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The essential steps that every business should do to convert more visitors into repeat customers. These easy steps dramatically improve the conversation rate and RIO of any business and reduce their CAC (customer acquisition cost).
What is the conversion rate?
After people have entered your webpage or e-shop, you have their attention. Now it is your job to guide them to do the next steps, so they keep their attention and interest. It doesn’t have to be a purchase on the first visit. It can be some other conversion – subscription, user registration, participating in a survey, downloading a paper, reading a blog post. If one of such conversions happens, you have successfully guided this person to possible future sales. Those conversions are the starters of your relationship with a customer and that’s what you need!
The conversion rate shows how well you guide your webpage visitors into the sales funnel. If 10 of 100 visitors convert to your customers, then your conversion rate is 10% and that’s already great. However, it’s quite common that the conversion rate is poor or doesn’t meet the expectations. Even if the number of visitors is high, you have a problem if the conversion rate is low. Why? Because you will not reach your targets by any means, or you lose opportunities to improve your business.
Reasons behind low conversion rate
There are different reasons why visitors leave your webpage without doing anything, never to return. Some of those reasons are related to visitors and maybe they searched for something else, so you can not influence it. However, often they leave because the communication didn’t work out.
Some of the reasons for this are related to the first impression and overall design of the webpage (headlines, pictures, content, colors, page loading speed, etc.). If it is hard to find relevant information quickly or the content is too confusing, then for a lot of people it isn’t good enough and they leave. Therefore I will introduce 4 methods to find out what may cause the low conversion rates.
Other reasons are related to how people think and decide. People need guidance and encouragement to do something. They need a nudge, an invitation to do something. Therefore, the problem may be, your webpage “Call-to-Action” buttons and fields are not working in the right way. They are not relevant for the visitor; they are hidden, or those actions seem to take too much time. In addition to the 4 research methods, I will recommend 6 ways to achieve better conversion rates.
Do your research!
First, you have to find out what causes your low conversion rates. The two main keywords here are analytics and testing. You can’t begin conversion rate optimization before you have information about visitors’ behavior on your website. What do they look or click and what they don’t? What brings them to your webpage? What do they notice and what they don’t see? To Sum it up: you must take the visitor’s perspective to understand what should be changed or improved.
Before I introduce some methods, keep in mind, it is reasonable to look at this matter in the long term. Creating a webpage or webshop is usually for a longer period and you will have to keep it up to date and therefore conversion rate optimization is a continuous process. Set your targets, also don’t forget to set your metrics to measure your success.
There are 4 methods to check what may cause low conversion rates:
- Analytics – properly configured Google Analytics will give you detailed insight about customer behavior in journey on your webpage. If you are aware from where visitors come to your page and what search keywords will generate traffic, then you can make necessary changes on your webpage. Moreover, you can optimize and adjust your tactics regarding marketing channels.
There are many guides and how to begin with Analytics, how to set your goals and what to keep in mind. For further reading: https://www.adhook.io/en/conversion-funnel-in-google-analytics/
- Heatmaps – visual overview of what users do on the webpage. How the Mouse moves, where visitors click and how the visitors are scrolling (what they skip and where they pay more attention). With this information you will understand what grabs visitors attention or where they spend more time. Maybe there is something that takes too much attention and it becomes a distraction instead of helping. In Heatmaps the information is highly visualized so it is easy to see what people actually are doing. One great Tool is Hotjar. For introduction you can check this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJMuc3zFi_w
- User Testing – real people can give you the best advice and will notice something that you may have missed. usertesting.com, a video platform where you can get feedback from real people. They test your product or visit your webshop and they tell you what they are experiencing – what they like or what is confusing or what causes poor user experience. Such feedback can be highly valuable, especially if you are launching a new product or service. Furthermore, compared with analytics or heatmaps, you may get information about positive and negative emotions! If you know what people really feel can impact your results enormously. If your design or copy makes people feel in the right way, they are much more open to buy from you.
- Surveys – you have many options here. The simplest method is to ask your friends or customers. However, for better and trustworthy results use more advantaged tools,like Formaloo, SurveyMoneky or Google Forms. Keep in mind, this can also be one conversion that you can use – put a Survey on your first page and invite visitors to share their feedback. If you’re looking for some templates & examples, you can check here.
6 ways to improve conversion rates
Besides analytics and testing, there are some other tools or tips you can try out. Most of them improve and increase the quality of your interaction with visitors.
ChatBots
As you probably know, people value time and want to get things done quickly. Therefore an automated ChatBot can be very beneficial for online businesses. Visitors can ask their questions right away and save a lot of time.
Bots can work 24/7 and give answers to customers during the night when you sleep. However, it is not easy to set up and use properly. Therefore this is not for everyone. Still, if you want to use a chatbot, but you do not need a sophisticated bot, it is possible to create a tool so the visitors can get in touch with you easily.
For this, you can use on your homepage a widget of Formaloo that is similar to a chatbot. Prepare some choices the visitor can choose from and you will get the information instantly. The video on how to pick and modify it is here:
LiveChat
instead of ChatBots, you can use LiveChat. Customers love to talk with real people and tend to trust humans more than AI. But there is more – besides the quick response, people like the quality of the result. Real people can ask more precise and relevant questions from customers and therefore the outcome can be much better compared with ChatBots. The downside of LiveChat is obvious – your workers will get tired and they can’t be online 24/7. Therefore you have to figure out how to arrange your LiveChat. For further reading, I recommend this article.
Fortunately, there are many great tools that can help you with that and automate your customer success process. At the top of the market, we have Intercom, which is a complete platform designated for customer support. It has great integrations with almost anything and even has a simple CRM built into it.
Also, you can check out Drift (Great for sales-funnel automation) or Crisp (Very good free alternative) which provide you with adequate software that meets almost all of your needs.
Pop-up’s (Not recommended for every business)
Yes, those annoying pop-up windows can boost conversion rates. But it is a thin line between what will work and what doesn’t. Think from the customer’s point of view: make it simple to understand and easy to handle. And offer real value to your customer. If you are not sure how to do it, just try different approaches and look at what works the best.
That being said, if you want to do something bad, do it well! Sumo is the biggest player who provides you with lots of features to create a pop-up instantly. Another great tool is the ConvertKit.
Lead Generation Forms
Lead generation form is a simple but powerful tool that may improve your conversion rate. As a result, you can get quality leads that lead to new customers. How? Lead Generation Form is an assessment tool for you, but also for the visitor. You can assess the possible customer thanks to the information that has been shared with you by the visitor.
The questions of the Form help the visitors to assess if they are in the right place. If the questions don’t feel right, then the visitor leaves or doesn’t enter meaningful information. If the questions make sense, then it builds trust and the visitor is willing to give more information about himself.
How to use Lead Generation Forms? Usually, it is a questionnaire on paper, inside e-mail, or on the web page/mobile app. It is reasonable to put the Lead Generation Form on your front page in a visible spot. Straightforward as it is, makes it easy to see it and to fill it.
Formaloo helps you to build more sophisticated forms. Formaloo Logic enables you to build smart forms based on conditions and logic. If the person enters a certain answer, the form will skip the next question if it fulfills certain criteria. This enables the person to avoid filling in unnecessary fields. This saves time and improves the user experience. For more information on how to use Formaloo Logic, click here.
This is a simple Lead generation Widget that encourages visitors to take an action and helps to find the right person from your team to interact with the visitor.
You can check for some Examples on Formaloo Lead Generation Templates. Also, you can look at how easy is to edit a Lead Generation Form and use it on your website:
Lead Generation Widgets (Newsletters, Signups, E-book downloads, etc.)
There are many more Widgets that can help you to optimize and increase your website’s conversion rate. You can use the widgets to build trust by showing who or how many customers have made a purchase or how many visitors are currently in your webshop.
You can ask for feedback about the product or webpage, for example, if you are testing what products you should focus on more in your next sales campaign. Also, you can offer coupons, discounts, or special offers.
With no-code solutions like Formaloo, it is really easy to create engaging Widgets. Just drag and drop fields that you want, add text and pictures. select the location where you want to use the Widget and you’re done! Then copy the shortcode and Embed it to your webpage. Or just use your own link with your brand. It’s super easy.
You can check some templates to get started here.
Landing Pages
Landing Page is a great way to achieve a high conversion rate. The value of Landing Pages lies in the narrow focus – one certain topic and no distractions! It is created for a certain target audience and all the designs and tools that are used are targeting that audience. All the tools described above can be used on the Landing Page and can be designed only for this.
You can create beautiful landing pages for each of your marketing campaigns in no time and no code with services like InstaPage, Webflow, and many more.
How to boost your conversion rate with Formaloo?
As you have seen in previous examples Formaloo can help you in multiple ways.
First, it’s easy to begin. You can start with Survey Forms, Customers Feedback Widgets or e-mail subscription, or Opt-In Widgets. All those are effective “Call-to-Action” Tools and may help you to get visitor attention and first conversions, so they are willing to enter the Sales Funnel of your e-shop. Also, with those tools, you will easily collect valuable Data to optimize your conversion rates.
Second, Formaloo apps, forms & widgets are GDPR compliant and fully compatible with mobile devices and tablets. This enables omnichannel marketing and presence in online and mobile channels. This enables you to improve your conversion rates too. Remember that most likely, 70-80% of your visitors will visit your website from their mobile phones!
And finally, Formaloo can provide you with a Customer Data Platform, so you can analyze your customers’ behavior and improve your webpage design and communication with your customer. It definitely benefits your sales and marketing in the long-term, helps you to deal with conversion rate issues, customer experience, and adjust your business strategy.
Best of all, you can use Formaloo totally free in less than a minute, signup here!
About the author:
Heiki Järveveer is a Marketing and Financial Management master’s student at the University of Tartu. He’s working in the company Est-Doma OÜ as a board member and is responsible for sales and communication. Also, he has been active in voluntary organizations – education, youth work, community activities.