No matter what your goal is for your website, conversion rate optimization is a key component to its success. Knowing how much traffic you’re getting isn’t enough. You need to know the percentage of your visitors who take the action that you want (completing a sale or filling out a contact form, for example), and then you must look for ways to improve that percentage.
In the quest to get more traffic, site owners often overlook conversions, with an average of $92 spent on traffic for every $1 spent on conversions. Those site owners are missing out on an excellent opportunity to make more money, because conversion rate optimization tools have a typical return on investment (ROI) of 223 percent.
If you’re a conversion-minded site owner, here are three trends to prepare for that you probably didn’t see coming.
- Category Navigation on Mobile Site Homepages
Most mobile e-commerce sites will include categories either in the header area or in a menu that the user can open, but another convenient navigational option is category links right on the homepage of the mobile site. These can be easier for the user to tap and give them the opportunity to start shopping for what they want immediately.
Category navigation is growing in popularity, to the point where it has become a best practice, according to annual e-commerce research conducted by Inflow. Even if your desktop site doesn’t have categories on the home page, it’s perfectly fine to have a different layout for your mobile site.
- Personalization Improves Conversion Rates
Tracking cookies and other personalization tactics have been a valuable tool in the e-commerce world for some time. Although these may have seemed a bit creepy at first, they’re now commonplace and can help your conversion rate.
There are several different personalization tactics that work well and are simple enough to set up. One option is a greeting based on how the visitor reached your website.
For example, let’s say the user searches for office chairs. Your site carries office chairs and you’re running pay-per-click (PPC) ads for the keyword the user entered. When they click your link, they’re taken to a page with a greeting saying “Looking for office chairs? You’re in the right place. Check out our selection below.” This quick message makes the visitor more likely to stay on your site and see what you have to offer.
- Customized Call-to-Action (CTA)
CTAs are criminally underutilized, as 70 percent of small businesses don’t even have one on their home pages. A CTA is the perfect way to show visitor exactly what action you want them to take on your site, and if you’re not using one, your conversion rate will suffer. Just having a CTA isn’t sufficient, though, because it also needs to fit your site so that it brings the best results.
Bradley Shaw of Dallas Website Design offers this advice, “Once you’ve put a CTA on your site, run A/B tests with it to see what makes it most effective. You can try using different colors, placing it in different areas of the page and writing different messages on it to see how they compare in terms of conversion rates.”
Conversion rate optimization is gaining in popularity, and it needs to be part of your strategy to keep your site competitive. By staying ahead of the latest trends, you can convert more visitors into taking the action that you want.