Not all marketers have the time and resources to go through a full website redesign process. Here are a few simple but proven techniques that you can implement today and optimize your website’s conversion rate.
Call to Action Button Color
This is one of the most important elements of your website. The “Call to Action” button is the button that guides your visitors to the desired business goal, like signing up for a trial, downloading a whitepaper or contacting sales.
There is no real best practice about using a specific color across all sites and businesses. If someone tells you there is, don’t trust them. CTA buttons are like road signs that tell people which is the right way to go. As such the most important thing to have in mind is that they need to be in contrast with their surrounding. A good way to determine contrasting colors is to use a color wheel (see below). For example, if you have a background that is in the “Blues” spectrum the corresponding color for the button should be from the “Reds” spectrum.
Another thing to remember is that no matter how logical a color change might look, always A/B test any changes to validate your assumption.
Pop-ups
For many years there was a certain stigma to using pop-ups on your website because it was thought that they ruined user experience. But with the proliferation of A/B testing and the ability to validate efficiency, more and more companies are starting to revive pop-ups as means to increase conversion rates.
The key to success with pop-ups is context. Forget about homepage pop-ups. Wait until your visitors have browsed a bit, so you can determine their intention. Here are some good examples:
Shopping Cart Pop-Up
Blog Pop-Up
Communicate Value on Sign Up Forms
The sign up form is the hardest and most important hurdle you need to take your visitors over, so you need to get it right.
You can always experiment with removing form fields, but this way you are capturing less important business information which will limit the segmentation options for post-registration initiatives like email marketing or sales follow up.
That’s why a more suitable tactic is to increase the desire of people to sign up.
For a newsletter form this can be done by adding a summary of all the useful resources you will receive if you leave your email.
For forms that ask the visitors for more information, like trial forms, you need to put a bit more work in. Things to consider adding, in addition to the benefit of signing up, are social proof like testimonials and things that address anxiety concerns.
Following those three simple techniques can get you closer to meeting your marketing goals. But remember, always test new things against current versions to make sure there is an improvement.
