Digital marketing is not just about bombarding internet users with marketing messages and advertisements. Just as traditional marketing strategies, digital marketing is also implemented to eventually increase sales or achieve a goal. This process of converting prospects online into customers after targeted campaigns is known as conversion.
Conversion Rate is the percentage of visitors on a website that perform a specific action, this is often calculated in terms of sales. Whenever a new website or e-store visitor performs a certain action or makes a purchase, it is known as conversion. The formula to calculate the conversion rate is easy as simple:
Conversion Rate = Completed Goals / Total Website Traffic
This can also be calculated with reference to the number of new actions (unique actions) and the number of sessions (unique sessions). This means that every time a user visits a website it will be considered as a new session whereas, actions will only be considered once a specific process takes place (often sales).
Conversion Rate = Unique Orders / Unique Sessions
Conversion Optimisation or Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) however is the process of optimising a website to increase its conversion rate.
Businesses with e-stores and subscription offers strive hard in this age to maintain and grow conversion rate, this is when conversion rate optimisation becomes useful.
The goal is to first analyse what stops a website user from performing a specific task that you denote as conversion, and later performing systematic steps to overcome the flaws. Your website might be complex and may not be able to provide good user experience, consequently increasing the bounce rate of your website and lowering the conversion rate.
To enable Conversion Rate Optimisation, you can stick to the following practices:
1. Create Mobile Responsive Websites
With mobile internet users increasing day by day, one cannot ignore the importance and need of a mobile responsive website, especially e-stores. It is essential for shopping platforms to have their mobile applications but not all users might want to download them, thus a mobile responsive website is the best option to increase conversion rate. By adding user-friendly features such as call to action buttons you can provide a great user experience which can eventually lead to conversion.
The goal in simpler words is to facilitate users so that they do not leave the conversion process in between.
2. Perform A/B Split Testing
You need to keep experimenting and testing different versions of your website to deduce which one increases conversion rate in the best ways. A/B split testing is one of the most common and important processes of Conversion Rate Optimisation as it brings out clear and tested results. Try playing with features and enabling segmented users to use it, later calculate the conversion rates to conclude which one best adds to the conversion rate.
3. Implement Customer Value Proposition
To enable users to make transactions on your website or subscribe to your work, you need to take them in confidence and build trust. For doing this, you need to implement the customer value proposition:
- What do you do?
- Why should they care?
- Why they must trust you.
- Where do they begin?
You need to add answers to these on your website, make them visible and let your users understand your products and their value. This practice of conversion rate optimisation also helps build trust rather than just increase the conversion rate.
4. Use Humanised Tone, Easy Language
While addressing your website users and informing them about product or subscription features, keep things simple and to the point. Not everyone is a professional or expert to understand technical jargons thus it is vital for you to use a humanised tone and explain it all.
5. Create the Sense of Urgency
This is one of the best ways of conversion rate optimisation as it plays with human minds and behaviours. You put an offer forward on your website and straightforwardly inform your users about the number of slots or products left. By creating a sense of urgency, you trigger users to take an action.
6. Address Ambiguities
What stops a user from performing an action? Confusion and doubts. Place everything on your website in a very clear manner to address all user ambiguities. A perfect way to do so is by adding FAQs-Frequently Asked Questions on your website. Another great way is to offer live chats as per to minimise the possibility of users leaving the conversion process.
7. Retargeted Marketing
Users often first visit websites to view products, content and services rather than to directly make purchases. But the next time when they visit your website, make sure you remarket the products they visited last time as they still might be interested in buying them. This facilitates conversion and helps you easily optimise the process of conversion.
Conversion Rate Optimisation is all what businesses online need, without such practices you may never be able to decode the secret to conversion growth. To optimise conversion rate for a website you may also make changes to a website’s homepage, pricing page, cart and blogs etc.
A good conversion rate is important for better sales and return over investment.
Conversion Rate Optimisation needs to be performed in a very systematic way. Need more guidance? Comment below to get answered!