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Your online store needs to be designed with your customer in mind. While increasing your traffic can lead to more sales, it’s just as necessary to focus on converting your current traffic into paying consumers.
At every step of your clients’ purchasing journeys, there are new occasions for you to make their path easier, shorter, and more enjoyable. You can fine-tune your online platform to push visitors close to making a purchase through rigorous analysis and experimentation. This process is known as conversion rate optimization or CRO, and here are the best practices you can implement.
1. Understand Buyer Behavior
We’re all looking for a quick and easy golden chunk we can perform for instant 10x growth—a new color here, a button copy tweak there. While growth tactics and hacks might look more inviting than systematic processes, you should rely on the latter.
Why? Everything is massively contextual. What works for Best Buy or Amazon might not work for you. It’s as simple as that. You can’t implement someone else’s solutions and expect them to solve your website’s problems.
The process looks different for everyone, but more than not, it looks something like this:
- Run quantitative and qualitative research on your unique website to identify core problems.
- Use your research to come up with test and experiment ideas
- Use prioritization methods like ICE or PXL to outline test and experiment ideas
- Start running the highest experiment or priority test
- Analyze the results
- Archive or record the results of the test or experiment
- Apply recent test or experimentation insights to create even better test and experiment ideas.
Contrary to most inexperienced beliefs, the best practice isn’t a particular type of webpage element at all. Bur rather a well-defined, systematic approach to CRO. That means developing an empathic understanding of your customers and website visitors. Instead of asking, “Why aren’t visitors converting?” you could perform quantitative analysis for insights like:
- Where visitors enter your site: which age they land on first
- Which features they engage with: where within your site or page do they spend their time
- What browsers or devices do they use
- What referrer or channel brought them: where they found and click on a link to your website
- What customers are (demographic, age, and interest)
- Where they abandon your conversion funnel: during what or where do users leave your site
If the analytics methods exceed your current resources, this CRO agency based in London can help you find out where to focus your efforts.
2. Build Customer Relationships
The biggest mistake that everyone at some point is making is that they forget that behind every product/website is another individual that will interact with. Not a chatbot, but instead a real human being. As it stands in any non-online relationships, to make new friends (or to convert), there is a long journey which is a continuing process:
1. Know yourself -know your website
Understand your website/product in detail. Learn about their weaknesses, strengths, potential, and so on. Why? Because you can’t sell something you’re a total stranger to.
2. Know your users – know your friends
Conscious sellers know how important is their relationships with customers. They understand users and treat them according to their varying needs.
- How do customers behave on the existing flow? What are their pain points?
- How can you make the existing flow easier for them?
- Are they trusting you?
3. A long-lasting relationship demands continuous improvement.
Your first conversion isn’t always a long-term win. Make sure you’re still in touch with your users/ customers in a human interactive way. As in any non-online environment, the first impression matters.
3. Keep in touch with your customers
The number one solution to improving your CRO potential is speaking to customers – be that in an interview or through surveys. As it seems, those trying to scale their conversions tend to be reckless in their ability to empathize with their customer base or view their offerings in an objective way. Arranged conversations with customers, lead, and churned customers will always be the quickest path to honest understanding – and sadly, probably the most unnoticed.
Start by convincing one customer to say yes. Not your entire customer persona. Just one individual.
Listen to what he or she says and where they are standing. What pain points are they experiencing at the moment? Ask some more. Come up with solutions based on that discussion. Listen to their reaction to it. Refine and repeat.
Like it or not, that’s what CRO is really about. That’s how you will learn to better your online sales. But selling to one individual, you are more likely to scale your selling process to many individuals.
4. Emphasize Clarity & Ease
Our advice can be summed up into one word- Clarity.
Be concise about what you’re selling, be clear about what value it offers, about the action your next visitor/ prospect needs to take; whether that be “try for free” or “sign up now” – your message needs to be evident.
Keep your landing pages simple and your primary task above the fold. While there’s always someone who needs a little more nudging and reassurance, you need to find a way to focus on reaching your goals with as few distractions as possible.
A core issue when it comes to implementing CRO” best practices” and “hacks” is the user not being motivated to take action, be that purchasing a product, signing up for a trial, or downloading your eBook. Even so, it’s highly unlikely that you can hack your way into a conversion.
This reminds us of a second issue: CRO practices often focus massively on winning in the short term while discounting the effects of these practices on the long-term relationship with users. So what else could you do? First, make it as easy as possible for your prospects to take action they are already motivated to take. For example:
- Focus on one user goal per page – what’s the single action you want your customer to take?
- Reduce aspects of the page that distracts them from taking that page.
- Remove any unnecessary steps in the process of the user reaching their goal.
- If the user does meet their goal, reward them. You will positively reinforce the behavior and increase the likelihood of them completing similar actions in the future.
You may also like: How You And Your Business Can Close More Sales
Image source: Unsplash.com
