Conversion Rate Experts Share The Best Optimisation Tips
The majority of marketing teams focus on SEO and PPC to acquire as many users as possible and direct them towards ecommerce sites, hoping they’ll convert with few issues.
But what happens when they arrive on your ecommerce website and can’t find what they’re looking for, or have to fight with the checkout process to complete their transaction?
Suppose you want to grow your business sustainably and successfully. In that case, it’s vital to uncover exactly where the issues lie and fix them directly, rather than use guesswork and waste time and resources fixing the wrong thing.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) aims to increase the number of conversions on your website. As a conversion rate optimisation agency, we achieve this by identifying issues with your current website, generating solutions, and A/B testing them with hypotheses.
As an ongoing process, CRO allows you to be flexible and continually improve your site to meet the needs of your users, both new and returning to improve their experience and increase the likelihood of them making a purchase. This in turn helps your business to grow successfully in the long run.
What is a good conversion rate and what does it mean?
Conversion rate of online shoppers worldwide as of 3rd quarter 2020, from Statista.
Whilst there isn’t a universal ideal conversion rate, conversion rate experts suggest to set targets for your website based on your industry, traffic, target audience and more. According to a study from 2021, the average conversion rate in Q3 2020 was 2.17%.
A ‘good’ conversion rate means that out of the total number of users viewing your website, a sufficient number of them are converting. In turn, this means that the number of transactions or conversions is enabling sustainable growth.
If your conversion rate is lower than the average for the sector, lower than your competitors, or simply not reaching the target you’d like, then you’re in the right place to conduct CRO.
How do you calculate the conversion rate?
To calculate your website’s conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the total number of visitors and multiply by 100 to get a percentage conversion rate.
To get an accurate conversion rate, it’s important to understand what you define as a conversion.
For example, if you are measuring a goal conversion rate such as email newsletter sign-ups, you would take the total number of signups, divide it by the number of visitors on the site and multiply it by 100.
If you are measuring the ecommerce conversion rate, divide the total number of transactions, by the total number of site visitors and multiply by 100.
Where should you implement the CRO strategy?
Your conversion rate strategy should have identified where the biggest issues lie, or quick wins that will have a big impact on the site. This will guide where to prioritise optimisation work on your website.
The areas that will have the largest impact from CRO are:
Homepage
This is where many users will land first and form their initial judgement of your website.
The better optimised your homepage is, the more effectively you can direct traffic to the pages or products they are interested in.
PDP (Product Detail Page)
PDPs can be make or break when it comes to users adding a product to their basket. Especially if the PDP isn’t optimised for conversions.
Think clear pricing, delivery and returns info, Add to Basket button stands out from the rest of the content, and a variety of images to showcase your products.
Basket and Checkout
The final step in your users journey is the basket and checkout. If you want more users to convert and complete their transaction, you need to make the basket and checkout as helpful and intuitive as possible. Our conversion rate experts have put together this helpful guide on how to improve your Add to Basket rate.
Reduce friction as much as possible and you’ll see your conversion rate start to increase in no time.
Conversion rate optimisation marketing strategies to test
Use text-based CTAs
Banner blindness is becoming a widespread phenomenon wherein users ignore banner style content on websites. Mix this with the fact that most users will quickly scan through the content, not always reaching the bottom of the page and it’s highly likely that banners could be missed.
In a test run by Hubspot, end-of-post-banners CTAs only accounted for 6% of leads whereas anchor-text CTAs generated up to 93% of leads.
Run A/B Testing
A/B testing allows you to test the effectiveness of your new design (B), whether an entire page, a piece of copy, or anything in between, against the control or original design (A).
You can drastically increase your conversion rate by making even simple changes to headlines, offers or CTAs.
Add live chat
Live chat with your customers to answer their questions in real time and offer support where needed.
This could help convert a user who otherwise may have left your site for a competitor by giving them the confidence to complete their purchase or add more products to their order, thereby increasing your AOV.
Start CRO
Whilst there are countless best practices and tips for CRO, ultimately it comes down to your specific target audience needs.
Find out what they want, and what they struggle with to find out the specific methods and strategies to optimise your website.
Final thoughts
We hope this advice from our conversion rate experts has been helpful in your endeavour to improve and optimise your conversion rate.