3 Key Steps to Increase Your Conversion Rates

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Karl Blanks, Co-Founder of Conversion Rate experts, for my podcast on the secret psychology of persuasion.

We had a fantastic discussion, in which Dr. Blanks revealed some of the top strategies, tips and conversion techniques they use to help their clients (businesses like yours) convert more customers online.

Whether you’re in e-commerce, social media, marketing or web design, there are 3 key things you need to do to increase your conversion rates right now.

1. Work on the right part of your business

Though we’d rather not admit it, when it comes to our jobs, it’s all too easy to fill up our working day with things loads of things that don’t really make much difference to the bottom line.

When dealing with conversion optimisation, Dr. Blanks advises that there’s one question in particular you really need to ask:

“If you had to double this client’s business, what would you do?”

He says that there’s a fundamental, qualitative difference between the type of idea that might grow a client’s business by 1%, and the kind of idea that might double it. If you’re not looking for those big ideas, you won’t find them.

So, stop asking yourself what tweaks to fiddle with next.

Get out of the paddling pool and think big, right from the start - ask yourself if you had to double your own business, what change(s) would you make?

2. Understand your non-converting users

Dr. Blanks recommended one tool in particular that he uses to understand why people aren't converting on his customers' sites, and that's Qualaroo. It's a really useful tool that lets you add an immediate survey into the corner of any page, which means that you can ask your users any questions you like.

A good question to start with is:

“Did you decide to buy x? If not, why not?”

Within minutes you’ll get direct feedback from your actual customers, which means that instead of having to guess why they are (or aren’t) buying, you’ll hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise why this kind of info is gold dust.

3. Create usable persuasive content...

When we think about conversion, chances are the first thing that springs to mind isn’t the copy.

In fact, the words we use to describe, convince and persuade our customers to buy from us are often the part we neglect the most, especially when it comes to emails, blogs and content pages.

Dr. Blanks says that learning how to write good headlines, calls to action and copy, is one of the most important things you can do to increase your online conversions.

Ask anyone who’s spent time writing effective sales pitches, sales pages or marketing emails, and they'll tell you there’s a huge amount of skill (and effort) involved in learning how to write persuasively so that you can get the conversions you want.

It takes time and patience, and to give you an idea of what you could be doing, I'll give you some insider tips on what I do to boost open rates for my newsletters:

• Spend 5-10 minutes coming up with different headlines - the goal here is to generate something that contains emotionally engaging or provocative words, to grab the reader’s attention. Choose 2 headlines to test against each other.
• When you write the body of the email, imagine you’re addressing one reader. If you haven’t profiled your users, run a survey and find out why they subscribed to you in the first place, what problem it is that you help them solve, and how you could help them better. Build up a picture of your reader in your mind, and write to that one person. Make it personal, use their name, and give them content that’s engaging and useful.
• Test your emails. You can test your headlines, copy (long / short, content, tone) and calls to action...

...and carry out user tests

When it comes to user tests for your website, find someone (anyone with opposing thumbs will do) and set a task for them to complete on your site. This could be to buy a product, leave user feedback, subscribe to your list - whatever goal you want to test.

Then watch in horror as they fumble their way through things you thought were obvious. Ask them what they had trouble with, make some relevant changes, and run the test again.

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Once you get the hang of it, you can start split-testing certain elements on particular pages of your site to see how your real users respond, and what effect it has on their conversion rates. A favourite tool of mine for running this kind of test is Optimizely, which is super easy to use and fun to play with.

So… That wraps up this week’s post. Come back next week when I’ll be writing about our next special guest, and sharing their expert advice with you on how to use the secret psychology of persuasion to increase your online influence.