Customers are no longer individual people, each with hopes, dreams, and desires, but just numbers on an excel sheet. We’re now at a point in global commerce when being data-driven is more important than being customer-driven. Every business aspires to get maximum conversion rates for their business, here are the 5 ways to increase your CRO.

Over the course of this article, you’ll learn how one man used just 18 words to boost year on year sales of a $125,000 Rolls Royce by 50%. How a grocery store used a single line of tape to increase sales by 102%. And how to do this on your website.

But First, What’s The Conversion on Your Website?

the average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%, and even companies in the top 25th percentile are only converting at a marginal 5.31% or higher.

Wordstream estimates

I was talking to a Digital Sales consultant at a symposium recently, and he was telling me about how he managed to get a “whopping 7%” conversion rate for a company he recently worked with.

And he kept telling me about it until my rather soft-spoken colleague asked him the question that I didn’t realize needed to be answered.

“How much could you convert if those customers were at this symposium?”

---

5 Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rates

Look around the room, the coffee shop or office you’re sitting in and think about what life would be like, if 9 out of every 10 people you interacted with, turned around and walked away almost as soon as they saw you.

Imagine what life would be like if that day was the best day of your life.

Companies spend so much money, time and resources; investing in quality content, SEO and backlinks, only to have 93% of that money flushed down the drain because you failed to convert your customers when they came to your website.

So in this piece, we’ll discuss how to plug those leaks and funnel more casuals to customers.

1. Content A/B Testing

Marketing guru and founder of my favorite ad agency, the legendary Ogilvy & Mather, David Ogilvy stated “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

David didn’t mess around with this principle and delivered results.

Ogilvy, was the man responsible for the now immortalized header, “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

After the ad went out, year on year sales for the Rolls Royce, a car that cost the 2017 equivalent of $125,000 increased FIFTY PERCENT.

His words ring especially true in the world of websites, if you don’t sell to your cold customers in the first eight words, you won’t sell to them at all. Companies A/B test for everything, call-to-action-buttons, URL’s, promotions and images, but consistently underrate content and content placement tests.

A certain portion of this comes from fears of SEO implications, that infringing on Guidelines can get your site demoted or removed from Google search results — probably not the desired outcome of your test. Just as luck would have it, Google understands these qualms, and in a blog post titled “Website testing & Google search”, it outlines some helpful tips and tricks.

Use 302s, not 301s.

Only run the experiment as long as necessary.

No cloaking.

2. Funnel Them In

Remember the last time you were in a store, browsing for something you wanted when a salesman walked up to your face and tried to sell you twenty other things you didn’t come for? Yeah, you avoided that store the next six times around just so you wouldn’t have to interact with him.

Customers feel the same way on a digital front. The worst offenders of this rule are online publishers and blogs, who pop a full-screen long-term-commitment newsletter prompts three seconds into an article. Visitors to a website come to look at your product, and not necessarily buy it that very second. Trying to strongarm them with an offer often dissuades them and in particularly severe cases, sends them to your competitors.

Don’t simply try to shove more people through the funnel, expand the funnel

Alternatively, think of what would happen if you walked in that same store, and after you browsed through their catalogs, a salesman very kindly asked you if you needed help. After he answered your questions, he gave you a competitive analysis of the product and then proceeded to assist you with the payment once you came to a decision.

It’s a natural tendency for us to want our customers to get from Point A to Point Payment as fast as possible, but far too often that is a counterproductive endeavor. Encourage your customers to spend more time on your website, preemptively answer their questions and don’t make them have to go to your competitors’ pages to understand what you offer that they don’t.

Suggested Reading: Sales Funnel Templates

3. Proof is In the Pudding

Again and again and again and once after that, research has told us that Word-Of-Mouth is the best marketing your business can get. Getting people to talk about your business to their friends and family though tends to be the difficult bit, which is why big companies spend money on advertisements that don’t explicitly talk about their product (Coca-Cola).

If you’ve got it, flaunt it.Companies underutilize the power of their existing customers.

Offer testimonials, case studies, use cases, customer reviews, current customer count, citations, articles in well-known publications, source material; all serve as acceptable client-side simulations to word of the mouth marketing.

Brownie points for video evidence with subtitles.

4. Simplicity

One of the gaps in communication between companies and customers stems from an assumption of knowledge on the part of the former. The vocabulary we use with our friends and family doesn’t cross over in companies interactions with clients. Single-word commands on FAQ pages like “download”, “log-in”, “click here” is how businesses suffer from social communication disorder and lose customers.

Simplicity is a skill unto itself. One of the simplest principles to remember while developing content for your site is ELI5, a popular subreddit that stands for ‘Explain Like I’m 5.’ The basic premise comes from a popular, albeit misattributed Einstein quote, “If you can’t explain it to a 5 five-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

The idea behind this logic is simple, you lose nothing by simplifying content, but you may lose customers if it’s too complex. In lieu of this, try not to use big words, drop the jargon, don’t make errors in punctuation and keep your sentences short.

And don’t try to stuff keywords into your website copy. You think it would be self-explanatory that a multi-billion dollar company with some of the most complex algorithms in the world knows when you’re trying to game the system. But I’ve seen so many sites that don’t even try to hide it. Cramming keywords into your copy and you’ll negatively impact the readability of your content, its conversion rate and how well it ranks in the SERPs.

5. Incentivize Your Offerings

The 2017 Nobel Prize for Economics went to a man called Richard Thaler for his work on Nudge Theory. This development probably doesn’t affect you, but you better bet your bottom bill that his work has. Nudge Theory is a field of behavioral economics which deals with how positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions influences individuals make decisions.

Take the following example, of how a single line of tape increased a store’s grocery sales by ONE HUNDRED AND TWO PERCENT.

A team at New Mexico State University sought to nudge customers who visited a supermarket to do something they wouldn’t usually do: Eat and buy healthier foods.

One of the researchers, Colin Payne puts it best: The more mindless you are when you shop, the more you are going to be poked and prodded to buy the manufacturer’s products. We’re trying to give consumers the same power the companies have.

The ‘nudge’ came in the form of a piece of duct tape stretched across the middle of shoppers’ grocery carts. Shoppers were shown a flyer that instructed them to put fruits & vegetables in front of the tape, and everything else behind the line. The result? You guessed it. A 102% increase in purchases of fruits & vegetables.

How’s that 0.6% boost in conversion looking now? 

People respond to incentives and you’ve seen websites trying to rope you in.

“Limited time offer. Sign up within the next five minutes and get 10% off”

“Want 10% off? Only when you enlist for our newsletter.”

“1+1 on all purchases.”

There are three primary incentive offerings, they’re distinguished based on discounts, time or quantity. One of the most efficient and commonly used examples of digital incentivization is free shipping. If your average cart purchase value is $80, run a campaign for free shipping on orders above $100 and watch business boom.

---

Summing it up

All of these methods take time and effort and depending on how you go about it, a buttload of money.

There is a way to effectively triple your conversion rate overnight, and it comes courtesy of advancements in Artificial Technology.

Want to know to triple your conversion rates for little to nothing?

Jump down this rabbit hole below