2019 Playbook for Conversion Rate Optimization

While top of funnel activities are important, they don't mean much if conversion rates are low. Even if you have one million visitors per month, you aren't going to have much success with a low conversion rate. 2018 brought a lot of changes and insight, and with 2019 coming very soon, it is time to look at what is going to work for conversion in 2019. Getting a head start on what works in 2019 can help you start the first quarter off strong. Flat sales charts don't do anyone any favors and the information below will help your company increase conversions, so your charts are impressive instead of depressive.

1. Reducing Distractions

You can tell who knows their sales funnel well and who doesn't when you look at different landing pages. If a landing page has many different offers, it isn't likely that the page is properly optimized. Having multiple offers on a landing page takes away the main goal of the page. It is easy to think that you are going to miss out on opportunities if you don't offer your potential buyers multiple offers, but the opposite is true. If you have too many offers, you are going to confuse potential buyers, and they are likely to go elsewhere. Offers aren't the only distractions on a page. Any outbound links are possible distractions. Any link that you have on the page that links to places outside of your site can take your visitors away from what you truly want them to do. Social media links are not necessary unless your main goal is to increase followers on a certain network.

2. Know What is Happening on the Page

Once you know what your goals are for the page, you need to see what is taking away from the main goal of the page. When you understand what is taking away from the page’s main goal, you can decrease those things. How do you tell what is happening on your page? When you look at the on-page time, if your on-page time is between one and three minutes you are experiencing average on page time. If your on-page time is less than one minute, there is a lot of room for improvement. You can set up special reports to find out which pages traffic sources are sending your traffic. Whether you get traffic from social media, search engines or other sources, if you know which pages each of them is sending traffic to, you can better optimize for the state of mind your visitors are in when they land on your page. Heatmaps are another helpful tool when you want to understand what is going on when people land on a page. If you see that visitors are clicking a certain button quickly and going off your website, you might move that button or change it to a link that is going to serve your sales funnel. It doesn’t matter how much traffic your website gets if it isn’t doing what you want it to do.

3. Make Your Design Simple

The simpler your design is, the easier it is for people that visit your website to understand what is going on and where they need to go. If you are confusing people with a loud designs with a lot of graphics, banners, offers and different things, you aren’t likely to get the best conversions. If your goal is to get people to click on ads, that is one thing. We aren’t talking about getting people to click on ads; we are talking about getting people to convert, and in this case by conversion, we mean sales. When you are designing your website, you think about how easy it is to read more than thinking about how fancy the website looks. If the visitor can’t benefit from visiting the site, it doesn’t matter how good it looks. Another challenge many websites experience are colors that don’t work together. If your colors clash and visitors don’t like the way your site looks, they are likely to spend less time on your website and very unlikely to convert.

4. Send a Clear Message

Very close to what we spoke about in point number one, your website needs to send a clear message. The clearer the message, the more likely your visitors are going to take action. Your main goal is to get your visitors to take action and convert. Having conflicting or confusing messages that can distract your potential buyer will decrease conversions and cause your website to provide less than stellar results. Your messaging can continue to develop over time so don't worry about not getting your message exactly right in the beginning. Get started and start testing to see what works.

5. Continuously Improving

Even after you have a good conversion rate, you should always be improving your website, your messaging and how you send people through the sales funnel. A/B split testing is a great way to make sure you are getting the most out of your traffic. If you aren't converting your traffic, there is no use for the traffic. Vanity numbers don't increase the bottom line. Once you get your conversion rate optimized and are converting a large number of your visitors it makes sense to increase the top of funnel activities. You are no longer putting water into a bucket with holes and you can expect to keep more people that come through so you can nurture and convert them as you move them through the sales funnel.

Conclusion

Working on your conversion rates to make 2019 a great year for conversions should be at the top of your to-do list. If you aren't sure about how to move forward, you can speak with an inbound marketing agency to help you through the process to get the best results.