5 ways to boost your conversion rate without spending money
Have you ever wondered how to boost your conversion rate without spending any money?
Do you want to get more out of what you already got with just a few tweaks?
In this week’s article I’ll cover 5 things you can do yourself, right now, to boost your conversion rate.
Increase your conversion rate by focusing on your users
Whenever you write anything on your website, you should ask yourself this:
Is it something that would interest my users?
If the answer is no, then you probably have a low conversion rate.
Depending on your audience and the type of website you have (ecommerce shop, blog, portfolio, etc) you should always focus on providing the best value for your users.
What you should do
– Make a list of the most visited pages on your website as well as the most important ones (cart page, pricing page, etc).
– Read the text out loud. Pay attention if it sounds too robotic. More often than not it will. Try to think of some other way in which you can rephrase it so it sounds more like a natural conversion. This does wonders for most businesses.
– Keep your buyer persona in mind and use their words. Go on your competitors websites and take a peek at how they write. Bonus points if you look at reviews on Amazon or comments on your social media posts. Talk with your customers the same way they talk to you.
In addition to all of that, try to use pictures of people that resemble your target audience. They will feel better if they see someone like themselves doing business with you (or reading your articles).
Speed up your website to boost your conversion rate
The faster your website loads, the faster will users reach their goal. If that goal is your thank you page then you’ll make more money.
Aside from that comparison, it’s demonstrated on a lot of studies that slow websites are conversion killers (1, 2, 3).
What you should do
– Optimize your images. If your image placeholder is at max 500px wide, then place a 500px image in it. There is no need for you to add something bigger than that. Depending on your platform, you have to be careful if you need retina ready images.
– Use as few plugins or apps as possible. This is especially important for WordPress and Shopify websites. A lot of people are adding a lot of plugins/apps on their websites. These slow down your page load time because they can add up a lot of code. The more lines of code your user’s browser needs to load, the slower it will do it.
– Use a CDN (content delivery network). Shopify has a built-in CDN so you won’t have to worry about it. However, if you host your website on a dedicated server, you might want to serve it through a CDN. A content delivery network is comprised of different servers around the globe. They cache your website and serve it to your users based on their location. For example, if your hosting provider has servers in the USA, but someone from Australia wants to enter it, it will take some time to download the data from the USA server. A CDN can have servers in Australia, so they will serve your website to your users from the nearest location rather than from a single location.
Increasing your user’s trust will automatically increase your conversion rate
If your users just don’t trust your website, they will not buy. You wouldn’t either.
Show your users that they can trust you by adding trust badges. Studies have shown that people tend to look for certain badges when they shop online (CXL Study).
What you should do
– Display your payment options as badges. If you accept Visa, Mastercard, Maestro or American Express be sure to add those badges on your cart page as well. It is especially important to add them on your Checkout page.
– Add trust badges to your cart page. Make sure people see that you are Paypal verified or that you have a Norton antivirus. A neat trick is to display that you have a SSL certificate. There are a lot of badges that you can use to describe this. People usually don’t know what SSL means so you have to go with one that clearly states what SSL is and what it does. But don’t add too many trust badges!
Tell you users what to do to convert and they will
As easy as this may sound, you would be surprised that a lot of people are not doing it.
Whatever call to action button you might have, whatever funnel you might have, make sure your users know what they have to do.
What you should do
– Make sure that your CTA is clear. If you want users to book a session with you as a coach, make your CTA state “Book a session”. If you want them to start a free trial, make the button state “Start my free trial”.
– Always keep your users informed of the upcoming steps in your funnel. The best example of this is the Shopify checkout. As any other checkout, it requires users to input their delivery address, personal details, card details and so on. What they do great is that they have broken this in 4 smaller steps while at the same time telling users how many steps they have ahead. People want to know where they are in the funnel. They want to know how long it will take to make a purchase. Make sure to always have a clear navigation for any and all your funnels.
Turn visitors to customers with the power of testimonials
Would you eat at an empty restaurant? Or go shopping in an empty store?
If you don’t know the place before hand, chances are you wouldn’t.
The same applies to your visitors. If they do not see any kind of feedback from other people that you are trustworthy, they might just leave your website.
What you should do:
– Make sure you have at least a few testimonials or reviews. When your visitors rely on other people’s opinion about your products or services, something called social influence. If they see that some other person enjoyed working with you, they are more likely to trust you and thus, pay you.
– Display your reviews where they can be seen. We ran a test a while ago on a product page of a renowned ecommerce website. We wanted to see whether or not people would buy more if they see the star rating of a product. It turns out that our assumption was correct. The conversion rate of that product page was up by 7.97%. Another experiment also based on star rating has increased the signup rate of one pop up by 8.83%. Test it out and let me know in the comments if it worked for you too.
