It’s like printing money!
Anytime you improve the rate of something, you get exponential returns. While many business metrics involve rates, we’ll focus on improving conversion rates because conversions equal money in your pocket.
Spending time on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), the process of improving your conversion rates over time, can yield massive results with minimal time invested. Adding 1 or 2 more customers to your register might only bring in a few extra dollars, while increasing your conversion rates from 1% to 2% can increase your revenue by $1,000s.
Here’s what you’ll find in this article on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The Four Pillars of Effective CRO
- Building Trust
- Offering Fair Value
- Having a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
- Making the Next Step Easy to Complete
Building Trust Online
- Highlighting Social Proof
- Providing Guarantees and Warranties
- Utilizing Third-Party Certifications
- Client Highlight: Improving Trust for a Local Cleaning Business
Offering Fair Value
- Standing Out in the Market
- Making Value Concrete
Simplifying the Next Step
- Eliminating Unnecessary Steps
- Fixing Broken Elements
- Adding Purposeful Friction
Crafting Clear Calls to Action
- Keeping CTAs Short
- Making CTAs Action-Oriented
- Highlighting What Customers Will Receive
- List of Effective CTAs
Testing Your Landing Page
- Four-Step Process for Testing and Improving Conversion Rates
The Foundation of Effective CRO
Effective CRO can be simplified into four foundations. Each pillar is independent of the others, but combined, they make a powerful force that compels website visitors to convert into paying customers. Let’s start with a quick overview so you can see the whole system, and then we’ll go deeper into each aspect.
The main pillars of CRO are:
- Building trust – Are you a reputable business? Will you do what you say? Will your product work as described?
- Offering fair value – Will I, as a customer, benefit from your business? Is the price of the offer reasonable? What are the long-term implications?
- Having a clear call-to-action (CTA) – Is the next step clear and easy to identify?
- Making the next step easy to complete – How easy is it to complete? Does it require a lot of effort on my part? How long will it take?
You can work on these pillars individually and run A/B tests—more on this in a bit—to see what’s most effective for your business. You will see the most results when all four pillars are optimized for your situation.
How to improve conversion rates by building trust online
Without trust, you’ve got nothing, so let’s start here.
For website owners, trust is about whether a visitor believes you’ll do what you say. Visitors want to feel confident that your product or service will deliver results. Common questions that people have are:
- Will the product or service arrive on time?
- Will the product or service work as described?
- Will the company promoting the product or service help with any issues after purchase?
- Will the cost of the product increase after purchase (for subscription-based services or products that require maintenance)?
Highlight social proof
There is nothing more powerful than a recommendation from a friend. Building a solid reputation can help visitors feel confident. Where possible, add reviews of your products and services. Also, provide indications of social proof. These can be other companies you’ve worked with or publications that have endorsed your business.
Provide a guarantee or warranty
To help visitors feel more confident, remove risk from their purchase. You can do this by providing a money-back guarantee or a warranty to protect the customer in case of a faulty product. Be aware that you must honour these commitments 100%. If a prospect gets even a whiff that you won’t provide the guarantee or support a warranty claim, they’ll lose trust and abandon your business.
Utilize third-party certifications
Like third-party reviews, certifications from outside organizations provide an excellent source of confirming your business’s trustworthy status. If your business is in an industry where outside certifications can be obtained, you should ensure you get certified. For doctors and allied health professionals, showcasing your education and any awards you’ve received makes sense.
Outside of certifications, your business can be listed with Dun and Bradstreet or the Better Business Bureau. If your company goes into people’s homes, you’ll want to highlight the screening process used to qualify staff and showcase insurance certificates and any licenses required by law.
Building trust – Client highlight
With one simple move, we helped a local cleaning business improve its conversion rate from 5.2% to 10.1%.
Using data, we learned that landing page visitors were interested in whether their team was insured and bonded. Knowing this, we added a line above the fold to highlight that our client did have insurance and was bonded.
Offering fair value
People want to feel like they are getting something of value. How you package and display your offer will help improve your conversion rates.
Let’s use an example.
Say your business sells cars. There are different models of vehicles and various features for each model. Packaging and pricing the models and features competitively will help you sell more cars. If a person feels they can get a better deal, and by deal, we’re not just talking about money here, they will shop elsewhere.
Continuing this thought, you don’t need to be the cheapest product to win. However, you need to ensure that people get value from your product or service. If your product is more expensive, you must convince people that the extra expense is worth it.
Stand out
To stand out in a market, answer this question. What is the one thing that ONLY your product or service does?
Saying your product has been around for 20 years isn’t compelling. You want to highlight something of value to the customer. For example, “We are the only provider of XYZ model” or “Our product is the only one that achieves this.”
Once you have discovered what only your business can do, move on to the next step to ensure your visitors understand the value.
Make it concrete
To help visitors understand what your product or service does, you must make your value statement concrete. Don’t list a feature but what a feature can do.
Here’s an example from Yasmine Khosrowshahi (@yasminekho) on X.
Got it? Good.
Let’s move on.
Making the next step easy
Here you are, ready to buy, but you’ve been thwarted by meaningless forms, onerous steps or a broken page to complete your purchase. Nothing is worse than wanting to buy something, but completing the transaction is complicated or impossible without help. Not only is this frustrating for the customer, but you’ll likely lose many sales.
Here are a few steps that will help make your purchase process seamless.
Eliminate steps
Are there needless steps in your sales process? Did you ask for information that’s not necessary to complete the sale and deliver the product or service? If so, consider removing these items and see how it improves your conversion rates.
Fix broken elements
Sometimes, what doesn’t need to be said is precisely what needs to be said.
Make sure that every part of your purchase process works. There should be no errors or broken modules. Errors or broken modules can make it impossible for someone to purchase, leading to reputational issues for your business.
Add friction purposefully
We know what we just said, but it’ll make sense for some businesses to add extra steps to their transaction process. This is particularly true for complex products and services, which have a long sales process, or for rare offerings that require qualification.
If this makes sense for your business, consider asking for a person’s email or having them call your store for pricing. These intermediary steps can help you close more deals.
Having a clear call to action
Most businesses are good at having a call to action, but here are some tips to help ensure that the CTA stands out.
Keep it short
To maximize your call to action, you only need a few words. You need two to five words to get your point across and get people clicking.
Make it action-oriented
Use a verb. This helps set the intention and move things forward–Get this or download that.
Highlight what they’ll receive
It’s wise to be congruent with what follows your call to action. This helps people understand what they will receive and ensures you won’t lose trust at a critical moment.
List of best calls to action (CTAs)
Here are our favourite CTAs you can steal:
- Boost your productivity in 5 minutes
- Cancel anytime
- Dive into savings
- Discover recipes for your diet
- Don’t miss out – everyone’s talking about it
- Find your perfect fit
- Gimme the goods
- Grab your free trial
- Join 10,000+ happy customers
- Let’s do this!
- Limited time offer – Act now!
- No credit card required
- Only 3 spots left
- Sale ends tonight
- See what’s inside
- See why experts recommend us
- Show me my results
- Start my free trial
- Start saving money today
- Transform your skin overnight
- Try risk-free for 30 days
- Uncover the secret
- Unlock exclusive access
- Yes, I want awesome hair
Test your assumptions on your landing page
One last thing you need to do to maximize your conversion rates is to test your assumptions.
Testing your assumptions is pretty simple. You need to follow a four-step process and continue to iterate. Even once you think you have a high conversion rate, it pays to keep testing and improving your results (literally).
Here’s our four-step process for testing (anything) and improving conversion rates:
- Determine what you want to test: headlines, CTAs, and benefits. Be sure to write down your expectations or hypothesis.
- Implement the change: Whenever possible, use an A/B test to compare your original landing page to your updated landing page.
- Review the results: Review the data and see if the changes you made improved your conversion rate.
- Iterate: Keep going!
Wrapping up
Conversion Rate Optimization can seem like a nebulous activity, but with the four foundations described above, you now have the tools to improve your website’s performance. Remember, each pillar can be developed independently but is connected to others.
Be sure to measure your results consistently and keep trying new ideas. The value is learning what works for your business, which can take trial and error before you start seeing exceptional results. Once you do, you’ll think you’ve invented a money-making machine.
Get help with improving your conversion rates
Need help with improving your CRO? Talk to a digital marketing consultant to get started.