How To Increase Conversion Rates

For marketing beginners who may not know, a conversion rate in marketing refers to the number of users responding to a call to action (CTA). A conversion rate measures the number of website visitors who converted as a percentage of the total number of users that visited your site. “Converted” might carry different meanings; for some websites, it means users made a purchase; for others, it could mean downloading something, signing up for a service or newsletter, or fulfilling another action.

In any case, the higher a website conversion rate, the higher the sales – and the more effective the site’s content. To get and maintain a good conversion rate, you must use Content Writing and marketing tactics to entice users to complete your call to action – whatever it might be. However, before going into this guide on how to improve conversion rates and boost sales conversion strategy, it’s important to understand exactly what is a good conversion rate. Our SEO Experts tell all below!

What Is A Good Website Conversion Rate And The Average Close Rate for Sales?

So, what is a good conversion rate? The average conversion rate for a website sits between 2% and 5% (2.35%, to be exact). Website conversion rates higher than 5% are considered “good” or above average.

Moreover, top brands in many sectors enjoy much better results than 5 percent – but what’s a good conversion rate for these big businesses? The top 25% reach high conversion rate averages, converting at 5.31% or higher. Ideally, getting into the top 10% is the goal — these are the landing pages with conversion rates of 11.45% and over.

Now that you know what’s a good conversion rate, let’s review how to increase conversion rate numbers for both your desktop website and mobile site. After all, learning how to increase conversion rates and making the changes needed to do so doesn’t just boost sales; it lowers your cost per acquisition and increases brand trust and authority – which search engines reward you from an SEO standpoint (all the more reason to deploy conversion boosting tactics!)

How To Increase Conversion Rate Numbers On Your Website

You should first tackle increasing the conversion rate numbers on your website using the following tactics and techniques:

1. Use A CRO Planner To Plan Conversion Rate Marketing

Website conversion rate optimization can seem like learning a new language for beginners. So, make it easier with a CRO planner! With a CRO planner, you can calculate your conversion rate and analyze why visitors aren’t converting. Improving your average conversion rate will be hard without this information, after all.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tools acquire data about your website and its visitors, revealing how people use it while identifying potential changes that could boost conversion rates. These tools then analyse and devise strategies to increase conversion rate numbers with gathered data. Many applications also include website heatmaps, revealing what stands out to users and which areas are overlooked.

Generally, there are three categories of CRO tools:

• User behavior analytics CRO tools
• Web analytics CRO tools
• CRO testing tools

Some of the most popular CRO tools are:

1. Google Analytics
2. Heap
3. Adobe Analytics
4. CRO Checker
5. Google Optimize 360
6. LiveChat
7. Crazy Egg
8. Hotjar
9. Full Story
10. Popupsmart

• Tip: We are conversion rate marketing experts! Our CRO services employ the best conversion rate digital marketing tactics and have a proven track record of delivering results.

2. Add Social Proof: Reviews!

The proof is in the pudding (the pudding being people). That’s right; real people are some of the best tools in conversion rates marketing tactics. 89% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase, while a Canvas8 study commissioned by Trustpilot also uncovered that 49% of people deem positive customer reviews among their top three purchase influences.

The results are clear: company reputation and online presence impact your conversion rate averages, so including social proof (reviews) on your website can boost those numbers. Include embedded reviews from your Yelp and Trustpilot pages and any other directory where customers have left reviews. Fail to have and show positive testimonials on popular review sites, and your conversion rate will suffer.

3. Shorten Forms

Friction on your website can affect website conversion rate averages. For instance, long forms that take too long to fill out might make users hesitant or abandon the process once they’ve started. Today’s users are busy and impatient, so you must eliminate headaches and hesitation. Instead, shorten your forms, and visitors are more likely to complete them.

4. Add Live Chat

A live chat is a genius way to increase conversions. Users who don’t convert might have a question or concern about your product or service. However, with live chat, your customer service or sales rep can alleviate concerns and answer questions of undecided users.

5. Increase Trust

Users won’t convert if they don’t trust your brand or experience friction – but how can you boost trust and see a conversion increase? Several tried-and-tested techniques work, including updating your site content regularly, making the website easy to use, and avoiding spammy links. Money-back guarantees also improve your conversion rate; they help the consumer trust your brand and feel more secure.

Another excellent trust booster is including team bios on your site; this gives your company a human element and shows users who they’re talking to. Furthermore, if you haven’t posted a blog in years or broken links are present in your content, it creates distrust, which will affect your website conversion rate. Writing and regularly updating a high-quality blog that answers users’ questions and gets people talking is essential to fostering trust and legitimacy and driving engagement (professional Blog Writing Services also help if this isn’t your forte!)

Google also judges your website’s trustworthiness; it pushes those with higher Domain Authority (DA) up the search pages. A high-quality backlink profile is one of the judged metrics. As a Link Building Agency, we can help improve yours and boost your site’s DA.

6. Add A Countdown Timer

People get anxious when time is running out – and you can capitalise on that by adding a countdown timer to your page, which can significantly improve conversion rates. Why? A countdown timer increases the user’s sense of urgency, pushing them to make the purchase or complete the offer before the time runs out and they miss out. The result? A higher conversion rate!

7. Implement A/B Testing

Figuring out what’s working and what isn’t regarding your conversion rate isn’t always simple. When you’re stumped, conduct A/B tests – see what types of headlines, layouts, copy, colours, and CTAs work for your audience. You could even let those creative juices flow and experiment with entirely new formats and CTAs!

Specifically, headlines are extremely important in marketing conversion rate numbers because they can make or break a page. If your headlines aren’t on point, some users won’t read further; they’ll quickly hit the back button and vanish.

Soberingly, 8 out of 10 users read headlines; only 2 out of 10 read the rest. Plus, 55% of consumers read an article for just 15 seconds or less. That’s why killer headlines are critical to keeping users on your page!

8. Point Of Purchase Upsell

Sure, this technique doesn’t increase conversion rates much, but it does boost revenue without affecting your current funnel. Offer a similar product or service customers can add to their order with a single click right before they complete their purchase. This trick can increase average order values by around 10 to 20%.

9. Utilise Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns

This hack for increasing conversion rates is common, but it works. Go on a website, add something to your shopping cart, and don’t check out. Simply leave it be and exit the site. After a little while, you’ll likely receive an email reminding you about the products you left in your cart – perhaps followed up by a discount code or special offer to entice you to complete your purchase.

Everyone leaves their cart from time to time, and it’s probably happening on your site, too. However, this simple email campaign gets shoppers to fulfill your CTA, especially when incentives like vouchers are involved.

How To Increase Landing Page Conversion Rate

Your landing pages play a vital role in your business, so learn how to increase their conversion rate properly with these tips:

1. Communicate Value Proposition

On any landing page, your must communicate your value proposition to increase conversion rates. To do that, you’ll need a deeper understanding of your brand’s unique audience and buyer persona and write your page copy specifically for your target consumers.

For example, you can address their motivations, goals, and pain points and discuss the benefits of your product or service over their features. Talking about the benefits will help potential customers envision their life with your product, while features are easy to skim past and ignore. Ultimately, your web copy should explain how your product or service can solve your audience’s problems (their pain points).

If conversions don’t increase, check how your copy is written. First and foremost, people buy on emotion – a factor many big brands have used to their advantage. Take Nike, for example; the brand’s storytelling campaigns generate emotions to which audiences can relate – they appeal to everyone’s inner hero. You need to find out your audience’s values, dreams, problems, and desires and undertake the same kind of marketing to really see those sales rise.

2. Meet Expectations

Your landing page needs to follow through when users click on your site after reading its meta description on Google or seeing your search engine advertisement. You have to deliver on the promises you made in that copy.

For instance, if users see this guide you’re reading on Google’s SERPs, they’ll expect to learn strategies to improve their site’s conversion rate. Naturally, they’d be very confused if they clicked on this page only to find a different guide. If a landing page doesn’t deliver what users thought they’d get, they won’t convert – they’ll click “back” and go elsewhere, resulting in soaring bounce rates.

It is important to consider any backlinks pointing to your landing pages. Spammy links can creep up in your backlink profile, with anchors not matching up to your landing page, ruining your site’s standing with Google. Our professional Backlink Audit Services can reveal any links destroying your website’s trust and help improve your off-site SEO.

3. Add Multimedia To Landing Pages

What is a good conversion rate strategy without visuals? Imagine this: you order a jacket from an online retailer after liking how it looks in photos. However, it seems completely different in real life than in the images. Disappointing, right? You don’t want this to happen to your users.

Incorporating accurate images and videos of your product or service in action on your landing pages is extremely helpful in avoiding this problem. Multimedia elements also make your site seem trustworthy – plus, many users enjoy consuming visual content; images of charts and graphs and even video testimonials can work wonders for your conversion rate. That’s also why media-rich social media platforms are incredible for boosting conversions!

4. Include Strong CTAs

A good conversion rate largely comes down to your call-to-action (CTA). Of course, your conversion rate website stats depend on your CTA, what it is, and how you communicate it to users. A CTA could be:

• Downloading an offer
• Sharing a post on social media
• Subscribing to an email newsletter
• Completing a purchase

Whatever it is, you must inject clear and accessible CTAs throughout your website, its landing pages, and beyond on your social media platforms – but not too much, as this can appear spammy and overly “salesy”. Our Paid Social Management can help you get the right balance on your social media channels with fantastic CTAs!

Normally, each landing page has a CTA incorporated several times, and the sooner a CTA appears on a page, the better. Otherwise, visitors who don’t scroll down far enough might miss the conversion point entirely. You must also ensure users can access the CTA regardless of their position on a page.

Also, generic CTA copy like “Sign up” or “Download now” won’t grant the best conversion rates; it needs personality. Starting a CTA with “Yes” is an easy win since it immediately evokes positivity in the user’s mind regarding the offer, psychologically speaking.

For example, a CTA button or headline could say: “Yes, I’d like to enquire about Click Intelligence’s epic Blogger Outreach Service!”

It packs a harder punch than merely “Click here for our Blogger Outreach Service”, doesn’t it?

5. Reduce Distractions

Removing distractions from landing pages that might disrupt visitors from fulfilling what you want them to do is vital. Busy pages make it challenging to convert visitors, so get rid of pop-ups, unnecessary links, complex navigation options, site speed issues, page errors, and anything else that could divert visitors’ attention from the goal.

You have a few seconds to win users over, and a difficult site full of distractions and clutter will make them click away. Sometimes, less really is more – especially when it comes to increasing conversion rate numbers. If you aren’t sure what should be on your website, you should consider getting experts to look over it. Our Enterprise SEO Services include on-page technical audits to help highlight what is and isn’t working.

6. Simplify Your Website And Avoid Analysis Paralysis

What is analysis paralysis? This term refers to the frustrating concept that too many choices can reduce decision-making abilities – and it’s very real. Your website visitors can suffer from this if there are too many places to look or if your site’s design is confusing. This problem causes user friction, and we know by now what friction does – it flushes conversions down the toilet.

How To Increase Mobile Conversion Rate

What is a good conversion rate tactic without including mobile-friendliness? Hint: it’s not good! Learning how to increase the conversion rate of mobile sites isn’t too different from desktop conversion rate optimisation; most of the tactics for boosting your website’s conversion rate are applicable to mobile and app CRO.

1.    Improve Mobile Page Speed

Modern web users have smartphones along with short attention spans. Unsurprisingly, you’ll see that page speed is an enormous obstacle when learning how to increase app conversion rate averages and mobile site conversions.

The time it takes for content to appear on the user’s screen is a major metric for SEO and conversions. Although the average retail mobile site loads in 6.9 seconds, 40% of users exit sites that take more than 3 seconds to load. It gets even worse for mobile sites; a one-second delay can result in a 7% conversion reduction, and 79% of shoppers dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same retailer again.

If your mobile page fails to convert, test your page speed via Google’s mobile site speed comparison checker and analyse it using Google’s PageSpeed tools. These tools can also suggest areas of improvement to help your website run quicker, such as reducing image sizes and boosting site responsiveness.

2.    Optimise For Mobile

This is crucial for boosting a site’s average conversion rate. Since Google implemented mobile-first indexing, websites that don’t prioritise optimising for mobile might see Google ranking reductions – which can impact conversions.

It’s important to note that mobile and desktop user experiences are different. To improve conversion rate numbers on your mobile site, use Google’s mobile testing tool to see if your site is mobile-friendly – it uses mobile optimisation metrics to assess your website, not just desktop factors. This tool also offers recommendations for how to improve your site’s mobile performance.

3.    Simplify The Purchasing Process

Purchasing on a smartphone should be straightforward, with minimal steps in the checkout process. Payment buttons also need to be easy to see and click, and users should be able to check out as a guest with whatever payment method they want – be it via credit/debit card, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or PayPal.

You should also remove restrictions on forms when gathering order information; for example, address boxes should allow users enough characters to input their full names and addresses – even long ones.

4.    Adjust Your Mobile Site

Your mobile and desktop sites should be different. For instance, your subscription forms might be smaller on your mobile site to fit small screens. In addition, you’ll likely use different CTAs on your mobile site to encourage a good conversion rate.

In any case, less is more for mobile sites. Eliminating distractions and reducing bulk lets you have a faster mobile website and easier navigation. Don’t forget to use a hamburger menu on your mobile site so that it’s easier to navigate.

5.    Localise Content (Local SEO)

Phone users will often search for locations and use it to find directions, contact information, or research reviews. This is an excellent opportunity for you. Local marketing and search engine optimisation (local SEO) help them find your website above others.

You’ll need to add location pages to your website, manage your online directory listings, and produce local content to perform better in local searches – searches that customers in your area are conducting because they need whatever you offer, smartphone in hand.

A Managed SEO campaign led by our experts can help your site’s local SEO and boost conversions.

6. Implement Clever Mobile Marketing

Boosting mobile conversion rates doesn’t just mean optimising your website for the mobile experience. You must also engage in mobile-only marketing. Put your creativity cap on and develop mobile marketing methods to connect with your smartphone audience users. For instance, SMS text message campaigns are popular, as are push notifications if you have a smartphone app.

7. Empathise

Most website owners have asked themselves, what is a good conversion rate strategy that generates fast results? It’s easy to get carried away thinking about complicated marketing methods and sales jargon. Don’t do that –  strip it back to basics and see business from a human perspective.

Use your past experience as a customer to evaluate your business’s appearance online. Take a step back, look at the bigger picture, and place yourself in your customer’s shoes from their viewpoint.

While looking through your website and analysing the customer experience, ask yourself this all-important question: would you purchase from your site? Without being biased (easier said than done), if the answer is no, you need to make changes and convert yourself before customers will do the same.

Need Help with Conversion Rate Marketing?

Of course, all of the actions mentioned in this guide are well and good if you have the time to learn and effectuate them. A semi-decent knowledge of the technical side of website optimisation, SEO, and digital marketing also helps, but that may be challenging to get if you have minimal experience with this tricky side of the internet.

Fortunately, that’s where experts like our teams here at Click Intelligence come in to save the day. Those without the time to learn how to improve conversion rate numbers and implement the strategies required need panic no more!

If you need help improving conversion rates, our conversion rate marketing experts can get the job done, whether you need a few minor tweaks or need to take advantage of our full-scale SEO Auditing Services. We can help find your website’s weak points, boost online visibility, and set those conversions alight!