How to improve your website’s conversion rate simply
A converting website is a successful website, and if it isn’t converting as you’d like, there are steps you can take to improve your conversion rate.
In this guide, we’ll look at some simple steps you can implement to improve your website’s conversion rate and get the results you want.
Let’s get started and improve your conversion rate.
Implement a live chat
Having a live chat on your website allows you to interact directly with your customers in real-time. Customer service is the backbone of any business, and excellent customer service is one of the keys to building a sustainable customer base.
Some live chat options on a website may be more obvious than others; some websites will have a clearly labeled ‘chat now’ option listed clearly on their site. Other times a live chat option will appear as a little box on the bottom right or left corner of a webpage.
Benefits of having a live chat
Live chats can be immediate
How many times have you called a customer support line only to be put on hold and made to wait for an answer? Probably quite a few!
Live chats help solve the problem of slow customer service as a live chat agent can give visitors/customers answers when they need them.
While phone and email support are key to any customer service system, a live chat option helps to reduce customer response times and gives customers the answers they need in real-time, which can often mean higher conversion rate and improve sales for your business.
Live chats drive customer satisfaction
Research by Customer service software company Zendesk conducted in 2015 indicates that live chat had an overall satisfaction rating of 92% based on a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ rating provided by a customer at the end of the chat.
Live chats give customers that all-important human touch, which can often be lacking in companies’ customer service departments.
No one likes to wait for an answer, and the more automated response a customer gets, the more agitated they’ll likely become. Live chats solve this problem by giving visitors to your site the quick and immediate answers they need.
In a study, global market research company J.D Power indicates more than 42% of customers prefer a live chat option to solve the issues and queries they have when shopping online.
Other research has found that up to 79% of customers find that live chats gave them quick answers that influenced their buying decisions. This means the quicker a potential customer can get their query solved, the likelier they are to become an actual paying customer.
The underlying message from all of this should be obvious: an effective live chat system helps get answers to your existing and prospective customers when they need them. This helps drive customer loyalty and gives potential customers confidence in your service/business or product which can improve your conversion rate.
Use heat maps
What is a heat map?
A heat map on a website is a data visualisation tool that helps businesses understand how particular pages on their website are performing.
A heat map uses colours to indicate the intensity of visitor engagement on different sections on a page. It gives business owners insights into what parts of their site are popular and what parts aren’t.
Website heat maps usually use a warm to cold colour scheme to show a web page’s performance; the warmer the colour, the higher the visitor engagement, while the cooler the colour, the lower the visitor engagement.
There are a few main types of heat map that track user engagement with a website are:
- Click maps show you exactly where website visitors are clicking on your website. The insights of where visitors to your website are clicking can be tracked over time and will help you see what links are working on your website and what links aren’t.
- Mouse movement heat maps, as the name suggests, show visitors mouse movement on a page.
These heat maps highlight how visitors are reading and navigating a page. You’ll gain insights into how many visitors hover over a particular area of a page on your website, and l show you which parts of a web page are getting the most attention.
- Scroll maps give you great insights into how visitors are interacting with content on your website. Scrolls maps show you the point where users abandon your content and give you a visual representation of how far visitors scroll down a page.
Why are heat maps important?
Heat maps give marketers and business owners insights into how to improve their website conversion rate. The information provided by heat maps can indicate the following:
- Which elements of a website should be made clickable.
- What’s working on a page and what’s not.
- Where key information should be laid out on a page.
- If the instructions on a website are clear enough for a user to convert.
Heat maps eliminate the need to speculate on what parts of a website are working and allow you to tweak and test the design of your site in real-time to improve your conversion rate.
How heat maps can boost your conversions
As we’ve already mentioned, heat maps can give you a host of information on how visitors/users are interacting with your website.
But how can you use the insights from a heat map to increase your website’s conversions?
Well, there are a few different ways…
You can measure the effectiveness of your CTA’s
Heat maps can help measure the effectiveness of the Call To Actions on your site (CTA’s).
If you’ve got your CTA’s set to us as links or buttons, you’ll be able to see exactly how many people have clicked and interacted with a particular button through the use of a click map and you can A/B test different CTA’s to see which is most effective.
You can measure the effectiveness of your content
Using a scroll map on your site will help you understand if your content is keeping visitors on your web pages and where you can improve things.
The warmer the colour indicates the most viewed sections of a particular page, and the colder the colour indicates the least viewed section of a page.
For example, if a heat map shows the top of your content to be a hot colour, then people are reading the introductory section. If this colour gets colder and colder the further down the page you go, then it indicates that visitors to your site aren’t resonating with your content or reading it to the end.
Streamline your website design
As mentioned above, mouse movement heat maps will show you the areas of your web pages that visitors are most resonating with, and click maps will show which parts of your website visitors are clicking on. You can use these insights to remove or rearrange parts of your site that aren’t getting much attention.
These insights will also help you see if the design of your site is too complex for visitors. If you’re setting up a new website, look into hiring a web designer to help you streamline the design of your site and make it as user friendly as possible.
If you’re looking to improve an existing site, then a professional web designer will be able to help you with any improvements that need to be made.
Building social proof on your website
What’s the first thing most people look at before making a purchase or signing up for a service online?
Customer reviews
There are some incredible statistics into the power of customer reviews and the effects they can have on buyer decision making:
- 72% of customers won’t take action on something they want to purchase until they read reviews.
- According to Bright Local 91% of millennials trust online reviews as much as friends and family.
- 90% of users need less than 10 reviews to form an opinion about a business.
Some other stats that will really encourage you to grow your customer reviews and social proof are:
- 86% of consumers would consider writing a review for a business.
- According to RevLocal a single review can lift a websites conversion by as much as 10%.
If you’ve got happy customers but haven’t got a review from them, you could be sitting on a potential gold mine. Reaching out to satisfied customers who’ve purchased your service/product and asking them to leave a review is a great way to begin your website’s social proof.
For example, let’s say you run a restaurant and you have happy repeat customers. An easy way to build your online social proof is to ask these customers to leave a review. These reviews can either be on popular review sites or your own website.
Having customer reviews on your website helps to give visitors a good first impression of what they can expect from the services you’re offering and gives customers confidence that your service/product is right for them.
If you run a business that solves a particular problem for a customer or a business (B2C or B2B), then you can develop more comprehensive forms of social proof such as case studies or customer interviews.
Customer interviews can be turned into blog posts, testimonials on your website, or if the customer agrees, you can share the audio or video interview directly on your website.
Finally, if you ever get the chance to get involved with the local or national press, then definitely take it. Any kind of media coverage (providing it’s positive) is a fantastic way to get exposure to your business and attract new customers.
How to minimize visitors abandoning cart on your site
If you’ve ever shopped online, you’ve probably at one time or another decided upon a product to buy only to get to the checkout page and decided not to go through with the purchase. Online shoppers leave retailers with an abandoned cart nearly 70% of the time.
Figures show that the most significant reason shoppers abandon their carts is due to the price of shipping. Consumers don’t like surprises when they’re shopping online, especially when they’re hit with surprise charges during checkout.
To solve this issue, experts from conversionrate.store recommend being transparent about pricing, one way of doing this is to show an estimated subtotal on product pages, a shopping cart page, or the beginning of the checkout page.
You can also include a shipping calculator on the product page to help customers gain insight into shipping costs before they begin the checkout process.
Implementing an abandoned cart recovery email campaign
A common tactic for recovering abandoned cart shoppers is through automated email campaigns. Stats show that an effective email campaign can help recover consumers as much as 15% of the time.
But to achieve these kinds of numbers, you first need to get the attention of the person your emailing.
Here are some tips to help you out:
Make sure your emails have catchy titles
To stand any chance of a customer opening your abandoned cart recovery email, it needs to have a catchy title. Unific conducted research into 70 online retailers and analysed hundreds of their emails triggered by abandoned carts. Some of the more catchy email titles included:
Complete Your Purchase at (company) With 20% Off!
Uh oh [NAME], Did you forget something?
[NAME], don’t miss out on your cart full of awesomeness at (example) .com.
As you can see, all these email headlines grab attention. If you can include the customer’s name or some kind of discount in your subject line, your email stands a better chance of being opened.
Make sure your emails have an attractive design
If you’re abandoned cart recovery emails are visually appealing and attractive in design, they will capture the shopper’s attention but also remind the shopper of the product they were interested in and the reason they wanted to buy it in the first place.
How to set up an abandoned cart email sequence
There are many different options available to help get your abandoned cart email sequence set up, so take some time and do some research into the best email marketing software for you.
When you’re ready to begin setting up an abandoned cart email sequence, you’ll need to decide how many emails you want to be part of the sequence. It’s recommended that the sequence contains more than one email, preferably one a day for five days.
The goal of every abandoned cart email should be to close the sale, and the main elements that you should look to include in the sequence: urgency, scarcity, benefits of owning the product, discounts.
You may have to come up with a few different sequences and test which one works best.
If you have a large number of customers abandoning their cart at different stages on your website you can begin to segment your audience. You can do this by seeing which stage visitors are leaving your site at and then you can use this data to set up relevant email and ad retargeting campaigns for visitors who left your site at different stages in the buying cycle.
Combining your email sequences with ad retargeting
Retargeting ads can be highly effective at attracting shoppers back to your site once they’ve visited. One study found that up to 30% of non-converting visitors return to a site through ad retargeting.
If you’ve ever gone to purchase something online and left the web page in question and hopped on any social media platform such as Facebook, you may well have seen ads for the website or product you were looking at.
Let’s say you were on Amazon looking at buying a new desk, you check out the reviews but decide it’s not the right time to buy. Next time you log onto Facebook, you’ll likely see an ad for the desk you’ve looked at.
If you’ve gone further in the buying cycle like heading to the checkout and then deciding not to buy, you’ll likely be targeted on Facebook with ads for the desk but with discounts and offers that Amazon hope will convince you to buy.
You can combine your email sequences with your ad retargeting campaigns. Facebook’s business manager will allow you to create ads for those who abandon carts at different pages on your website.
This means you’ll be able to target the same person with retargeting emails and ads. Using both of these strategies will increase the chances of visitors returning to your site and making a purchase.
Through Facebook business manager, you can create retargeting ads targeting the visitor with the exact product that they abandoned and really maximise the chances of the visitor changing their mind and making a purchase.
For a full guide on creating abandoned cart retargeting ads, check out this guide from Fly High Media.
Let customers choose from a range of delivery options
Giving customers a choice over how they get their product delivered gives them more freedom and flexibility over how they receive their items.
To do this you can:
- Give customers updates on the status of their order.
- Provide the option of a pick-up location or if you run a physical store the option of collection.
- Allow customers to have their packaged rerouted to another dress if they need to.
- Let the customer know when their package has been delivered.
While these options may take some setting up and be a little more complex if you’re a smaller business, your customer will appreciate the extra flexibility options give them.
Give your customers a choice over payment options
It’s nice to have a choice over how you want to pay for a product or service. Services such as Klarna allow consumers to choose how they pay.
Through Klarna, a consumer can choose to pay for a product in three manageable installments or up to 30 days later with no interest or late fees.
You can also use the benefits of different payment options in your ad campaigns.
If you’re using retargeting ads for those who’ve abandoned your cart, you can advertise the fact that customers don’t have to pay now or that they have a variety of different payment options to pay for a product.
This is particularly true if you’re integrating a service like Klarna as an option for your customers. In your ads or emails, you can highlight that the customer won’t have to pay immediately for their purchase.
This amount of flexibility reduces the need for visitors to your site to feel the need to purchase right away and is particularly handy if a customer is in the middle of waiting for a payday or any other type of income.
Consider giving customers a choice to pay in traditional ways like debit or credit card but also think about giving customers the option to pay through online services like PayPal.
If you have the means, you can even let customers pay via cryptocurrency to really give them options.
The final word
Having a high conversion rate should be the goal of any business owner who relies on their site for selling products or advertising their business.
It can take time to piece everything together to improve your website’s conversion rate. Don’t be scared to test different strategies and refine as you go.
These tips should give you plenty to get started with on your quest to improve your website’s conversion rate!
