11 Effective Strategies to Increase Conversion Rates

Is your website working for your business? Your website is a critical element of your marketing strategy for winning new customers and closing repeat purchases. But even if you’re getting a lot of traffic to your site, that doesn’t mean you’re making a lot of sales.

The metric you want to focus on is your conversion rate. That is the percentage of website visitors who turn into paying customers. If your business has a low conversion rate, that suggests that your website isn’t fulfilling customer needs and tweaks need to be made to boost conversions and get your website making money. Here are our top conversion rate optimization tips.

What is a good conversion rate?

You have the perfect product to help your target audience. Your website should reflect that, showing how it resolves your ideal client’s pain points and answering any FAQs your customers could ask during the purchase decision-making process. If your website is a good lead generation and sales tool, you’ll have a high percentage of website visitors converting.

But what is a good conversion rate? It does vary because there are so many moving parts in a business. Two key factors include business type and business maturity. As a benchmark, the average conversion rate for a landing page is about 2.35%. If you want to achieve an above-average, higher conversion rate, you’re looking at over 5% or even over 10%.

Is your website below average or at least not where you’d like to be? It’s time to start implementing some optimization strategies.

11 Effective Ways to Improve Conversion Rates

If your website’s conversion rate isn’t very promising, not all is lost. There are some simple tweaks you can make to your website to help more potential customers go through with their purchases. Which one of the following do you think would make the biggest impact on your business?

1. Add pop-ups to your site.

Do you have a high bounce rate? That means visitors are leaving your website quickly and probably not coming across a single call to action before they go. Adding pop-ups to your site ensures potential customers see a call to action and are allowed to interact with the business before they go anywhere. 

You can even set up the pop-up to appear when visitors are about to leave the site so you can catch them on their way out. Pop-ups work well when you offer a quick win to your customers such as a discount if they join your email list or a countdown for a limited-time sale.

2. Add a web chat.

You might find that visitors are leaving your site because they aren’t getting the help they need to make a purchase decision, leading them straight into the arms of competitors. Provide customer support at this key juncture by adding a webchat tool to your website. Consumers are a bit fed up with chatbots so it’s best to direct customers to real customer representatives who can help them with their queries.

A lack of customer support causes frustration and that will kill your conversion rate. If you’re still unsure, see what it would be like to have a web chat on your site with our free trial.

3. Improve your CTAs.

As well as providing key information about your products such as delivery time, the pain points it resolves and the benefits it provides on your website, ask for the sale. The best way to get website visitors to follow a desired action is to ask them to. It gets them thinking about what their life would be like if they buy the product or join your email newsletter or whatever call to action you want your potential customers to follow.

Consider using CTA buttons as this makes the ask stand out more clearly on the webpage. Carefully choose your wording too, making it seem exciting and desirable, not boring or a chore. For example, “Start your growth journey now” sounds a lot more compelling than “Sign up here”. You can always do some split testing to find the best CTA for your website conversion.

4. Make it simple.

It can be tempting to try to impress potential customers by adding all the bells and whistles to your site. In reality, it can do more damage than good. Website visitors could end up overwhelmed and confused. Ultimately, your customer’s buying decision doesn’t rely on finding a unique font for your website copy. It relies on them understanding how much easier and better your product will make their life. Communicate that with clarity.

Simplicity also involves removing any unnecessary steps in the customer journey so there can be a seamless transition from website visitors to paying customers. For example, a lot of SaaS providers find they set more visitors signing up for a free trial if they remove the requirement for customers to put in their credit card information. They just register their email address and go. Unnecessary steps make engaging with the business overly complicated and create friction.

5. Analyze visitor data.

Optimizing your website conversion doesn’t have to be a guessing game. You can garner so many useful insights by collecting real-time data on user behavior. The more you understand how users interact with your website, the easier it will be to stop blockages and focus optimization efforts. You can collect metrics such as the most visited pages, how long people spend on your website and where, and even plot heat maps that show where visitors spent the most time on each webpage. This highlights what’s working and what isn’t.

You may find it useful to segment this data into where the website visitor came from using Google Analytics. You might find that traffic from search engine results behaves differently compared to email newsletter subscribers following a link in your latest email. This paints a picture of the ideal customer journey to get conversions in the shortest period possible.

6. Research competitors.

It’s always useful to know what your competitors are doing. It allows you to take inspiration from what’s working for them and create differentiation in the gaps they have left in the market. Your website layout, design, and copy could portray you as distinctly different from a competitor in a good way. Your business offers something no one else including your biggest competitor does – double down on that.

7. Create a conversion funnel.

The first time potential customers visit your website may not be the time they buy. Some people need time to weigh up their options before making a purchase. You don’t want website visitors to forget about the business during that decision-making period.

This is where creating a conversion funnel can be useful. It’s a way to support leads through the customer journey, often described in the AIDA model – awareness, interest, desire, and action. Your customers become aware of you, through social media content or your SEO efforts to rank on Google for example. Then as they browse your website they become interested in what you offer. They’re not quite ready to buy so they join your email list because you’ve offered an incentive like free tips or a discount. Through email marketing, you can build desire that leads to action i.e. the sale. 

Make sure you have a system in place to keep leads and have them return to the website when they’re ready to buy instead of letting them drop off if they don’t immediately make a purchase.

8. Highlight your value proposition.

It’s unlikely that yours is the only business potential customers are considering making their product purchase from. So while you have their attention on your website, clearly define your value proposition. Why should they choose to buy from you? Establishing a differentiation helps website visitors to choose you.

Your value proposition explains how you help them to resolve their pain points and achieve their goals in the easiest way possible. For example, at Podium we help businesses to grow by making customer communication easier with our omnichannel inbox alongside other marketing and communication tools.

9. Improve your site’s customer experience.

How easy is your site to use? In this digital age, consumers have short attention spans so if they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly, they’ll click away and probably forget about your business. A good user experience starts from the very first click. Make sure the load time of your website is a matter of seconds. Any longer than a couple of seconds and you’ve lost customers.

Then consider the design and navigation of the website. For example, is it easy to go from the homepage to the product pages? It’s not just about the website looking pretty but keeping visitors on the website long enough to be able to decide to make a purchase. Reduce potential areas of friction and blockages on your website.

10. Test your headings.

The webpage headings are a crucial part of the website design and ease of use. They should portray what the webpage is about in a compelling way that eases the buying decision. A conversion-boosting heading looks good visually in terms of positioning, readability, color, etc, and uses wording that incentivizes visitors to keep browsing and even buy.

You might not get this on the first try. So you might find it useful to try split testing. This is also referred to as A/B testing and it can help you to figure out the best version of a marketing campaign or webpage. It works by creating two versions of the same thing with one difference between them. Some website visitors are sent to version A while others are sent to version B. Then metrics are tracked to determine which version performed best. It takes the guesswork out of conversion rate optimization.

11. Utilize social proof.

Potential customers are going to trust what customer reviews have to say about the business more than what the business has to say about its success. Your website is well-placed to showcase social proof that your product works and is well worth buying.

There are various ways to approach sharing social proof and your website can include a combination of a few. You could link to an online review site such as your Google Business profile as a way to authenticate good customer feedback. You could have a webpage of case studies where you expand on exactly how you got client results. Video testimonials can be really powerful for bringing the impact of your products to life. Short quotes and clips work well on product pages. Make the most of positive feedback to encourage website conversions.

Spark Your Website Conversion Rates

Out of all of the strategies for boosting website conversion rates, here at Podium, we’ve found that our clients have experienced the biggest transformations when they have added our Webchat tool to their websites. In fact, by using the Podium Webchat software they generate up to 11x more inbound leads from their websites.

Using web chat turns your website into a conversation starter which is powerful for making sales. It allows you to provide a high level of customer care at the critical moment of potential customers making a buying decision on your website. If website visitors are unsure about anything, they can reach out for help in a convenient way that gets them a timely response.

The Podium Webchat tool works so well because it is text-based meaning leads can leave your website and continue the conversation. They can get on with their day while waiting for a response. Even better, you collect their name and phone number so you can keep the conversation going beyond the initial website visit and conversation.

Give it a go for yourself by seeing what the Podium Webchat would look like on your website.