Conversion Rate Optimization 101 for Tech Websites
Article Summary
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is pivotal for tech websites, ensuring that brand awareness and lead generation campaigns translate into tangible actions and revenue. The article by ActualTech Media underscores the essence of CRO, which involves tweaking a website to prompt visitors to undertake specific actions. By mapping the customer's journey, businesses can discern which pages and content types warrant optimization focus. Landing pages, with an average conversion rate of 23%, are instrumental in offering a tailored experience for visitors. Emotional appeal in content, backed by genuine intent, can resonate with customers, driving them towards desired actions. Streamlining the conversion process, such as swift response times, can significantly enhance lead conversion rates. A/B testing, employed by 77% of businesses, allows for experimentation with different content formats to discern the most effective ones. In essence, CRO is about understanding, engaging, and guiding the customer seamlessly towards conversion.
A successful B2B lead generation or brand awareness campaign loses its value if none of those prospects purchase from you. You need conversions to turn into interest and awareness into action. That action will generate revenue that offsets your marketing and sales costs and grows your business. Conversion rate optimization is a vital strategy to add to your toolset alongside your other marketing and sales processes.
Learn the benefits of conversion rate optimization and how to create an optimization strategy for tech companies.
Key Takeaways:
- Conversion rate optimization is adjusting your website so that it encourages your traffic to take a specific action
- Map your customer’s journey to understand what pages and content to focus your optimization strategies on
- Your landing pages are the most important part of your optimization strategy and have the highest conversion rates
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What Is Your Website’s Conversion Rate and How Do You Optimize It?
Your conversion rate is the percentage of prospects that perform your target action. For example, if you have 1,000 visitors to your product page, and 20 of those visitors purchased a product, your conversion rate would be 2%. The average conversion rate for online shoppers fluctuates between 2% and 3% across all industries.
Other examples of conversions include:
- Percentage of leads that purchase a product
- The number of visitors that sign up for your free trial
- The number of readers that download a digital asset
When you optimize your conversion rate, you adjust your marketing and sales content to increase the number of conversions. Your content becomes conversion copy when it makes your target action more appealing, removes any hindrances, and creates a more straightforward process. This is called conversion rate optimization (CRO).
CRO vs. SEO: What’s the Difference?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a well-known strategy for optimizing web content because marketers like to focus on targeting and attracting traffic.
However, SEO relies on conversion rate formula (CRO) to complete the sales cycle. Without optimizing for conversion and bringing in traffic, your traffic will bounce, and you won’t generate leads or make sales. Often, they complement each other.
For example, you might optimize your sales page by targeting keywords with a high buyer’s intent or desire to buy. This combined effort helps you bring in traffic and convert those visitors all in one strategy.
5 Tips for Optimizing Your Website for Conversion
Use these five strategies to optimize your conversion rate and increase your company’s revenue.
1. Understand Your Customer’s Journey
The customer journey is the steps your customers take from their first touchpoint until they purchase from your company and become loyal customers. When you track your customers, both those that buy from you and leads that don’t, you’ll find the data you need for optimizing your website.
Your customer journey map will tell you what pages your traffic spends the most time on and where they usually stop before purchasing. In addition, you can see what types of content they interact with and what formats encourage customers to click the action button.
For example, you can see how many customers responded to call-to-actions in your blog content versus buy buttons in your sidebar.
Once you have this data, you can simplify the conversion process by adding strategic links on pages that most often lead to conversions, and you can adjust low-conversion pages to be more appealing.
2. Create Unique Landing Pages
Landing pages are one of your most valuable conversion strategies, with an average conversion rate of 23%. You can provide a customized and unique experience for every visitor by building different landing pages for specific campaigns, occasions, or products.
For example, if someone searched your product with the phrase “price” or “buy now,” this might trigger a chain reaction that shows your conversion landing page in the search results rather than your website. This landing page would take the buyer directly to the product they searched for and eliminate any distractions like top bars or other links for them to click.
The following landing page from Later is an excellent example of keeping your customized landing pages simple and laser-focused on one action. In this case, the page is optimized for converting visitors into leads when they start the free trial.
Image from Later
3. Appeal to Customer Emotions
Whether you’re marketing to a customer or a decision maker, they’re both humans and react to emotional content. However, emotional content shouldn’t be shallow emotion just to get a response. Instead, it should be emotion with a purpose.
Some examples of phrases that can trigger an emotional response include:
- “Limited time deal”
- “Hurry, this won’t last long”
- “You deserve XYZ”
More subtle emotion pulls include listing your current clients, offering limited deals and coupons, or adding a countdown timer on your page.
You can incorporate emotion into your content by sharing testimonials, case studies, or brand storytelling. However, if you want that content to become conversion copy, focus on an action and add a clear call-to-action or pop-up that makes your conversion activity accessible and easy.
4. Streamline the Conversion Process
Sometimes you lose leads, not because of a lack of interest, but because your conversion processes weren’t streamlined. Automating the conversion process will increase your response time and decrease the number of lost leads.
If you can respond to a lead within 30 minutes, you’re 21 times more likely to qualify the lead and will convert the lead 391% faster. Some ways you can optimize your website to improve your response time include:
- Have a chatbot reach out to visitors who are on high-conversion pages
- Automatically send a sequence of conversion-optimized emails when a consumer fills out a website form
- Score leads that interact with high conversion pages higher than other leads to qualify and move them from marketing to sales faster
5. Perform A/B Testing
About 77% of businesses use A/B testing for their websites. When you perform A/B testing, you can try different formats for your website content to see how it changes consumer behavior. For example, the headline on a website page can change your traffic by 500%.
To A/B test for conversion optimization, start by creating your page. Then adjust one element at a time to see which formats work best for converting your traffic. For example, you can change your conversion button’s size, color, and location to find the perfect balance between standing out without looking so pushy that it turns your readers off.
Learn About Our Conversion Rate Optimization Services
Create content that converts using ActualTech Media’s content creation services. Our unique designs and formats help you optimize your content to increase conversions.
Contact us to learn more about our conversion rate optimization content services.