How to Convert More Customers From Your Existing Website

Do you love being told that you’re doing things wrong? Probably not.

But, without a little constructive criticism, it can be hard to make forward progress—especially when it comes to optimizing your website.

Fortunately for you, though, we recently hosted a couple of brave volunteers on Disruptive’s “Quick Class” webinar series who were willing to let Chris Dayley, our VP of Conversion Rate Optimization, review their websites.

These sites cover two very different industries. One sells digital dictation products to large organizations like hospitals and law firms. The other sells high-end, industrial kitchen products to the restaurant industry.

In this webinar, Chris took a look at a variety of site and page components on these companies’ actual that were helping or hurting their conversion rate. He also provided recommendations on how to optimize these sites to produce more conversions from their existing traffic.

As you might imagine, you can learn a lot from listening to a CRO expert assess someone else’s site. Here are some of the key takeaways:

Don’t Hide the CTA

When visitors arrive at your product details page, they’ve already done some work to get there.

At a minimum, simply being on your product details page means they are interested in your product, which also means that they think your product can solve a problem for them.

Now your job is to convince them to do something about it.

The easiest way to do this, of course, is with your call-to-action (CTA). Your CTA is the next logical step in their journey from curiosity to closed sale, but for your CTA to work, it needs to be easy to find and set crystal-clear expectations.

Check out these ways to improve the visibility and clickability of your CTA:

• Use a contrasting CTA color. While most of your site should adhere to your brand’s color palette, the primary CTA should be an exception. Use a bright, contrasting color to make it stand out. It shouldn’t clash, it just needs to be noticeable.
• Make the CTA bigger. A bigger button will more easily catch the attention of your visitors. Consider making it slightly bigger than any other button on the page.
• Minimize distraction. Too many colors or images distract your visitors from seeing the CTA. Reduce the number of colors used on your page so that your contrasting color CTA pops out like a beacon.
• Keep the CTA above the fold. If your CTA is below the fold or in an unintuitive location, visitors may miss it. Place it just below or to the right of the product image to make it easy to find.
• Make a direct path to the CTA. If you have product options that the customer must select before they can checkout, present them with clear steps that end at the CTA.

Remember, the easier it is to find your CTA and the clearer your CTA is, the more likely people are to convert.

Avoid Overwhelming Product Descriptions

By the time someone makes it to your product details page, they are looking for reasons to buy. They want to know what makes your product perfect for them, but they don’t care about every single perk.

So, your product details page shouldn’t be a novel. Focus your text on the most important (and relevant) information—whatever your potential customers need to know before they’ll feel comfortable converting.

Try these tips for giving visitors the right information and the right amount of it:

• Use bullet points. Readers don’t like to read huge paragraphs of text. Transform big blocks of descriptive text into clear and concise bullet points.
• Limit the number of bullet points. Too many bullet points can also overwhelm potential customers. Add three to five of the most important points, like money-back guarantees, warranties, or competitive differentiators.
• Use visuals to highlight key points. If a particular aspect of your product or aspect is especially important (like a money-back guarantee), you can create a graphic or other visual to draw attention to that point.

If you can’t convince people to buy in a few words, you certainly won’t convince them with a wall of text.

Use Images to Inform Purchase Decisions

Most online shoppers rely heavily on product images to help them determine if the product will work for them. It’s important to that product images give them the amount of detail and number of product views that they need.

Make sure you’re following these best practices for your product images:

• Use high-resolution, large product images. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to see more detail on an image that’s too small or that pixelates when you zoom in. Yuck! Make sure images are big when they first display and remain crisp and clear when visitors zoom in.
• Provide additional product images. Visitors need to see more than the front view of the product. Provide side views, top views and close-up views of details.
• Include zoom and rotation capabilities. Let visitors get up close and personal with the product and view it all angles to make a better decision.
• Move Related Items below the fold. When Related Items are presented above the fold, they often distract the visitor from the primary CTA. Place them below the fold, just after the product description or even lower.

The right image is worth a thousand words—which is a lot more words than your customers will ever read on your page. Make sure your product images are sending the right message.

A Few Extra Tips

Although Chris primarily focused on product details pages in this webinar, he also looked at a couple of other site components, including a brief trip out to a purchase page and a review of chat functionality.

• Use natural flow for shipping and credit card forms. Keep the forms for shipping information and credit card details on two separate pages or vertically, one right after the other.
• Give assurance with purchases. Add a security logo or trust symbol on purchase pages to relieve customer anxiety about purchasing and providing personal information online.
• Test different chat presentations. If you really want visitors to engage with chat, test different colors and copy. Instead of stock photos with models, use real employees to be more authentic.

Optimizing your purchase pages and chat popups can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. In fact, Chris has seen smart chat usage increase conversion rates by up to 20 percent!

Conclusion

Obviously, there are a lot of things you can try to help convert more customers from your existing traffic. However, I like to start with what I call the “10-Steps Back Rule”:

Pull up your page and take 10 steps back from your computer. Is it obvious what your customers are supposed to click?

Now ask someone who isn’t familiar with your website. Can they figure out what they are supposed to click from 10 steps away?

If people can’t figure out what they are supposed to click on your page from 10 steps back, chances are they’ll have trouble figuring it out sitting down at their computer.

By the way, if you’d like me or Chris to take a look at your website and give you some specific recommendations (don’t worry, we won’t do it in front of an audience), let me know here or in the comments.

What have you done to convert more customers on your product details pages?

As a Disruptive Professor, I’m always excited to research and learn more about what works and what doesn’t.