Did you know that there are 1.83 billion websites online? The page with the stats is updated regularly. So, by the time you’ll be reading this article, it may be 2 billion or more. A large part of those is business websites offering their eCommerce products or services.
And you need to find your place there, find a target audience, get traffic and leads, and convert them into buyers. This must sound so difficult. With time, things will get easier. For example if you are on Twitter and trying to reach the top faster, then you may search for Twitter bot to grow rapidly.
Given that you’re here, most of the journey is already finished. Here, we’ll focus on how to increase conversion rates on your business website.
If you’re a beginner, pay close attention to the paragraph below. If you’re not, it’s OK to pay half the attention, just to refresh memories.
What’s a conversion rate?
This is the percentage of visitors that have made a step you wanted them to do on your site. It may be:
The most common target action is, of course, a purchase. Conversion is one of the parts of the deal between you and a potential buyer. You know about it when they don’t yet. It’s called a lead funnel. Inside of it, you change the status of a person from a complete stranger to a customer and, potentially, a promoter.
Img cr: devrix.com
How to calculate the rate?
Easy-peasy. Choose a time limit, take the number of people who have visited your site during that time and the number of converted leads. Divide the conversions by the total number and multiply by 100%.
(5 / 100) x 100% = 5%
Or just use Google Ads and other tools to calculate the statistics automatically.
Now, let’s see how you can leverage the conversion rate to achieve your goals.
1. Offer a high-end user experience
Right from the moment your website starts to load, make it a fun ride for your visitors. Keep the balance of interactive features and the loading speed, though. If your site will load over 5 seconds, chances are you’ll lose almost ⅕ of the traffic. But about that later, in another section.
User experience or UX is responsible for how you make people feel when they are on the site. And this is more important than you might think. Your product may be the best, your support teams may be quick and sharp. But if the experience isn’t fun and smooth, people will get bored unless they come directly for your products and services.
Personalize the site, make people feel as if you were waiting for them alone.
The best way to improve UX? Imagine you are your customer and think about what you’d want to see and feel.
The best way to analyze UX? Use the following metrics:
2. Make speed your website’s buddy
It might be difficult to make people actually click a link and visit a website. But even after achieving this goal, you may lose a part of those people by having a slow-loading page. How slow? Even 5 seconds is too slow if you want a high conversion rate.
Here’s how the rates drop depending on the loading speed:
Experts say that around 40% of people will leave the site if it loads for 3+ seconds. Let’s say those are the people who aren’t really interested in the topic. They won’t be loyal customers. Plus, it may be hard to have a beautiful, engaging website that fully loads instantly.
Nevertheless, remaining in at least the 0-5 range is crucial for traffic increase and higher conversion rates on your business website.
3. Mind your backlink profile
If you think your backlink profile is fine but you haven’t checked on its condition for a year, 5 bucks say it’s not. Why?
Keeping your backlink profile in the range of middle to high-rank websites relevant by topic is crucial. Those buddies reassure readers and Google that your source is credible and worth prioritized crawling and a higher rating.
For better conversion rates, you need more visitors to the site. There are many ways to use backlinks to draw traffic to your page, among all other purposes. Those may include brand awareness, faster page crawling and indexing by search engines, etc.
How to get great backlinks:
Analyze your backlink profile often to always be informed about any problems or factors to improve.
4. Keep the balance between pages’ metrics
There’s a rule of thumb that your main page and other pages like blog posts, etc. of the website need to have similar numbers of backlinks to them. ‘All the other pages’ versus ‘homepage’.
Many webmasters either:
Don’t underestimate the main page of your website. It’s important to take care of your home page conversion rate since it’s the main, most visited page (or it should be).
There are many ways to optimize the rates on any page of your website. You just need to find a proper combination of steps and a golden balance between the overall ratings and backlink profiles for the homepage and other pages.
While the main page has to be leading because it’s the most logical access to the site, other pages need to have similar traffic. The best backlink profile for your whole website is a balanced 50/50 traffic volume for the homepage and other pages.
This will mean your whole project is interesting for people. It also means you need to get backlinks to as many pages as possible to get traffic there.
Plus, the site itself has to be engaging, useful, and interesting for people to actually surf it. But we’re sure you know about that already.
5. Don’t underestimate email marketing
Many people think that emails are a thing of the past. In reality, though, thousands of conversions, if not millions, are made through the good old Gmail every day. There are multiple methods to convert leads using emails. All of them involve great communication and persuasion skills. If you’re not sure about yours, hire an expert.
They will create a business pitch and email structure from the subject to the closing part that will engage even the pickiest reader.
How to get visitors’ emails? There are several tactics. Here’s an example:
Do you still think email marketing isn’t a thing anymore? OK, let’s look at the situation in another way. Your marketing campaigns and online presence have to be in places with many people, potentially your target audience.
You know how many active email users there will be by 2023?
4.3 billion!
Img cr: Oberlo.com
According to the latest statistics, you get $42 for every $1 spent on email marketing. That’s a pretty nice ROI (return of investment), isn’t it?
Out of almost 300 billion emails sent a year, don’t you think at least 1,000 should be yours to your leads? And if only 10% of them eventually convert, that’s already 100 potentially loyal customers.
“And how is this connected to my business website if it’s email marketing?” Well, you’ll still be directing the people to the pages of the site, right?
6. Make use of AI-run chatbots
Businesses that choose not to use the benefits of Artificial Intelligence miss a lot. The new corporate age requires a certain degree of tech prowess. Otherwise, you won’t be able to catch up. It’s all about automation!
And while having a powerful and quick customer support team is very important, a chatbot can take a huge load off its shoulders.
Usually, most leads have the same questions about your project or product. You can:
The first and second options are OK but quite boring. Well, a FAQ page is a given, but people get too lazy and inattentive reading long articles they aren’t necessarily very interested in.
Replying with the same answers every time will cost you more money in the long run than creating a chatbot.
It’s a relatively new, unique way to talk to every customer, giving that UX level and “we’ve been waiting for you personally” message.
An example: the Julie chatbot by Amtrak answered around 5 million questions a year, increased conversion by 30% and saved the company 1 million dollars!
7. Invest in a responsive design
A website without a responsive design won’t be indexed that quickly, let alone being visited by Internet users. Did you know that 90% of the users access the Web from their mobile phones? That’s almost 4 billion people!
Besides, last year, over 50% of website traffic accounted for mobile users. So, having a site that can accommodate visitors from any device will increase your conversion rates by much. Clicking on a link redirecting you to a website where you can’t see anything and have to zoom all the time doesn’t cause an “Oh my God, I need that!” reaction.
Combine methods for the best results
While you may have one method that works wonderfully for you, consider trying a complex. Even if other techniques will provide 70% or 50% of the result of your main tactic, that’s still an increase.
Mind how much you invest, find the most balanced option, automate some processes to have more time. As a result, you’ll double if not triple your conversion rates in a short time. Invest time, money, and effort into your next campaign. Be closer to your potential buyers, give them a real customer experience.
It’s not only about conversion, it’s about what happens then. You may have an amazing marketing campaign, but that’s it. After all the effort, the lead will be redirected to a regular order page with slow loading and almost non-existent tips or customer support.
Many people won’t return after that. So, make sure every step the person makes on your business website, whether it’s reading the “About Us” page or ordering the most basic plan, product, or service, is an experience.
Keep the balance of quality on all stages, analyze mistakes, and make conclusions. And you’ll have one of the most successful businesses, no matter the crises.
