A guide to conversion rate optimization for small businesses
Your website’s conversion rates are unique to your industry, business, goals, and target audience. And while different sources put the average conversion rate anywhere from 1% to 5%, it’s difficult to set a specific benchmark for a “good” vs. “bad” conversion rate.
For example, a survey of Shopify ecommerce website owners found that the average ecommerce conversion rate is 1.3% with a conversion range between 0.2% and 3.2%. With ecommerce sites, conversion rates are often more straightforward than in other industries. They’re typically measured in sales—though sales aren’t the only conversion goal you should track.
Ultimately, the best benchmark for conversion rates is your own. Once you discover your current website conversion rate, you can improve it through the process of conversion rate optimization. With these strategies, you’ll be able to increase website conversions and improve your user experience.
What is conversion rate optimization?
Every page on your website should have a goal or a desired action you want your website visitors to take when they’re on that page. When a visitor takes that specific action, it’s a conversion. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of experimenting with your website to try to increase conversions on different web pages.
One of the most straightforward examples is a product page. If you run an ecommerce site, the goal of your product page is to make a sale. Every time a potential customer visits your product page, adds the product to their shopping cart, and completes the checkout process, that’s a conversion.
Different web pages have different goals, and sales are just one type of conversion that matters. While more sales may be your ultimate goal, not all of your website visitors will be ready to make a purchase. It’s therefore important to have smaller goals along the way that help move website visitors further down your sales funnel.
Examples of conversion goals
Your conversion goal will vary based on the webpage a visitor is on. For example, someone visits your site from a search engine. They click on a blog you’ve created as part of your search engine optimization (SEO) content marketing strategy.
This could be the first time this site visitor has encountered your business. In this case, it might be too soon to expect a sale. Instead, the goal of your blog is to educate your reader and build brand awareness and familiarity with your product so you’re top of mind later when they’re ready to buy. That said, you’ll still need a conversion goal—a benchmark to categorize the actions you want potential customers to take.
For a blog post, that goal might be to get them to click a link to a landing page, or you might want them to sign up for your email list with a call to action (CTA) like, “Get more great content delivered to your inbox.”
Your exact goal will depend on where a visitor is in your conversion funnel. As you start experimenting with your website conversion rate, you may find that a goal you set wasn’t right for that page. Perhaps you were trying to sell too hard too soon, or maybe you’ll find a page where you could make a stronger sales pitch.
Here are some conversion goals to consider for different parts of your website:
- Click a link to a landing page
- Click a link to a product page
- Sign up for your email list
- Fill out your contact form
- Download a white paper or case study
- Sign up for a product demo
- Sign up for a webinar
- Make a purchase
How to calculate your conversion rate
Before beginning any optimization process, you need to know where you’re starting from. To calculate the number of conversions from one of your web pages, you’ll first need to set your conversion goal. Then use this formula to calculate your on-page conversion rate, or the percentage of visitors who perform your desired action.
Conversion rate = the number of web page visitors who perform a desired action ÷ the total number of visitors × 100
Let’s say you have a landing page, the goal of which is to get people to download a case study. Your landing page gets 1,250 visitors, and 75 people download the case study. Your conversion rate for this landing page is 75 ÷ 1,250 x 100 = 6%.
There are conversion rate optimization tools—like Google Analytics, Hotjar, Unbounce, and Kissmetrics—that can help you collect these metrics. Most website analytics tools will run your conversion rate calculations so you can see how your web pages are converting in real time. If you’re not ready to invest in a dedicated CRO tool, start with Google Analytics, which is free to use.
Where to start optimizing
As you begin your conversion rate optimization efforts, it helps to focus on just one or two web pages. This will help you see how your efforts impact not only the conversion goals for that page but also your overall sales funnel.
To create maximum impact with your conversion optimization efforts, there are three potential places to start.
- The web page that brings in the most website traffic: Maybe it’s your home page, a landing page you’ve linked to from your social media accounts, or a blog that’s ranking high in search engine results. Optimizing a high-traffic page will give you a higher return on investment (ROI) for your optimization efforts because you’ll be converting a percentage of a much larger number of visitors.
- The web page that currently has the highest conversion rate: Small tweaks to that page may drive even higher conversion rates, which can quickly drive up sales and lower your acquisition costs.
- The web page that has the highest drop-off or bounce rate: If you’re able to solve customers’ pain points on that page, you could end up keeping them on your website for longer, which gives you more opportunities to make a conversion.
The conversion rate optimization process
Once you’ve decided which web page you want to optimize first, you can start working your way through the conversion rate optimization (CRO) process.
Step 1: Set your conversion goal
Before you begin, decide what you’re aiming for. This will help guide the rest of the process.
Step 2: Analyze user behavior
See how visitors are interacting with the web page as it is now.
You may find that your visitors bounce (leave the page) within three seconds of trying to load the page. If so, you may need to look at your load time. Maybe users frustratedly click the same button on repeat, implying your CTA button may be broken. Or perhaps they get to the page and immediately begin scrolling, indicating that the information they’re looking for isn’t at the top of the page.
As you analyze user behavior, you’ll get a better understanding of your website users’ experience and be able to address their pain points.
Step 3: Form your hypotheses
Unfortunately, there are no clear-cut answers in conversion rate optimization. Every website and target audience is unique. To improve your conversion rate, you’ll have to come up with theories based on your users’ behavior and then put those theories to the test.
For example, if very few people are clicking the CTA button on your landing page, you might theorize that the button isn’t noticeable enough. You could then decide to experiment with making it a brighter color or changing its location to see if that increases conversions.
Some of your hypotheses will turn out to be correct and have a positive impact on conversion rates, while others will have no impact or even an adverse impact on conversion rates. Even when you’re wrong, every CRO test is a learning experience that helps you understand your potential customers better.
Step 4: Run one experiment at a time
You might look at part of your site and come up with multiple theories about how to increase conversions on that page. For example, imagine your website has a pop-up that asks visitors to share their email addresses for a discount. You theorize that you could get more conversions if you change the messaging, copy length, colors used, and the button placement.
Even though you might turn out to be right—all of these things could have an impact—it’s important to test them one at a time. If you change all three at once and your conversion rate changes, you won’t know which element led to the change, so you won’t be able to learn from your experiment and understand how each element impacts your customers’ experience.
Step 5: Analyze your results
Make note of how your conversion rate changes after you run an experiment so you can learn from the results as you design future web pages and CRO tests. Keep the changes that increased conversions and ditch the ones that didn’t.
Step 6: Test and test again
Your users’ behavior and website conversion rate are always evolving, so your CRO strategy should as well. Think of this as an essential part of your ongoing digital marketing strategy. Perform tests regularly. Make notes of what’s worked and what hasn’t. Keep forming new hypotheses and occasionally retesting old ones to see if your results are still valid.
Regular CRO tests will help you turn your website into one of your most effective sales tools.
5 conversion rate optimization strategies
These techniques can help you start the conversion rate optimization process, formulate hypotheses about what to optimize, and run more effective CRO tests.
1. Conduct user research
Your current website visitors are one of your best resources. Here are five ways to reach out to them for help improving your user experience:
- Use email or pop-up surveys: With surveys, you can ask users questions about how they found your website, why they did or didn’t make a purchase, and what they do or don’t like about the user experience.
- Host one-on-one or group interviews: Interviews allow you to get more in-depth information than surveys and open the door for follow-up questions.
- Conduct usability testing: You can also recruit users who match your target audience’s demographics and conduct usability testing. With usability testing, you ask testers to perform certain tasks while you monitor how long it takes them to perform those tasks and what challenges they encounter along the way.
- Set up session recordings: With a session recording tool, you can take a screen recording of every interaction a website visitor has with your website. You can see all the pages they visit as part of their user journey, monitor the challenges they encounter, and identify drop-off points.
- Use a heat map: Conversion rate analytics tools can create a heat map, or a color-coded map of your website that shows where users click, which pages they visit, how far they scroll on each page, and what they interact with the most (and the least).
2. Identify drop-off points
Using your testing results and analytics tools, identify places where your bounce rate or drop-off rate is high—areas on your website where people return to the search engine or exit your site without completing the desired conversion action. This will help you discover customer pain points and experiment with different CRO tests to improve the page.
3. Use multivariate testing
Often called A/B testing or split testing, multivariate testing is when you create two or three versions of a web page with a small difference on each one. Then you see which version has the highest conversion rate.
For example, you might want to test out different messaging on one of your CTA buttons. One version might say, “Sign up now,” the other might say, “Get started,” and a third might say, “Try it out.” You’ll create three versions of this webpage and show each version to one-third of your website visitors for a set length of time, depending on how much website traffic you get.
Then you’ll compare the conversions of each version and keep the one with the higher conversion rate.
4. Optimize landing pages
Landing pages are typically designed to drive sales, so optimizing these pages can have a high return on investment.
You can experiment with the headlines, CTAs, forms, button coloring and placement, and where you display information, like pricing or testimonials for social proof. This information is typically displayed below the fold (or on a part of the web page you have to scroll to see), but you may find the page performs better if you put this information higher up or remove it completely.
Remember to only test one element of your landing page at a time so you can be sure that change is what’s impacting your conversion rates.
5. Improve website speed and responsiveness
Slow website speeds and unresponsive formatting are two of the most common pain points users experience. These issues are common causes of user drop-off, so by improving them, you can keep website visitors on the page and increase your conversions.
To increase your website speed, you might need to compress the media files on your website or invest in a higher-bandwidth hosting plan. You can use Google Analytics to run a free speed test on your site.
According to recent data, over 58% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, so it’s essential to have a responsive website with formatting that can convert from desktop to mobile. Improving your website’s responsiveness and fixing elements that aren’t formatting correctly can resolve customer pain points and increase your conversion rate.
Create a website that converts
With these conversion rate optimization strategies, you can turn your website into a powerful sales and lead generation tool.
Running CRO tests will help you improve your website’s user experience. It can encourage website visitors to spend more time on your site and make them more likely to complete a desired action, like signing up for your email list or purchasing one of your products.
But CRO is just one component of a successful digital marketing strategy. Try implementing a small business SEO strategy to bring more traffic to your (now optimized) website. Your conversion rate is a percentage of your overall traffic, so higher traffic can lead to higher conversions.
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