Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is a study of optimizing your website in many ways to get more conversions. These might be more sales, more subscriptions to your blog, more emails collected, or more customers signing up for your service/website.
And CRO applies to almost everything you do online – from your landing pages, pricing page, homepage, blog, and product descriptions.
The gist of CRO is to become trustworthy, authoritative, and a good enough offer to lure as many potential customers to your page as possible. Of course, this entails having a properly designed website where everything is as it should be.
But how do you know if your website is optimized for conversions? If you’re falling short of your goals, your conversion funnel needs improvement. But where to get started?
In this article, we’ll talk about the simplest and most fundamental strategies you need to be doing to create a better conversion rate optimization strategy. So let’s get started.
Step 1: Research Your Target Audience
You should address your target customer effectively on all pages and in everything you do online. You need to know precisely what they feel, what they do, what they want, and what they’re looking for on your page.You’ll want to create customer personas – at least 3 of them- but have one primary persona you’ll be targeting with your online content. This applies to blog posts, landing pages, sales pages, sales letters, product descriptions, and more.
For example, you might want to learn the following things about your customers:
- Their age
- Gender
- Education level
- Employment status
- Marriage status
- Needs and wants
- Whether they have kids
- More
A good strategy for this targeted approach is to create a few customer personas where you specify y all of these details about your customers. And from there, you’ll want to develop and base your content and all you do around these personas.
You will want to cater to their emotions in your sales and landing pages, and you’ll also want to prove that you’re a worthy choice later on. But this is applicable even to blog posts you put on your website.
Step 2: Create Attractive Headlines
Headlines are everything in the online world. They’re the first thing your scustomers will see once they enter your website, see your blog post, receive your emails, and sign up for the newsletter.So as one of the world’s most famous advertisers of all time, David Ogilvy, put it, “you spend 80 cents of your dollar on your headline”. In other words, if the headline is not attractive to your customers, they will not proceed to read the rest of your content and will not view your offer as worthy.
Headlines should be brief and concise. If you’re creating blog posts, you can rarely go wrong with a how-to headline, for example. But when making a sales page headline, the words free, guarantee, and headlines with specific numbers and facts usually work best.
For example, a bad headline for signing up for your e-book would be this:
Sign up for our e-book now
This is a very vague headline and very unspecific, so it can be connected to many other newsletters on the internet. It doesn’t offer something unique that would entice the customer to sign up.
If you’re offering a free e-book with the 9 best digital marketing tips, then you could phrase the headline like this:
Get our 9-step free e-book to improve your digital marketing now..
Step 3: Create Appealing and Strategic CTAs
CTAs, or calls to action, are the bread and butter of every CRO specialist. You should have a clear idea of where to position your CTAs and how these buttons should look to maximize conversions.Almost every page of your website should have a CTA, even if you’re writing a short, simple blog post or if you’re writing an email to your customers.
1. CTA Positioning
One of the more critical things about CTA buttons is strategic positioning.The best position for a CTA regarding landing and sales pages is right above the fold. This means your customers won’t have to scroll down to take action, and they will clearly know what you’re offering from your content above the fold.
You should also place CTAs up to 3 times on your landing or sales page. This creates a more straightforward pathway for your customers to take action instead of just having one CTA at the top of the page. For example, you could put another CTA at the bottom of the page so they don’t have to scroll back up.
2. CTA Design
Talking about the design of the CTA, it’s the second most crucial thing that will help the customer decide whether they will take action or not – right behind the positioning of the CTA.In short, the buttons should look neat, sweet, and modern and be in the right place regarding colours and design.
In terms of design, here are some things to keep in mind:
The colour. Firstly, it should fit with the overall colour theme of your website. If you have a white background with black text and some blue elements, then it might make sense to create a blue CTA.
The shape. You're probably harming your conversions if you put generic CTAs without too much thought about their condition. A lot of people pay attention to well-designed CTAs. If your website design is more rounded, then it’s better to create a round CTA.
The text inside the button. Yes, it matters a lot. It should be short, although not too long. And it should state clearly what it does, too.
3. Text CTAs
Another good strategy is to incorporate text CTAs all over your website. This is especially prevalent for blog posts.Banner blindness is absolute – it means your customers ignore banners, which is often unconsciously done.
Only some people are appealed to graphical elements, and if they are readers, they will want to read the content on the website. In that case, a text CTA will work best. Supplement your CTA buttons with text CTAs for the best results.
Step 4: Improve Page Load Speed
This fantastic research shows how every second of loading speed costs Amazon $1.6 billion in sales. Or for example, when Mozilla increased their load speeds for 2.2 seconds, their numbers rose by 15.4%.These both prove the importance of having a fast-loading page. Your customers might get bored, and if the page loads up too slowly, they will inevitably leave. Every second counts nowadays, mainly because the competition is growing stronger and stronger.
The most important page to improve loading speed is your checkout and cart pages. This is where you don’t want any intrusions, and you don’t want the page to be slow, which can turn off the customers.
Step 5: Customer Reviews, Testimonials, Verified Badges
One of the best ways to entice your customers to buy from you is to appear as legitimate and trustworthy as possible. While you may achieve that with free reports and helpful content, nothing beats customer reviews and raving testimonials.When customers see your other happy clients, they will not hesitate to buy from you. Consider incorporating customer reviews and testimonials into your sales pages, landing pages, and emails you send to leads.
Additionally, you should place reviews on your checkout page and your cart.
But even more importantly, you will want to put verified badges on your checkout page for checkout pages. These may be the verified payment options or other verification badges you can put there.
Step 6: Test, Test, Test!
One of the most important things you can do with your CRO is to test everything new you try out.It might be as simple as rearranging the layout of your pages – or it might be as comprehensive as changing the entire text on your homepage.
When you test, you know exactly what you’re doing and what works for your ase.
We are saying here what has worked for others and us, but it doesn’t mean it might 100% work on your webpage. What will work is what you try and see that it’s giving results, so you should test.
Performing regular A/B tests is the best way to test new small and large strategies in your marketing.
