Feb 10, 20164 min read

6 Website Tweaks to Give Conversions a Shove in the Right Direction

You’ve developed your content marketing strategy, planned your publishing schedule and honed your writing skills. You’re cooking up hot content like Gordon Ramsay on Pancake Day, and it’s driving a ton of relevant traffic to your website.

That’s awesome.

For some reason though, conversion rates are low. You’ve been tripped at the last hurdle on your route to content marketing success.

This can be one of the most frustrating challenges content marketers face, and it’s often the last piece of the puzzle to be considered.

There are many reasons why website visitors might not be taking the actions you want them to take. There could be something fundamentally wrong (such as no demand for your product), but usually it takes just a few tweaks to give conversions a shove in the right direction.

Here are six ways you can optimize your conversion rates right now.

1. Write a compelling call to action

Perhaps the most obvious technique, it can have a substantial effect on the number of leads generated from your website.

Instead of using dull CTAs such as “sign up” and “click here,” you should opt for more creative and original choices that speak your customers’ language.

A bold CTA like this one championed by Dollar Shave Club is more stimulating than “Join Now,” while also prompting an immediate response.

It’s also a good idea to focus the CTA on the value the prospects will receive rather than the action they should take. Saying “get your free report” is more effective than asking visitors to “order your free report” because it highlights what the customer will gain, not the effort it will take.

Something as simple as the size or color of your call to action also can have a profound effect on conversions. Using a color that is different from your standard palette could do a brilliant job of drawing attention to the CTA button.

2. Add click triggers

Click triggers are bits of text that reassure visitors about their decision. It’s likely that some prospects will hesitate or doubt our offers, and click triggers could provide the little nudge they need to take the desired action.

Click triggers can generate trust in the vital moments running up to a conversion. They include:

Product ratings
Customer testimonials
Extra information about products such as “top seller” or “most popular”
Guarantees
Benefits, such as free shipping
Secure-payment icons
Transparency about next steps/set-up

Check out this example on Sprout Social’s home page, which reassures users about the simplicity of the process to follow:

3. Use an exit-intent pop-up

Pop-ups can be annoying. They often interrupt the natural flow of users surfing the web who close them before a single word of the message has registered.

But when used with apt timing, a pop-up can be your last-ditch effort to capture a visitor’s contact information.

Exit-intent pop-ups work by tracking the movements of users on a web page so that a special offer or opt-in form can be displayed when they show signs of leaving.

This is a less interruptive and more effective way of engaging visitors with a pop-up. It can be used for any message you see fit, from discount codes to opportunities for visitors to subscribe to your blog.

4. Simplify forms

Filling out online forms can be a chore and the subsequent commands – fill out these boxes, give us your details, prove you’re not a robot – annoying.

You’ve spent so much effort attracting customers to your website and have successfully guided them to a landing page, it would be a horrific shame if they were to abandon your site at the last minute because of a time-consuming form.

You should make the process of converting as simple as possible for your customers. Using the minimum number of fields possible will increase your conversions – even though that means sacrificing some additional information about your leads.

At Bumbl we reduced our contact form from six fields to three and more than doubled our conversion rate.

With these changes we gather less information about our leads, but it’s totally worth it when you consider how many more leads we are generating.

5. Optimize for mobile

As Google research reveals, more people search on mobile devices than on laptop or desktop computers.More people search on #mobile than laptop or desktop computers via @google #research @GregBumbl #SEO Click To Tweet

Generally speaking, you should expect around half of your website visitors to be accessing your site from a mobile device. With that said, it’s crucial that your website and the whole conversion process are optimized for these consumers.

Loading speeds need to be up to scratch. Mobile connections are usually slower than desktop, and the longer people have to wait, the more likely they are to abandon your site.

In fact, Amazon found that if its page took one second longer to load, it would cost $1.6 billion in sales each year.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU: How to Write Content That Engages Mobile Readers

6. Remove distractions

Every option your landing page presents to visitors — other than the step you want them to take — eats away at your conversions.

Removing unnecessary links gives your users less opportunity to navigate away from your page. That includes anything from distracting images and sidebars, to unnecessary offers. HubSpot found that removing the navigation bar from landing pages can increase conversion rates by as much as 28%.

Less is more.

Final note

When making changes to the design or copy of your website, it’s important to A/B test elements to maximize conversions. That involves performing split tests to find which variation of an element yields the best results. You can use a tool such as Optimizely to run these tests. Simply:

Decide what it is you want to tweak.
Create two variations of it.
Run both variations at the same time, distributing them evenly to visitors.
Measure the results.
Keep the winner and discard the loser.
Repeat for new element.

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Cover image by SplitShire via pixabay.com

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).