Website conversion is a thing. It’s not a glamorous thing, but it matters quite a bit.
I’ll let you in on a piece of intel I like to give my clients. Everything you’re trying to do online is a function of three things: purpose, process and tools. I find that having this conversation early on makes it a lot easier to explain the weird world of local marketing.
A website is a tool. When you’re playing around online, it’s one of the more important tools. However, what I find happens more often than not is that clients focus more on how a website looks, rather than what it’s supposed to do.
To use a baseball analogy, when it comes to online marketing, you’re the pitcher and your website is the catcher. You throw everything you can at your website in the way of traffic. You do a little SEO, a little social media, perhaps a little paid advertising. Your website’s job is to catch all of that traffic and then do something with it.
Unfortunately, it’s very easy to build a website and forget to build in the stuff that does the catching.
In the online world that stuff is called conversion. If you get a thousand people to your website and every one of them looks around and then leaves, you’re not in a much better position are you?
Traffic is very important and there is a need to invest in the tools that help generate it, but traffic without conversion is an absolute waste of time.
Luckily, the internet isn’t new anymore. There are quite a few best practices that you can put into play to increase your website conversion even if you don’t increase the amount of traffic that your site gets.
Simplify Your Forms for Website Conversion
Simple forms get more conversions than complex forms. That’s one of those no-brainers that doesn’t really need a university study to confirm. In fact, removing a single field from your form could boost your website conversions by as much as 26%.
In a previous article we mentioned the difference between the needs of a company that primarily sells to businesses and one that is mostly consumer based. My recommendation? If at all possible, keep your online forms simple. Two lines max.
If you need more information, then by all means ask for it, but understand that the more effort you require of your website visitors, the more your conversion rates will suffer. You’re not the only game in town and the alternatives are just a few clicks away. A good technique to help you figure out what’s best would be to split test different forms and compare the results you get. Beats guessing.
Add a Third-Party Signup Service
Some people really hate typing. Some hate it so much that it’s a deal breaker when it comes to any sort of engagement on your website. A simple solution to this conundrum is to allow visitors to sign in to your site using a third party service like Apple, Facebook or Google.
There are two sides to this option so you’ll have to decide if the Pros outweigh the Cons for your particular use case. On the pro side, a study conducted in 2011 by Janrain and Blue Research found that 77 percent of consumers favored social login as a means of authentication over more traditional online registration methods. However, as we’ve seen lately, different tech companies have different views when it comes to privacy.
Third-party apps are applications built on the Twitter platform by external developers, and are not owned or operated by Twitter. Depending on its permissions, an authorized app may be able to obtain information from and use your account in various ways, such as reading your Tweets, seeing who you follow, or seeing your email address.
Apple’s position on this is that there is a real benefit to offering users a sign-in option that does not require a user to hand over their personal data to an outside third-party company when trying to use a service.
With WordPress, adding social logins to your site is as simple as downloading a plugin from the Repository and installing it to your website.
Improve Your Call to Action
There’s nothing wrong with a simple call to action. After all, “Sign Up” and “Subscribe” can get the job done. The problem is, they’re just not exciting.
One easy way to increase your conversions is to spice up the calls to action on your site. Here are some suggestions and statistics:
- Turning your Call to Action from a link to a button can increase website conversion by 45%.
- Adding an arrow to direct people to your Call to Action can increase click rates by 26%.
- Using first-person wording (Schedule my free consultation) can increase conversions by as much as 90%.
- Putting your Call to Action below the fold (meaning on the part of the page that visitors can’t see without scrolling) can also increase your website conversions.
One explanation for the last statistic is that people prefer to learn as much as they can about an offer before completing a form.
Does any of this mean that you shouldn’t try to attract more traffic? Of course not. That would be silly. But you may find that you get better website conversions by trying some of the methods I’ve outlined above.
From https://chriscarter.net/process/website-conversion-rate/
from
https://chriscarterlocalmarketing.wordpress.com/2020/05/08/fix-website-conversion-for-more-bang-for-your-buck/
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