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While it’s a significant first step, merely owning a website isn’t enough if you want to use it to drive website traffic. And even optimizing your website with SEO isn’t quite enough, although it certainly is a step in the right direction.
The key ingredient in driving website traffic is conversion rate optimization. Whatever your website’s primary purpose is, whether it is to make a sale, collect visitor emails, or to make a booking, etc., conversion rate optimization improves your website’s ability to do so. By supporting your website’s ability to fulfil its purpose, a high-converting website will help your business grow, and develop your customer base.
In this article, we’re going to share six essential steps to converting your website into a high-converting website that supports and improves your business and brand.
Having a privacy policy is essential for any website, so much so that not having one is the equivalent of waiting for trouble to happen. The purpose of your privacy policy is to inform visitors on what types of data you are collecting from them and how you intend to use it.
Furthermore, it should let visitors know how you are collecting their data, how you’re storing it, and where it is stored. Your privacy policy acts as a safeguard against potential legal ramifications while also giving your business a degree of transparency.
The fact that it provides a degree of transparency is useful when it comes to conversion optimization. Many visitors are wary of businesses collecting and using their information. For this reason, they may be distrustful and reluctant to provide their information which results in them not converting.
By having a privacy policy, you can quell their suspicions and enable them to be more confident in giving away their details.
Writing excellent copy comes with numerous benefits for your conversion rate. If done correctly, great copy:
A call to action (CTA) encourages users to perform a specific action (convert), usually through a combination of a button and accompanying persuasive text. Suppose your CTA isn’t compelling enough whether it doesn’t relate to the target audience or the language choice is too pushy (or not pushy enough), you won’t be able to get users to convert. Strategically implementing excellent content in your CTA’s improves the likeliness of visitors converting.
A high converting landing page is built with one purpose in mind – to get people to convert. Every single aspect of a top converting landing page is geared towards ensuring that this purpose is fulfilled. A couple of things you can do to create your high converting page are:
With a mailing list, you can transform many of your prospects into converting leads. After opting-in and supplying their emails to your database, you’ll have a database full of people interested in your service/product to tap into on a routine basis.
Furthermore, over time, this list will grow, creating an ever-expanding list of potential repeat converters.
When building your mailing list, we recommend that you use double opt-ins. A double opt-in is a two-step process that collects a person’s email and then confirms their intention to subscribe to the mailing list with a confirmation email. What this does is that it filters out spam accounts and inboxes that aren’t monitored regularly, ensuring that your emails are sent to valid actively monitored inboxes.
By doing so, you will be able to get a more accurate depiction of your metrics, such as the proportion of recipients who opened your email.
We also recommend that you regularly send emails in the form of newsletters to your subscribers. These newsletters can contain updates on the business itself, information (with calls to action) about new products and services, or even announcements about promotions and special offers.
Sending newsletters will not only keep your readers interested, but it will also increase the likelihood of getting your leads to convert.
With over 80% of internet users using mobile phones to do searches, ensuring that your website is aesthetically pleasing and functional on mobile devices is essential to boosting conversion rates. By optimizing your site for mobile devices, you are improving your user’s customer journey.
Navigating websites on a mobile device can be tricky at times, sometimes the font or buttons are too small making them difficult to see, or clickable elements are grouped too close together making them difficult to use. Accounting for and fixing these potential problems streamlines the journey from the point of time they land on your page to the moment they convert, making your website secure and pleasant to use.
Taking measures to optimize your website for search engines (SEO) will do wonders for your conversion rate. The higher your site ranks, the more visitors your site will get, which will ultimately result in more conversions. On top of this is the added trust factor that websites at the forefront of SERPs rankings innately gain when reaching the top.
This trust factor will help quell doubts that potential leads may have regarding the site’s reputation and ability to fulfil their needs.
Search engine optimization also comes with some promising long term benefits. Such benefits include a substantially higher rate of audience growth and subscriber accumulation, an increased amount of referral traffic, and more revenue as a result of having more conversions.
Optimizing the navigation of a website is essential for allowing customers to quickly and correctly find what they are looking for within your website. Ideally, you want the experience of navigating through your website to be intuitive and thought-free. Achieving this is a matter of improving the site-architecture of your website (see below), and utilizing the layout such as the white space and colour scheme to make elements more comfortable to locate.
A website’s blog serves several different functions. It acts as a knowledge base of sorts, while also presenting news, bolstering the user’s perceived authority of the author/business, and encouraging users to convert. Ensure that your blog layout is clear and presentable. Consider using a card layout for blog articles, with clear fonts, catchy titles, relevant accompanying images, and enticing excerpts.
To optimize your website design for conversions, consider trying A/B testing. A/B testing involves pitting two variants of the same web page against each other to determine which layout results in the highest number of conversions. The option with the least amount of conversions is discarded, while the ‘winner’ typically moves onto subsequent rounds of testing. While A/B testing is instrumental in determining what types of layouts yield the best results, you must use large sample sizes to ensure that the results are not just due to ‘chance’.
Pop-ups are another great way to use the layout of your site to maximize conversions. When used right, they can boost your conversion rates by a significant percentage. Here’s a few examples of where and when to use a pop-up:
Furthermore, over time, this list will grow, creating an ever-expanding list of potential repeat converters.
When building your mailing list, we recommend that you use double opt-ins. A double opt-in is a two-step process that collects a person’s email and then confirms their intention to subscribe to the mailing list with a confirmation email. What this does is that it filters out spam accounts and inboxes that aren’t monitored regularly, ensuring that your emails are sent to valid actively monitored inboxes.
By doing so, you will be able to get a more accurate depiction of your metrics, such as the proportion of recipients who opened your email.
We also recommend that you regularly send emails in the form of newsletters to your subscribers. These newsletters can contain updates on the business itself, information (with calls to action) about new products and services, or even announcements about promotions and special offers.
Sending newsletters will not only keep your readers interested, but it will also increase the likelihood of getting your leads to convert.
Although it doesn’t directly affect conversions, having great website architecture sets the stage for conversions to be made. For this reason, it should be taken very seriously, particularly during the design and development process.
Website architecture starts with the website’s sitemap. By using a sitemap diagram you can get a visual representation of your sitemap, you can determine which pages are linked to each other and how many pages are required to be navigated to fulfil a particular action.
An excellent sitemap is one where linked pages are highly relevant to each other, and well categorized, while optimizing the number of steps required to complete various actions.
On the other hand, if your site architecture is non-intuitive and muddled, visitors will likely find it challenging to navigate through your site and see what they need, resulting in a loss of potential conversions.
What’s this all about?
This has been part one of a six-part series that deals with how to create and execute a content strategy that will engage your readers and ultimately increase CRO across your business. Keep an eye out for our next lesson, and in the meantime, visit our website to find out how R11 solutions can elevate you and your business.
The key to having a high-converting website requires a multi-pronged approach including having great content, a comprehensive privacy policy, an optimized website layout, excellent website architecture, mobile responsiveness, SEO optimization, and methods to build your mailing list. While you could do this yourself, it may take time—a lot of time, time which you could spend elsewhere on other vital aspects of your business.
To save time and headaches, and to ensure that the job is done right, we can’t stress enough the importance of hiring expert help, particularly experts proficient in CRO, Design, and Marketing Strategy. If you want the best, we recommend that you work with the best. At R11 solutions, we specialize in this, and we’d love to help. Get in touch to find out how we can help you achieve your goals.
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