Total pageviews and average time spent on a page.

3. After fetching this data look at the the Bounce Rate and the Exit Rate on your site. This is the most crucial data.

What is Bounce Rate and Exit Rate?

According to Google Analytics, Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-

engagement sessions. And exit rate is the percentage of exits on a

page.

In simpler words, bounce rate is determined by calculating the number

of bounces over the total number of page-views to a page. A bounce

happens when a user visits a page and subsequently exits a page

without visiting any other page or even taking any action like

commenting on the page.

Take a look at this image. This is how Google Analytics shows you the Bounce Rate and Exit Rate.

Exit rate is the number of people who exit your website after visiting a page compared to the total number of views the page has.

Both these metrics are may seem similar to each other but have subtle differences and cannot be interchanged.

It is recommended that you read more about the differences in both of these metrics to have a clear understanding on how they can benefit you.

Exploring the “Conversions” section in Google Analytics This is yet another important section in this tool. Once you define the goals you want users to complete for eg: subscribing for a newsletter or downloading an ebook, this tool can accurately measure your conversion rate.

You can also go a step further and set up a funnel. You can define your path in the funnel which you want users to take for completing the goal. This allows Analytics to track where the visitors enter and exit the path. If a large volume of visitors exit the path before finishing the goal, you’ll come to know where the problem is and which page you exactly need to fix.

On the other hand if you find visitors skipping a few steps then you have an opportunity to streamline your funnel.

b) Use Heat Mapping Tools Heat mapping tools are the best way to know how your visitors are interacting with your website. Tools like Crazy Egg and Hotjar are apt for this kind of analysis.

Heat mapping tools track visitors’ mouse movements, clicks and scroll on a given page. These visitor actions are shown visually by a heat map laid over a page.

Take a look at how heat map lays over a page.

[Image via: www.crazyegg.com]

Wondering how this would help in conversion rate optimization?

With the help of a heat map when you come to know if visitors are not scrolling all the way down to the bottom of your page. In which case, you should consider having important information at the top of the page above the fold. You can also devise elements that urge visitors to scroll further.

Moreover, when you look at page clicks using a heat map you’ll notice parts on your website which don’t have much interaction. This may indicate that the information there is something that visitors are not interested in or is not apparent to them. Looking at such key insights you can determine what changes you have to make on your website.

c) Use Survey Tools There is no better way to find out why your website visitors aren’t converting than to ask them.

Have you seen those emails brands send right after you’ve left their website? Or a pop-up that asks you to rate your experience before you leave the website?

It is a great way to get insights on how to optimize your website for conversions.

Step 2: Get Savvy With Testing

Identifying the problem areas helps you make improvements to your website.

But do you know the best ways to fix these problems?

You just can’t afford to rely on your gut feeling or common sense when it comes to website optimization.

Testing is the only way to find out the best possible solution.

There are mainly 2 types of testing methods: A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing

a) A/B Testing A/B testing or split testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage against each other to determine which page performs better.

It basically helps you take data-informed decisions as opposed to guesswork.

Take a look at the figure below which shows 2 variations of a page.

[Image via: www.optimizely.com]

How A/B Testing Works

In an A/B test you modify and create a second version of a webpage. The change can be as simple as a change in the headline or in the colour of the CTA. To get accurate results, ideally both the pages are kept the same apart from one variable which is being tested.

After this half the traffic is sent to the original version of the page (known as the control) and half is driven to the modified version of the page (the variation). As visitors visit one of the two pages their engagement is collected on an analytics tool like Google Analytics. You can then determine which page is working the best for you.

b) Multivariate Testing Multivariate testing is not very different than A/B testing just that it tests more than multiple variables at a given point of time. It is like conducting numerous A/B tests all at once. Here’s an infographic explaining how multivariate testing works.

Multivariate testing is complex and hence not used by many marketers, but if you have high volume of traffic it may provide you accurate results which may benefit you.

Step 3: Add These Elements on Your Website Now While there is no magical formula to optimize your website for conversions, it is imperative that you have these elements on your website.

a) Have a Clear Value Proposition What if people came to your site but take a long time to figure out what your product or service is? Do you think they would stick around?

The answer is NO. They would rather go to a company which clearly state what their product or service is.

Visitors want to understand what your product or service is in a matter of seconds. For this your copy should be clear, concise and customer-focussed.

Moreover, reducing clutter, having less text and images would help visitors focus on more important points and also urge them to take decisions.

Here’s an example of a clear value proposition on one of our client’s website.

b) Include Calls To Action A calls to action button prompts a visitor to click in order to complete an action. CTA’s move visitors further into the buying process. It might range from a button prompting a visitor to download an ebook or asking an online shopper to “Buy Now”

If you don’t have CTA’s on your website then it’s the first thing that you should have on your website right now.

Here’s an example of how a calls to action looks like. Here “Contact Us Now” button is the CTA.

The various things that you can test about a CTA is:

- Placement of the CTA

- Size of the CTA

- Colour of the CTA

- Offer of the CTA

- Number of CTA’s on a single page

c) Include Social Proof There are very less people who would like to buy your product or service

before its been tried by a bunch of people. Most of them would like to read

a review of the product or service before they decide to buy it.

You must have seen ratings given to a particular product you’re interested

in on popular ecommerce sites such as Amazon and Flipkart. This is

nothing but social proof.

Testimonials too is a great way of showing social proof on your website

which urge visitors to buy your product or service.

Here’s an example of how testimonials are used as social proof.

d) Reduce Risk For Your Customers Reassure that your site is safe and secure as your customers are going to share their personal information here.

Always have a privacy policy page so that your customers know how you use their personal information.

Highlight “Risk Free or Money Back”, “Hassle-free Returns” if you have such a policy.

Make these simple changes in your website and see your conversion rate rise up.

Not sure if you can do this yourself? But really want to increase conversions on your website?

We can help.

Call Pigtail Pundits NOW.

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Deepak Jayaraman Founder, Transition Insight Private Limited

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