For many individuals, a company’s website is their first touchpoint in going from awareness to consideration. However, just increasing your website traffic to improve your conversions won’t cut it. There’s only so much potential leads you can get using this channel.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) allows you to improve your chances of conversions for the traffic you get. Instead of worrying about finding more leads, CRO incorporates strategies that guarantee subscription or purchase. Check out our article here for a quick introduction to how CRO can be a winning addition to your marketing efforts.
Like anything, it takes finely-tuned skills to implement CRO strategies that work for specific fields and niches. However, with a few small tweaks to your website, you can work towards maximum conversion. Here’s a list of some changes you can do to improve your site performance:
Benchmark your performance
Before you do anything, it’s important to be aware of where your current campaigns stand, not just for CRO. The Google Analytics platform provides you with insights such as day-to-day visitor count, their demographics, which pages they’ve visited from your site, how long they’ve stayed, and many more.
Knowing your current figures allows you to improve and set bigger goals. Besides that, benchmarking your performance against competitors can give you a larger picture of how much further you can grow as a business.
Ensure a clean interface especially for your main page
The first look is everything that stands between a student enrolling versus them clicking away from your website. As such, you need to optimize this page to showcase the best for your program. This can range from providing your services, showcasing glowing testimonials, a sample course video, and persuasive call-to-action buttons that lead to the registration page.
Everything about this stage should aid users into converting. A clunky copy can seem as hard selling to your learners while a disorganized layout will give the impression of low-quality courses. These will quickly drive learners away.
Check your website’s technical side
All marketing strategies would fail if the technical side of the website is poorly structured. Learners get impatient with slow loading times and low-quality images. They’re bad for ranking on search engines as well. CRO experts deal with this and are quick to catch them before it negatively impacts the leads’ customer journey.
Include testimonials and reviews
For products and services that are classified as high-consideration–like eLearning courses–testimonials and reviews provide a guarantee that your program is worth investing in, especially since learners’ career futures depend on them.
In fact, a 2020 report of Wyzowl shows that up to 95% of individuals agree that testimonials and reviews affect their purchase decisions. As such, having a dedicated page or even a section of the main landing page can boost your conversion rate by a lot.
Experiment on what works and what doesn’t
It isn’t CRO without doing experiments on whether or not the adjustments made are working. You can do this through A/B testing where you show two different page versions to two similar kinds of audience groups. This lets you determine which strategies are effective in delivering maximum results.
Hubspot highlights a few features you can experiment with such as:
- Website copy
- Content offers
- Images used
- Form Questions
However, these experiments need to be rigorous and properly set up. If not, your whole website–and by extension your business–can suffer because of it. An expert eye can give you the help you need in launching them without the fear of messing with what already works.
