Conversion Rate Optimization, Or, Making It Easier For People To Give You Money

In general, digital advertising is only as good as the website it’s sending traffic to. I often see digital marketers spend lots of time and energy making their campaigns as good as they can be. This is good and worth doing, but very frequently, that same time and effort could have reaped more of a return if it had been invested in making the website more likely to convert the traffic it was already getting. 

What is the desired ‘conversion’ action you want someone to take after landing on a given website? Each website typically has more than one way in which someone can convert. Each of those conversions probably has multiple conversion pathways. What can you do to make those pathways easier to traverse? 

Our example website is looking to sell something online and in stores. People can order online or over the phone or by going to one of their physical locations, so we’ll tackle those one at a time. What can you do to decrease friction for each of these scenarios?

Ordering online

Find a product and go through the steps to purchase it. How seamless is it? What are the pain points? A common complaint is requiring an account in order to buy something. Of course there are scenarios where requiring an account makes sense, but much of the time it introduces unnecessary friction into the process.

For lead generation forms, there’s often an instinct to get as much information as possible from the user. And I’m sure every salesperson would love to have every CRM field filled up before they contact that lead. Unfortunately, every additional field in a form decreases the likelihood of that form getting submitted. I normally encourage my clients to identify opportunities to cut down on the fields in their forms. For example, if a form asks for city, state and ZIP code, why not just consolidate those into ZIP code? Of course, if a precise street address is truly required, then this doesn’t make sense. But generally, the street address is not required, and the city, state and ZIP are used to get an approximation of where the lead is for shipping purposes or whatever. But surely it’s easy enough to reverse-engineer city and state from a ZIP code, right? Filling in the city and state fields doesn’t take that long, but it’s a non-zero amount of work. Digital marketing is a numbers game, and there are some people that just won’t fill in that information, and will abandon your site for lower-friction pastures. Consolidating those fields from three to one only eliminates a bit of friction...but that is multiplied across every person that comes to your site, and it adds up fast. 

Think back to the opposite of ‘death by a thousand cuts’. What other improvements can you make to a website? They don’t have to be huge, revolutionary overhauls. Every little bit helps. Of course, you have to weigh the gain against the amount of time that’s going into it.

Ordering over the phone

This may seem like a no-brainer, but make that phone number clickable. Put it where it belongs: at one of the uppermost corners of the site. Consider making it stand out with a larger font than its neighboring text. If your website call tracking isn’t up to snuff, then you won’t even have the data you need to optimize this.

Going to a physical location

Let’s say there are a few stores, each with its own listed address and phone number. What can you do to make it easier for people to find the store nearest to them and go there?

Get Help

Those of us that regularly visit a given website are the worst people to evaluate its ease of use, because we’re used to using it. So, find some help. Volunteer labor is probably best, but unwitting help will almost certainly provide a more honest, knee-jerk reaction. You can conscript people to this cause by showing them the website and asking them to accomplish something. Watch them navigate the site, and try to identify stumbling blocks in real time.