Chintan Zalani
There’s a leak. Your website is losing money every single day. It could amount to millions of dollars of lost yearly revenue. The reason? Your visitors are encountering conversion problems on your website.
They might be:
- Having difficulty in finding the perfect offer tailored for them.
- Facing trust issues with your brand and don’t believe that you can provide value.
- In the worst case scenario, they might be clueless about the next step for grabbing your offer.
The third one is the most likely scenario.
Because as per a 2012 research by Bryan Eisenberg, companies spend $92 on driving traffic. But merely $1 on improving their customer experience.
If you don’t care about the user experience, then you’ll obviously find it difficult to get more conversions. Your audience might lose trust and leave your website.
It doesn’t need to be that way though…
Your business can fix the leak, opening floodgates of revenue from your existing audience, who are already on your website
There are common aspects of your website that can affect the user experience and hence impact your sales. Walmart increased their conversions by 20% and doubled their sales on mobile by changing their website to a responsive design.
I don’t promise to give you a magical 8-point CRO template that will get rid of all your conversion problems. Conversion optimization is a complex iterative process that requires a lot of your time, money and resources.
Then what is this article all about?
It’s a list of 8 common conversion optimization techniques that have been proven to make more sales. I’ll share data and case studies along with every technique to help you understand the context and conditions under which the tactic worked.
Ready to take your website for a conversion spin?
8 Tips To Fix Your Conversion Problems
CRO Tip #1: Start with a small request to leverage the principle of consistency
Do you know that humans like to stay consistent in their behaviour?
It’s the classic Cialdini’s principle of commitment and consistency – people go a long way to stay consistent in their words and actions (even take irrational steps).
That’s the reason public commitments pressurize you to stick with your goals. You feel obligated to appear consistent to others.
via GIPHY
And that’s how advertisers like you can use free trials and money back guarantees to lift your product sales. Once a prospect starts using your product, they become committed to it. And it becomes more difficult to ‘not buy’ it from you.
Similarly, if you get your prospects to make a micro-commitment to your brand, then they are more likely to convert (just to stay consistent in their behaviour).
Photoshelter.com managed to double their sales by offering a $1 trial.
Let me share 3 more examples of how this consistency principle can be leveraged to increase your conversions.
1. Pre-qualify your landing page traffic
You might have already read that asking your visitors to fill 10 form fields on your landing page won’t help your conversions.
It will only end up overwhelming them.
An alternative is multi-step landing pages.
You don’t send your PPC traffic to the lead capture form with multiple fields directly. Instead, you break down your questions into multiple stages to reduce the fear.
For instance, Advanced grass broke down their 7 question landing page into two steps.
Here’s step 1.
And here’s step 2.
This resulted in a 214% increase in conversions.
You can read more about creating multi-step landing pages here.
2. Ask your readers to share your post on social media before allowing them to view it
If you’re confident of the value of your content, then you can ask your visitors to first share it on social media before allowing them access to the full content.
Neil Patel used to show such a pop-up asking the reader to tweet or like the post.
Remember to provide an option to not share it so that the reader doesn’t feel annoyed. Notice the ‘I already liked you’ and ‘Not now’ buttons at the bottom of the above popup.
Similarly, you can also selectively block a section of your article and ask for it to be shared in return for getting to read it fully.
3. Get your audience to say ‘yes’ before presenting your opt-in
Popups aren’t the most entertaining entity for readers. They hurt their experience, yet they are the highest converting method for collecting emails.
SumoMe found that 313,000 sites using their product triggered 10 million pop-ups through their list builder that shows popups. And they doubled (even tripled) the number of conversions.
A great way to smoothen the conversion journey is by asking relevant questions to the user in pop-ups. Rocket Memory use 5 such small steps to increase their opt-in-rate by 271%.
They first prompt the visitor to answer a simple set of questions.
And finally present him with the opt-in.
Similarly, in his first mail to new email subscribers, Pat Flynn asks the subscriber to click on the link that describes their situation aptly. This ‘tags’ the readers and helps Pat in sending the most relevant content to them.
CRO Tip #2: Ensure that your website is blazing fast
How many times have you heard this advice?
A slow website hurts user experience and decreases your conversions. It’s a part of the first impression of your brand in front of many consumers.
When a user fails to see the information he’s searching through Google, he immediately clicks the back button and checks another SERP result. This behaviour is called ‘pogo sticking’ and sends a negative signal to Google that a user isn’t satisfied with your website.
Google could demote you in their rankings if this happens a lot. They outright stated that loading speed is a critical search engine ranking factor (first announced by Google in 2010).
Here are 3 additional stats to show the importance of a website’s loading speed.
- 75% of users give up on a website beyond 4 seconds. And 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- Google prefers to show fast loading websites in its results. They have started to show ‘slow to load’ labels on mobile that might hurt your CTR.
- As per KISSMetrics, every second’s delay in loading time is equivalent to a 7% decrease in conversions.
Here are 3 steps to optimize your website for faster loading time and satisfy the shrinking attention spans of users.
Step #1: Use the Pingdom speed test tool
You’ll get a summary of how your website fares with loading time, performance grade, number of requests and page size.
If you scroll down, you’ll find performance insights with suggestions on improving individual elements that hurt your loading time.
Keep scrolling to find a breakdown of the requests and content size by content type.
Try to combine multiple elements (images into CSS sprites) and eliminate as many heavy objects as possible.
Step #2: Consider switching your web hosting company.
You get what you pay for. This is especially valid for cheap shared web hosting plans. Their so-called “unlimited web hosting” plans are designed on the assumption that most websites never pick up traffic.
But if your website receives decent traffic, then your hosting plan might not be able to take the additional load and your website might crash.
An alternative?
Switch to a professional hosting plan.
Here are the fastest web hosting companies of 2016 as per an analysis by How To Get Online.
If you’re on WordPress, then WPSiteCare recommends the following 7 hosting companies.
Once you’ve migrated your website to professional hosting, I recommend you install caching and a content delivery network (CDN).
Unless you’re a programmer, installing WordPress on your website is the safest and most powerful option. You can buy Siteground web hosting since they offer built-in caching and CDN integration.
Step #3 – Check the loading speed of your website on slower internet connections.
Most advertisers forget this step. It’s important to ensure that your website loads fast even on smaller screens. Mobile internet connections are generally slower and the user is more impatient.
A great place to replicate the mobile experience of your users on a range of mobile phones is at Mobiletest.me. You can find the most pertinent devices used by your audience inside Google Analytics.
Furthermore, CDNs and browser caches don’t work on mobiles. So you’ll need to rely on HTML localStorage specifications.
For ensuring stellar mobile SEO, you can also plug your website and get recommendations inside the tool by Patrick Sexton here.
Here are the results we got when we plugged Nativeads.com.
Our mobile speed score is only 59 and we got the following recommendations for fixing the slowing issues.
