How you can double your conversion rate

When you’ve made an investment in a website and marketing, you want it to pay off. So when you’re not getting the conversions you need, it can be frustrating.

Fortunately, there are a few easy things you can implement on your website to increase your amount of conversions.

Five ways to increase your conversions are:

1. Have a good value proposition

A value proposition helps to keep people on your website, and is a great opportunity to sell your website.

Make sure you spend time coming up with a compelling value proposition. Make sure it’s something more interesting than a simple “welcome” message, or just your business name. Check out what your competition is doing, and make sure yours is different and stands out.

Once you’ve come up with the wording for your value proposition, you can then experiment with elements on your website such as size of font, button shapes and images that will help you gain conversions. If your original value proposition isn’t achieving the results you want, don’t be afraid to alter it and see if different wording will attract a higher conversion rate.

2. Alter your sign-up form

If you’re finding that people are navigating through your website to a sign-up form, but you’ve still got a low conversion rate, the problem may be what’s included in the form itself.

To increase your conversion rate, consider:

• Removing fields: consider the length of your form. The shorter it is, the more likely people are to fill it out and submit it.
• Personal information: it’s pretty standard to ask for a customer’s name and email address. But do you really need their phone number? If you don’t need to call them, take it out of the form. This will make customers less reluctant to submit a form.
• Choice: give your customers a choice about what information they can include on the form. Some people won’t want to include a phone number, while for others that won’t be a problem. You risk losing conversions if you make too many fields compulsory to fill out.
• Become a member: some websites require people to become a member before completing their purchase. Having an additional, unexpected form to fill out before completing the transaction can lead to abandonment. Instead, have an option to complete the transaction as a guest, and include the option to sign up as a member once the purchase has been completed.

Remember - the shorter your form is, and the quicker people can fill it out, the better.

3. Increase trust levels

People are only going to download an ebook, fill out a form or complete a transaction if they feel they can trust your website. Making your website appear trustworthy is a sure way to increase conversions.

So how exactly can you make people trust your website more?

• Use testimonials: word-of-mouth is extremely powerful. People will trust your business more once they know other people have already had positive dealings with you.
• Update your content often: what do you think when you navigate to a website’s blog or social media pages and see it hasn’t been updated in six months? You instantly question whether this business is even still in business. To give your business more credibility, make sure you consistently update your social media pages and blog.
• Errors: avoid simple errors, such as spelling and grammar errors, as this will reflect badly upon your business. Also avoid having broken links on your website to avoid damaging your credibility.
• Security: if you’ve got an ecommerce website, you’re going to want people to feel secure when completing their transaction. You can do this by having two step verification, various payment options such as Paypal as well as credit cards, and include a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate for your website.  
• Contact: make it easy for people to contact your business. Make sure all your information is up to date, and include your phone number, email address, and if necessary, physical address.
• Design: ever gone onto a website and felt like it wasn’t quite legitimate? You don’t even need to navigate through the website, sometimes the design is just off putting. Make sure you give your customers a good first impression by having a professionally designed website.

4. optimize your landing page

You’re wanting people to complete an action, whether that be download an ebook, or purchase items from their shopping trolley, or sign up to a newsletter. Whatever the action is, you want people to know they should be doing it.

To make sure people complete the action you want them to take, you need to optimize your landing page. Remove all other distractions so the customer knows what you want them to do. Do you have any irrelevant images, or are your menu or headlines too big? The more visuals you include on your landing page, the more confusing it is, and the less conversions you’ll get. Remove anything that is unnecessary which doesn’t contribute to the conversion.

5. Add incentives  

You need to make people stop deciding whether or not they want to take an action, and actually make them do it. So how do you make people take an action now?

Add in a sense of urgency to your action. You can introduce quantity-related scarcity - such as a certain amount of plane seats left at this price - or time-related scarcity - last day to buy this product.

Scarcity helps to speed up the purchase funnel, and makes people commit to a purchase rather than continue to question their options.

You can even consider giving bonuses, such as “first 50 people get this item at X price/X discount.” When supply is endless, this is an easy way to encourage people to commit to a purchase.

Implementing these factors onto your website are quick and easy, and are sure to see your conversion rate double.

Know any other handy hints to increase your conversion rate? Let us know in the comments.