You probably have many ideas on how to improve your website so that it generates more sales. But how do you know what will work best for converting more visitors into website sales?
Based on my 15 years experience optimizing conversion rates for hundreds of websites, here are 10 of the highest-impact CRO tasks that you should begin now to get the best results for increasing your online revenue.
1: Setup a short visitor survey to gain feedback
One of the best ways to improve conversion rates for any website is to discover what is causing your visitors to leave your website without purchasing, in particular their most common issues and problems.
Knowing this helps you understand what needs improving or explaining better to ensure they purchase more often, and forms high impact website improvement ideas.
To discover this setup a short visitor survey using Hotjar. It should popup after 2 mins on a product page, and include these essential questions:
- Do you have any doubts or hesitations about this website?
- Is anything missing or stopping you from purchasing?
Check out my detailed guide on the best user feedback questions.
To increase your response rate offer your visitors the chance to win a gift card if they take the survey. See image below for an offer that I found to work well for getting many useful responses.
2: Improve your shipping offers and promote them better
Shipping costs are one of the biggest influencers on checkout abandonment according to research, but many online businesses don’t take advantage of this. You not only need to ideally offer free shipping, but you need promote it clearly all your product pages right by the add-to-cart button so visitors can’t miss it. See image below for one of my clients who promote this well — Unboundmerino.com.
And remember that often Amazon will be one of your competitors and they offer free next delivery! To save on your shipping costs, you can always increase your prices slightly so that you can afford to offer free shipping.
3: Check if your website breaks on smaller devices
It’s important to always check your content on the most common desktop and mobile devices. But don’t forget about the smaller less common sizes.
Why? Because your website layout can often break on small devices like iPhone SE 2019 which only has a 320 width. Common things that break are overlapping or squashed content, CTAs and navigation elements you can’t click or use properly, or sticky content like live chat blocking key content.
Up to 5% of your visitors can be using these older smaller devices, meaning many lost sales if you don’t check and fix any issues. To check your website for potental issues you can use the mobile view in Chrome and at the top change the mobile size to be 320 width.
4: Add unique value proposition to the headlines in your ads
Optimizing your ads is an important part of increasing your website conversion rates, but you need to do more than getting the targeting right.
You really need to focus on adding your unique value proposition to your Google Ads and Facebook Ads headlines and copy, as these will get higher click rates and convert much better when they arrive on your website. Why? Because you need to make your ads stand out and explain why you are the best option for them, and why you are better than competitors.
Here is a good example of a client doing it well in their Facebook Ads:
5: Gain feedback from your customer support team
Ask your customer support team what the most common problems or issues they get regarding your website are.
Discovering this is often a real goldmine for great website improvement ideas and quick fixes, particularly for adding missing information that seems to be stopping visitors from purchasing.
If you have access to their live chat tool you can also do a more detailed analysis yourself by searching for words like ‘can’t find’, ‘issue’, ‘not working’, ‘problem’ or ‘confusing’ and see what issues you can discover.
6: Improve your filters on category and search results pages
Make it easier for visitors to find the product they want by improving your filters on category pages and search result pages. In particular make your filters sticky on mobile so they can’t miss them.
REI.com do this very well by offering filters by ‘best use’ to help give visitors a way of self-selecting what they need it for. They also offer a great option to search for brands which is particularly useful if you sell many brands.
7: Add UGC video content to your product pages and ads
Add user generated video content to your product pages and ads to help engage your visitors and convert them better. These work extremely well for showing your product in use and the benefits of them. Tools like Billo.app are ideal for helping you quickly create video UGC.
Here is an example of one of my clients that have created this UGC video content and used it well on their website.
8: Use proactive live chat popups to engage potential buyers
Start using proactive live chat popups after 90 seconds on a product pages to ask if visitors need any help. These convert much better than hoping they start a live chat or contact you to ask their question.
Another one of my clients does this well on their pricing page by popping up a live chat that asks if they have any questions.
9: Stop annoying visitors with entry popups
I’ve done 100’s of user tests and one of the most common things that I see that annoy users are showing newsletter or discount popups as soon as they arrive. This is a huge wasted opportunity because they will just close them. Instead you should wait at least a few minutes before popping up to get better signup rates.
10: Add more tool tips instead of relying on FAQs
Add contextual tool tips on product pages and forms to explain common questions visitors might have — don’t just rely on your visitors going to your FAQs page and hoping they find the answer. Many of them won’t do that and will just leave your website, meaning many lost sales for you.
This is very important to do if you are selling any product or service that isn’t easy to understand, and works particularly for explaining what to enter for potentially confusing form fields. One of my clients does this well by using ‘?’ tool tips that give helpful information — Filenow.com.
So go ahead and start these 10 CRO tasks, particularly the visitor survey and live chat analysis ones as these conversion research ones work particular well. All these tasks give you much better results for improving your website conversion rate and sales compared to guessing or listening to your HiPPO!
