How to improve your website conversion rates

Conversion rate optimisation is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action on your website, whether that be:

• Buying a product
• Filling in an enquiry form
• Signing up to a newsletter
• Making a phone call

Why improve your conversion rates?

Conversion rate optimisation provides the opportunity to maximise your existing traffic, rather than invest in enquiring more.

Say your business receives the following:

• 10,000 monthly website visitors
• £30,000 monthly revenue
• 300 orders
• £1 cost per visit

You will end up with a conversion rate of 3.00%.

But, say you want to increase your monthly revenue to £40,000. You end up with two options:

1. Increase web traffic
2. Increase your conversion rate

Currently it costs your business £10,000 a month to convert £30,000. To increase your visits by enough traffic to reach £40,000 within the current conversion rate, you would need to increase your marketing spend by 50% each month (£5,000).

This is unsustainable, and quite frankly wasteful.

Instead, you can look to improve your conversion rate. Simply by increasing your conversion rate to 4.5% within the existing parameters, you will achieve £10,000 more revenue a month at no extra cost!

Focusing on the user

Before you can begin to improve your conversion rates, you need to begin by getting to know your users. To do this, you need to conduct research on your existing audience and discover their;

• Problems
• Desires
• Challenges

Only by understanding your user can you begin to create content that is tailored towards them, making them more likely to convert.

How to research your audience

When researching your audience and its needs, it’s important to look internally as well as externally. Within your business, you already have access to some of the most important audience research tools at your disposal; your customers.

It’s vital you take the time to understand your existing audience, what brought them to your company, why they choose to use your company, and what needs you are and are not meeting for them currently.

Once you understand this, you will be in a much better position to reach and communicate with new users.

For more information on researching your audience, read our blog on creating content that convert

We also recommend using heat maps to better understand how your users are currently interacting with your landing pages and content.

Heat maps provide a visual representation of web page interaction through colour.

They are important tools in understanding and reviewing on page performance and engagement.

Creating personas

Once you’ve gathered your audience insights – it’s time to create user personas.

These outline a typical member of your target audience, providing you with an understanding of how you should communicate your message and structure your page.

For example, ASOS, a popular clothing brand, may discover the following personas when researching their audience:

Fashionista Fran – who is interested in new clothing and the latest trends.

Budget Ben – who wants affordable clothing options.

Casual Colin – who just wants to browse.

Needs Inspo Natalie – who needs help finding what she’s looking for.

Given those personas, we can see how ASOS have crafted a user experience more likely to convert.

Designing a great user experience

The key to designing a great user experience is, unsurprisingly, focusing on your user.

The average human interest rate has dropped dramatically in recent years; falling from 12 seconds in 2,000 to now only 8 seconds in 2020.

Because of this, we recommend you take the following actions to make sure your users can quickly and easily find what they’re looking for on your website.

• Be clear in what you want a user to do – do not overwhelm them with options. Keep things simple
• Be conscious in your approach to designing a user journey:
  • Search bars
  • Menu links
  • Calls to action
• Ensure all content is no more than 3 clicks away
• Sample your prototypes with your identified user personas.
• Never stop testing!

Testing is paramount to improving your website’s user experience and conversion rates. If something isn’t working don’t be afraid to try something new.

A / B testing can be a fantastic way to speed up the process and understand what best engages your audience.

Landing pages

Landing pages are vital for improving your conversion rates. They are the first introduction to your business for a potential customer, so it’s really important that they clearly communicate:

• Who you are
• What you do
• How you can help

If they don’t, a visitor won’t stay on your page for very long.

When designing a great landing page, we recommend the following:

• Utilise AIDA:
  • Attention – what will draw their eyes to your content?
  • Interest – how are you going to keep them engaged?
  • Desire – what will make them want to use your product or service to meet their need?
  • Action – what action do you want your users to take after reading?
• Use calls to action
• Keep it simple
• Ensure it’s clean and easy to read

Simple tricks for improving your landing page conversion rates

• Don’t overload the user with actions
• Get your headline right
• Tell visitors exactly what they’re going to get
• Be benefit-led
• Use social proof through testimonials
• Ensure you’re targeting the right audience

How we can help

Having a great user experience proves that you are a customer-centric organisation. Only by understanding your target audience, their needs, their challenges, and their desires can you look to craft a user experience (UX) that converts.

Our UX expertise comes from data-led insight and usability testing throughout the entire process, from initial research, to design and right up until the go live to ensure a successful implementation.

Our marketing team will work with you to understand your audience, building journeys that are designed to provide a seamless experience for your customers, and maximum return for your business.

Discover how our user experience and conversion rate optimisation services can help your business turn your visitors into customers.