Prerequisites And Fundamental Checklist For A Smart Conversion Rate Optimization
According to Google Trends, the public web facility of Google Inc. which shows how often a particular search term is entered in Google search from across the globe, the term ‘Conversion rate Optimization’ is an official ‘breakout’; which means that searches for that phrase have leveraged by +5000% in the last few years.
While this propagation is a good news for the industry, it does have one distasteful drawback, which is the major requirement for CRO; ‘Testing’.
How many of your website visitors convert into your customers? Is your website conversion-friendly? After all, if your website is not optimized for conversion, then any amount of paid marketing or SEO is not going to help. Ensure that your webpage is on par with the below checklist, to be confident that you are on the right track to sustain a long term business growth.
1. Have you set your KPI’s?
Key Performance Indicator is the metric which is used to evaluate your performance against your business objectives. For instance, number of page visits, sales and revenue are metrics which represent numbers. Conversion rate and bounce rate are ratio metrics. To set powerful KPI’s, perform the following steps
- Obtain a very good understanding of your business, its goals and objectives.
- Convert or translate your business objectives into goals that can be measured. In other words, set your long term target.
- Identify your leading and lagging factors for achieving your goal. These are your KPI’s.
- Set a quarterly, half-yearly or annual target individually for each KPI and record your performance towards them.
2. Is your data ready?
Have qualitative and quantitative data with respect to your website’s activity readily in hand.
Qualitative data collection
- Set your customer service team into action and understand the pain-points which customers are facing.
- Create surveys and take regular feedbacks.
- Reach out to your customers directly and ask them for any specific issues which need to be addressed.
Quantitative data collection
- Be on track with your website’s conversion rate, bounce rate and average order value.
- Perform behavioral analysis to identify the activities of visitors on your website.
- Segment your users into various categories based on what they buy gender, payment methods, most purchased item, user who complains most, returns most, replaces most etc.
3. Is your ‘call to action’ up to the mark?
Add to cart, Buy now, Signup, Download are all the call to action buttons which need to be bright and prominent, asking the user to take an action. But apart from that, the location of these buttons on your page and what it is offering to your visitors is more important. Also create a sense of urgency by setting up ‘Buy now and get 20% off’, ‘Sign up to get promotional samples’ or ‘create an account to get attractive coupons’.
4. Never underestimate the power of testimonials.
Client testimonials bring up another major factor; ‘Trust’. The ideal way to convince a new customer is to gain their confidence by showing them reviews and testimonials from a previous buyer. It is highly recommended to publish real testimonials from your clients. You can also set up trustworthiness by launching video testimonials. You can also highlight feedback screenshots from social media pages.
5. Check these other factors
Apart from the major checklists given above, a few other points for you to check on the go.
- Set up faster loading times for your page. The slower the page, the faster you lose your customer.
- Is your website cross browser compatible?
- Is your website responsive to smart phones and tablets?
- Avoid pop up and flash messages.
- Does your website hold a prominently placed search bar?
- Avoid broken links.
- Ensure that the landing page is well crafted.
- Cut out technical jargons.
- Use short sentences, small paragraphs and bullets.
- You can use bold and italics here and there, but not everywhere.
- Post creative and unique taglines which are realistic.
- Hold only important content on home page. Do not flood the home page with all the information. Ask the reader to ‘learn more’ and ‘read more’ to increase their time of engagement with your website.
- Create live chat system.
- Create a smart ‘About Us’ Page.
The Bottom Line
Optimizing your website for conversions is an ongoing process. ‘Testing’ is the fundamental commandment to understand what works and what does not. Above all, never be afraid to experiment. In fact, it is the only way to improve!