When conversion is an order, it is easy to determine its value. Whatever the price of the product is, then this is the value of the conversion. You can increase the number of purchases or the value of the product by optimising your website. But how will you be able to calculate the value of conversions which have no monetary value but rather something like leads, downloads, newsletter signups, phone calls etc? And how can you do Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) on websites which are not selling products but they still need contacts and leads?
There are many websites that don’t have any macro conversions (like placing an order) but only lots of micro conversions (like downloading a brochure, watching a video, request for follow up etc). These are often the websites which either sell very high priced items like properties, cars, yachts or sell consulting services. Since people generally don’t buy such items online, you won’t find a shopping cart on such websites.
If you have a website that resembles this you can still optimise your conversions, you just need to focus on different areas of your website and different conversions other than the usual final purchases and average order value.
If your website’s main goal is to gather new leads (subscriptions, request demos or callbacks, download brochures…) one of the best things you can to do is to improve your forms.
Forms optimisation can be very successful both in terms of user experience and conversion rate. Neater fields, more space, inline validation, mobile optimised forms, bigger Call to Actions (CTA), clarify the mandatory fields, test removing unnecessary information required, are many examples of what you can do to be able to increase form conversions.
Another goal may be to reduce the number of calls to the call centre and increase online interaction as the main form of contact. This will enable visitors to find solutions to problems and not have to be left waiting at the end of the telephone.
To do this you should look at improving your FAQ pages, make searches easier for the customer, highlight the most viewed topics, reduce the visibility of the main telephone number whilst at the same time helping customers to find their answers more efficiently. All this will have a major impact on the cost of servicing your client base, which in-turn will increase profitability.
Another good way to increase leads on this type of website is to optimise content. Enable visitors to access the content they want more accessible and quicker by improving navigation and highlighting the main CTA’s in every page you have on your website.
Often visitors don’t always find what they want so a good exit intent strategy promoting popular content or signing up for newsletters and contact requests can also be very successful and very easy to implement.
Landing pages can also be a very important area of your website which can be optimised. Users land on these pages coming from either search engines or other marketing campaigns and therefore you need to make the most of them and stimulate conversions. If, after some optimisation your landing page works better you will also be able to easily associate a monetary value to the optimisation work you’ve done, increasing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, aggrevates people more than not getting what is promised. When drafting your ad and landing page, pay close attention to the message you’re giving out — the keywords or the banner and the content of the page should be consistent across ad and landing page.
You should also up your game and give users something that matches their requirements. What you should offer is your Unique Selling Proposition, it defines the reason why your landing page even exists. If you stay focused on the USP’s promised in your ad, visitors will eventually move further down the conversion funnel.
One of the most essential elements of a landing page is the CTA, it offers the visitor the ability to engage further and potentially helps close the deal. Your campaign message within the landing page will have guided them towards the button, make sure your CTA is compelling and give them a reason to click.
As far a landing pages are concerned, create an uncluttered and easy-to-understand page, with clear USPs and CTAs, make sure you test many variations and see which one will deliver and provide an increase in leads.
Forget “I don’t have an e-commerce website so I don’t need Conversion Rate Optimisation” and start to optimise to realise the full potential within your website now!
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