Everyone wants to increase their conversion rate. Websites are designed around the idea of turning a passive visitor into an active user, helping the audience take the next step.
Your website’s conversion rate tracks how many visitors actually become buyers. For instance, if your site sees 200 visitors every month, and makes 50 sales, that leaves you with a conversion rate of 25%. That’s an incredibly high conversion rate, however, and if you expect that growth you’re likely to be disappointed.
Here are five tips to help you expand your conversion rate range and capitalize on every visitor:
Create Trust With Visuals
The best way to gear your website toward higher conversion rates is to include visuals that signify trust.
Official Internet company logos, security badges, positive images, and even just making sure that your product photos are clear and easy to understand all contribute to trust in a customer — and likewise to conversion.
One way to enhance your product images is to remove photo background, which gives a cleaner and more professional look. By doing this, it helps customers to focus on the main subject and build trust in your brand.
Include A Landing Page — And Update It Often
This is a no-brainer for a lot of website designers, but it should definitely be mentioned among the top five tips for increasing conversion. Landing pages are designed to attract attention and deliver a definite call to action, immediately that your visitor arrives on your site. They generally take less time to load, as well, maximizing the time that you have available to you.
But it’s more than just the creation of a landing page. For higher conversion results, it’s a good idea to keep your landing page fresh and up to date — even if you’re not actually adding brand new content every day, you can use eye-catching words and phrases. “New!” “Just added!” “Now available!”
And, of course, induce a sense of scarcity by including a time frame to deals, sales, and offers that are mentioned on the landing page.
Your landing page is one of the chief tools that can be utilized in upping your conversion game. Don’t let it be just a “one and done.”
Adjust Your Navigation Bar
User-friendly navigation is an important feature of a well-designed website. But some research suggests that the amount of information included in your navigation bar can actually have a deleterious effect on your conversion rate.
How so? Namely, by being a major distraction.
Culling potentially distracting elements in your website design is a significant concern for boosting conversion. Adjust your nav bar so it doesn’t suggest that your visitors immediately navigate away from your CTAs and landing page. In fact, consider removing the nav bar from your landing page entirely.
In other areas, you may consider either removing the nav bar if it’s an immediately noticeable feature (take a look at this test run) in which the website creator removed the sidebar from his blog and saw conversion rates increase by 71%). Alternatively, you could make the navigation interactive, requiring that your visitor clicks on or at least hover over the items in order to make them viewable.
Keep Forms Brief, Or Include Them On A Separate Page
Landing pages and pop-ups are often used to generate leads, such as asking for your visitor’s name and contact information. And they can be very useful for this, but they also could be causing your visitors to shy away from actually converting.
This is most noticeable with longer forms that require time and effort to fill in. Think about it: if you visit a website and the first thing that happens is you’re asked a barrage of questions, are you likely to fill the form in, or just back-click right out of there?
Generally, based on the rule of “path of least resistance,” it’s more likely that people will handwave the forms and forget about the site. And even when they do buckle down and fill in the fields, they may not include actual data — I know I’m guilty of that myself. I’m much more likely to “convert” or give a lead later on after I’ve looked at the site and know what I’m getting into.
So keep the forms on your landing page brief. And consider adding a link to a separate page, instead of asking for information right out of the gate. If you adjust the information you ask for, even if just by getting rid of the field that asks for a phone number, research suggests that you can raise your conversion rates by another 5%.
Choose Images And Videos Carefully
Another way to make sure that your visitors aren’t getting needlessly distracted is to be very selective when it comes to your images and videos.
Of course, it’s good to be selective anyway. But to keep your clients focused and maximize the potential for conversion, it’s not just about the type of images and videos you select, but also about how many you include. Again, this is especially important for your landing page. Too many elements on a landing page can greatly distract from the CTAs that you’ve so carefully included within the text.
While conversion rates vary depending on the type of business and services offered, sources suggest that the average rate of conversion for eCommerce ranges between 1.84% and 3.71%, and across other industries can average between 2.35% and 5.31%.
With rates tending to be low but allowing for a good range, kitting out your website to reach optimum conversion is a must.
Author Bio
A graphic designer by profession, Carol Alison also work as a freelancer on the side by writing about graphic design, branding, and visual designs. Her favorite tools are Illustrator and Photoshop but she’s dabbled with Inkscape and GIMP as well.
