Increase Conversions by Making Changes to These 4 Elements
Are you wondering how to make your website better? Are you getting traffic but curious what changes to make in order to increase conversions? Sometimes rebuilding your website isn’t necessary. By making changes to a few different types of elements can lift your conversion rate dramatically. Here are four areas that are a great starting point for increasing conversions:
Increase Conversions by Switching Images
Images are of greater importance when having an e-commerce site, they still have a huge impact regardless of the type of site you have. We live in a visual world, and when there’s a great image that carries some kind of relation to your post, page or product it draws more attention.
One of the most important tips for images is to use high definition photos. While that may go without saying, I continue to see too many sites that continue to use low quality images. This goes for featured images in blog posts as well. It’s easy to find free stock photos these days from sites like pixabay, unsplash and pexels.
I know it’s much easier to find stock photos online, but using custom photos will help increase conversions even more. They can include photos of your team, your office, your products, or whatever is relevant to your website. The great thing about custom photos is that they don’t look like stock photos. sub-consciously visitors know that you put some care and attention into your site which translates into putting care into your products and services. Yes, it does take time, money and effort. but well worth every penny. Find a great local photographer and make it happen.
Change Your Value Proposition
The Value Proposition is the big headline that goes at the top of the page – Usually with a large image behind it. Your value proposition can easily make or break your conversion rate as it’s the first thing that people see when they land on your website or page.
A value proposition good or bad, accomplishes 3 things:
- Tells the visitor if they landed on the ‘right’ page. Meaning, did they find a site that will help them solve their problem.
- Encourages them to explore the rest of the site and at the least, scroll down to find out more
- Tells them what you have to offer in a short statement.
I see too many value propositions that read like a tagline. Stop trying to be creative and start being strategic. Sometimes the most boring statements can provide the best results. Take a look at some of the larger companies out there and consider their headlines. Get Response’s headline reads, “All-in-one Online Marketing Platform to Grow Your Business”. In order to get the real benefit of reading other peoples value propositions, you’ll need to consider their target market – Which by the way is another way of structuring your value proposition.
Try changing your value proposition and you can not only increase your conversions, but visitors can garner a new perception of your business.
Optimize Call to Action Buttons
It amazes me that more people aren’t giving more weight to the buttons on their website. When I design a website I can stare at the screen for a long time just thinking about what the text on buttons should be.
In short, the call to action should tell the visitor what’s on the next page. If you see a button that says, “Work With Me”, what would you expect on the next page? Likely, it would be a sign-up form of some kind. If that button is pointing to a landing page, it’s the wrong text to use.
The call to action button is exactly that – It’s an action. So the text should indicate taking some type of action. “Learn More” in my opinion is a lazy call to action and I see it all over peoples home pages. While it may not always be a bad to use, creating different calls to action even if they’re pointing to the same page can have some great action because some visitors may graze over one call to action, another might catch their attention.
Think about where the button is pointing to, and create text that tells the visitor something about that page on the button.
Create Landing Pages
I know this is probably obvious, and there are a thousand things that can be said about landing pages, but I want to simply provide more of the concept in this post and I’ll dig into more detail in future posts.
Create landing pages for each product or service you offer. Each page that is created should be an independent page that removes distraction from everything else on your site. This means that there’s no sidebar, no other buttons pointing to other pages.
In view of the funnel process, landing pages are close to the bottom of the funnel. The goal of course is to drive all your traffic to one of your landing pages. When you think about a landing page, you should be able to use it as a click destination for Facebook Ads or Google Ad Words.
Each landing page should have a specific strategy and goal in mind. It could be to get people to sign up to your list, or sell a specific product or service. Once a goal is established, the strategy can be built out asking yourself, “What is it going to take to get a visitor to take the desired action on the page”.
Conclusion
How do you know that some of these changes are working? One of the best tools is to use the ‘userflow’ feature in Google Analytics. It tells you the journey people are taking through your website, and where they drop off. If you see that people are getting to your landing page, but then leaving the site, you can determine that you need to make some changes to your landing page to increase your conversion rate. If they’re not even getting to your landing page, then you may want to make changes to your call to action buttons.
Take a closer look at your website and see where you can improve these four elements and see what the results are.
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Randy Dueck | Founder Street Smart Creative