Conversion rate optimisation is the art of turning cold traffic who don’t know about your brand, into paying customers.

What a lot of people don’t realise is that the conversion rate optimisation journey actually begins before people even land on your website.

This ultimately comes down to how you build trust and position your brand/business in a world full of noise and distraction…

This blog will cover a number of powerful proven strategies that have helped my clients generate over £10m in additional sales in both B2B and B2C businesses.

 I’ll be breaking these strategies down into the 2 main areas:

  • External CRO Elements
  • Website CRO Elements

First, let’s start with the on-site elements of conversion rate optimisation.

After all, there’s not much spending time, money and effort driving traffic to your site, if you’re effectively just pouring water into a leaky bucket!

pool tom GIF

On-Site Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategies For D2C Brands

When it comes to turning more website visitors into leads and sales for your business you need to look at a 3 core elements and in the following order:

  • How can we firstly grab someone’s attention the moment they land on the site and show them we have what they need
  • How can we then demonstrate trust, authority and credibility to get them to stick around and keep reading
  • How can we finally use a combination of copy, images and/or video to make a compelling enough case for them to take action right now.

The video below covers examples of some very high-converting ecom landing pages and how they use each of these elements in a very specific order to turn a cold visitor into someone who’s ready to pull out their card and make a purchase.

We’ve also put together a handy framework document that breaks down some example landing pages below that you can use for reference when designing or creating your own landing pages.

These same principles apply if you’re in the B2B space or you’re looking to generate leads.

The only KEY difference is you’re NOT looking to sell your service on the page – You’re only looking to sell the next step (ie booking a call, arranging a demo, or making an enquiry.

The video below covers a real-life example from a payroll-software and payroll outsourcing company selling both a service and software:

visitor behaviour analysis and a/b testing to optimise conversions

The next critical component to any conversion rate optimisation strategy is going to be continuous experimentation.

This process can be broken down into 3 core steps

1. Analyse visitor behaviour using CRO software like Hotjar or LuckyOrange to identify conversion bottlenecks or UX issues through the funnel/user journey

2. Creating a hypothesis from this data using a combination of heatmaps, session recordings and user surveys.

3. Setup an A/B test on the page using A/B testing software like VWO to run a split test on the page and prove out that hypothesis.

Once you’ve done this cycle, you’ll rinse and repeat to make sure you’re continuously improving this over time.

Want To Boost Your Conversion rate?📈

 

Over the past few years I’ve personally audited over 100+ websites in a huge range of industries and helped businesses increase their conversions by as much as 600%. Book a website audit today for as little as £125.

Oh…and the best part? If after implementing my changes your conversions don’t increase, I’ll refund you every penny.

 

VWO A/B Testing Tool

how often should you do a/b testing and visitor beahviour analysis

A question on a lot of people’s mind here is how long do we need to do this for?

In other words, when have we “completed” CRO…

The reality is, as your business grows, you’ll likely be introducing new sales channels, platforms, content pieces, products, etc…

As such, with that growth, there will always be new gaps created and new learnings that need to be made.

It’s a bit like playing a game of whack-a-mole, but having a well-structured CRO process in place, it will allow you to get better and more skilled with that hammer over time and become easier to test and optimise over time at each stage of growth.

For example if you launch a new offer to a new audience, you’ll likely need to testing new messaging or hooks to see what resonates most with that audience to drive conversions:

how long should run an a/b test or how many visitors do you need?

The short answer is…it depends.

Ultimately, this comes down to how quickly you can reach statistical significance.

It’s also going to depend on the size of your business. For companies getting millions of visitors a month, they can very quickly test and iterate as they have some huge volumes of data available to them.

If you’re a start-up, only getting 100-200 visits a month, it could take years before you get the same amount of data which is only going to slow you down.

As such, you have to work with what you’ve got.

I recommend using a statistical significance calculator like the one here.

These will tell you how likely the data you have is to be statistically significant (meaning how likely it is to not just be a fluke!)

This is always important to check before deciding the outcome of any A/B tests of experiments as if you implement changes too soon, it could actually end up having a detrimental effect on your conversion rate if that data was just luck or chance.

SITE SPEED AND CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION – does it really have an impact?

You might have heard that site speed can be a major factor in conversion rate optimisation.

And this is true…to an extent.

Google published a study back in 2021 showing the probability of bounce rate increasing for every additional few seconds it takes for your page to load.

Mobile Site Speed & Bounce Rate Study By Google

As such a lot of CRO experts and web developers jumped on the bandwagon to use this as an excuse to get more business.

In reality though, this will vary depending on a number of factors and we’ve seen countless real example of websites that have doubled their page speed but seen little to no impact on conversion rate.

My recommendation is to test the site for yourself (both on Wi-Fi and mobile networks) if it feels slow or cumbersome, you’re likely going to be losing people.

However, if it feels snappy and responsive you likely don’t need to worry too much, unless you’re a very well established brand or market leader fighting over the smallest percentage gains in a hyper competitive market.

OPTIMISING THE BUYER JOURNEY & FUNNEL

The final piece of the puzzle is to work on optimising the overall user journey over time.

This will look different for each business and you will likely have multiple user journeys for each different stage of the funnel.

For example, you might have top of funnel traffic coming through to blog articles on your website who then have a low-intent freebie or CTA they can opt-in for as the next step.

You may then have a different user journey for people lower down in the funnel where they land on a case study or competitor-comparison page, which then goes to a sales page (or maybe even a calendar page if you’re in B2B).

Having clearly segmented user journeys for each stage of the funnel, whereby you can monitor the drop-off at each step, is critical to finding the gaps and bottlenecks, and knowing where you need to priortise your CRO efforts.

GA4’s free-form funnel explorations and reports are a great way of being able to create these user journeys and funnel overviews.

Custom Conversion Funnels In Ga4

Off-Site Conversion Rate Optimisation Strategies

This is one of the most overlooked aspects of conversion rate optimisation.

In fact, I’ve seen some absolutely terrible websites (from a design, CRO and UX standpoint) that have far higher conversion rates than extremely slick websites, just because they’ve done such a great job at building trust and desire BEFORE people have even landed on the site.

Do NOT underestimate this step.

how content marketing impacts your conversion rate optimisation

One of the easiest ways to build trust and generate demand before people land on your website is through content.

Content can take many forms, from posting on or commenting in forums and communities, to creating long-form content on YouTube, posting videos on TikTok, or creating blogs on your website.

The key is to make sure you have content that covers each stage of the funnel and buyer journey and actually positions you as the go-to company/brand in your market.

If you’re a D2C brand this might be done by using humour or creating highly sharable content on socials. If you’re a B2B business, this might be done through thought-leadership content and articles that establish your business as the experts in your space.

Below is a great example from Cognism and how they use different bits of content at each stage of the funnel to build trust with their audience (without even mentioning what they do initially) and eventually begin educating them on the business itself and generating demand for what they offer:

strategic partnerships, personal branding & influencer relationships

The word ‘influencer’ has a bit of a bad reputation at the moment.

It’s not surprise when the way a lot of brands have historically used influencers is cheap and tacky. Finding anyone with a few thousand followers to post about their products regardless if there’s any alignment with the brand.

This has resulted in a huge decline of trust in influencers amongst consumers.

When done right though, people can sense authentic partnerships and this kind of relationships can be a huge unlock to building rapid-trust with previously untapped segments of your audience.

This can also be done to great effect in the B2B space finding key industry influencers or thought-leaders and forming win-win partnerships.

Most platforms these days also give you the ability to promote posts directly from the creators page so it doesn’t feel so much like an brand ad and instead feels more like an organic post.

Sparks Ads - Influencer Ads Posted From Creators Page

Personal branding can also be used to great effect for boosting both B2B and D2C conversions by having someone (or a number of people) within your company who build their own followings and audiences through content.

There’s a reason most company pages struggle to grow beyond 10,000 likes or follows, whereas personal profiles can easily grow beyond 100k…people buy from people!

We all want to feel connected to someone and it’s very difficult to build any real trust/connection with a company page.

Use this to your advantage by allowing your team to have their own voice and build their own brand. 

    kpi’s and metrics for conversion rate optimisation

    Finally, it goes without saying, if you’re looking to use the conversion rate optimisation strategies to really increase your CVR, you’ll need to track the metrics to ensure you progress over time.

    My video below shows you some of the key KPI’s and marketing metrics you should be tracking, covering everything from conversion rate to your cLTV .

    If you’d like more hands-on assistance boosting your conversions, let’s chat about my CRO consultancy services today.

    Want To Boost Your Conversion rate?📈

     

    Over the past few years I’ve personally audited over 100+ websites in a huge range of industries and helped businesses increase their conversions by as much as 600%. Book a website audit today for as little as £125.

    Oh…and the best part? If after implementing my changes your conversions don’t increase, I’ll refund you every penny.