In the world of digital marketing, we hear many important terms. We hear about search engine optimisation or SEO, we hear about inbound traffic, return on marketing investment or ROI, and brand image. But the ultimate element all of this leads to Conversion which up to an extent also depends on website design.
Summing up the basics
When a visitor makes a purchase with the ultimate ‘Buy’ call to action button, it converts the lead into a customer. This is called a conversion and everything digital marketing does is with the attempt to make more conversions to happen. Conversion is the state of buying after all the browsing and stalling.
Surprisingly for those who do not know how often people window shop on the internet, a conversion rate of 3% is the average. A 5% conversion rate is considered good. And anything above 10% is only achieved by the biggest global conglomerates.
Conversion Rate and ROI
No amount of marketing, social media presence or branding matters if the conversion rate is not going up. Conversion rate and ROI are directly proportional. But they need not be theoretically absolutely correlated. ROI is about calculating the profits due to a marketing investment. Conversion rate is about the overall conversions irrespective of a marketing campaign or branding strategy.
However, practically, you need good branding and marketing investments to increase the conversion rate. Conversion rate optimisation is done through various strategies using many digital tools to help track customer behaviour and make them want to make a purchase. Let us discuss some of the sure shot ways that help improve the conversion rate.
- Responsive website for every platform
Making websites responsive to mobiles was just an added perk even 5 years back. But now, with the rising number of smartphone users, and the rising number of online shoppers, you must take care of the mobile users, without ignoring the desktop users.
Make sure your website is responsive to both platforms. Navigating to the product options and call to action buttons should be easy. Having a simple and responsive user interface for your website from mobile and desktop is an important prerequisite for conversion rate optimisation. The website should launch quickly and each page should load fast with all the images, product descriptions, and call to action buttons must appear within seconds
2. Converting above fold
CTA or call to action button plays a significant role when we talk about conversions. It is intrusive to pop CTA all across the screen. But having it in a humble position on the screen, small but clear, should not be a problem. Easily accessible call to action buttons helps in getting conversions.
Keep your call to action buttons right in front of the eyes, so that visitors do not have to scroll to hit ‘Buy now’. Also, make sure these CTA buttons are equally responsive on both, mobile and desktop. Don’t make them too big for the screen or too small for the average fingers. Don’t make it too bright or too inconspicuous. Green is the standard call to action button colour. You can experiment but make sure the buttons are visible at a first glance.
3. Focus on User Experience
Making your website responsive is not enough. Track the user behaviour, check out which pages they spend the most time on, where they come from, when and what they are looking for, and where else they go (via cookie tracking). Accordingly improve the user experience by eliminating intrusive ads or pop ups and providing engaging content.
It is very important to ask for user feedback on the website so that you do not only know how many people leave disappointed or satisfied. But also get to find out why they leave, why they stay, what needs to change, and what needs to be done more.
4. Go by Hick’s Law
Hick’s Law states that the amount of time taken to come to a decision is directly proportionate to the number of options available. So, the more options you offer, the more you confuse the visitor. This is not to say that you should not have enough colour variants or size options on a product. But the call to action buttons and navigation options need to be focused.
Focus on ‘Buy now’ over ‘subscribe to the newsletter’. Focus on ‘check out the products list’ over ‘give a review’. This does not mean newsletter and email followers aren’t important or reviews and feedback are unnecessary. But you need to prioritise on the conversion options in order to achieve conversion rate optimisation.
5. Use Negative Space and Colour Contrast
Let there be enough negative space, or blank space by using smaller fonts, images with negative borders, and generous line spacing. Put CTA in a contrasting colour and have a white or blank border around so that the website looks neat.
People subconsciously choose from neat sites than cluttered sites because they end up associating the product handling, delivery, and after sales service with the tidiness of the webpage.
6. Apply Gestalt Similarity Principle
The human attention span on the internet is just about 8 seconds. Within this time you will have to engage their interest before the attention runs out. How you can do it is by applying the Gestalt Principle that implies that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Make each element appear similar to anything that is popular or irresistible. Put a positive review at an optimum distance, so that it catches the eye of the visitor. CRO will increase if you know how to appeal to the senses of the visitors.
Apart from website design, some other factors which needed to be considered are:-
7. Using SEO for CRO
A few years back SEO only used to be about creating content with keywords that are trending so that the webpage appears in the maximum number of searches. But now SEO helps build brand image, improve visibility through quality content and improve the ranking of the website based on integrity of content and not just number of clicks. Hence, SEO and CRO are inter related and this opportunity is used by companies associated with SEO services in Delhi, Mumbai, Gurgaon and NCR to generate revenues for the clients.
8. Influence with Brand Image
It is totally necessary to create a brand image for the company because that is the theme or the essence people will identify the brand with. Now, once you have a strong brand image, you will not have as much difficulty selling each product as you would, without this identity. Achieve conversion rate optimisation by maintaining a consistent brand image and having an active presence via email as well as social media.
9. Apply content marketing
Create content that does not necessarily promote the products directly, but keeps the visitors engaged. You need to make people want to buy the products instead of telling them how much you want them to buy it.
With articles or video blogs you can get them hooked to the concept or the theme of the products.
10. Volunteer
Everybody loves kindness in this wretched world. You think your products might be a tad bit more expensive than that of your rival? Or maybe even a little less functional? But if you associate your products with environment friendly options, or have some parts of the profits to go for social welfare, people will want to be associated with you. They will want to purchase something that makes them a part of a charity or anything constructive.
So, conversion rate optimisation is not just about following analytics and making technical strategies. It is a lot about all that, but more about understanding psychology. It is about understanding how to influence people into buying your products instead of simply asking them to do so.
Read about marketing trends and breakthroughs. You will get many ideas and soon you will start coming up with your own. Don’t be shy to experiment. Put your ideas to test.
Website Designing Company in Gurgaon, Delhi and other cities therefore focus on the designing part as well and if website design and CRO are inter- related it becomes important to talk about conversion rate optimization or CRO.
