Conversion rate optimization implementation have doubled, tripled and increased the sales, leads, and revenue of businesses by many folds.

If you are a business owner or a digital marketer you have to know about this one simple skill of optimizing your website for conversions. The article covers complete details around conversion rate and optimization, follow this simple conversion rate optimization guide in order to implement it successfully for your business or website.

Fact:

Many digital marketers and business owners put a lot of effort and succeed in driving tons of traffic to the website, but unfortunately many fail to convert many of the potential audiences and finally fail in whole as a business. (They fail to convert the audience to a customer)

What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?

The number of visitors performing the intended objectives on the website as defined/considered by the business owners against the total number of visitors to the website is measured as the conversion rate.

Conversion Rate = Visitors Converting (performing the action defined by website owner)/Total number of visitors

E.G: Conversion Rate On website = Sales/Total Visitors = 10/1000 = 1%, so the conversion rate is one percent.

From the above image total transactions are 4475 out of the 497986 visitors. So, the conversion rate is 4475/497986=0.90%

E-commerce conversion rates are usually between 1% to 5 %, in some cases it goes up to 10% or more based on the objectives of business owners, industry or category of the business, the type of marketing or promotional activities.

Conversion Rate Optimization In Digital Marketing:

Optimization of the website in order to improve the conversion rate by implementing strategies in order to convert the users against the defined objectives is known as conversion rate optimization.

For example, the main objective of the website owners is to sell a product or capture the information of the user visiting the website or any other action such as downloading of the file or visiting a specific page.

Now a visitor performing any of the above-mentioned action such as the purchase or filling the lead form or downloading the brochure is considered as a conversion.

Now a whole question is how do businesses increase the conversions or conversion rate?

What kind of optimization needed to be done on the website to improve the conversion rate?

In this article, I will be explaining the important aspects that play a role in improving the conversion rate,

1. Marketing elements
   • Tactical elements
   • Influencing
   • Impactful
2. Optimization of the website
   • Design or presentation optimization
   • Technical elements optimization
   • Creating convenience or guiding appropriately
3. Offline elements
   • Branding
   • Reputation management of the business
   • Dealing with the niche category of products or demand of the product

Improving or increasing the Conversion rate is not always about the optimization of the website from marketing point view alone or technical point of view alone, but unfortunately many take care of only one of it and they never realize there is a need of taking care of both along with the offline elements.

If you are struggling to boost the conversion rates for your websites seek our help. We have implemented this for several businesses, where the businesses have seen an increase of conversion rate by up to 100%.

Marketing Elements:

Most of the websites present the content plainly and those kinds of write-ups and the webpage designs accordingly never tries to sell the product or service. Ideally, the web pages should act as a salesperson, where web page should be as thorough and detailed as a salesperson with that proposition of product knowledge and the marketing elements.

Marketing elements are very crucial on the web page and if you are finding difficulty in understanding those key elements just follow my simple thumb rule and based on that and with some practice you will be able to build a web page with appropriate marketing elements those for sure play a significant role in improving the conversion rates on your webpages.

Thumb Rule Starts:

Call to actions (CTA) –

The appropriate call to actions at the right instances in the content makes a significant change in terms of creating convenience for the users, helping them to explore further or to guide them to the intended objectives of the business/website.

Here are some of the call to action examples:

• Buy Now!
• Explore Now!
• Contact Us!
• Get in touch with this!
• Leave your information!
• Chat with our support for a quick response!
• Get a quote for free!

The list goes, you can use anything that can fulfill the audience and the website owners objective.

Call Out Statement –

The information or statement about the product or service which is playing a role in making the mindset of the user as per his needs or the objectives of the business owner is called a call-out statement.

A statement that enables the audience or user to make the decision is known as callout statement.

Here are some of the call out statement examples,

Let’s say a user is struggling to decide between the two mobile phone brand which has got most of the features almost same including the price, and in this case, the call out statement will be as follows:

72 Hrs of battery life! – This one point would make them take the purchase call as the other mobile phone doesn’t have this specific advantage even though its features are almost the same from all other aspects.

Below are few more call out statement examples,

• 100% money back guarantee!
• 24/7 support
• Lifetime access
• Service centers across the city
• Higher Resale value
• The most recognized brand across the globe

Likewise, the list goes on based on the product or service or industry.

USP’s –

USP’s are unique selling propositions or unique selling points which only your business will have as compared to other players in the market and this unique proposition will play a crucial role in improving the conversion rates.

Don’t confuse USP’s with the call out statements, the USP’s can also be the call out statements but not all the call out statements are the USP’s.

Tactical, Influencing and the Impactful elements:

Tactical Marketing:

When you play a tactic to sell a higher number of products for the products which are similar than everybody else in the market without any loss in the margins or compromising the business goals or objective is called as tactical marketing.

E.G: Instead of asking the user to register for the existing workshop dates for a course training you can ask them to pick a convenient date, with a messaging or information that when your date is not approved you will be moved to the nearby date workshop.

Despite knowing this fact the user still registers for the date he wishes, but finally, they all will be moved to the pre-decided nearby date.

Influential Marketing:

A healthy and a positive effort of influencing the customer mindset as per the objectives or business goals without affecting or putting the audience in loss or trouble and fulfilling or satisfying their goals or objectives is known as influential marketing.

E.g: Publishing user genuine reviews on the webpage

Positive reviews from the genuine users about your product or service will influence the user to make the decision.

A call out statement can also influence the decision making the power of the audience.

Impactful elements:

Any type of content or information about the product or service which is most appealing to the user and can create an impact on their mindset about the product or service but which necessarily may or may not play a role in converting the audience. Impactful usually an effort to create or trigger a positive attitude towards the product or service.

Optimization of the website:

Optimization of the website covers several elements, let discuss each of them one by one.

Design or Presentation optimization:

Many times you may have amazing content and user journey will be defined to a great level, but unfortunately, the design elements of the page or layouts may not allow you to present the content as per the requirement, and this one barrier may impacts very big on your conversion rates.

Web technologies have evolved to a great level, the competition has grown significantly, the user preferences or lifestyle or the way they consume content on the internet has changed drastically and an old school method of presentations may not take care of coming up with the user requirements or serving exactly what they need quickly is impossible and this one thing is stopping business to grow as expected or depreciating every now and then.

Fix:

Understanding the user priorities, their conveniences, and business goals the designs have to be developed. The UI/UX team building the experience has limitations, and they cannot present the way how marketing and salespeople need it. Salesperson knows what to speak first and what’s next based on user and understanding them and they will be the right people to define the content flow on the webpage and for every product there is a need of customization and the same design or theme would not work for all the products or services especially when the user prefers to research before he makes the decision.

There is a lot of difference in, bot speaking to the person and a real person speaking to the person, same way the UI/UX team developed designs are like bot communications and the marketing team communications are a customized communications, which are more impactful, objective oriented, flexible and more, and hence building the designs or presenting the content considering the marketing teams requirements is crucial and helps lot in improving the conversion rates or to achieve the stabilized rankings for SEO.

Note: The marketers should be the real marketers to suggest the content presentation or design and many fail in providing the right suggestions.

Technical Elements Optimization:

You cannot believe that more than 60% of the business suffer conversion rates due to technical issues, for a website the conversion rate depends on some of the factors or most of the below-mentioned factors, such as:

1. Servers on which websites are hosted
2. Developers knowledge
3. Dynamic content handling
4. Coding practices or backend development practices
5. Front end development practices
6. Responsiveness
7. Technical errors on the system

And a couple of other technical factors play a crucial role in conversion rates.

Wondering how technology plays a role?

Ideally, a website has to load as quickly as it can, and suggested is less than 3 seconds and if a website is loading for several seconds user would not explore or make the purchase or perform any action as defined and intended by the business owner and this is a big loss.

A website doing business across various geographies may have to serve the content based accordingly (respective language or currencies) based on the IP detection, and the developers cannot handle this properly it’s a gone case, business owners cannot expect a single conversion when the implementation has bugs or its wrong.

Likewise, there are few 10’s of technical fixes that a website needs in order to drive it towards the goal or success.

Creating convenience or helping the user to achieve his goals-

Every user lands on the webpage with a well-defined goal or objective and if he finds any inconvenience in between he/she doesn’t prefer to explore the page further, as they prefer struggling to find that piece of content or the elements that they want to interact on the webpage.

Many users suffer to explore the sections they are interested, let’s take an example, a user who has landed on your website want to get in touch with you and if he couldn’t find the contact details to speak to you or the form to fill the details and leave a message to you it’s an inconvenience.

The disgusting thing is on websites with payment integrations and accepting online payments the payments buttons will be put in the least prominent places of the webpage, even if the user wants to do a payment he cannot.

Offline Elements:

It’s not always the marketing elements or the technical elements on your website, there are so many things outside of your website that influences the conversion rates, many times you may have to fix those offline elements in order to succeed. Here are the few offline elements that play a crucial role in conversion rate,

Branding:

A well-known name makes a lot of noise, sometimes you recognize it and sometimes you may not and for sure one day you would realize the kind of impact a brand plays in converting the audiences when you can speak to them or conduct a survey.

When audiences have already heard of you they don’t doubt you they make the decisions spontaneously and hence you will be able to sell to them. The competition is very high if you are not known or taking time to let know about your credibility by then your competitor would have taken over you, which is utter damage to the conversion rates or to the business as a whole.

Branding is very crucial for businesses in order to improve the conversion rates on the website or in the offline.

Online Reputation Management:

Your audience prefers to seek the opinion or experience of your past customers even though you are a big brand, as for them that trust always comes by understanding the happy state of your past customers. Hence they research about you on the internet and in case of any negative talks about your business would deviate them from purchasing your product or service and hence a positive talk about your business is very important to convert your website audiences.

Online reputation management activity is one such that addresses the grievances of customers if there are any and encourages the happy customers to share their feedback or experience to the entire community so that the audiences benefit and also understand the actual problems that happened in the buying process, their severity, considerability and more.

I remember in 2015-16 we dealt with a business that had tons of negative reviews and their conversion rate was luck. We have taken control of the conversion rate, our online reputation management activity has addressed the concerns of genuine buyers and have improved the ratings and score across all profiles on the internet, such as Google business listing, Trustpilot, MouthShut, Glassdoor and couple of others, the business is heading towards an unbelievable growth and which also has the highest conversion rate compared to any similar player in the industry.

Dealing with the Product:

The conversions rates are also largely dependent on several aspects catering to the product, such as,

1. Its availability in the market
2. The competition
3. Introducing in the right time
4. Offers associated with it
5. The ease of transportation or delivery
6. The price compared to other players

And many more!

The above 6 factors play a crucial role in improving or affecting the conversion rates and hence planning the business according is also important, as sometimes you dealing with the wrong product would never reap any benefit to you.

Conclusion:

Conversion rate of your website visitors define the success of your business, if your conversion rate is good or growing your business revenues to spike up, if in case if the conversion rate is going down you would see a drop in leads or sales. Meanwhile, many businesses have an opportunity to grow further, but then they are not growing as businesses owners or marketers are not aware of how to optimize the conversion rates further, they are going through this conversion rate optimization guide would help them to implement the conversion rate optimization strategies for their business.

When you improve your conversion rate by 100% you will see a 100% growth in your business from the same amount of traffic to the website, and hence focusing on conversion rate optimization is important.

If you have liked my effort of serving the information to the digital marketing lovers and business owners do like and share this post.

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.