Conversion Rate Optimisation Statistics You Should Know In 2021
If someone visits your website and leaves without taking an action, they might as well have never visited. In order to convert visitors into customers, you need a strategy — a conversion rate optimisation (CRO) strategy. A CRO strategy is the mix of tools, tricks, and designs your business can use to maximise the chances of getting visitors to take a desired action. It’s a long-term strategy focused on growth and, though it may sound daunting, these statistics show it’s a must-have for any business.
An Emerging Field
CRO is being utilised to gain a competitive advantage in the online market. Top companies currently spend more than 5% of their marketing budgets on CRO and, since 2012, searches for CRO have jumped almost 500%. However, 68% of businesses don’t have a CRO strategy and organisations spend on average just $1 on converting visitors for every $92 spent attracting them.
How Do You Measure Up?
Knowing how others are performing tells you where you stand. The average conversion rate for a website is 2.35% and 2.72% for online shopping globally. It is important to keep in mind that conversion rates vary by industry with legal services (7.4%) and point of sale services (7%) having the highest conversion rates, while B2B SaaS (1.1%) and computer product manufacturing (1.1%) have the lowest. Benchmarking helps you judge your campaigns and strategies while maintaining perspective about expected conversion rates.
The Way to a Perfect Website
Gone are the days of ‘build it and they will come’, now is the time of ‘design it so they will stay.’ Every part of a website must be designed to get visitors where you want them.
Are You Designing for the Future?
Increasingly in the 21st century, shopping is done through mobile phones and tablets. As phones become faster and more people use them to shop, optimising your website for mobile phones is a necessity. In fact, a website optimised for mobile phones is three times more likely to increase conversion rates by 5%.
Landing Conversions
Landing pages are a crucial component of any website for turning visitors into customers. Specifically designed to focus on calls to action, landing pages should be the first thing a customer sees. They should also be designed to link with individual campaigns. Organisations that have more than 40 landing pages generate 12 times more leads than those with 5 or less.
But having landing pages is nothing if they aren’t well designed. Longer landing pages, with more information, can produce 220% more leads than a standard call to action. While a landing page with a video increases conversions by as much as 86%. But be careful you don’t overdo it and end up distracting your website visitors. Reducing the number of form fields can increase conversion rates by 120%, while removing the navigation menu can increase sign-ups by as much as 100%.
Does Your Website Have the Look?
Poorly designed websites limit conversion rates. It only takes a consumer 0.005 seconds to form an opinion about a website. Being difficult to use, hard to navigate, aesthetically unpleasing, or lacking a sense of flow will severely dent your conversion rates. And watch out for loading times. Every second it takes a page to load, decreases conversions by 7% and if a website takes more than four seconds to load, one in four people will close the tab. Despite this, only 52% of landing page users perform tests to improve conversions.
Why Branding Is So Important
Branding is an essential part of any business’s CRO strategy. For 86% of consumers, authenticity is a key factor in deciding to go with a brand, while 81% of consumers will only buy from brands they trust. To achieve authenticity and trust, consistency is key. A consistent, transparent brand can boost sales by 33%. Your brand’s typography, visual assets, and vibe has to be the same across all platforms for your customers to trust your brand and see it as authentic. It may sound daunting to build a brand from scratch but we’ve got you covered with a blog on how to do just that.
Getting Your Users to Stay
You could have the most beautiful website ever created, but if it’s got nothing to say it’s doomed. Killer content is a necessity for any website.
By creating compelling and useful content for your website or landing page, you’ll ensure your website appears more frequently and higher up in Google searches. Blogs, especially with a well-placed call to action, are a great way of going about this. User reviews are another easy way to increase conversions. 70% of global consumers trust online customer reviews and 61% of customers read user-generated content before buying a product or service.
Not only does Google want to display more relevant content but it aims to provide users with better user experiences and that means personalised content. The growing trend with CRO, as with almost everything else, is increased personalisation. Custom content is 92% more effective than traditional TV advertising at increasing awareness and 168% more effective at driving purchasing preference. Further, 74% of consumers feel frustrated when content isn’t personalised to them. Personalised emails; products targeted to a customer’s location, age and gender; and interactive quizzes that can direct users to the right product for them are all examples of personalised content that can increase conversion rates.
Along with content, another key driver for CRO is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is the process of boosting your website’s ranking for search engines. Integrating SEO and target keywords increases conversion rates by as much as 87%, making SEO indispensable for CRO.
Getting Heard Everywhere
Social media is a fantastic way of boosting conversion rates. The great thing about social media is that it can be targeted to people who’ve already expressed interest in the area you operate. Personalised calls to action have an incredible 202% conversion rate when compared to regular ones. Facebook ads, for example, have an average conversion rate of 9.21%, four times higher than regular websites. And with 81% of sales occurring after 7 or more contacts, social media, with its constant exposure, is a key part of any CRO strategy.
Getting the CRO Strategy for You. As more and more businesses move online, and more consumers shift to online shopping, CRO is fast a necessity for business.
Blank Theory offers a plethora of tools aimed at maximising your CRO. With expertise in social media campaigns, branding, SEO, website design and development, Blank Theory doesn’t only bring visitors to your website, we get them to stay. Get in touch with Blank Theory today to take your business to the next level.