Antholo (beta)

Getting people to visit your website is great, in fact, it is a large part of the puzzle, but, the question is, do you know what to do if you have solid incoming traffic, but that traffic is not completing the gaols you need them to. In other words, if they are not purchasing, signing up, or downloading your products – you have a problem. If you want to improve your conversion rates, it’s time to master CRO or conversion rate optimisation. Today, our focus is on helping you understand what CRO is, how it benefits your business, and effective tactics to use.

Reduce Page Loading Times

You know when you’re at a café and you take a seat? You read the menu, you wait for service, you see things happening around you, and yet, they don’t come to you. It is frustrating isn’t it? It is the same really when someone comes to your website. If the page is slow to load, or elements do not load, then studies show people will abandon your website. Imagine, all that hard work getting them to your site, just for them to leave.

How do you expect to convert website traffic if your visitors are unable to load your landing page quickly? Improving website speed should be a priority as it reduces loading times

According to Akamai Technologies, your website should load within 3 seconds. Otherwise, 40% of your website visitors will leave your page. Amazon – the e-commerce giant – has proven that 100ms latency in loading speed can cause sales to drop by 1%! If you are a business expecting sales of a million dollars, then 1% is a sizeable number.

Make it a habit to test your loading speed regularly and ensure you optimise conversion rates on your website, Use tools such as Google PageSpeed, Pingdom Tools, or GTmetrix. If possible, also use a lightweight theme, remove unnecessary plugins from your website and reduce your image or video sizes.

Write Powerful Headlines which Inspire or Provoke Thought

Headlines serve an important purpose – they call the attention of your target visitors and they make it easy for people to skim to parts that may be more of interest if the content is long. The key thing to remember, however, is that the headlines need to be compelling, not just placeholders. Your goal is to pique the curiosity of your potential visitors so they are more likely to click or act on it.

A few good examples of powerful headlines are ones that ask questions, offer to solve a problem, give out directives, or promise to instruct or provide information. Without a powerful headline, you can end up wasting your leads by not being able to convert them.

In an analysis of headlines conducted by the Content Marketing Institute; the following conclusions ensued:

• Write headlines with an average of 8 words to get 21 percent more click-throughs.
• Add numbers on your title to boost click-throughs by 20 percent.
• Use hyphens to separate and/or emphasize thoughts or details.

Keep Your Checkout Funnel as Short as Possible

The checkout funnel refers to the steps that customers need to take to reach the end goal –a paid transaction or sales. To facilitate conversion optimisation, you must simplify this process and require as few steps as possible.

A traditional checkout or sales funnel involves four steps: awareness, interest, decision, and action. A complex sales funnel looks is convoluted and long. It may include requiring your customers to set up an account, subscribe to a newsletter, input the products they want to buy, agree to your store policy, and go through a complicated payment procedure. This is exhausting and will discourage your visitors from making a purchase.

Avoid this mistake by keeping the checkout process as simplified as possible. Fluid website navigation and requiring minimal info from your customers is the sweet spot for higher sales conversion.

Utilise Strategic CTAs and Placement

The Call to Action (CTA) is one of the most important elements to look into for higher website conversion optimisation. CTAs can come in a variety of forms: buttons, pricing tables, or pop-ups. You can conduct tests to see which of these types to implement.

Ideally, your CTA should be visible across all pages of your website. They should be prominently positioned to optimise responses from your visitors without necessarily being obtrusive. To ensure higher conversion using your CTA, you must take three important things into consideration.

Firstly, think about the positioning of your CTA. Experts agree that placing it on top of the page is more effective than when it is below the fold. Second, its colour and shape should be visually arresting so that your website visitors will notice it easily.

And finally, make your CTA message benefit-oriented. Avoid the traditional CTAs that do not offer anything of value such as “click here” or “download now”. Instead, focus on the benefits such as “show me more” or “get started free”.

As we mentioned earlier, undertaking A/B testing (for colour, words used, and positioning) can all lead to important ongoing improvements.

Tap into the Power of Visual Stimulus

A huge percentage of successful websites with high conversion rates rely on their visual elements. If you want to increase your conversions, you need to consider the power of good photography or stellar imagery. Choosing high quality and high-res photos on your website’s landing page can help increase your conversion rate. Not only does it make your page more attractive, but it also reflects on your brand’s credibility.

Engaging your audience with engaging images is just one aspect to consider though. The images must also be accompanied with text content that is compelling enough to convert!

Highlight Verified Payment Systems, Free Shipping, and Other Symbols of Trust

When you are trying to sell your customers something, it is important that you gain their trust. If you have no trust, then no matter what you do to improve your on-site conversion rate optimisation factors, you will be pushing the proverbial uphill.

There are several ways to build rapport, which includes offering verified payment systems. Using trusted symbols such as Symantec SSLs and Verified can increase your customers’ trust. And when customers trust businesses, this leads to an increase in sales.

Aside from a reliable payment method, offering free shipping can also help you generate more sales conversion. The high cost of shipping and handling has been linked to shopping cart abandonment. Make sure you address this by offering your customers free shipping, whenever you can, even if it means absorbing some of it into your overall price of sale.

If free shipping is too costly, you can set a minimum order amount for them to get free shipping (but keep the threshold reasonable).

Conversion rate optimisation can be challenging and as a practice it is constantly evolving. Make sure you analyse the current strategies you have in place to see if they are helping you reach your sales goals. If they are not, look at your data and determine where you can implement tweaks to boost conversions. Or if you are lost and unsure what to do, or don’t have the capacity to do it yourself, call Three Piece Marketing, we are here to help.

Most people hate receiving emails from businesses. I, for one, dislike it when I get too many messages from the same company, seemingly trying to shove their products and services down my throat. It just makes you want to click Unsubscribe as quickly as possible and never hear from them again. Yup email marketing can be polarising – especially if you are not reading your audience.

The truth is, people do not hit Unsubscribe because they don’t like the brand, they opt-out from the email list because the emails, instead of adding value to them, spam them with overly sales-sy messages or email them too often which is downright annoying.

But when planned out properly and sent out at the right moment, email marketing can prove to be a valuable supplement to your entire marketing efforts that will generate a high return.

Let’s find out when to use email marketing and how you can maximise them in your customer’s buying journey.

How you can benefit from email marketing

According to Statista, more than 293.6 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2019 alone, and that number is set to grow to 347.3 billion daily emails by 2022. Of that total, a large number are marketing emails:

Indeed, email marketing has become such a powerful tool for marketers because:

It helps with lead generation.

If done right, an email marketing campaign can produce valuable leads that give you a higher chance of getting a sale. Since subscribers are already familiar with your brand, reaching out to them is a warm(ish) lead and closing the deal that little bit easier.

It helps you build credibility.

Consumers these days are more connected than ever and this gives them more access to information than ever. With strong email marketing strategies in your arsenal, you’ll be able to build your company credibility and be more relevant in your industry.

It helps improve your communication with clients.

You know how important it is to build a strong relationship with your clients, but have you realised how important they are as a marketing tool themselves? Look after them, add value and be humble and they may just become advocates, helping to sell your brand and products above what you can do yourself.

It helps you determine what’s working and what’s not.

Email marketing services go a long way to helping you obtain the metrics you need to see how the rest of your marketing campaigns are performing. For instance, you can determine what type of content is mostly consumed by customers through your click-through rates. Do they like images? Videos? Content about super user tips? Learn from what they engage with and use it to improve your content to make it more effective.

 So, when should you use email marketing?

To build a good foundation for your email marketing strategies, you need to remember that an email is a personal experience for your consumer. Unlike advertisements that are targeted towards a general audience, an email campaign seeks to reach out to a consumer on a more personal level. It should be more targeted.

Think about it as sending that first message to a girl or guy you like.

• You don’t go in too brash and bold, or they will think you are arrogant.
• You don’t tell them why you are amazing, you let them find out slowly.
• You don’t shout at them or make them feel pressured, you give them the power to decide.
• You make sure your reputation matches what you are trying to say.
• It comes down to tone, what you have to say and being interesting.

Keep this in mind for your emails as well. With that in mind, here are some scenarios where email marketing is a smart strategy to employ:

To Inform your consumers about a new product, service, or promotion.

Send a short yet compelling email message that offers a sneak peek of a new offering. Tease at it, show the benefits, but let them be in control. Let them drive interest in your product and choose to visit your website or give you a call.

Keep in touch with your customers.

These people already know your brand and they’ve probably tried your product before. But the truth is, you can’t rely on your consumers’ memory to keep them loyal to your brand. After all, (as we said above) they are digitally connected and trying something new is simple. Sending emails is a smart way to keep in touch with customers where you can deliver timely and relevant information to them. Alluding to a “Soon-to-be-released” offer means you can then ask them to register interest/or give you a reason to contact them (see above).

Reach out to prospects who are not active on social media.

Although social media is used by almost everyone these days, you can’t pass up the opportunity to reach out to consumers who are not as active on these platforms.

With email marketing, you have the power to reach out to a demographic on a more personal level to give your audience useful content, and not just focus on sales.

Plus, you can use email to augment what you are saying across other channels.

What are some of the best practices in email marketing that you can adapt?

Email marketing should never be used to bombard your consumers and prospects with emails that don’t add any value to them. Here are some key points that you should remember when creating an email people want to engage with:

Have purpose.

Remember, your customers are receiving potentially hundreds of emails every day. Don’t be just another email.  Have a clear purpose for what your email is about and make the relevant. It could be to introduce a new product, to request feedback, or to offer a discount or promotion to your consumer.

Personalise your content.

Creating personas which group people is a good start to personalising email, BUT if you have the tools to embed insights truly relevant to each recipient (EG if they have visited your site and not transacted), then use them to make the emails you send truly valuable.

Stick to a schedule.

When it comes to email marketing, you need to distribute regularly but not too often or too little. It’s best to stick to a schedule so consumers can anticipate your content and make it part of their reading routine.

Keep an eye on your metrics.

Open rates and click-through rates are very important metrics that will allow you to know if your email marketing campaign is effective or not. You should keep an eye on these numbers to make the necessary adjustments to your strategies and create content that is not only readable but also shareable. This is already easy with all the modern email analytics tools available today.

The Bottomline

If done right, email marketing can do wonders for your business. As long as you know what your goals are and how you can implement them properly, you’ll get the benefits out of your email marketing campaign.

If you need help in developing a good email marketing strategy for your brand, we are here to help – drop us a line and one of the Three Piece Marketing team will get back to you.