You’ve most likely spent a lot of time getting traffic to your website. This is the first step towards online success, but unfortunately it doesn’t stop there. Of course, you want every visitor to your website to ultimately convert. Whether this is a physical purchase, a contact moment or any other conversion.
We hope to make your website (even) better through the tips below. With these tips you ensure that the visitors who end up on your website find what they are looking for and also convert. Some may be obvious, but others may be new to you. Hopefully you will find in this article a number of things that you can apply to get more conversions from your visitors.
Technique
This is a broad concept, but we will limit ourselves to a number of the most important issues.
Let’s start with the design, apart from making the site look neat and good, make sure this is the case on as many devices as possible. A responsive design, the site must be neat and above all function well on desktop, tablet and smartphone.
Unfortunately, it still happens a lot that a site works fine on desktop, but as soon as you try to view the site on a smartphone. Then suddenly the site falls apart and no longer functions as it should. Unfortunately, this is the #1 reason visitors navigate to another site. And if you consider that approximately 50% of online traffic takes place on mobile… It is really important to pay attention to this.
In addition, with an unparalleled online offering, visitors unfortunately really have the patience of a “peanut”. Try to ensure that the website is fast, in general visitors expect a page to load within 2 seconds. If this is not the case, there is a real chance that the visitor will look further at a competitor.
There are a lot of (free) online tools to measure the speed of your website. Usually provided with points for improvement. This can be in various areas, such as server response time, (too) large images, but also user-friendliness.
Images
Using images is the fastest way to convey information. An image says more than a piece of text, that is common knowledge. But there are a number of things that are important.
Make sure you have beautiful images, the images must be sharp and preferably fit within your website in terms of style. Make sure that the images are optimized for use on the web.
Of course a professional image of 10MB is beautiful in quality, but this is far too large to place on a web page. This would have a major impact on the loading speed of the website. And as you have read above, that is an important point. There are many tools you can use to optimize your photos. This keeps the photos more than beautiful enough for the website, but does not slow down the website more than necessary.
Try to minimize the use of stock photos or, if possible, don’t use them at all. If you want to use photos with people in them, use photos of your own employees or of yourself, of course. This makes the site personal, but also more credible. Because honestly, a photo of a beautiful and perfect office with only exaggeratedly smiling people… That is not really reality and if you know that, your visitor knows that too.
Use your call to actions on your website and you can ensure that the photo you use is looking in a direction where your call to action is also positioned. That would be absolutely great. It has been shown that using these types of photos increases conversion. The visitor looks unnoticed in the direction the people in the photo are looking.
Call to action
We already talked about it in the earlier tip, the call to action. These can be buttons, links or your telephone number or email address, etc. etc. These call to actions are pretty much the most important thing on your website. These ensure that visitors do what you brought them to your website for. Buying your product or contacting your company. Because they are so important, it is good to know what you should or should not do here.
The do’s and don’ts
- Describe what will happen in the call to action. So don’t put text like “click here”, but put here what the button will do. For example, “Go to our contact form” or “download more information here”.
- Also try to write in the first person as much as possible. So not “Register” but “Register me”.
- When a visitor comes to a page, make sure that the call to action is immediately visible. It has been shown that the most viewed part of a page is above the fold line (anything that is immediately visible without having to scroll). Assuming that the page requires scrolling, place the call to action at the very bottom. Someone who has read the entire page was certainly interested and so it is important to show this call to action there again.
- The use of color in call to actions is also important. In general, a complementary color to the corporate identity works best. So these are colors that are exactly opposite. If your website is purple, use a yellow button, if your site is blue, use orange buttons.
- Limit the use of call to actions to a minimum. Preferably even just 1 per page. That is not always possible, but try to deviate from the primary call to action for a secondary call to action.
Content
You must have tried very hard to write good texts. There is a pitfall here. Make sure your texts are not long blocks of text. Cut them up into paragraphs and use headings and images. This makes your text a lot easier to read.
In addition, visitors do not read but scan. When you use headings to indicate what the text is about. This easily allows the visitor to go once to the parts that they find important.
Landing pages are also good opportunities to attract visitors and provide more information about your products or services. Try to take the above tips into account here too. This also increases your reach online and your findability. So win-win.
Navigation
A navigation must be very clear, compare it with car navigation. It must be very clear where you want to go and how you get there. It is therefore preferable not to use drop-down menus with dropdowns. Check whether it is possible to show the subcategories on the category page. Yes, it is one click more, but that pays off in the ease of use.
Also use breadcrumbs, this gives a very clear picture of where the visitor is at that moment and also makes it easy to go back one level in the navigation.
Try not to let the number of menu items exceed 7. Our memory can handle more than 7 less well and you therefore lose attention. Plus, this helps you easily pick out and remember the most important items. Use a secondary menu if you want to show more items. This also helps to have clear navigation and gives you the opportunity to show more information.
Try to limit the amount of information you post to what is necessary. This way you prevent an overkill of information that is no longer stored.
Search
This function is most likely one of the most used functionalities in a website. But it is also number 1 in terms of irritation if it does not function properly. Apart from the fact that it is recommended to have a search function, it is also very important that it functions properly. So check carefully whether this is the case.
Even though the search function works well, the visitor may still not find what he is looking for. Think carefully about the results page especially if nothing can be found. For example, offer a number of options here. Under the guise, “maybe this is what you were looking for”. And offers a number of results that often prove to be relevant.
Contactform
This is a commonly used way for visitors to get in touch with you. There are also some different things that are important to take into account. One of the most important is to show as few fields as possible. The more visitors have to complete, the greater the chance that they will choose not to complete the form.
Also try to avoid showing complicated recaptcha options. You know them, enter the letters in the field opposite and then there will be letters that are actually difficult to read. But here are more options that prove too complicated. It is best to use an invisible recaptcha. Based on the way you surf, this actually checks whether it is a (spam) bot or a real user.
Reviews
An important tool to persuade visitors to order from you or get in touch with you is to radiate trust. You can do this by posting testimonials, but visitors appear to be suspicious of this. This is because you, as the website administrator, can often place the testimonials yourself. “How real are they then?” A good alternative to this is to integrate reviews from external parties such as Google, Trustpilot, Customer Storytelling, etc. These are sometimes paid solutions, but they do create real trust.
If you have an online store and you sell physical products, product reviews can also work very well. Visitors can read from real users what they thought of a product. Apart from the fact that this increases the visitor’s confidence. You can also get another advantage from this. If a product is rated as bad, try to find out what you can do about it. So that customers will rate this product positively. Or maybe you even choose to remove the product from the collection.
Increase conversions
Save the best for last…
If you have been able to convince the visitor to convert, it is of course very nice if you can get as much out of this as possible. Increasing conversions is particularly interesting for web shops, but can of course also be applied to websites.
There are some pretty simple ways to increase conversions. Starting with offering discounts when ordering larger quantities. Visitors can be motivated to purchase more products if this means that the product becomes cheaper. This works very well, especially with consumables.
Free shipping above a certain amount often also works very well. For example, free shipping on orders over €50. Apart from the fact that this can simply be shown on pages, there are even tools that, for example, show in the shopping cart overview how much a visitor would have to spend to qualify for free shipping. This triggers visitors to look further within your range, or to order this product twice instead of once.
Another option is to follow up on abandoned shopping carts. If a visitor has left items in his shopping cart and has not placed an order. Then you can set up tools for this that send the visitor an email after a period of time to remind them of the filled shopping cart. You can then try to persuade them to complete the purchase. You could even link discounts or a free product to this.