28 Ways to Improve Your Website Conversion Rates
Well the answer to this is to divide the number of visitors who come to your page and take the course of action that you require by the total number of visitors to reach a percentage.
To give you an idea about the type of conversion rates that you can expect from a website are that an averagely performing website is likely to convert to at around 1% where as a well performing website is likely be around 4%. These give you a realistic indication of how it is unlikely that you are going to get a result from say 60% of visitors, because more people stumble across information in the online world and there are often many choices to visitors to jump out of your fish bowl and into another one. We need to look at how to get visitors to stick with you and engage with you going forward.
Many businesses consider how their website looks in representing their brand, but do not think about engaging visitors and asking them to take a particular course of action. Adding features to your website to engage visitors has many benefits to your bottom line including providing the ability to engage with people who have an interest in your offering and build a relationship with them. If you don’t attempt to engage with your visitors, then you may have lost 4% of your visitors in becoming prospects and even customers and all that effort to get them there in the first place is wasted. Plus all the positive words they could be spreading about you.
In addition to this, if you engage with your visitors then you can keep them coming back to your website through your communications. This has the added benefit of increasing the number of ‘qualified’ and interested visitors to your website.
Here are some ideas for you, but you don’t think that you have to jump right in there and do everything. Consider what would work for your business.
Ask for the conversion in the first place
1. Make a product/s available to buy
2. Add an email subscription
3. Add an email autoresponder sequence
4. Add an RSS feed (e.g. blog)
5. Add social media bookmarking
6. Ask visitors to share
7. Add a prominent phone number
8. Add click to call features
9. Ask visitors to post comments
10. Ask visitors to follow a link
11. Add affiliate links/products
12. Ask for reviews and testimonials
13. Ask for inbound links
14. Create an irresistable offer that your visitors just can not refuse
The point being that conversion rates are not always about sales, but are about how much your visitors are engaging with you on a particular course of action that you would like them to take. The key is to know the outcome that you want to achieve, ask your visitors to do the thing that you want them to do and then measure it. Here are some tips and ideas for increasing conversion rates…
15. Know the outcome that you want before you set to work
16. Try out things that have worked off-line, online
17. Create a very prominent and clear call to action
18. Use different font sizes and colours to draw attention to specific calls to action
19. Use graphics to draw attention to a call to action
20. Experiment with video to draw attention to a call to action
21. Use a call to action relevant to your website within your press releases
22. Experiment with page titles
23. Use different page layouts and see what layout attracts the best results
Once you have things in place, you need to know how your website is performing for you and there are lots of tools available to you to measure outcomes and test methods for improvement.
24. Implement Google analytics and analyse your metrics
25. Create goals within Google analytics to measure conversions
26. Use the goal conversion feature within Google Adwords
27. Split test landing pages to see which generates the greater conversion rates
28. Monitor email signup rates through your email delivery programme
The key is to build relationships with visitors to your website and make improvements to how you do things over time. There is no right and wrong answer and you know best what works for your business, so experiment, measure and improve and don’t always feel that you have to take ‘expert advice’ on board. Listen to your customers, have confidence in yourself and don’t be affraid to try different things.
Share your comments and experiences below.
