Imagine you run a shoe shop. Shoppers come in, look at your products and immediately leave without saying hello and without showing any interest. Clearly you have a problem.
What would be the ideal situation? They would walk into the shop, look at the shoes, interact with you, ask questions, look for suggestions and, in the end, buy a pair of shoes or promise to buy the next time they come in.
You will have to make them listen, act and finally convert. It is a difficult path but it is your responsibility to guide users so that they don’t get lost and end up taking those actions that will help you achieve your business goals.
Converting visitors into potential customers or “leads” to end up converting them into customers, is the cycle that all brands strive to improve every day and fortunately, there is a science to it. The science of CRO.
Tips to improve conversions
What is psychological CRO?
CRO stands for Conversion Rate Optimisation. But if you’re reading this post you’re probably already familiar with this concept.
Psychological CRO, on the other hand, is the art of applying psychological principles and the knowledge we know about human biases to frame the hypotheses of any CRO process.
Psychological CRO strategies leverage what people do, as a default, and give that flow a structure so that optimisation professionals can use best practices to improve conversion rates in a predictable way.
An easy to understand example is the classic “.99” in retail pricing that actually comes from the theory of psychological pricing, a very popular technique in ecommerce.
In this post we will go over tips to improve conversions and the most effective psychological CRO principles that have worked for different industries.
1. Repeat your CTA several times
The first step to making sure your visitors have enough opportunities to convert is to repeat your CTA buttons several times throughout your pages (but don’t overdo it).
Let’s say your visitor starts on the home page, reads the headline and then scrolls down to the subhead. He encounters a CTA that he ignores, and then moves on to the next section. After he reads your features, testimonials or whatever element you have placed next, he will gain a little more trust.
Therefore, your next CTA should appear, with the same text or with a different text but one that reminds him of the value you can offer him. Time is an important factor because our visitors take a long time before they click on something or leave the page. Therefore, encouraging them to take immediate action several times can improve the likelihood of conversion.
It is important that as users move through and discover the content of your page they are presented with CTAs that encourage them to convert, but these should be tailored to the level of trust we are generating. We are not going to ask them to sign up for a newsletter on our homepage when they have not yet read any post on our blog, it seems obvious, doesn’t it?
2. Aggravating problems, satisfying needs
Visitors come to our website through different channels and for different reasons. As CRO optimisers we do our best to seek visitors´pleasure and avoid pain or friction. This involves problems and needs. Therefore, when visitors search for information and products, they basically say “I want to improve my life”.
To achieve great conversion rate optimisation, you will need to offer two things: a good experience and great value.
Most people who optimise their websites get hung up on the details and don’t cover the most important part, which is the visitor’s intent, problem and need.
When we develop content, we have to make sure that it touches on all the things that are not right in the readers’ lives or the so called “pain points” as these are what our users are looking to solve.
Make sure that as users empathise with your value proposition, they are drawn to the main objective of your website.
Use resources to make users perceive what they can achieve thanks to your added value, and how thanks to you they can say goodbye to their problems. This is called the future rhythm. Then introduce yourself with a strong CTA that promises immediate gratification.
3. Get the deal first
Throughout your sales process, you should introduce yourself, provide free value, offer insightful advice and keep your visitors engaged in the funnel.
A great way to improve conversions is to “walk them out” first.
Don’t jump right in with a great question. Get their approval to subtly engage and show up in their inbox. You can do this through a monthly newsletter, through a lead magnet or by sending a series of posts (with their consent).
Once the relationship is solid and is well perceived by your leads, then get more information through other elements such as a Demo CTA (if you have a SaaS business) or discount coupons (if you run an ecommerce).
4. Show solid social proof with real testimonials
Most people follow the crowd, either consciously or unconsciously. Your website is small, the internet is absolutely huge. People know their options and are always looking for the information, products and services they trust the most.
The easiest way to instantly impact your customer’s trust is to offer solid social proof in the form of real testimonials.
If respected members of the Internet community are vouching for you, people interacting with your brand will subconsciously believe what you are saying and what you are promoting. Why? Because humans don’t like to be the black sheep. We find comfort in the flock. And testimonials from influencers or honest words from other satisfied customers lead us to want to experience the great benefits they have already experienced first-hand.
5. Provide FREE information and value
Since your conversion rates always depend on customer behaviour and their behaviour is often influenced by their trust in your brand, your website should offer something that is hard to refuse: free stuff.
You can offer this in the form of written content (ebooks, case studies, a collection of useful resources, etc.), in the form of a free call, a free consultation or perhaps a free sample of your products. You need to be creative, think outside the box and align yourself with the deepest needs and desires of your potential customers in order to capture their attention.
If your users perceive your free content as a real value, they will want more because they will see it as a real benefit in their life. Most brands offer free material in exchange for visitors’ emails, so they can then develop email marketing campaigns with software like Mailchimp or Pardot that generate conversions and automatic sales.
6. Offer clear instructions
When your visitors click on a link and go to your website, you must grab their attention immediately and keep them until the end of your conversion funnel.
Your sales process is different from other businesses, so you will need to develop an effective and personalised strategy that gradually increases the trust, attention and interest of your potential customers.
Talk to your visitors. Ask them questions, tell them interesting facts or stories and offer them the benefits they are looking for. Promise those benefits but don’t deliver them yet. Give them instructions: sign up here, comment on this post, leave comments – you can use all kinds of direct approaches to give clear instructions and keep their attention!
7. Give them the “why”
When we give our visitors instructions, we often need to tell them why. You can’t know everything about your prospects. What you can do, however, is let them know your intentions. If you encourage someone to read an important blog post, tell them why the experience will improve their lives.
If you ask for their permission to send regular emails, provide a “why”, letting them know what they will encounter, when they will receive them and the benefits involved.
Very often, your prospects will not consciously understand why they are on your site. When you remind them that they need you to help them visualise a positive end result, they will be tempted to take more action and convert faster which can improve your web conversions.
8. Talk directly to your customers
Making changes to a marketing strategy can often come with risks. Some of your moves will not lead to improvements. On the contrary, they could damage your company’s business performance.
To minimise the risk of your optimisation actions, you can talk to your potential and current customers directly to get real information.
The insights you can get from the people who have put their trust in your company are invaluable enough to give them your time, attention and money.
9. Offer personalised experiences to improve conversions
The digital marketing tools available today allow you to improve conversions and offer your website visitors personalised experiences based on a variety of factors, such as their interests, country, device, search history, previous actions taken on your website, actions taken on their emails and more.
Big brands are working with data that provides insights into visitor behaviour. Whether you’re working with WordPress or you’re using a coded website, you need to implement strategic analytics that gather feedback describing your visitors’ behaviour, preferences, deviations and more.
There are plenty of digital analytics tools out there. I would advise you to try several solutions until you find the ones that work best for your business.
Once you have gathered enough insights from your customers and leads, you are ready to offer personalised experiences.
You can do this by creating different sets of basic rules such as:
- If a visitor comes from {Country name}, the website will load in {Country native language}.
- If a visitor subscribes when they were searching for {X, Y or Z keywords}, they will receive specific emails that are relevant to their previous search intent.
- If an email subscriber doesn’t open your emails frequently, automatically move them to a different list that focuses on attracting attention to your value proposition.
For example, if the keyword “cheap essay writing services” attracts low quality traffic and the keyword “cheap and quality essay writing services” generates traffic that converts consistently, you have a good idea to apply.
People looking for cheap and quality need different triggers and perhaps require more trust and credibility than those just looking for cheap. Therefore, CTAs and benefit propositions on each page should be different so that the content can build a relationship with both potential audiences.
You can think of different strategies, implement them one by one, test them until you gather decent data to draw conclusions and evaluate the results. If they are positive, scale up your efforts. If they are negative, keep personalising and optimising!
10. Don’t think you already know everything, try everything!
The biggest mistake would be to assume that you know everything about your target audience. Another would be to ignore the needs of your target audience and test your optimisation ideas without sufficient justification.
To increase the efficiency of your optimisation, you will have to “play” with solid data. As I mentioned earlier, there are many solutions that will provide surprising insights into your visitors, email subscribers and customer mindset and behaviour.
I suggest you run A/B Tests on your campaigns several times, collect tangible feedback, evaluate it together with a team of marketing professionals and draw conclusions later.
Seeking and implementing undocumented changes is a risky practice. It can be done well, but you never know how disempowering it can be.
When you analyse your traffic consistently and test your installations elaborately and accurately, you will not rely on luck but on a CRO strategy.
That’s the end of the tips to improve conversions.
What now?
So how do you implement these tips to improve conversions in your business?
It’s tempting to go all out and start with multiple changes. But reason says that practice makes perfect. Use the approach you think your online presence needs most right now, stick with it until you see results and then move on to the next one.
Once you understand exactly why your visitors take action and spend money on your website, you can apply that understanding to much more than marketing or web design.
You can create a complete business that is in tune with the pace of your market and thus improve your digital business conversions.
