If you run an eCommerce store or make income online, your conversation rate ends up becoming your biggest bottleneck. Thankfully, conversion rate optimization (CRO) has been studied extensively. There are many great resources online that can be used to help you increase conversions. In this article, we’re providing a number of crucial CRO techniques that will boost your ROI.

Use Social Proof

Social proof is a very powerful CRO technique. There is enough data out there to back this up. With social proof, you can help encourage potential customers to convert by showing the actions taken by other existing customers. There are many different types of social proof. Perhaps the most common is simple product reviews. According to a study, 93% of consumers say online reviews have an impact on their purchase decision. Besides product reviews, social proof methods could include features like live purchase notifications, and live data on how many people are looking at products in a certain time frame.

Create a Live Chat and Keep Your FAQ Up To Date

Social proof works wonders to add trust to new consumers, but if they want to know more information, the first stop should always be you. You should make sure you have an updated FAQ page that covers all of the most likely questions customers may have about your business, products, or services. If you want to take it a step further, consider including a live chat plugin. With this, potential customers can interact with you in real time and get the information they need before converting. Live chat gives customers more reason to trust you and it helps them to know that the website is run by real, trustworthy people.

Live chat does require you to have somebody on standby ready to answer questions, but setting business time hours for your live chat can help with this. It’s worth considering – in a study, 63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as opposed to one that doesn’t. This means that not only does live chat serve as a great way to build initial trust, but it also works as a way to bring customers back to you.

Put Effort Into the Copy that Appears Before Your CTA

There’s no denying that testing your CTA position and appearance is important. However, the copy that comes before your CTA matters just as much. You need to sell your product or service in this space and you need to do it confidently. The copy that visitors often first see on your website will make a huge difference to your overall conversion rate.

This article from Moz further points out how important the words you choose in your copy are. Yes, choosing the right copy may take lots of A/B testing, but it’ll be worth it in the end. Optimize for Both Mobile and Desktop Everybody is jumping on the mobile bandwagon and you should too. In 2017, the percent of visits that were from US mobile devices jumped to 63%. Stats like these show that designing your website for mobile is even more important than designing it for a desktop browser.

You should put effort into making sure your website works well on mobile and your navigation, CTA button, and the copy is in the most optimal positions. But don’t forget all about the desktop. With desktop still accounting for just under half of global traffic, that’s still a large portion of potential customers you can’t miss out on. Thankfully, building responsive website designs has never been easier. Just make sure to go over everything on both your mobile and desktop versions to ensure everything is running without hiccups.

Appeal to Visitors’ Visual Senses

Images can play a very important role in CRO. Anything from working on a new logo to creating better homepage graphics can help to improve your conversion rate. A good example of this in action in this test from ExactTarget, which showcased that better image selection helped them to improve their conversion rate by 40.18%. The quality of your images, especially on mobile, is important too. A study shared on Jeff Bullas’ website showcased that on an eCommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product. Just keep in mind the page footprint – optimize and compress your images before uploading them. You can use tools like tinypng for free compression.

Conclusion

This brings us to our conclusion. Hopefully, this article has helped to pinpoint some of the many effective methods you can take advantage of to improve your conversion rate.