Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is one of the most important aspects of any online business (e-commerce or otherwise!). Whether you want customers to purchase products from your site or convert by contacting you, you’ll always want to focus on CRO to optimise the likelihood of site visitors actually taking action. At Reform Digital, we pride ourselves on involving CRO best practices in almost everything we do as we know well how important a part this plays in the bigger picture for business growth.
In this blog post, we will discuss three easy CRO strategies that you can try for your own business! These are strategies that have been proven to work and when you think about it, are pretty common-sense changes to accommodate website visitors on a website.
When selling products with variants: Comparison is key.
We’re in an age where convenience is key for retaining people’s attention and increasing the likelihood of conversion, and when you’ve got an e-commerce business with products that have variants, it’s important to make the comparison process as easy and streamlined as possible for customers.
An example of this would be if you were selling different models of a coffee machine, although a dropdown bar is an easy way for customers to select which model they would like – how can you showcase the differences between the models and provide easy access to information so customers are making an informed decision? Providing comparison information not only decreases the chances of customers cancelling, refunding and swapping out products later on but also removes the need for them to leave the website and do the comparison themselves on another website. Part of CRO is aiming to ensure visitors stay on the site, and spend longer on the site to eventually convert.
A great example of this comparison functionality is on Best Buys where it has a dropdown but provides more info on each model and provides a link to a full comparison with even more information to support the customer’s decision-making:
Help your visitors recover from errors with content and more options.
The worst thing that can happen for a visitor is hitting a 404 page on a website but there are things you can do to avoid losing those customers! Not only is optimising your 404 error page great for SEO but it’ll also improve the rate of customers continuing to browse your site after hitting a roadblock.
One of the easiest ways you can do this is by simply changing the language to be more easily understood. Remove all the codes and the numbers and state a 404 for what it is – a page that can’t be found. You can make it humorous or straight to the point but it’s most important to make it more familiar without all the technical jargon.
The next best way to optimise your error pages is to provide options for customers to go elsewhere within your website and avoid them bouncing to another site or back to the search engine. This CRO strategy is a fundamental part of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics guidelines for better user experience and interaction design for any digital application (we’d highly recommend that you read more into these heuristic guidelines by the way!).
An easy way to redirect customers to further options is to include common categories for them to go back to the browser just like MECCA has done in this example:
We also love the use of search bars on 404 error pages (or even pointing out that they can use the search bar!) as it allows the user to search for something similar to perhaps what they might have been looking for.
Optimise headline content to be more value-based and action focused.
Headlines are often the first things a website visitor sees amongst the website’s general branding and content is really the bread and butter of a website as it needs to easily communicate why your audience should interact with your brand. Even back in 2011, there are studies that show the different conversion rates based on how you word and present headlines on a website that run true. From headlines with exactly 8 words to titles with odd numbers, the main gist of these studies is that headlines are extremely important and can make or break a converting customer.
An easy way to figure out which headline is best and to optimise for more conversions is to A/B test and use free tools such as Headline Analyzer to find who you can best word headlines for great results.
These three tips are some easy ways you can assess and improve your website CRO for better results, increased growth and engagement with your customer base online. Let us know what you think of these and if you’d like a more in-depth CRO audit of your website, feel free to contact us and join the digital reform!
