Conversion rate optimization is the art of increasing the number of website visitors that buy your product, sign up for a giveaway, ask for information, call you or use your contact forms.
Most businesses use their website as a business card and expect nothing out of it. This philosophy will get you nowhere.
So, What have I learned? I have learned that your website should be another marketing part of your business. By optimizing your website to increase conversions and assigning a monetary value for each conversion, you can see how much revenue is generated each month for your company.
We have been working on websites for over 10 years. I have been in sales for over 40 years. Once I got in the website design business, I quickly realized that it doesn’t do any good to have a nice looking website if no one is going to it. The next thing I realized was that even if you had a large number of people going to the site, it doesn’t matter if you are not getting any leads or sales from them.
One of the coolest things I have learned is all of the different kinds of conversion techniques. There is a lot of information available on tests that other companies have done, what kind of results they got, and they are willing to share their information through blogs and case studies. Two of the companies that have loads of information are Conversion Rate Experts and ConversionXL.com.
Conversion Rate Experts have helped companies like Sony, Google, Facebook Apple and more. They have several reports and case studies listed on their website about how they have helped these companies make hundreds of millions of dollars.
One of my favorite case studies is the Million Dollar Landing Page they did for seomoz.org. They give a detailed 11 page report on all aspects of conversion techniques. This is available for viewing on their website at http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/
Another thing that I have learned is that you can’t just put a page and expect people to buy; you need to do a total sales presentation in order to increase your sales. You need to establish trust, handle objections, build value and then close the sale. You wouldn’t have someone buy from you in person in just a few minutes and the sales presentation on your website should take the necessary amount of time to convince someone they have made the right decision.
Conversion Rate Experts also have a study for Crazy Egg that increased their conversion rate by 363%. http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/crazy-egg-case-study/. This is a very in-depth report that encompasses many aspects of conversions from the original home page to the checkout process and everything in between. I learned that you can keep improving your site by going over each individual area and working on improving the conversion rate for each. Let’s say you are working on 5 different areas and you can improve each by 5%. Then you can increase your online sales by 25% for the year. This is substantial.
One of Crazy Eggs founders is Neil Patel. He wrote a blog about what he learned from spending $252,000 on conversion optimization.
On the crazy egg study the redesigned page is about 20 times longer than the control page. Again they are doing the total sales presentation on one page.
In this article Neil also mentions Digital Telepathy as one of the companies he used. I have checked out their site, they had a case study of what they did for Crazy Eggs design. http://www.dtelepathy.com/case-studies/crazyegg. They were focused more on the design and how the design could improve conversion rates.
They trumpeted a 21% conversion rate improvement for Crazy Egg. Their service starts at $20,000 per month which can be a little pricy for smaller businesses.
The other website that I like is Conversion XL. Peep Laja is a blogging master. He comes up with article after article of valuable information that can be used by experts and novices alike. If you are selling products online, he wrote “The Ultimate Guide To Increasing Ecommerce Conversion Rates.” The information in this post is fantastic. If you are working on increasing your online sales, you can work from the post and the accompanying links for months.
Some topics that Peep covers are:
- Quality Product Images
- Great Product Copy
- Product Videos
- Customization Creates Ownership
- Charging for Shipping
- Specials Section
- Shopping Cart Abandonment
- Live Chat
- Increase Trust
- Payment Options
- Communicate Value
- And Much More
There are many other posts about all different aspects of how your business can make more money through conversion optimization. Peep is a data person, as all good business people should be. Never assume something is going to work better without testing it.
Another favorite post ConversionXL does is the post about a good value proposition. This is about what so many websites are missing. A Great value proposition should be the first thing on your website for most businesses and it should do what Eben Page recommends, Answer three questions about your site.
- What is it?
- Who is it about or What is it about?
- What do I get?
If you can answer those three questions and put together a value proposition, you’re on your way to higher sales. A good value proposition consists of:
- An Attention Grabbing headline
- A paragraph explaining the headline
- 3 bullet points
- A graphic
Peep also has a great report that you can download by signing up for his newsletter called “13 Ways to Increase Your conversion Rate Right now”.
I will list the 13 items he mentions. He gives details in the report on exactly what to do with each item.
- Do A/B Testing
- Create a compelling and clear value proposition
- Set Up a Sales Funnel
- Cut the Jargon
- Address Objections
- Increase Trust
- Make it Easy to Buy from You
- Communicate Value
- Offer Proof
- Remove Distraction
- Compare with the Competition Before they do
- Reduce or remove risk
- Add Incentives to take action right away
This is another report that you can spend months on implementing.
In summary, there is a lot of great information out there on how you can help your business with conversion optimization. Make sure you have a good way of monitoring the results with an analytics program. Good Luck and Good Optimizing!
