Step 1: Get to the heart of your value proposition!
A potential customer must immediately understand why he should take advantage of your offer. To do this, you need to make it clear which specific problems (“pain points”) you solve better than your competitors – and how you do it. All of this must be brought to the point in a clear statement. You can find more on the topic of value propositions here.
Step 2: Address the most important customer questions!
At each stage of the buyer journey, potential customers have different questions. Your goal is to answer these questions in understandable language. Therefore, always target pages and landing pages to target customers who are at a specific stage of their customer journey.
Step 3: Define a response goal for each page!
For each page, define a goal that you want the user to achieve. Place a call to action and remove anything that could lead the user of the “right” path. Often these are inconspicuous things like words or graphics that the user does not understand. But they can also be boring stock photos.
Step 4: Use triggers!
It is not always enough to provide an answer to all questions. Often, a small trigger is still missing to get the potential customer to act. It is therefore highly recommended to present supplementary, surprising arguments. For example, a time limit (“Offer expires in 53 seconds!”). The original sound of customers and testimonials provides social proof and thus inspires trust. Note: Reinforcing arguments should be easy to understand and should not trigger new questions in the customer.
Step 5: Ignore search engines!
You can either target a site to humans or to search engine crawlers. In practice, you often try to reconcile both and therefore make a compromise. But if you want to maximize your conversion rate, your content must be 100% geared towards the potential customer.
Step 6: Ensure a fast page load time!
Every second of loading time has a significant impact on the conversion rate. This has been shown by numerous studies. Therefore, try to optimize graphics and videos with regard to their data volume and loading behavior. If necessary, it is also completely sufficient if a video is loaded only afterward. Another problem for the loading time is plugins, which execute countless JavaScript functions in the background. Put everything to the test.
Step 7: Collect reasons for abandonment!
No matter how much energy you have already spent on optimizing your conversion rate – there will always be main reasons why website visitors do not reach the response target. Because, of course, you can’t please every potential customer. Nevertheless, it’s important to know where exactly things usually go wrong. This information can be very valuable for successively increasing the conversion rate. In addition to the usual web analytics, screen recordings and heat maps are particularly suitable for research purposes.