Category: Conversion Rate Optimization

In a world where 70% of customers visit your website before making their first purchase decision, it’s no longer okay to say, “I don’t get that website stuff,” and also not pay someone to fix problems. If even 10% of those potential customers I just mentioned that visit your website decide not to buy, that’s a 7% decrease in sales.

For me, a 7% decrease in sales is tens of thousands of dollars. For that amount of money, I can justify spending either my own time or my own money to fix all potential problems.

Here’s how to fix the biggest problems I see with most broken business websites.

Fix broken links.

After spending two minutes on a friend’s business site and encountering just the right number of broken links in just the right places the other day, I gave up trying to find what I needed and actually just went to Google. Google sent me to a competitor’s site, where I found what I needed.

And, I spent two minutes on the site. Your potential customers won’t put up with more than one or two broken links to things they actually want to see before they just go back to Google and search for it – where by the way they’ll be shown all of your competitors.

Don’t let this be you. Go to your homepage, hold down control, and click every link you can find. Holding down control ensures they all open in new tabs so that you don’t have to navigate back and forth. Then, on each new page, hold down control, and click every link. If you find a bad link, remove it or find the correct URL and fix the link.

You can also check Google Webmaster Tools (if you’ve submitted your site and preferably your sitemap) or use a service to crawl your website, but if the website is under 100 pages, I actually prefer to do this by hand so that I get a feel for the user experience.

Your widgets are hanging out.

Want to show that you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, MySpace, Friendfeed, Orkut; that you have popular posts, comments, activity; and that you like other blogs, have a family, take pictures, and have a mission statement?

Great, but don’t.

Sidebars are like signs on the freeway. They are very important, but if they have too much going on, drivers stop paying attention to the road and never get where they need to go (ie. they crash). Keep your sidebars simple and only include what is really valuable to your visitor.

Things get worse when your widgets and badges are broken. A broken sidebar widget is like a busted or graffitied shop window. Who cares if the shop is open… If the business owner doesn’t take enough pride in his business to fix his windows, no one is going to bother patronizing his business. Plain and simple.

Look at it from the customer’s perspective.

I’m just as guilty of this one as anyone. I get working on a website, put in a ton of hours, and suddenly realize that it doesn’t address anything my customers want. It’s too wordy, too cool, over-designed, and filled with jargon, and your website probably is too.

Every once and a while, it helps to get a customer’s perspective. With one client that ran a retail store, we posted a message on Facebook that said, “We’re giving 10% off one item each to the next man and woman that come into the store and spend 15 minutes giving us their opinions on our website.” In 9 minutes, we had the first man, and in 13, we had the first woman. It costs the store $20, and we guessed we made $5,000 in additional sales over the next 3 months.

Two of my other favorite options are UserTesting.com and mturk (or SmartSheet if you prefer, but it’s the same thing really). With UserTesting.com, you get a real, quality walkthrough of your website, but it’s fairly expensive compared to the other options. With mturk, you can get a lot of answers for cheap (like in the video below).

Either way, your website needs to address your customers' interests not yours, and very often, the only way to find out whether it does is to give your customers an incentive to give you the feedback you need to win yourself that extra 7% of new business.

Don't ignore it.

It always surprises me when someone says, "I've never heard/heard of/watched/etc this show/song/person/etc," and says it as if they're proud of their ignorance. When did it become cool to not know things?

The same goes for your website. Being ignorant isn't cool, and even worse, it costs you money, and honestly, do any of the things I listed above really sound so difficult that even the average business owner couldn't do it themselves?

Are you wondering why your website seems doesn’t convert more people even though you’ve been putting more time into it? It’s time to go back to the drawing board and evaluate if what you’re doing to draw more people to your site is having any effect on getting those visitors to convert. This is the start of conversion rate optimization – CRO.

What is CRO?

A conversion can simply be defined as the successful completion of a specific action on a particular website by a visitor. These actions include online services such as buying products or acquiring services, signing up for online media services such as an e-newsletter, submitting forms and other kinds of services that the website offers. A conversion rate is then defined as the total of your conversions divided by the total number of visitors visiting the website.

CRO can be defined as the process of carrying out a comprehensive analysis of a website and coming up with improvement strategies and testing the strategies with the aim of increasing your conversion rates. It involves identifying possible reasons why visitors are not converting, then coming up with a solution that will fix the problem. The solutions are then tested to ensure that they satisfactorily solve the problem before they can be permanently employed. This will necessitate a thorough study of the visitor behavior and expectations in order to understand specific visitor needs and lay out strategies to meet these specific requirements.

Research has found CRO is particularly important because a slight increase in the conversion rate can yield huge profits in some websites with large volumes of traffic. However, if your site registers low traffic, then the profits could be less but still significant to allow you operate smoothly and increase your market share power.

Reduce Conversion Killers

The key to reducing conversion killers lies in the ability to identify them and coming up with appropriate strategies to mitigate them.This will involve identifying where the visitors find it difficult using the site and establishing the reasons as to why they may not take the desired action.

A good first place to look is your web analytics package. Google Analytics and other software will show you what are your most common exit pages, time on site, and you can even set up tracking to find out if people fill out the first 3, or 4, or 5 fields in a sign up or check out form and then abandon the process. This data is extremely vital as it helps in determining the performance of your website and enables you to make the proper adjustments to effectively realize your goals.

Once you are comfortable with Google Analytics, it’s time to try out a tool like ClickTale or CrazyEgg that will show you heat mapping of where people spend the most time on your pages and more. These tools help to identify where your visitors are looking or not so that you can see if that really cool graphic you put up or that super simple sign up form or anything else is actually having a positive effect on conversions.

 

Offer Compelling Content

To influence your visitors in a positive way, you have to give them the content they want, when and where they want it. This doesn’t always mean giving them a blog post to read. Sometimes, it’s putting your call to action in a new spot based on that particular visitor’s behavior or offering a how-to video right when they’re wondering how your product actually works. To do this, I recommend surveying your users. You can use a pop up, a post check out questionnaire, an email to visitors, or even a somewhat larger scale approach.

 

When the visitors visit your website, you should never leave them clueless on what is going on your website. It is for this reason that you should include a call to action that should be clearly visible and informative of what you want them to do at your website. You need to do this discreetly by reducing distractions such as too many links, unnecessary text, and images that is likely to distract the visitors.

Above all, your customers should be able to trust you. To do this, offer credible services and products so that your customers can trust you and feel comfortable to conduct business with you.

Create an Action Plan

To successfully implement any proposed changes aimed at improving conversions, an action plan is necessary. The action plan should help you identify the areas that need change, provide solutions on how it should be done, identify the individuals capable to aiding you in completing these tasks, and create a more refined website that compels the visitor to make a conversion. However, when creating an action plan, utmost caution should be taken to ensure that no loopholes are created, as they will make it difficult for the team to identify potential conversion killers.

Most importantly, creating a plan and projections for outcomes helps you measure and continue to improve. Like most things in life, it's not likely that you'll get this perfect the first time around.

Summary

The most important things in CRO are to learn to identify conversion killers, create a plan for how to remove them, and measure the outcomes so that you can continue to improve. Simple changes to your design, contact, calls-to-action and more can result in huge increases in revenue and more.