How to increase your conversion rates? How to optimize your conversion rates? How to increase your sales on your website? How to increase the number of subscribers on your website or the number of subscribers to your newsletter by collecting more emails? Whatever your goal, setting up a process of optimizing your conversion rates is particularly virtuous. Let’s see, thanks to the computer graphics proposed by Quicksprout, the basis for implementing such an approach to improve your pages.
Why improve your conversion rates?
Why optimize your conversion rates?
Many of the projects that I see happening when asked to do a consultancy often come from an interesting or even excellent idea.
But in at least 80% of the cases, the company in question has already fully spent its “development” budget and now wants to put the package for launch. However, after a few minutes spent on the site or application, it is usually not difficult to see that their registration page or their product page is in itself a sufficient brake to cause the project to crash in its entirety.
If your competitor sells 2 products each time he receives 100 visitors while your online store only succeeds in selling 1 product for 100 visitors, you will need to produce twice as much effort and get out twice as much budget to achieve the same results.
This additional charge reduces your margins and compresses the time needed to develop new ideas, new products, new partnerships.
The increase in the percentage of conversions is thus a powerful lever which allows to:
1. Generate more revenue with the same traffic.
2. Increase the reach of your actions in terms of referencing , communication on social networks
3. Reduce the cost of your paid advertising campaigns while maintaining equivalent results.
According to Quicksprout, a conversion optimization approach allows an average increase of 49% in your goals, while for an ecommerce, the revenue per user can be increased by 50%.
It all depends of course on the level of optimization of your site but it is usually not uncommon to be able drastically increase sales or enrollments in the very first months. The following improvements do not impact the results as much, but at a rate of a few percent per month, a test year can truly transform your business.
Increase your conversion rates
Optimizing your conversion rates therefore reduces all the brakes that prevent visitors from taking action by finalizing their purchase or leaving their email on your site.
Here is how we will proceed: we will modify your site on the basis of a hypothesis and divide your visitors into 2 groups. The first group will only see the modified version while the 2nd group will always have access to the old version. At the end of the experiment, we will compare the results to determine if the hypothesis is better than the current site.
This method is called the AB test and I show you how to do it because it’s not that complicated. So where do you start?
1. Define conversion targets
define conversion targetto define target conversion
1. Define the goal to improve :
Do not try to achieve several goals at once or you will not be able to learn from your optimization test. So much better if your other statistics also increase but focus on one metric according to your final goal:
– The click-through rate of the purchase button
– The collection of the email
– The average shopping cart
– The rate of purchase abandonment
– The rate of bounce
– The time spent on your site
– The loyalty rate of your users
2. Define the pages to be tested:
– The 5 pages with the highest bounce rate
– The 5 most important drop points in your conversion tunnel: sales page, shopping basket, registration page, validation page, page of payment …
– The 5 pages having the most strategic and / or remunerative on your site
3. Use AB test tools to set up your experience:
Google Analytics offers its own test tools AB but Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer allow to carry out these experiments in a simple way and without knowing how to code.
2. Gather statistics on your conversion rates
1. Use Google Analytics to record your current conversion rates for the defined goal:
– If a product page generates 1 sale per 100 visits, your conversion rate is 1%.
– If your basket dropout rate is 95%, take this metric as the basis for improvement.
– If 2% of users click on your ads and increase your ad revenue is a goal, retain 2% as your conversion rate.
– If 1% of users leave their email on a collection page, this statistic can be an objective to improve.
– If only 3% of your users come back to your site after signing up, how to increase this statistic?
Set up “conversion goals” in Google Analytics to identify the most effective pages and communication channels to achieve your goal. This will allow you to focus on the most impacting pages and better allocate your budget to the profitable traffic sources.
2. Create a survey on your site to identify problems.
Your users can provide you with improvement tracks to test, feel free to integrate surveys directly on your site with tools like Qualaroo or Surveymonkey . The perception of users about your site is often quite different from yours.
3. Formulating a hypothesis
From the quantitative and qualitative data obtained, you will begin to better identify what is blocking. The advantage of the AB test is that you will be able to test everything on a sample of your visitors.
1. Identify the real levers
When I started working with event, we first asked the site statistics in an Excel document to analyze where to start to increase revenue from the site.
We considered a time to improve sharing on social networks. The statistics showed, however, that even with a 200% increase in the sharing rate, traffic would not be significantly impacted.
On the other hand, we noticed that it was possible to increase the revenues of the site by 25 to 50% by increasing the number of page views per users, which seemed potentially easy.
Conclusion: Before you go headlong into your tests, analyze which changes can have the most impact.
2. Formulate your hypothesis
A good hypothesis is at the basis of any good experience. Do not test more than one hypothesis at a time.
The main elements of a page that rapidly impact conversions are:
– The call-to-action button (“Order now” “Subscribe” …)
– The title of the page presenting the product, service.
– The structure of the page and the design in general
– The text content of the page
– The payment page and the shopping path
– The forms of registration or collection of emails and leads
Consult the tutorial to improve your sales pages or registration pages in order to go further regarding items that can penalize your conversion rates.
4. Set up your AB Test
1. Start with minor changes:
As Quicksprout recalls, go to the end of optimizing your page by starting small alterations that can have a lot of impact before testing a complete redesign of your site.
2. Change only one variable at a time in order to be able to decide whether optimization has had a positive effect on your conversion rate.
3. Do not reinvent the powder, there are good practices in your industry. Test what has already worked for others.
4. Check the tracking of your statistics so you do not get bad results and draw bad conclusions.
5. Decide which sample your site will be tested for. Traffic must nevertheless be sufficient and representative in order to draw lessons from experience.
perform an AB test
5. Start the test
Ultimate advice: let the test run 1 week a minimum to avoid false positives. Indeed, it is not uncommon for a test to have spectacular results for 3 days then, simply because of random statistical or cycles linked to the day of the week, then a catastrophic fall of the results.
1 week is therefore a minimum but I advise you to let it run more time especially if your traffic is relatively low.
Tools to optimize your conversion rates
Recall tools to improve your conversion rates:
1. Google Analytics for all data regarding your tunnel conversion
2. Qualaroo to get user feedback
3. (Possibly) CrazyEgg as eyetracking tool to analyze where users click and pass their mouse over to your site.
4. Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to realize the split test and distribute your traffic between the original version and the test version.
Questions to ask yourself before starting an AB test
Effectively, beyond the changes that can allow you to increase your sales, take the time to think about the quality of your site in general. Why spend thousands of euros in a site that does not convert or at least that does not get all the benefit of traffic so hardly earned:
1. Is your site functional?
– Does your site or service do what your users expect of it? You are certainly convinced that this is the case but do your users have the same opinion?
– Can a prospect quickly determine if your site will fix its problem or not? If your service is great but your homepage does not give a satisfactory representation of it, you lose half of your potential customers.
2. Is your site accessible?
– Can the user access your site? from a mobile, from any browser, if it is visually impaired or hard of hearing …
– What are the barriers that prevent the user from using your product or service and satisfy his need
3. Is your site usable?
– Is your site “user-friendly”?
– What are the obstacles to navigation?
4. Is your site intuitive?
– Is the purchasing process natural and intuitive?
– Does the client have to carry out binding actions to satisfy his need?
5. Is your site persuasive?
– Do you want the user to use or buy your product or service?
– Is your solution really a problem and a need?
– Is the user’s expectations reasonable in relation to this unsatisfied need?
– Will the user be completely satisfied once the purchase has been made?
