3 Ways To Supercharge Your Conversion Rate In 30 Minutes or Less

Table of contents

  1. #1 Make your website faster
  2. #2 Remove Distractions
  3. #3 Remarket to your “almost-customers”

Despite an highly developed existing landing page, Highrise HQ managed to drive a 102.5% improvement with an A/B tested redesign. Far too often people use percent improvements to make minor shifts in small numbers look important. “We had a 200% increase in sales” = last month we sold 1 book, this month we sold 3. But not so in this case - Highrise HQ was already a successful product with plenty of people signing up.  So what magic made this massive conversion funnel improvement possible? As we can see from the above before/after screenshots, the redesign changed almost everything.  Two shifts in particular stand out though. First, the new focal point is a smiling person next to a large testimonial. Social proof is powerful.  Second, the call to action button is bigger and more direct: “See Plans and Pricing” became “Start using Highrise today”.[1. Behind the scenes: A/B testing part 3: Finalé] Major redesigns like this can reap huge rewards, but they also tend to be more expensive.  A successful redesign tends to be the result of extensive research on best practice and target audience. But before you jump into a massive redesign, you can probably reap some still major gains with a few focused actions.  Working smart will always beat working hard.

#1 Make your website faster

Back in 2010, Firefox noticed that their downloads page was loading quite slowly and decided to run an experiment to see what impact a faster page would have on their conversions.  From a starting point of 4.97 seconds (remember, this is 2010), they got down to an average load time of 2.81 seconds.  This faster website drove 15.4% more conversions to download. Firefox ab test Based on their daily traffic, Firefox estimated this 15.4% boost translates to around 10 million extra downloads each year.[2. Firefox & Page Load Speed – Part II] Not to shabby. Similar tests have been repeated by Amazon[3. How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 Billion In Sales], Shopzilla[4. How Website Speed Affects Conversion Rates] and Walmart.com[5. How Walmart.com Correlates Web Performance to Business Performance].  The data is clear - a slow website will cost you sales. So what can you do? What to do in 30 minutes

  1. Check your current speed with something like Pingdom or YSlow
  2. Make your images load faster (e.g., WP Smush)
  3. Use a caching plugin to compress your website’s code (e.g., WP Super Cache)
  4. Harder, but impactful: Get a faster web host and a content delivery network (CDN)

For even more speed boosting, this and this will help you get started.

#2 Remove Distractions

Every page on your website should have a single purpose. When your customers are browsing, say, your products page, do you want them to add to cart or share on social? Well of course adding to cart is better, but can’t we leave the social buttons too? Won’t the customer who want to purchase, purchase, and the customers who want to share, share? As it turns out, no. Taloon.com initially put share buttons on their product pages.  But they decided to test this - did social buttons distract customers from purchasing?  The A/B test was simple - the original version had social sharing buttons; the experiment version did not.  After the dust settled, they discovered that the simpler page - the one without any sharing buttons - drove 11.9% more clicks on “add to cart”.[4. Removing Social Sharing Buttons Increases Conversions. Yes, You Heard That Right!] If you want your customers to take one action, don’t also throw fifteen distracting links at them.  Yes, getting people to share you product is quite valuable, but don’t encourage social sharing when you really want purchases.  Amazon balances this quite well by presenting sharing buttons after checkout - once you’ve made a purchase, then the next desired action is sharing. What to do in 30 minutes

  1. Go look at your conversion funnel and count all the distraction links - header links, footer links, social links, and anything else.
  2. Remove any not needed for usability

#3 Remarket to your “almost-customers”

I wrote last week about Examine.com’s anniversary sale case study - where they used a segmented email list to drive $100k in sales.  At the end of that sale, they noticed that ~40 email subscribers had clicked all the way to checkout, but never finalized their purchase. This final remarketing email campaign drove a 20% conversion rate and ~$3.2k worth of sales.[2. $100,855 by segmenting to 6500 emails] examine.com Remarketing - reaching out to customers who have already shown interest - tends to drive spectacular results.  Perhaps they were interested, but got distracted. Or maybe they’re almost ready to purchase but need more info. If your funnel is leaky, remarketing can help close the gap. What to do in 30 minutes

  1. Put tracking in place to measure where people are dropping out
  2. Install a tracking pixel for your favorite outreach tool (e.g., email marketing service or ad platform)
  3. Start with an automatic campaign for people late in funnel (i.e., checkout or signup page)

Other powerful tools to improve a leaky funnel or long sales cycle could include chat on key pages or encouraging half-convinced users to join email list (which is a whole science of its own).