9 Strategic Steps To Increase Conversions
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Understand Your Conversion Funnel
Conversion Funnel: The journey a customer takes from an Internet advertisement or search engine, to a website and then finally to a sale.
Map out your conversion funnel and analyze the parts that are performing the best and worst.
Digitalmarketer.com breaks down conversions into 3 funnel categories:
- Acquisition: Designed to acquire new customers.
- Activation: Designed to turn inactive buyers into active buyers.
- Monetization: Designed to generate revenue from active buyers.
Build one funnel that needs the most improvement.
Let’s say you’re looking to turn large chunks of leads into buyers, you will want to focus on the activation funnel.
Digitalmarketer.com uses a Flash Sale funnel example of a type of activation funnel.
Think of a Flash Sale Tunnel like Groupon or Black Friday Sale, you want to “offer as much value as you can at the lowest price you can stomach.”
A Flash Sale activates two conversion triggers for customers:
- A short amount of time: “This is for a limited time only, I should probably buy this service now”
- A deep discount: “This is the best deal of the year, I should probably take advantage of it”
Click here for more funnel examples.
2. Understand Your Visitors
Try to understand who your customers are, how they make purchasing decisions, and why they make purchasing decisions.
Research 3 core areas:
1. What different types of customer are visiting your website?
i7 Marketing identifies 4 customer personality types:
- Thinkers: Organized and conservative, this personality type doesn’t make impulsive buying decisions. You’ll have to sell them the true benefits of your service and entice them with a free trial.
- Drivers: Busybodies who want to get to the point quickly. This personality will make a buying decision based on trust, logic, and reality. You’ll have to make a strong first impression.
- Expressives: The creative, dreamy, and expressive type who will buy based on their intuition and heart. You’ll have to dazzle them with an eccentric presentation and get them to dream about the possibilities of using your service.
- Feelers: Friendly and compassionate personality types who need support from others to make a decision. You’ll have to capture them with empathy and “rock-solid guarantees.”
How to identify your customers personalities?
- Data research: Firms like Caliber Mind analyzes human language to build detailed profiles of your customer.
- Personality Tests: Conduct a personality test with your active customers.
2. Identify what user experience (UX) problems your visitors are experiencing.
According to Conversion XL, 74% of customers get frustrated when irrelevant information is displayed on a website.
Themediaflow.com identifies 2 UX errors:
- Interface: When the booking system is confusing for viewers to use.
- Understanding: When a visitor doesn’t understand parts of your website.
Using Rezgo’s user-friendly booking software will help eliminate these UX errors.
3. Research and identify your visitors objectives.
In order to create a website that gives your visitors everything they are looking for, you have to understand their objectives.
Are they visiting the website to:
- Find out information?
- Book a Tour?
- Read your blog ?
- Research their next trip?
For example, if you determine that people mostly visit your site to book a tour or activity then you’ll want to make all the information to do so very clear. Make the process of booking simple and straightforward.
3. Understand Your Market
A classic SWOT analysis will do the trick.
Strengths: Understand what your business does well and build on it.
- Understand your assets: What will your customers value most about my tour or activity business?
- Present your assets: What is the best way to display my assets to customers? How can I use my assets to persuade them to use my service?
Weaknesses: Understand where your business needs to improve and fix it.
Use the Social Media Examiner’s 6 Social Media Monitoring Tools to keep track of what customers are saying about your tour or activity business.
Answer their questions, comments and concerns – not only will this help with your customer relationships, but will also help improve your business to better suit your customers.
Opportunities: Know what opportunities are present within your market and make a plan to take advantage of them.
How to find opportunities within your industry:
- Follow industry experts
- Study economic, market and political trends
- Look for changes in government regulations
- Analyze if your customer market has expanded, aged, or shifted.
Threats: Understand your competitors and outshine them.
By understanding your threats and where they come from you give yourself the opportunity to minimize them.
How to find threats in your industry:
- Follow your competitors closely
- Study economic, market and political trends
- Study government regulations
4. Choose Your Strategy
From your research, pull out the biggest, boldest ideas that will grow your business in the shortest amount of time – bzog bold moves are the most likely to increase conversions.
5. Implement Your Strategy
Create a “tester” website that has the new strategy updates.
The new web page should more persuasive, easier to use and more convincing than the first.
6. Test Your Strategy
Determine if your strategy actually increased your conversions.
Try A/B testing (split-testing): A test where you present two variants of a webpage to the same number of customers – the web page that generates more conversions wins the test.
Vwo.com wrote a complete guide to A/B testing for more details.
7. Replicate Your Winning Strategies
Once you’ve successfully implemented your strategy, take a step back and see what else needs to improve and how you can apply your previous strategy to the new problem.
The more successful strategies you implement and replicate, the better you will become at increasing conversions. Each previous strategy builds upon the next.
Want to increase your conversions right now? Try out these 4 tips.
4 Tips That You Can Apply Right Now To Increase Your Conversions
1. A Clear Path to Booking
A clear path to booking will increase conversions because:
- Users won’t be frustrated and abandon the booking process early
- Users will likely use your website for future bookings
- Users will spread the word about your simple and easy-to-use booking process
Rezgo is a booking software that is simple, elegant, and specifically designed to increase your booking conversions.
- User-friendly software: Your online booking engine has been user tested and optimized to make it the best possible booking experience on the market.
- Total flexible and responsive design: The responsive design of your booking engine means your customers will have a beautiful shopping experience no matter what device they use.
- Fluid website and mobile booking: Customers can easily book when using their desktop computer, tablet, or mobile phone
2. Call to Action (CTA)
Calls to Action or CTAs are when you call your website visitor to perform an action.
The idea is that the CTA sparks a sense of urgency or “fear of missing out” in the site visitor.
Your CTA buttons should:
- Serve different purposes
- Be placed strategically throughout your website
- Be coloured to stand out
Types of CTAs:
- The “just looking” visitor: This type of site visitor is just browsing your website to see what you’re all about. A CTA should call for them to learn more information about your services, each service or feature should have a different button.
- The “I’m not convinced” customer: This type of site visitor wants more information before making a purchasing decision. A CTA should direct them to your FAQ page, contact information photo gallery or review/testimonial page of your website.
- The “I’m ready to book” customer: This type of visitor wants to begin the booking process. Your CTA button should stand out and read “Book Now.”
3. Forms
Have you ever looked at a long form and thought to yourself “No way am I filling this out”. Short, relevant forms will increase your chances of conversions.
Features of a well designed form:
- Three Fields: According to unbounce, forms will 3 fields or less have the highest conversion rate at 25%.
- Concise: Only necessary information should be included on your form. According to unbounce, asking for a telephone number reduces conversion by 5%.
- Relevant CTAs: The default button “submit” is intimidating. According to unbounce, the CTA that performs the best at a 30% conversion rate is “Click here.”
However, you should be testing your forms to see which ones perform the best. Different features work for different types of customers.
Types of Forms:
- Enquiry: This form should be short only and only require the site visitors to fill out their contact information.
- Booking: This form should be longer but still only include relevant information. You’ll want to ask questions that will ensure the site visitor has the best experience on their tour or activity. For example, asking for dietary requirements or preferred mode of transportation are relevant questions to ask.
Click here for VWO’s “8 Indisputable Ways to Increase Web Form Conversions”
4. Social Proof
Instill confidence in your website visitors by providing social proof.
Social proof examples:
- Awards
- Customer testimonials and reviews
- Tripadvisor badges
- Number of Facebook likes and shares
- Photos and videos
- Secure payment badges
To encourage likes shares, and reviews use:
- Twitter Stream: This plugin shows your Twitter timeline right on your website.
- The Facebook Like and Share box: This can be installed right into your website so that visitors can like or share your website easily.
Make sure you manage and answer your comment and testimonials sections to show that you care about your customers.
Written By | Rezgo
