Essential tips to help increase your online conversion

Congratulations. You have just secured a domain name for your website and you are ready to go online. But you then say to yourself ‘What am I meant to do with this?' Are you selling products? Maybe you want people to sign up to your newsletter or download something from you.

Any intended action that you want prospects to take is known as a conversion. In order for your website to be successful, it is crucial that you have some conversion goals in mind. But even that isn’t enough. How are you going to ensure that your site is geared towards fulfilling those objectives?

You can start off with…

Creating personas of your target audience

You can never please everyone in life, and that adage rings true for the online world too. Try and hone in on who your audience are. Visualise them and give them characteristics - even give them names. Write this all down and you’ll have yourself a bonafide persona. This is a great way to start.

Identifying your value proposition

Unless you're offering something truly unique, it is likely that you will have plenty of competitors occupying the same online space as you. So the power of the message is vital. Ask yourself, what is it about your product that makes it special and different from your closest competitors? And how exactly will your target audience stand to benefit from your proposition? If you can truly think like a customer this will help your conversion rate significantly.

Simplify your language

‘Bespoke tailored solutions specialists in web content management’ might mean something to you but may have no relevance to your audience whatsoever. Ensure that your web copy is clear and readable. As soon as you start thinking like an expert and less like a customer you will make it difficult for your website to achieve what you want it to achieve. But this is particularly crucial when doing...

Headlines

This is the most important aspect of your page that needs to grab the attention of your audience instantly. It was advertising mogul David Ogilvy who said it right, “On average, five times as many people read the headline as the bold copy”. Make sure that every webpage has a headline which doesn’t involve any investigatory work for your audience. Leave them in no doubt what your page is going to offer them.

Don't guess, test

Guess work is now something that can be firmly taken out of the equation when it comes to judging conversion rates. There are now tools out there that allow split testing. This is essentially testing two versions of a web page against each other. Your visitors will be able to see two different versions of a page (you can control who sees what). The information is then gathered through an analytics platform and you can see which one performs better.

Create a call to action that is clear

It’s pretty simple. By now you know what you want your prospect to do, now you need to tell them how to do it. So if that instruction is BUY NOW, or SUBSCRIBE or CLICK HERE make that abundantly clear to your reader. There should be no guess work or misconstruing of this. The command needs to be clear as day. That might also entail making this stand out from the rest of your page. Consider bright colours with a big large font to make this clear.

Accreditation = trust

This is another way in which you can think like a customer. Most of us are sceptical creatures when it comes to making transactions. We need to feel like we can trust what we are getting is of good quality and is rated. For this reason you should allow third party sites to be integrated to yours. This could be review platforms; the seal from an industry body or links that reference you from other sites. It just adds another layer of trust to your offering.

Don’t fret over all the metrics

You're going to come across a few different types of metrics when it comes to conversion rates. This will include Bounce rate, Exit rate and Click Through. Now these are important metrics to monitor and will give you an indication of how your site is resonating but the most important thing is how high your conversion rate is. If some of these metrics aren’t so strong but you’re getting conversions which are translating into higher revenue or X number of subscribers then it doesn't matter. Focus on the end goal not obsessing over every detail.

At Payzone, we support small to medium-sized businesses across the UK with our card payment solutions. Find out more about our online payment solutions.