Every business in the world wants to improve its conversion rate. So itâs hardly surprising the search term âconversion rate optimisationâ has seen a big spike in interest in recent years.
If youâre not converting website visitors into leads or customers at a decent rate, youâll struggle to make money online. Conversely, get your conversion rate optimization (CRO) right and the benefits are huge â save money on your ad spend by reducing wastage; drive more results from your organic traffic; delight your sales team by giving them a constant stream of qualified leads; the list goes on.
However, thereâs a big difference between wanting to improve your conversion rate and actually doing it. Just 22% of businesses say theyâre satisfied with their CRO strategies, while only 32% strongly agree theyâre being strategic and proactive â as opposed to tactical and reactive â in their approach to conversion rate optimization.
With that in mind, here are nine best practices to help you do more effective, impactful CRO in 2021.
Conversion rate optimization should never be based on guesswork. If youâre rewriting your page copy or adding new calls to action (CTAs) based on nothing more than gut feeling, youâre not doing CRO â youâre just making a few tweaks and seeing what happens.
Instead, it should be based on data. Every time you make a change to your website or PPC campaigns or social ads (or anything else) with the aim of improving conversion rates, you should test your new âchallengerâ approach alongside a âcontrolâ subject â typically whatever youâve got in place at the moment. For instance, Crazy Egg ran an A/B test that pitted its existing homepage against a new, much longer variant:
To run effective conversion rate optimization tests, you need to get two things in place upfront:
If you donât have the right tools in place, youâll struggle to do effective conversion rate optimization. In fact, legacy technology is cited as the number one barrier to increasing conversions.
Iâm not saying you need to invest thousands of dollars to do CRO well. Itâs just a case of picking the right tools â some of which are completely free â across the following key areas:
Thereâs a good chance lead capture forms will be a big focus of your conversion rate optimization tests, especially if youâre a B2B brand.
Why? Because these are the tools you use to capture leads. A high-performing form makes a huge difference to the volume of leads you generate, so forms are an obvious starting point for your CRO strategy. Those forms come in lots of different flavours, such as:
A prime example is the registration form Aura uses to let users sign up for a free 14-day trial. It uses clear and concise language and only asks for three details: first name, last name, and email address.
Some of those form variants are more effective than others. According to Omnisend, landing pages are by far the best performing of all signup forms â yet theyâre also the least used.
On the flipside, popups are overwhelmingly the most popular type of signup form, yet they achieve the second-lowest signup rate.
The lesson here? Popups and Wheel of Fortune spinners might look flashy, but a high-quality landing page is hard to beat.
So weâre agreed â choosing the right type of lead generation form is a crucial piece in the conversion rate optimization puzzle.
But thereâs a lot more to it than that. Once youâve identified the right type of form to use, you need to make it work for you. That means being strict with yourself about the information you truly need to capture from your leads (vs. the information youâd simply like to have).
Why is this so important?
Because completion rates drop off significantly when more than three fields are included on a form.
Sure, in an ideal world you might want to capture your leadâs:
And lots more. But how much of that information do you need upfront? And how much can your sales team find by doing a couple of minutes of basic research?
Keep your forms as concise as possible.
First name and email address are possibly the two most vital pieces of information you need from a lead, and itâs even more beneficial if email marketing is part of your strategy.
When it comes to lead gen forms, the saying âless is moreâ certainly rings true.
If you want to improve your conversion rates, you canât afford to be passive. Donât just hope customers will come running to your site and convert on their own â you need to gently nudge them in the right direction!
To understand how this works in practice, look no further than Booking.com. Just look at all the tactics it uses within a single hotel listing to convince potential customers to book right now:
Within that one listing, Booking.com tells us:
Once youâve read all those things, thereâs really nothing stopping you from hitting âSee availabilityâ.
An example in the B2B world would be Nectar, an employee recognition software company.
Like Booking.com, Nectar uses a number of tactics to prompt users into taking action:
Lastly, let us look at Herbal Dynamics Beauty as an example of how a company can drive users to take action. If you visit some of their product pages, you will be greeted with a couple of things:
Trust is key for driving leads and sales, which in turn makes it an important element in conversion rate optimization.
One of the ways you can build trust is through social proof. Simply incorporating testimonials on a sales page has been shown to drive conversions by as much as 34%. But testimonials arenât the only form of social proof you should be using â other examples include:
Look how Houston personal injury lawyer Attorney Brian White & Associates also display social proof on his site in the form of testimonials and below them, logos of the organizations heâs been featured in:
The best thing about this? If youâre good at what you do, demonstrating social proof is easy. Your customers will be happy to review you, say nice things about you, and share your content â you just need to ask them!
Youâve got your tech stack in place, youâve set goals and hypotheses, and tweaked your lead gen forms. But your conversion rate still isnât improving. Whatâs going on?
Thereâs a good chance the issues youâre seeing are down to your mindset.
Simply put, conversion rate optimization isnât something to dip into every now and again. To yield the best results, you need to be doing it continuously, following each of these five steps before looping back to the start:
Thereâs plenty of room for creativity in the world of web design and user experience. Generally, the more creative you get, and the more you experiment, the more youâll discover unexpected tactics that drive results.
However, you shouldnât experiment with everything.
One of the elements of your site that you probably shouldnât be playing around with too much is your CTA buttons. The fact is, your visitors are used to CTA buttons. They look out for them and instinctively understand that when they see one, itâs a trigger to drive the desired action. In other words, it clearly roadmaps where they should go next.
When every other website is using CTA buttons, itâs not a great idea for you to rip up the rulebook and go in a completely different direction.
Your CTA buttons should incorporate a few key characteristics:
Hereâs a pretty classic example of how this should look, from personal injury lawyers Rosenbaum & Rosenbaum:
However, thatâs not to say thereâs no room for experimentation here. Stick with the basic design, but feel free to play around with the colour, copy, size, font, and location of your CTA buttons.
Another example comes from the Law Offices of Jay Knispel, a personal injury firm in New York.
Knispel uses a bright blue CTA button that tells readers to book a free consultation and puts it close to a client testimonial, which is pretty clever.
Iâve already briefly referenced this, but itâs such an important conversion rate optimization best practice that it deserves its own separate point.
After every round of testing you perform, take the time to deep-dive into the results so youâre completely clear on what happened and why. As a minimum, strive to answer the following questions:
Once youâve done that, youâll be much better prepared to plan and launch your next test, which in turn increases your chances of making further conversion rate improvements.
Sure, thereâs a lot of elements to this. If youâre new to conversion rate optimization, Iâm not expecting you to put all this stuff in place immediately.
But if thereâs one key thing I urge you to take away from reading this article, itâs this: always view CRO as a long-term project.
You wouldnât âtry SEOâ by targeting one keyword for a month, then giving up if you donât immediately hit the top of Google. In the same way, donât expect to dip your toe into CRO for a short period and expect to find all the answers to your conversion rate problems.
Before you get started, plan multiple tests upfront, and commit to running each for however long it takes to generate the necessary data â whether thatâs a week, a month, a whole quarter, or even longer.
Eventually, the incremental improvements youâre making will add up to a significant increase in your overall conversion rate.
About the author: Freya is the founder of the personal finance blog CollectingCents that teaches readers how to grow their passive income, save money, improve their credit score, and manage debt. She has been featured in publications like Business Insider, Fox Business, the Huffington Post, and GoBankingRates.