Why Conversion Rate Optimization Should Be Your Number One Priority
Your website is up and running. Your pages are chugging along, as you’ve made sure to practice good optimization for search engines, and maybe you’re even paying for ads. As we’ve covered in other posts, visiting your website is just the first part of the customer’s journey. You need those visitors to convert.
This article isn’t about how to optimize your page for conversions — see the list at the end for links to our guides. This post aims to answer the question you might ask before you even get started: why is conversion rate optimization so important?
A conversion is simply an action that you want a visitor to do. This often means a sale, but not always. Sometimes, you want sign-ups for your webinars. Maybe you have a newsletter and you want visitors to subscribe. No matter what kind of conversion you’re looking for, the goal is the same: to make your visitors more likely to take the action you want.
There are two ways you can increase the number of conversions generated by your website. The first, and simplest way, is by offering something valuable. As in the video, below, if you promised a truck full of gold bars in exchange for an email address, you would have more conversions than you would know what to do with.
Since you aren’t going to be offering to make someone an overnight multimillionaire by clicking your sign-up link, you have to look at the other main way to generate conversions: making it as easy as possible for your users to take that action you want them to take. We call that “reducing friction.” Here are three reasons why it’s so important:
A little goes a long way
The best argument in favor of CRO is how little changes can lead to big results. Even if the improvement you make is minor, you can still see huge benefits. For instance, if making a small alteration to your page makes for one more conversion a week, that’s 52 more conversions a year than you had before. Chances are, your efforts will be rewarded with even more than that.
Optimization makes your website better
When we say you need to optimize, that’s what we mean: we want you to make your site more useful to your customers. Not only will conversion rate optimization make your site more usable, but it will also focus your audience exactly where you want them to go. It might help to think of every conversion as a transaction, no matter what is being exchanged — money can be exchanged for goods and services but it can also be as simple as submitting an email address or filling out a form. By optimizing your pages for conversion, you are also optimizing them for usability.
Time isn’t money, but it sure is valuable
When your kitchen knife gets dull, you sharpen it; you don’t throw it out and buy a new knife. This is a good way to look at CRO — improving what you already have and maximizing resources you can use today.
Here’s something you can do right now
One big obstacle that we see often is found in the forms we ask our users to fill out. One thing you can do right now to make your users more likely to convert is to reduce the friction they encounter when they fill out your form. How much information do you absolutely need from your user? Simply reducing the number of questions you ask in a form will give you an immediate bump. Try it now!
Speaking of forms, fill ours out to get a free, no-obligation consultation with the experts at DOM.
More about this subject:
