According to Hubspot, only around 22 percent of businesses are comfortable with their website design conversion optimization. In a changing interconnected digital world, websites have no choice but represent and showcase a business or company effectively. The website is the first contact potential buyers make with a seller and the quality of web design does have an influence on their perception of a company or business. This is where website design conversion optimization comes in.
So what exactly is website design conversion optimization?
It refers to the mechanism of attracting visitors to websites and persuading them to complete the desired action on a specific page on the site, such as purchasing a product or filling email opt-ins. In basic terms, it draws down to ascertain what you would like visitors to carry out, monitoring them consciously to ensure they’re doing it, ascertaining whether the action is being carried out smoothly or not and effecting changes throughout to improve their experience.
Why is it important?
Every website is out to compete with others and effectively cut a niche for itself. A website that can convert is thus a huge necessity. A converting website has a superb user experience amidst being an effective lead generation tool. Website design conversion optimization ensures your website leads and guides visitors to what they came for.
It also goes a step further and collects as much information as possible from users, which you can use in future to improve your marketing strategies to continually convert visitors into customers every time.
Web design conversion is intelligent and helps your business to establish a clear position. It also means that content is created and shared with a view to establish and maintain relationships.
The interest of visitors is captured easily that even their names and other details are remembered. Conversion rate optimization also ensure the interaction or ‘romance’ between the website and visitors is maintained and fueled.
Intelligent website conversion optimization also ensures that setting goals, tracking diverse metrics, analyzing such data and tweaking it according to your needs and preferences is effectively done.
Is web design for conversion rate important?
Website design best practices require design to be done precisely, attentively and intelligently paying close attention to the designing process and overall site development. This is due to the effect of design on the conversion of visitors into purchasers or customers as a result of the strong impact made by graphics, color, layout, user experience, images, and contrast, among others. For a website to be considered successful and perfectly optimized to offer the most effective experience to visitors it must go beyond appearances and visual appeal.
Design helps conversion rate in a number of ways:
- Makes website accessible and usable: A well-designed website has a wonderful usability factor, which means users find it intuitive and user-friendly. It means the webpages load faster and products or content are provided in an easy to follow in order to save visitors from wasting too much time trying to acquire what they came for. Design also guarantees readability by making sure the content is informative, highly legible and clearly understandable.
- Design guarantees pleasant aesthetics. Every website wants visitors to stay a while longer and complete certain actions like purchasing a product. The arrival to the site, remaining in the site and leaving can be influenced by how the site looks and makes the visitors feel. Design ensures that contrast, colors, images, among others are effectively used to create an aesthetically satisfying website. Design guarantees that directional cues are used, encapsulation is perfected by capturing the perception of the visitor and directing them to what you want them to behold, successful and balanced use of colors and contrasts, white spaces and copy design and proper placement of the call to action.
- Enhances communication. To enhance conversion rate the website needs to be interactive with functional webpages. The design must be communication-centric attracting visitors to engage in conversation to allow consumers to take certain actions and provide opinion where necessary. The design nudges visitors and consumers compelling them to click certain links and buttons that really make all the difference. This is achieved by using large font types and sizes as well as headings that are focused and clearly bold. Design also ensures the pages aren’t cluttered but clean to allow users to see what matters, such as terms like ‘click’, ‘search’ or buttons like ‘buy’ or ‘subscribe’ in the process maintaining the conversation. Social sharing and navigation buttons, form signups, among others are also placed in a way that users naturally click on them for communication and sharing purposes.
Why would visitors leave your website?
Even with a professional looking website, compelling content, polished products and streaming visitors to your site it’s possible that they leave almost immediately and conversion is very little if any.
The reason visitors are leaving could be due to:
- An outdated web design
- Difficult copy to read due to bad font type and font size
- Relying on outdated and unintuitive plugins
- Overwhelming adverts
- Auto-playing videos on the website
- Poorly laid and unhelpful navigation structure
- Obtrusive registration details and requirements
- Lack of site/brand personality
- The website takes a lot of time to load
- Unappealing offers that visitors aren’t interested in or connected with
- Selling/marketing product features rather than product benefits
- Unclear or lacking call-to-action features
- The website has been hacked unobtrusively
- Unresponsive website to mobile gadgets
- Lack of exit intent responsive technology to capture visitors before they leave
Are your website conversion goals well-conceived?
In most conversion tools it’s possible to track different kinds of conversions and understand where your visitors are spending their time and whether your conversion goals are well contrived. Nonetheless, if your website conversion goals aren’t well spelled out you could be losing more than you can see.
Not every action in a website is equal to another. Some actions or goals are micro while others are macro (or simply subset goals or actions that might not be as important as others in a marketing campaign while others are critical). For instance, you might consider watching videos, subscribing, filling out forms or purchases more important than the others. This is exactly what clearly thought out and working conversion goals are all about. In the process you end up with actions you consider as conversion, such as a purchase or watching a video.
The ultimate reason of running a business site or any website out there is to reap from conversions and optimize them accordingly. If you don’t set up your goals properly and conceive them clearly you could be leaking visitors streaming into your site from all over.
Even for business or e-commerce sites, the primary goal of conversion might not be sales only. Whatever the conversion goal is and to effectively accomplish the main goal it’s possible you need to come up with smaller, easy to manage and clear conversion goals to nurture a relationship and build trust with visitors first.
Have you considered your site’s user experience?
User experience refers to how individuals feel after interacting with your site or other things like softwareor apps. It indicates the consumer’s behavioral displays while interacting with what your website offers and highly influenced by diverse factors such as website design.
Of course you would like visitors to convert but the experience must be splendid enough to satisfy their needs first. User experience is critical as it aims at providing positive experiences to ensure users remain loyal to your site, brand or product. For site owners, it ensures that the consumer journeys, for instance, are well defined on the website and helpful in converting visitors to buyers, subscribers etc., ultimately leading to success.
Tips for website conversion optimization
You cannot risk getting website conversion optimization wrong and see your investment ruined.
To effectively optimize for conversion:
- Use effective analytic tools for websites to study and understand performance insights to comprehend how visitors are responding to your website and optimize accordingly
- Analyze the behavior of your website visitors through behavioral analysis tools from form analyzers, scroll maps to heat maps among others to know where exactly your visitors are losing their interest
- Include real-time surveys on your site to receive a highly actionable and reliable response from real website users and get qualitative and quantitative feedback
- Personalize your website by focusing on a particular type of visitor niche such as women, teens, professionals, marketers, etc.
- Track every conversion goal to improve macro conversions such as purchases without forgetting micro-conversions such as downloading eBooks that can be optimized further to improve macro/main conversion goals
- Include video marketing to succinctly convince visitors better and enhance your conversions, considering most people consider video clips to long reads and unappealing text
Website design conversion tools
At times it’s hard to optimize your website well and boost conversion rate because you have no data or actionable analytics showing you where you’re losing it. The following seven tools can help you understand your visitors, how they interact with your website, where and why you’re failing in conversion, where to begin with optimization, among others.
- Google Analytics: A tool from Google that efficiently reports and tracks site traffic. Within a few hours of adding a tracking code on a website page, the data starts streaming in fast.
- HubSpot: Allows you to measure how the whole marketing funnel you’ve initiated is performing with reports and conversion analytics. Efficient dashboards allow you to interact with useful data on traffic quality and quantity while measuring webpage performance to identify sources of traffic.
- ActiverCampaign: Allows you to automate most of your marketing and sales processes, build contacts and send well contrived targeted marketing campaigns.
- VWO: An effective platform with lots of website design conversion optimization tools that allow you to craft an optimization roadmap, carry out research on visitors and experiment continuously.
- Hotjar: Allows you to understand view how visitors are interacting with your site and using it. Includes visitor recordings, form analytics, heat maps, feedback surveys and polls, conversion funnels, among others in a single system.
- Optimizely: Platform offering A/B testing tools to help web users compare webpages performance and deliver continuous personalization and experimentation driving up digital products value.
- Tutorialize: To ensure your services or products are clear to visitors, the tool allows you to come up with personalized videos and share them on your website to help users engage with your services or products better and effectively.
Website design conversion optimization is very critical to the overall success of your website and must be done accordingly. It’s very hard to optimize a site and boost conversion rate without really understanding it.
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