You launched some great paid search and social media campaigns. You optimized them, and they’re in their sweet spot — with a low cost per click and high click-through rate. People are coming to your site, but they’re not converting as often as you’d like them to. What’s a digital marketer to do?
At this point, the problem may well be your website. You can build the best digital advertising campaign in the universe, but if your site isn’t user-friendly, you risk losing ad spend and revenue simply because you’re not pointing your visitors in the right direction once they arrive.
Is your website or landing page clear, well-designed and fully-optimized to drive those coveted conversions? If you’re attracting people to your website, but they’re simply not converting, you are probably overdue for a round of conversion rate optimization — also known as CRO.
The life-changing magic of CRO
Once you start thinking like a conversion rate optimizer, nothing is quite the same. You can’t look at any website or landing page without noticing the barriers to conversion and potential optimizations you could implement, given the opportunity.
If you are a marketer, the first step to launching a CRO project is to talk to your design and tech teams. Make sure they understand that you will need to make changes to the website, and why. It’s essential to get their buy-in and cooperation before you start, or you may run up against resistance and bottlenecks once you start recommending changes.
Then you need to study. Read up on CRO best practices and observe known high-conversion websites to understand what they’re doing and why it’s working. Learn to identify a well-optimized ecommerce or lead-generation website. It helps to look at a lot of well-designed landing pages — there are entire galleries out there for you to peruse.
We’ll get you started with these five essential CRO best practices — with examples!
1. Create a bold, above-the-fold call to action and benefit statement
If your ads contain a call to action — and they should — you want to replicate this call to action on your product or landing page. It doesn’t have to be word for word the same as your ads, but it does need to clearly tell people what to do when they land on your site.
Why should someone download your PDF, subscribe to your newsletter or buy your widget? Because it will change their lives for the better, of course. That leads us to the second point — your call to action needs to be accompanied by a strong and exciting benefit statement. Identify the number one benefit of your product or service, and use this benefit to explain why someone should buy, fill in your form, subscribe…
Here are some great examples of landing pages with strong calls to action and benefit statements:
2. Guide people down the conversion funnel
Highly optimized websites are kind of sneaky. They are structured to guide visitors, one step after another, down the conversion funnel — from curiosity, to engagement, to commitment. To do this, you need to map out every required step that brings visitors closer to purchasing.
Making sure your website is a funnel and not a labyrinth means eliminating two things: distractions, and unnecessary steps. Study each step in your conversion process with one, clear goal in mind: conversion. At each step, ask if your content is easily pointing users to the next natural step. Are there bottlenecks? Unnecessary steps? Shiny distractions? Usability issues? Minimize all of these and put front and centre a clear incentive for visitors to proceed to the next step.
Here’s a great example of a smooth and easy conversion funnel. In this case, the incentive is reiterated throughout — visitors can sign up for free.
Step one: Clean and simple intro with one clear low-commitment call to action.
Step two: The simplest of forms, with no distracting header links.
Steps three and beyond: Making a potentially boring process easy, fun and conversational.
Driving conversions with a free product onboards a customer in a way that makes the entire experience a conversion funnel for the paid product.
3. Simplify the form completion process
As emphasized above, you want to remove as much friction as possible from the conversion funnel. Once a visitor lands on your form, you don’t want to waste their time with unnecessary form fields and steps. Only ask for the most absolutely necessary information. Place the entire form above the fold… or better yet, embed it on your landing page so the form is zero clicks away. Remember, people will be responding on their desktops and smartphones, so make the text and fields big, bold, easy and responsive.
Here are a couple of optimized forms that we’d be thrilled to fill in:
4. Increase page speed
This one is a no-brainer, but one that can take some time to resolve. If your page doesn’t load within three seconds, more than half of your visitors will up and leave. There are many ways to increase your page speed. You could rebuild your web pages with AMP, work to minimize HTTP requests, reduce your server response time, or figure out how much you can compress your files without compromising quality.
Most likely, increasing your page speed as a CRO project is one you want to give to your nerdiest web developer. Make a persuasive case, and hand over a list of all the things you need done to ensure the site loads lightning fast.
5. Run A/B tests
All the best practices in the world won’t teach you as much as real, live website visitors will. It’s not magic that many of the world’s top lead generation and ecommerce websites convert like crazy. They have tested every button, every field and design decision to learn what works best with their specific kind of customer.
An A/B or multivariate testing such as Optimizely or Unbounce allows you to create variations on your landing and product pages to test the positioning and design of different elements. Using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, you can move and adjust page elements without relying on a designer or web developer, then monitor the results to see which version generates the best -through gold. Read more on A/B testing here.
CRO is a journey
One thing we’ve learned from doing many rounds of CRO: no website or landing page is ever finished. You may come up with a winning formula, only to find that its conversion rate starts to decline after six months. There are many reasons for this — new technologies, design trends and user expectations are just a few.
Once you begin optimizing your website or landing pages for conversion, there’s no going back. The testing, tweaking, reworking and learning curve will continue as long as you remain curious about what you can do to make your content and campaigns perform better. Happy trails.
If you need help optimizing your landing pages, get a proposal here.