4 Tips To Help Optimize The Conversion Funnel
The mistake that most companies make to improve their conversation rates is focusing on the landing page. Optimizing the landing page is key, but reliance solely on an optimized landing page overlooks important features and incorrectly assumes Internet users will complete an online transaction once they are on your website. The truth is even the most effective landing page may fail if the steps that follow are not user-friendly. Therefore, it is necessary to take conversion optimization a few steps further and focus on the entire conversion funnel—the online user journey, to its completion.
Here are important features to improve conversion rates that go beyond the landing page:
1. Limit the Choices
It makes sense to offer multiple choices to consumers. The more options available and the more awareness generated about other products, the likelihood of consumers buying anything then increases. Providing too many choices, however, may actually confuse and overwhelm the user, making it difficult for them to find the item they want. If they are spammed with other products, this could drive them away from purchasing at all.
2. Highlight the Path
Each page should serve a purpose. Design each page in a way that each goal you want achieved by the consumer is clear and progressive. Focus on a simplified goal for each page, optimize that goal, and then make finding the “next step” easy to find. The idea is to appropriately “guide” the user toward the final step of purchasing.
3. Have a Call to Action
Get the user to act now. Make sure any offer that appears on your site—whether it’s free shipping, discounts, or deals, is continually visible. If your Call to Action only appears on your landing page, consumers will have fewer opportunities to act. Ensure that these offers stick with your consumer as they roam through your site by making every opportunity presentable whenever possible.
4. Cut Out Unnecessary Data
Many companies use the check-out process to gather information. Of course, acquiring as much information as possible from your consumer is important, but the process of gaining this information is cumbersome to the consumer. We want to make the purchasing process easy. Ask what is really necessary. If you must, limit your information-gathering to only vital questions in the form of a pop-up to prevent discouraging your consumer at the final stage of the conversion funnel.
Understanding the stages in the conversion funnel that go beyond the landing page enables you to know more about the behavior of your consumer and what needs to be improved on your website. Bringing consumers to your landing page is an achievement in and of itself. Hold on to those consumers by making their user experience easy down the final stretch.
