The essence of designing a website is to promote what you do and creating awareness of what you have to offer. Websites are similar to your physical offices but they have an edge over your office as they are not limited to people in your locality. This is because people that don’t even live in the state or country where your firm, establishment or company is located can have access to your website without having to visit your office. A busy office with people walking in and out of it premises is similar to a website having substantial traffic (website visitors). They are similar because they indicate that there’s a likelihood of progress in your business. They are only indicators that your business may likely flourish, you can’t actually be assured that your business will flourish because people are walking into your office. What if these people just came to make inquiries? What if they don’t actually end up subscribing to your service?
The same thing goes for website traffic, the fact that tons of people visit your website doesn’t mean that tons of people are actually being converted. Just like in the case of the office, it could be that the outlook of your office isn’t suited to the taste of the prospect, it could also be that the person was turned off by the manner in which your receptionist or secretary attended to him and her and many more. That’s for the office aspect.
The joy of every website operator is to see that prospects become subscribers as this is the only way that you can be assured of making money. Having serious traffic on your website without an equal amount of converts is as good as having a video of your receiving many views and likes but selling no tickets for your event or show. Yeah, it is that bad. Listed below are some criteria you can use to judge if your conversion rate is what it should be:
- purchase a product
- sign up for a newsletter
- subscribe to a software
- hire a service
- download a free e-book
- fill out a ‘contact’ us form
- answer a survey
- give feedback
- take any action a page is designed to encourage.
Is it possible to have tons of people visiting your website without subscribing to your service? Why is your e-commerce website’s CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is constantly dropping? Below are some reasons why this could be happening.
No Obvious Call to Action
It is disheartening that some individuals are still guilty of this fact. This is as good as having a well designed and decorated the office with no billboard or worse having a beautiful office without a receptionist. A lot of people will end up walking in and walking out of your office almost immediately after they finish admiring your office. The importance of call to action indicators is very important as it draws the consciousness of prospects that “there’s more where that came from”. You can use words like “view details”, “subscribe”, “give feedback” etc.
Overly Compulsive Call To Action Words
Despite the importance of a call to action, it is more important to avoid making your prospects feel like they’ve already taken the action. The words used for a call to action on some websites will make you feel like you’ve already gotten involved already. The use of words that contain “now” should be avoided for as much as possible. That word indicates commitment and commitment that people have no idea about and people not ready for will scare people away.
Catchy Headline Empty Content
A number of websites on the internet are just good looking bottles with no wine inside of it. They have very captivating headlines but lack the adequate content to back it up. Try sticking to what works for you rather than what surveys think is most productive. Some individuals develop content better when they are guided by a headline while others develop content better when they start with the content itself. A good headline will bring in people but a good content will convince them to pay for what you have to offer.
Catchy Headline Different Content
Lemme tell you a story, related to football and the press or media. Arsenal Football Club ( a club in the English Premier League) has a player called David Dicks. At one time he got injured and had to sit out a game. The English press gave the public the news with this headline “Arsenal to Play With Dicks Out”. It reported that the club made a record sale as regards match tickets and also a record for the highest amount of female spectators at that time. This is the case of a number of website operators. They use catchy headlines to draw people’s attention but end up confusing people with the content of their website. This will cause your CRO to drop as people will see your website as one that doesn’t give proper information but promotes propaganda instead.
Under Optimised or Over Optimised Website
This is sometimes the reason for dropping in conversion rates. The fact that something worked when you did it once doesn’t mean that it’ll work ten times better if you do it ten times. Because you added a video and the increase to your website traffic doesn’t mean that adding ten videos to your website will increase by ten folds. This may end up hampering your website’s effectiveness as the videos may end up causing your website to lag. A lot of website operators have very much abused the use of keywords to the extent that these keywords are located in every sentence contained in the content.
