Whether it’s to make a purchase, fill out a form or sign up for a list, the natural purpose of any business website is to get visitors to convert. When first starting out, entrepreneurs may focus more on the logistics of their website—ensuring each page works properly and that it is designed to meet brand standards—but in the process, they may forget to think about action steps for potential customers.
However, if entrepreneurs want to boost sales or generate leads, they’ll want to optimize their digital strategy for conversions. To help, nine members of Young Entrepreneur Council offer their best tips for increasing conversions and explain why their advice is so effective.
Members of Young Entrepreneur Council share ways companies can optimize their digital strategies to increase conversions.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Focus On Remarketing
Remarketing or retargeting lets you circle back and capture those sales you lost when buyers changed their minds at the last minute. You can view empty carts or analyze cookie data to see who viewed your page but didn’t convert. Then, either email the customer (remarketing) or serve ads to potential customers who viewed a page and then left (retargeting). Remarketing is all about addressing your customers’ interests and behaviors and keeping your brand at the top of their minds. Dig into your data and see who your audience members are and what they’re doing. – Shu Saito, All Filters
2. Perform A/B Testing
To discover which strategies work over others, run a month-long A/B test. Consider experimenting with different landing page formats, text-based calls to action, lead forms, lead flows and even ad copy across all your marketing channels to see which tests deliver the best conversion rate. – Ron Lieback, ContentMender
3. Create Content That Appeals To Your Audience
A good digital strategy starts with a solid understanding of your audience. If you have a clear idea of who your target customers are and what they respond to, you’ll be able to create content that speaks directly to them. This is key for increasing conversions, because the more relevant your content is, the more likely it is that people are going to engage with your brand and share it with others. For example, if you’re selling yoga mats, you might create a video of a celebrity doing yoga on your mat or write an article about why yoga is great for your body and health. These strategies work because they appeal directly to the people who are most likely interested in buying yoga mats: those who practice yoga regularly and want to improve their practice. – Brian Greenberg, Insurist
4. Ensure Smooth Website Navigation
Delivering smooth website navigation for a better user experience is one of the critical steps that businesses can employ for increased conversions. Users always start their journey with a specific problem. When they land on your page from search engine results, they quickly look for that piece of information. If they can navigate through your page elements in a smooth way, they can easily locate the information they seek. Further, if users get hooked by your website and want to scroll through the website pages to understand your products or services more deeply, better navigation with an over-the-fold design approach helps them snake through everything. This particular design aspect drives enhanced user engagement through a sharp user experience. – Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day
5. Add A Human Touch
One of the easiest ways to optimize your digital strategy for increased conversions is to add a human touch. This means making sure that your content, messaging and overall tone come across as relatable and trustworthy. When people feel like they can relate to your brand, they’re much more likely to do business with you. Adding a human touch also helps build trust, which is essential for converting leads into customers. People buy from people they trust, so it’s important to make sure your digital strategy reflects this. – Adam Preiser, WPCrafter
6. Leverage Push Notifications
An underestimated tool that most businesses fail to use is a push notification tool. It is a specific step businesses can take to increase conversion rates because it allows you to send a notification directly to someone’s phone or desktop. It is effective because push messages appear when a user is live and active online, so you can’t help but catch their attention. It is an effective way to get someone’s attention and remind them about your product or service. The key is to use it sparingly and only for important updates or sales. Otherwise, you risk annoying your audience. However, personalize the messages as much as possible so the customer doesn’t feel like they’re just another number. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
7. Improve Your Website Load Speed
The human attention span seems to get shorter every year. When someone is waiting for a website to load, they are also thinking about other things they could be doing with those same seconds they are wasting by waiting. More often than not, they are skipping to the next site before the webpage is fully loaded. You’ll lose so many people with slow load speeds. Keep the speed up and, when they click the button to get the information they wanted, they are much more likely to spend money with your company. A pause in that process means they are more likely to jump to the next thing. – Mary Harcourt, CosmoGlo
8. Include More Than One Call To Action
One big trend for 2022 is putting multiple calls to action on your website—specifically on a landing page. The strategy is to carefully place two calls to action to encourage a desire to click through. This is a strategy that has been utilized for years on click funnels that populate emails, so it’s a tried-and-true method even though traditional businesses haven’t used it much in the past. It doesn’t take a lot of effort or extra design to add a second call to action. The one thing to remember about this strategy is you have to know where to place the call-to-action buttons. A good general strategy is to place one up high where every user will see it and then one closer to the bottom of the page so it will be available for users who scroll down. – Baruch Labunski, Rank Secure
9. Optimize For Local Audiences
One technique for improving conversions is to optimize your Web and social media pages for local audiences. Brick-and-mortar businesses generally know the importance of reaching a local audience, but national and global companies can do this as well. Even if you’re selling a service where location doesn’t seem to matter, people are often more likely to respond to offers that have a local angle. A simple way to do this is to add local-based webpages to your site. You may sell SEO services nationwide, but targeting an audience for Atlanta SEO or Sacramento SEO can help you connect with potential customers in specific areas. You’re also narrowing down the field of competition, which can help to improve conversions. – Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting
