It’s a busy time of year for marketers. Whether you work for a large corporate, a small business or are part of a digital marketing agency, there are a host of landmark dates and events to plan for. Halloween, Guy Fawkes night, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas – and then the New Year sales. To name but a few.
It can feel like a hamster wheel – the same old same old. So it’s tempting to do the same things as you’ve always done previously. But if they have not been as effective as you would have liked, what can you do to get better? How can you win more customers from visitors to your website?
To do this you need to focus on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO). This is the process of analysing the current performance of your site – and visitor behaviour on your site – then making changes that will lead to visitors doing more of what you want them to do.
At Xcite Digital we understand the importance of CRO. As a progressive digital marketing agency we have improved CRO for many of our clients. This enables them to identify and achieve the outcomes they want from their website traffic, and ensure that these outcomes make the required contribution to their overall business growth strategy.
So what are the ways that you can improve CRO?
Based on our experience we recommend three simple steps that you can use to improve CRO. To make these easier to remember we will use the acronym ACT to describe our three steps:
A Analyse what is happening now and what you actually want to happen
C Change the things that you need to change
T Test to see whether the changes have been successful
This is an iterative process that you will need to go through again and again to make sure that your site is always at the top of its game in terms of achieving what you want it to do.
Analyse
As with any element of marketing strategy, decisions should be based on data. So first of all determine the goal(s) you are trying to achieve for the web page(s) that are under review. This needs to dovetail in with your business goals.
Goals need to be specific and measurable. For example you may want to specify an increased number of customers entering the sales funnel, new email subscribers, new enquiry leads to follow up, or increased visitor time being spent on your site.
Once you have your goals you then need to use data to analyse what visitors are actually doing when they are on your site. You can get a lot of quantitative data such as sources of traffic, audience demographics, entrance paths, pages and links most/least visited and bounce rates from web analytics tools.
It is also equally important to look at qualitative data so that you gain an understanding not just of what people do but why they do it. So over and above the quantitative data it is essential to observe – and actively seek feedback on – the customer journey and their feelings about your products or services.
Using a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data will enable you to make objective decisions about how you need to improve your CRO.
Change
Now that you have clear CRO objectives, you can decide what aspect of your site to work on first. You will not need to change everything all at once, but here are five main areas to look at improving:
- Landing page design
Your landing page is the first page that visitors will see, so you need to make it do its job of keeping them on that page for long enough to want to start exploring the rest of your site. Landing pages should be personalised wherever possible so that, for example, if someone arrives from a link for a special offer or tailored promotion, there is relevant information about that on the landing page.
The design of the landing page is also really important. The better your page looks, the more likely it is that visitors will stay on it. So plan your design carefully and test it (see below) before launch. As general guidance, use white space effectively to give a clear outline, complemented by bright colours to highlight important information or Calls to Action. Well-placed images are also good for capturing customer attention.
- Site navigation
If you want visitors to progress from the landing page then your site needs to be easy and clear to navigate. It is essential to remember that today’s visitors tend to be impatient and want everything now. So you need to present a site that is easy to navigate with minimum amount of clicks. If your navigation is unstructured, visitors are likely to get lost and may end up abandoning your site. Not only does this lose you a potential customer but if it happens a lot, it could also have a detrimental effect on the reputation of your brand.
Even better for site navigation is if you can continue to personalise pages to make them relevant to visitors in terms of demographics, devices and past browsing history. This way, each individual customer may actually navigate through a slightly different customer journey, but one that is more likely to result in conversion.
- Loading speed
To get visitors to stay on any page of your website it is essential that it loads quickly. A slow loading site creates poor UX, and can also be a negative ranking factor for Google. But what do Google regard as slow? Well, according to John Mueller of Google in 2016, we should aim for a loading speed of less than 2-3 secs. This advice was augmented by Maile Ohye of Google in 2019:
“2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second.”
A recent study by Akamai aimed to quantify the impact of a slow loading web page. It found that a 1 second delay in page load times is likely to cause:
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
So do make sure that loading speed for all your web pages is as fast as it can be, across all devices. Every second’s delay will impact on your conversions: many potential customers will simply close the page and move elsewhere.
- Content
As well as all the above, you need to ensure that every page of your site contains relevant and engaging content. This can make the difference between visitors either deciding to stay on your website and progressing to further action, or simply leaving your site before interacting further with you.
Make sure that your content has arresting headlines and then body text that is relevant to the reader. Just as search is becoming more geared towards user intent – see our recent article Optimising for User Intent – so too should content. Content should answer the questions that readers have even before they ask them. It should also be easy to read, well laid out, and reflect the essence of your brand.
- Clear Call To Action and ease of response
If you want customers to respond to your page you need to make it clear to them what they have to do. Ideally you should combine the CTA with a button to press, for example:
- Buy Now
- Sign Up/ Subscribe
- Free Trial
- Learn More
If you need more detailed information from the customer as part of the CTA then a form is a good way of achieving this. A form can be used as a follow on from the CTA button. The form needs to be attractively laid out, and ask for the minimum information that you need – both for good UX and also to satisfy the requirements of GDPR.
If you require the user to set up an account and password as part of the process then make this as simple and painless as possible, otherwise some users may give up at this point.
Finally make sure that the form is easy to submit – ideally one click only – and that the user receives an acknowledgement that the form has been received and has not just disappeared into cyberspace.
Test
Once your changes have been made, you need to ensure that they are going to achieve the desired results. So you need to test, test, and test again.
Testing needs to take place both during and after the change process. You can test pages using tools such as Google Optimize – see our article Improve Results with Google Optimize for further information. You may also want to do some face to face qualitative analysis using focus groups based on different target audiences.
It is also important to continue to analyse data to see if your CRO goals are being met and, if not, to review what else you need to change. This needs to be an ongoing and iterative process but will prove invaluable in making good decisions and meeting business goals.
If you want to improve your CRO then ACT now! Follow the above steps to analyse, change, and test what you are doing, and you will soon be able to see positive impact on your CRO.