Every online marketer knows how important the overall look of a website is and how it can greatly impact its visitors. Apart from having an impeccable design and not being cluttered, it must have quality content, including both text and visuals, as that is what will engage the visitors and make them interested in a brand.
The general feel of a website can highly influence people’s opinion of a particular business and make them want to stay to find out more about a brand. Since the landing page of a website is the front door through which visitors come in to check out a particular company, it is the page most responsible for the forming of first impressions, so its design must be as inviting and engaging as possible.
It goes without saying that your website must have a mobile-friendly and responsive design, since that way, you will be able to provide mobile users with a seamless user experience, which can greatly improve your SEO and help you rank higher in the SERPs.
Why is all of this important? Because optimizing your website for every possible little detail can help you drive more conversions and keep your conversion rate constantly going up.
However, it is not nearly enough to do it once and be done with it. It is a never-ending process that should be dealt with on a regular basis, so as to ensure your website always meets the needs of your target audience, especially since the trends in web design are constantly changing.
Nonetheless, apart from the aforementioned and many other elements of an effective and successful website, check out some tips that can help you learn how to optimize other aspects of your website that you perhaps hadn’t even thought about in order to increase your conversions.
Include Social Proof on Your Pages
The general mentality of people is that, if someone else is doing something that reflects good behaviour, they should probably be doing it as well. Social proof has the power of influencing people’s opinions, so you try and use that to your advantage.
Leveraging social proof can help you influence the actions of your site’s visitors and potential customers, so you should think about adding social proof to the various pages on your website, as that will definitely help you drive more conversions.
For instance, you can add a subscription button on your landing page and on your blog, with a number of subscribers next to it. Such a call-to-action can show your visitors how many people have already subscribed, thus encouraging them to give it a shot as well.
You can also add some other social proof, such as testimonials, which are especially important for ecommerce websites, since they can highly influence people’s purchasing decisions.
You can consider including testimonials on your landing page or even on your CTAs. For instance, adding testimonial tweets on your call-to-action offer can add credibility to it and make more people want to check out that offer.
Update Your CTA Designs Regularly
It is essential that you update the designs of your CTAs and provide them with a fresh and new look on a regular basis, as it can greatly help you drive more conversions.
Think about it for a moment. If you saw the same design of a call-to-action every time you checked out a particular website, would you click on it? Probably not. Why is that exactly? Because it no longer grabs your attention.
That is why your CTA designs need to be updated from time to time, as they can become old pretty quickly and, thus, greatly lower your CTRs. Change your CTA copy every once in awhile and breathe new life into it. Update your CTA buttons and make sure your visitors don’t play hide and seek in order to find them. They need to be clearly visible, so make sure you utilize your website’s white space, so that everything can be easily found.
Update Your Call-to-Action Offers
Updating the designs of your CTAs can certainly help you increase your conversions but, if your offers are outdated, your visitors will not be very likely to click on them. Imagine placing an offer on your website that says “Free eBook: 5 Content Marketing Tips for 2011”. Would that offer help you increase your conversion rate? Of course not.
Therefore, invest both time and effort into creating new offers or even updating the ones that can benefit your business again. Consider analysing the strength of your existing offers in order to gain insight into which ones performed well in the past, as that can help you create quality content that will certainly drive conversions.
Update Your CTAs on Pages and Blog Posts with the Highest Traffic
As you already know, CTAs have a tendency to get old after a while and they need to be updated. However, what happens when you put a particular call-to-action offer on a blog post that goes viral and starts getting tons of traffic? What if that particular blog post keeps receiving a lot of traffic and your offer gets old? It would certainly not be such a good idea to keep it there.
In such a case, all you need to do is replace the underperforming offer with one that performs well. That way, you will manage to get all the people coming to read your successful blog post to click through and learn more about your offer. You will be able to convert them into quality leads in no time.
There are a lot of tools that can help you replace your underperforming CTA with a new one, so make sure you find one to best fit your needs and don’t shy away from using it. Those tools enable you to replace your old CTA with a new one within one CTA group, so that every instance of your old CTA is automatically replaced with the new one you created.
Consider Adding Secondary CTAs
Perhaps you think that adding two different calls-to-action on one and the same page on your website will only result in your visitors being confused and distracted, but it needn’t be so. It would certainly distract the visitors from doing what you want them to do if you place two competing CTA offers on the same page, but if the secondary CTA you include on a page doesn’t compete with the main offer, your visitors will definitely not be distracted and you will not negatively affect your conversion rates.
Therefore, it all depends on the offers of your CTAs. For instance, you can even add two different CTAs right next to each other, but only if they promote different offers. Your main CTA could offer a free sample of your new eBook to your visitors, while your secondary CTA could be inviting your visitors to subscribe to your blog.
That way, you can capture the attention of the people interested in the content of your eBook and the people who found the content of your blog valuable enough to want to subscribe and learn more about what you have to say.
Whenever you can include two CTAs with non-competing offers on your website, experiment and see whether or not they help you increase your conversions. You will certainly accomplish that if you make sure the offers you promote are not related to each other, but instead to completely different matters.
What’s essential is to monitor the results of adding two different CTAs on one page. If it happens that your conversion rate is decreasing, then perhaps it is not quite a good idea to display two CTAs on that particular page. However, if your conversion rate does get increased, then your secondary CTA was certainly a smart decision. Therefore, you should definitely try it out.
Conclusion
Increasing your conversion rate is certainly one of your main goals when it comes to your online marketing campaign, since it is something that can help you enlarge your customer base and increase your sales, thus enabling you to generate more revenue. By following the aforementioned tips, you will make sure you receive a surge of quality traffic and get higher conversion rates that always translate to greater ROI.
Therefore, make sure you follow these tips for website conversion optimization and you will certainly be on the right track to converting the visitors to your site and turning them into quality leads. Every online marketer works toward employing different kinds of methods in order to increase their conversion rates, but the sad truth is that not so many of them actually succeed in their endeavours, so, by using these tips, you can definitely get the upper hand and manage to always stay in the game.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
