Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of your website visitors into goals. A goal may be a sales conversion or simply completing an online enquiry form.
Recent studies in the US have shown the average conversion rate of visitor to goal is generally accepted to be about 2.3% depending on industry. However, converting at 2-3 times that is possible if certain tactics are employed.
4 Tactics You Need To Employ To Get Your Website Traffic Converting Into Sales
What conversion rate should I be aiming for?
There is no correct answer to this question but generally held view is anything above 2% (and up to 5%) is very good.
Therefore, if you have 1,000 visitors a month, if more than 20 turn into sales leads then you are converting at a sufficiently high rate.
However, if you are operating in the Finance industry 5% would may be considered poor where rates of conversion are generally higher and sometimes as high as 10% on a consistent basis.
Note though that if you have very low volumes of traffic, then percentages can be misleading and should be discounted. A small increase of 3-4 conversions is a big spike if you are measuring less than 200 in total.
Therefore, choose a starting point. Benchmark your conversion rates at that point and strive to improve them. The best target you have is your own figure. Use your analytics to accurately track your own conversion performance over time and always aim to improve it.
Create an interesting Offer
You need to find out what your clients want and then turn these desires into your Goals. Never assume that your potential customers would like to read your newsletter. You may soon become disillusioned when less than 1% sign up.
Get feedback from your existing clients, ask potential clients and get brainstorming to come up with creative and unique offers you can make a potential customer want to convert. Always test 2-3 offers as there will be surprises in the results!
Find and remove road blocks!
Once you have established the goals for your website you need to map the journey to achieving each goal. For example, if one of your goals is sign up for a “Free Trial”, then you need to complete this process of signing up for a free trial on your website.
Map each step of the journey and note what you liked and disliked about the journey. Better still, ask a number of people to sign up and then find out where they started to lose interest. There are many potential road blocks (Captcha for one!) that can really turn visitors off. You need to identify them and remove them.
Read the auto generated emails, test the links in the emails and find out what annoys you when you do it. Then fix it.
Remember that each time you make a change to a step in the process, you need to run through this all over again.
Finally, test and then test again…
If you really want to outperform your competitors, you need to A\B testing your pages, offers or Calls to Action (CTA).
Change one each time, monitor the effect and record it.
The ultimate aim is to find the Offer than attracts the most interest, the Landing Page with the lowest bounce rate and the process with the smoothest path. Each piece, once optimised will drive your Conversion Rates up over time.