You can drive tons of traffic to your site, but unless those site visitors take the next step and buy something, there is little point in driving them there. Fortunately, there are some simple things you can change on your site that will result in an improved bottom line.
Social Proof Your Site
According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project conducted in the spring of 2013, it was found that 72% of Internet users are regularly on social media. However, social proofing your site goes much further than simply having a presence on Facebook and Twitter. The reach of social media is similar to word of mouth. One site visitor shares something from your site on Facebook and it is likely to be seen by dozens of people, perhaps even hundreds or thousands. With that in mind, it is important to implement social elements such as:
- Embed tweets onto your home page.
- Make sure articles and content on your site can be shared and followed.
- Get visitors involved by allowing visitor content, such as images and posts.
- Get people talking by enabling comments.
- Enable sharing of comments (if it shows how many shares, this is even better).
- Include product reviews from those who have purchased your product or service.
- Displaying your number of followers on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
- Adding case studies and testimonials.
Optimize Call For Action
If you’ve been in the marketing or business world for any time at all, you’ve likely heard about the “call for action”. This is simply a way to ask the consumer to take action and give them a good reason to do so. But, did you realize you can optimize the words you use and gain a higher conversion rate?
In an article on Treehouse Blog, Jason Fried was interviewed about a study he conducted on call to action words and conversion rates. He decided to apply some basic psychology to the words he chose to get people to click on the sign up link over at the Highrise website.
- He wondered if perhaps the words “free trial” were scaring people, who expected to have to sign up and provide a credit card. With so many scams out there these days, people are leery of clicking on the word “free”.
- He first eliminated the words other than “free” and “trial” or any similar words or combination thereof.
- He then replaced those words with various phrases until he hit on a combination that shot his conversion rate up 200%. Yes, you read that correctly – 200 %!
What were those words? “See Plans and Pricing”.
These words encouraged site visitors to get more information on the product and get details to make an informed decision without the risk associated with a trial period. The moral of this story is to be upfront with your site visitors. Tell them that you are taking them to more information about your product and allow them to explore their options with your company.
Single Action Landing Pages
Have you ever visited a website and been so overwhelmed with choices that you left and went to an easier to navigate site? Most people have experienced this and that’s the last thing you want your visitors to experience. Focus on single action landing pages. You can have as many landing pages on your site as you need, but each page should be for a single product or service. Don’t try to do too many things in one landing page.
Here are some things to keep in mind as you design your landing page:
- Grab the reader’s interest.
- Keep it short and simple. The attention span of the average website visitor is not long, so you’ll need to get your point across quickly and effectively. 17% of Internet browsers stay on a site less than 4 seconds. On a page with around 500 words, only 28% of those words are actually read. People are skimming and looking for quick information. (Statistic Brain)
- Keep it on topic. If your landing page is about shower widgets, don’t go off into a side story about water conservation.
Try Larger Images and Call-to-Action Buttons
Make your images larger and call-to-action buttons loud enough to stand out. If a user is looking for what you sell, he wants to absorb the information quickly and find an easy way to buy what you’re selling. If he has to hunt for a call-to-action button, he will probably find somewhere else to buy the product.
In a multivariate testing case study, Hyundai improved their leads conversion by 62% by using larger images and more call-to-action buttons. Their goals with the case study were to increase brochure requests, get visitors to click through to the funnel of information on the car, and to check engagement of the customer in the process.
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Because of this, the company tested multiple variables at one time instead of a more standard A/B single variable changes model. In addition to the high conversion rate, the click through rate increased a whopping 208%. The combination of SEO friendly text, larger picture of the product (in this case the car) and more call-to-action buttons seemed to be the magic formula. Try a repeat on one of your product pages and see if your results are similar.
Make Your Site Sticky
Remember that the average user is just skimming your page for information at a rapid rate and unless you hook him, then he is going to move on. Your goal is to grab his interest and keep him on your page as long as possible. The longer a visitor stays on your site, then the higher your chances are of converting him into a paying customer.
Tools Suggestion: Get Started, Now.
When you’re ready to implement these changes to your site, you’ll want to track which changes work best and do your own case study.
There are some helpful tools that will allow you to figure out what changes you should make and just how well these changes are working to convert visitors into customers.
Google Analytics
Google analytics will tell you everything from how long someone is staying on your website to where they are coming from. By studying these elements and learning just who your site visitors are, you can make changes to your site aimed directly at those consumers. Do you have a high percentage of people visiting your site from Spain? Add a landing page in Spanish as well as English. There are many ways you can utilize the information you’ll gain from this handy tool.
Web Engage
Use targeted surveys and easy click buttons to find out whether your visitors are getting anything out of your site. How engaged are they? Do they want to hang around? What do they like? What do they not like? This powerful tool will help you improve in-site usability and engagement rate. They will even offer conversion tools to increase everything from SEO to product sales.
Try Just One Thing Today
Hopefully, you’ll give each of these ideas a try and your site conversion rate will increase dramatically. However, if you’re as busy as most website owners, all of this information may seem a bit overwhelming at first. Instead of trying to implement all of these tips at one time, choose just one and implement it today. See how successful that element is for you. Use Google Analytics and your own website tracking tools as well as any related increases in product sales to see how effective that particular thing is for your conversion rate. Then, move on to another tip and try that out. If you add just one new thing every few days, before you know it, your conversion rate will be so impressive that they’ll be writing a case study about you.