bvwall

If you're looking to up your game it is time to look into increasing the proportion of your website traffic that converts into sales through Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Quite simply CRO can will increase your income.

Unfortunately understanding how best to implement CRO can be a lengthy drawn out process that can involve a lot of trial and error. To make things easier, here are several tips to use CRO to drive your business into a revenue-making machine.

1. Invest in the testing software that will make a difference

In regards to testing software, the phrase, ‘you have to spend money to make money’ could not be truer. You need to be prepared to make an investment in quality testing software that may set you back a few hundred dollars.

However, this is a quality investment that the ROI will be realized quickly. You definitely need A/B testing software that is user friendly. So many can leave you scratching your head and leaving you confused and requiring assistance from an IT guru. We have identified a number of testing software selections that are easy to navigate.
- Unbounce
- VSO (Visual Website Optimizer)
- Google Experiments (Added bonus it is free!)
- Optimizely

2. You have invested in the right software – now it’s time for constant A/B testing.

Conversion gains happen when you can identify what is causing the conversions. With A/B testing (that’s a fancy, geeky term for when you compare two iterations of a webpage to find out which is the better performing one), you parallel two web pages by showing the two alternatives to comparable visitors to your site simultaneously. Obviously, the version that converts better or more frequently is the better of the two.

A/B testing is easily the most dependable and consistent way to find out which copy of your web page is working more effectively for you.

Some A/B tests that are highly recommended include:
- Testing your call to action (both text and placement)
- Sizing (both imaging and text)
- Your banner headline
- Color orders
- Volume of content
- The amount of fields in a form

3. Make sure your Call to Action is highly visible

This is a far simpler suggestion to follow through on. If you want to convert visitors to your page you have to make sure your call to action is highly visible on the section of your homepage when you land on it, also known as the fold.

You should not limit yourself to just one call to action however. If you have considerable content and information on your homepage you will benefit from having another call to action available to viewers as they scroll down the page.

Ensure there is consistency in your call to action so your site has symmetry and is easy to understand for visitors.

4. Your call to action is visible – Now make it bigger!

Make your call to action impossible to miss.

This one is pretty simple: The bigger the button the more likely visitors are to click on it.

5. Lessen the admin

When you are signing up for a new website or a new offer there is nothing worse than having to fill out long sections of information. This process very quickly becomes tedious and actually can cause a lot of people to lose interest altogether and remove themselves from the signing up process.

In many situations you do not need a whole lot of information to encourage visitors to your site to take the next step. There is no point asking for all these details when a name and email address will serve the same purpose.

6. Simplify and maximize your headline

Your headline is the first text that visitors read when they land on your homepage. By simplifying and maximizing the text you can create a lot more conversions. What do we mean by simplify and maximize?
- Make it big and bold
- Make the text simple (no long winding messages)
- Be clear and easy to understand in your statement.

When people land on your homepage no one wants to see cryptic hard to understand messages. Lay all your cards on the table with a clear, simple message.

7. Include testimonials

A lack of trust is a major obstacle that is going to turn people away from your website. Personifying your website with testimonials helps break down those walls of trust that are often high with cautious first time visitors to your site.
What do we mean by personifying your testimonials? Make them real:
- Include images of real people
- Describe how you made the customer happy
- Include a few details about the person
- Make sure your testimonials come from people who are relatable to your target audience.

By following these steps you can achieve CRO without spending big dollars or having to call in external, professional IT help. These hints have an uncomplicated nature, which means that they are simple to implement and you can track progress as you go.

HayleyS

I think that all these tips make sense and are effective for boosting a conversion rate. Some of them are new for me, so it makes the reading of this article really interesting for me. Thank you for sharing.

Sean CS

All suggestions are acceptable for SEM. Yes, it's very true that one should invest in some paid tools if he/she wants to get success in PPC. Without any perfect tool, it is tough to target right audience and get targeted audience.

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tshelby

Thanks for the tips,you hit the right points. There is a software that I use in my Ecommerce store for a while and I'm pleased so far, it's called Segmentify. It offers you to increase user engagement with smart recommendations and less bound rate, better card and content optimization, returning visitors by sending stay in touch emails and push notifications and above all, it provides your website to increase conversion optimization rate. You should take a look at it and add to your E-commerce software list

dburk

Good grief... yet another article dump by a serial article dumper.

Obviously another article written about a topic the author is unfamiliar with. Please people take this articles tips for what they are, a listicle written by an author that is paid on a per word basis, so it is filled with fluff that to most users will be mostly worthless.

Lets examine a few of the glaring errors in this "paid-per-word" article writer's listicle of errors, shall we?

Error 1. - He makes an assertion that "you have to spend money to make money", yet in his list of recommended tools he mentions one that is totally free to use, so he immediately contradicts his first assertion.

Error 2. - He asserts that the "testing software that may set you back a few hundred dollars." Really? He the goes on to list solutions that start at about $600/yr. on the low side to many thousands of dollars. I think he missed the mark just a little, don't you?

Error 3. - He lumps Unbounce, a landing page builder, into a group of A/B testing tools. This shows how little the author knows the topic he is writing about. Sure Unbounce, like nearly all Landing page creation tools, has some A/B split testing features built-in, but those features only work on the landing pages built and hosting on Unbounce platform and cannot be used to test any of your existing pages. It seems clear that the author was unaware of this because he likely has never actually used an A/B split testing tool.

Unbounce is in a totally different category of tools, to use an analogy, calling it an A/B testing tool is like calling Ford Motor Company a speedometer company.

As an aside, The WF should try running an A/B split test to see how much article dumping drives away members that are looking for discussions rather than a low quality article directory.


Really shouldn't this be part of tip #1? Hey, I guess this listicle is all about word count, not quality, right? Afterall, it seems obvious the author is paid on word count.

And what the hell is "color orders"? Is he talking about rainbows or something?


Here the author gets into a little bit of gobbledygook:
"If you want to convert visitors to your page you have to make sure your call to action is highly visible on the section of your homepage when you land on it, also known as the fold."

"Convert visitors to your page" Oh no... I've been converted to a page.

"also known as the fold." It's not known as "the fold" silly non-expert, it is known as "Above the fold". It's a reference that originates from the newspaper industry where only the top stories were printed on the front page "above the fold" so that it would be visible on the newsstand to passers by.

Placing your CTA above the fold is one bit of advice that get's a lot of people into trouble. I've seen a lot of marketers blindly follow this advice, without ever testing it, and it turns out to be their biggest conversion killing mistake. Placing your CTA in the most optimal location should be the goal, and yes, A/B Split testing can help you determine the most optimal location for your CTA. So, my advice is to ignore this non-experts advice, and test to find the best location for your CTA.

CRO is not as much about optimizing your page content as it is about optimizing the thought sequence of your target audience. Conversions originate in your visitors thought process, and it is those sequences of thoughts that you need to optimize to improve conversions rates. So, you see it is location of the CTA within the sequence of thoughts that is paramount, not the placement in relation to the fold. If you get the CTA out of sequence, it doesn't matter how high up on the page layout it is placed, it will be highly ineffective.

Again, shouldn't this have been part of tip #3?

This advice seems a bit over-simplified to me, and I think it misses the mark.

The goal should be to make it clear what you want your visitors to do next, making your CTA bigger isn't always a good idea. making it more "prominent" is the goal. There are many ways to make a CTA more prominent that don't involve making it bigger, and making it too big can create problems.

The difference may seem subtle, what you want to achieve is optimization not extremism. There is definitely a size that is too big, and a size that is too small, and somewhere in between you will find the optimal size.

The only thing worse than having too many form fields is having too few. Again, the author misses the mark a bit. It is way more common to see forms that ask for far too little information these days than too much. People are smart enough to tell the difference between someone that wants to help you solve a problem and someone that just asks for the typical info needed to be added to a marketing list. You communicate your lack of concern by using too few form fields to be useful when your only goal is to build a marketing list. People can see right through that.

Your focus should be on asking the right questions on your forms, and none of the wrong questions. Look at your form from the perspective of your users, not just from your own marketing list requirements, you are communicating a message by the type of questions you are asking.

There is also the issue of quality versus quantity. The questions you ask on your form field should be researched and tested, and not simply reduced to the minimum number required for your marketing list. This too should be tested.

I suppose the author copied this idea mostly correctly, however I would have said "Make your headline clear and prominent."

One of the most common problems I see with landing pages is that they have no clear headline at all. Many times you will see pages with no apparent headline, or a bunch of headings arranged so that you cannot tell which one is intended to be the primary headline. having no clear starting place for your audience to start reading leads to inconsistent thought sequences which make CRO ineffective.

Making your headline the most prominent page element will help your users identify where they should start reading and the proper sequence to read your content. Again, size is not the only thing that helps to make a page element prominent, placement, color, and negative space play a huge role in prominence.

Hmm... the author states, "Make them real" then goes on to include this statement: "Describe how you made the customer happy"

Is he suggesting that you write real "fake" testimonials? I'm confused, which is it, a real customer testimonial, or a fake one that you wrote yourself to "describe how you made the customer happy"?

Which is it " tips", "steps", "hints"?

Sounds like you put this article through an article spinner and interchanged words that had similar meanings, but don't quite fit into the article.

Yes, these "hints" do have an "uncomplicated nature", because they are just low budget, low quality, pay-per-word fluff pieces that regurgitate information that is commonly found on the web, offering nothing new, and presented in such a way that it is practically useless for most readers.

By the way, Google classifies this type of content as "webspam", I hope it doesn't end up harming WF even more by getting some, or all, of it's pages de-indexed.

Not to mention, it is highly inappropriate to dump low quality articles on a discussion forum. This is a place where people come to discuss topics not an article directory. Nothing kills discussion faster than article dumps. All they do is encourage comment spam, which also harms a discussion forum.

Comment spam is commonly found on blogs and article directories that permit unmoderated comments. Comment spam is easy to recognize as it typically entails a 1-2 sentence comment that ads nothing to the discussion, and often begin with phrases like "great post...". The spammers often include generic compliments, even when undeserved, hoping to not have their spam deleted.

I personally see these article dumps as an attack on this forum and implore that the moderators take action to put an end to this abusive tactic, especially when committed repeatedly by the same serial abusers.

* Get Results - Outsource Your PPC Management |
* Don Burk Advertising & Marketing - www.donburk.com

Waqas Khattak

Any Good Advice On Pay Per Call. .???... Where To Promote. Adwords is Crazy expensive right now and Bing has no Yield..

marcyscreed

Thank you for at least mentioning free to use testing software.

sprucevn

1. Get the most powerful testing software available.
2. A/B test non-stop.
3. Place your CTA above the fold.
4. Shorten your form.
5. Make your call to action bigger.
6. Make your headline more obvious.
7. Add testimonials.

ivanadee

I Agree to No.3 since I myself experience it. The website that I use have grey color for the hyperlink and it makes the link cant be seen easily. After change the color, the conversion is better

Abarrane Wilson

dburk, thanks for mentioning those points!
Well, I have subscribed to a newsletter and one simple thing I've learnt is "Progressive Disclosure". It basically means hiding information so visitors don’t see it until they need it.
This is really good and does work a lot for many websites. All are so busy showcasing their cool stuffs in their arsenal that they forget how much really a reader can take in.

Thanks for the tools you've mentioned in your post bvwall! They might help.

chetanlegend

For me these informations are really helpful but 1st i've to perfomr some A/B testing then after. And yes I'm agree that if you are running PPC campaign then to invest some paid software/tools will be worth to better optimization of conversion. I'm using paid software to optimize my campaign's keywords.

Really helpful stuff. Thanks

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Cookie Monster

There's a lot of things that one can put/write on his landing page, but you can't use everything. A big headline, sub headline, video, call to action etc. etc...
Sometimes you just need to take a look at the content on this page and ask yoirself "what in NOT helping?" and get it out of there.
Also, fine tune forever...
Also, very important, ask yourself "am I being clear about what my product is and why they need it?"

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Aseem Juneja

These are pretty nice tips. Specifically, for AB testing, there are quite a few low hanging fruits that you can start working on. Here is a detailed article on this.

gagan22

Many people buy for emotional reasons. If you make them feel just right, they’ll take action. The same rule applies when choosing images for your site. A positive image brings out positive emotions. It could be a smile, a smirk or a gesture. Emotions are powerful, and they work.

buihoang

I think design blog, speed is important to increse convertion too

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marketingmasala

Great tips indeed! All these points are essential for boosting sales.
I also feel that with clear understanding of conversion funnel, optimizing customer journey can be improved leading to revenue generation. I would like to share 4 steps to nail conversion rate optimization using funnels -

-Understanding your customer’s buying patterns and journeys.
-Defining the goals and events that make a difference to your business.
-Setting up and understanding funnels in google analytics.
-Taking data driven decisions to improve your marketing.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Shivankit Arora
Marketing Masala

WealthManagement

Thanks man