5 easy conversion improvements you can do today

5 simple improvements you can make today to let your site or blog perform better.

1) Make it crystal clear what you do and why this is the place to be

Almost every website can use a slogan and/or show USP’s to clarify what they do. Put these in the header, since a lot of your new visitors will come from Google and won’t always land on your frontpage.

Keep it short and simple with one sentence or a couple of USP’s. When it comes to USP’s pick no more than 3. If you have more than 3 unique benefits (who doesn’t, right?), choose the 3 best ones. Why the magic number 3? If you need more than 3 arguments to convince me to stay & buy, your product isn’t good enough. Or you’ve chosen the wrong USP’s. Back to the drawing table then. Always good to test your sentence and/or USP’s on Uncle Bob or someone else who doesn’t love you.

2) Ask the minimum amount of information you need.

This happens on a lot of sites when I am close to spending my money, or when I’m about to sign up for a newsletter. They ask too much. Do you really need to know my date of birth to sell & ship your product? No? Then get rid of it. A field for fax-, mobile- and home number might look good but it is just more stuff to fill in and will give me more reason to exit. If these fields aren’t required, just get rid of them. Do you need my first name when I sign up for the newsletter? If you don’t use it. Get rid of it.

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If you use it to say ‘Hi [firstname]’, make sure you test your conversion rate of newsletter signups. If they go up, keep it, if not, lose it.

Something we all have less and less of these days is time. Make sure you save people time by making any navigation or order process on your site as smooth as possible. They will thank you for it, hopefully in sales or subscriptions.

3) Prove you’re not lying

If you don’t have these already, put honest reviews, comments & opinions on your site. Not just about your product but about you as a person or company. This will backup the claimes (see point 1) you just put in your header.

Ask your customers about their opinions. Call them, mail them and ask them if you can put their testimonials on the site with name & link to their websites (they will say yes quicker :)). Phase 2 is emailing every customer with a simple link that gives them the opportunity to leave their experiences. Ask for their name, their website and leave a blank field for their story. Names & websites that I can click on underneath a review shows me that these people are real. “Look, Steve Sing from ordercoolstuff.com ordered with them, this must be good”.

Put everything online and only edit those who write foul language, discriminate or show other obscene behavior. Don’t be scared of negative reviews, nobody believes that a company has 100% positive comments. That only makes you look fake.

4) Speed creates energy – slow website creates friction

This is a no brainer and we have experienced it all: we don’t like slow sites. Just run your site through Google’s Page Speed and directly see the things you can improve for speed. Google even gives examples on how to do this.

5) Improve trust

Especially for e-commerce sites: always add your phone number and/or email directly on your site. Change the standard ‘contact us’ link in the header to ‘contact us on +45-65709037 or info@website.com’.

Most of the visitors won’t ever call you but this shows you are there if they need you. Plus, if they would call you, would you mind spending 5 minutes on someone who is about to spend $100 with you, but want wants to know if the price tag can be removed when you send it?

Simply put; put yourself in your customers shoes. You know what you like and don’t like when you visit other sites, so why not apply that to your own site? Let us know what steps you’ve taken to enable more conversions in the comments.