Landing pages are crucial for turning website visitors into customers. However, creating pages that consistently convert is challenging. Common issues include cluttered design, unclear messaging, slow loading times, poor mobile experience, weak calls-to-action, and lack of testing and improvement.
While conversion rates differ across industries, success comes from understanding your audience and constantly improving based on data. This guide covers advanced strategies for conversion rate optimization (CRO). Join us as we explore advanced strategies and techniques for conversion rate optimization, to help you convert browsers into customers from each part of your sales funnel.
Whether you want more sign-ups, sales, or leads, you’ll learn how to make your landing pages work harder for your business.
Analyzing and Optimizing Conversion Rates: Key Metrics and Tools
Landing page conversion rate is a metric that measures how effective a landing page is at converting new customers or sign-ups to a product. It’s typically measured as the (number of conversions / number of visitors) x 100. For example, a page with 200 visitors, of which 10 of them sign-up, has a 5% conversion rate. The average conversion rate is about 4.3% across all industries, with anything over 10% considered very good.
There are several tools like GA4 and Hotjar that can help you to measure and analyze conversion rate. They can also provide metrics for other issues that can contribute to conversion rate bottlenecks, such as bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave the landing page without taking any action) or form abandonment rate (the percentage of visitors who start filling out a form but leave the page without completing it).
While achieving and maintaining a strong landing page conversion rate may seem difficult, there are various strategies that can be implemented to improve landing page conversion at each stage of the funnel. Below, we’ll explore some of these strategies, and introduce you to FooConvert, FooPlugins’ newest offering (coming in the very near future). FooConvert is a tool for optimizing WordPress landing pages, with a focus on ease of use and integration with other FooPlugins products.
Mastering A/B Testing for Significant Improvements
A/B testing is an iterative form of testing that is crucial to optimizing landing pages for better conversions. To explain it simply, it involves testing two variations of the same page with minor changes, such as different placements of CTAs, different copy, or the presence or absence of pop-ups. You can then assess which version works better for your particular audience.
For example, one version of your landing page might feature a headline like “Sign Up for Free” while the other uses “Start Your Free Trial Today”. The message is essentially the same, but the wording differs slightly – now you need to establish which version resonates better with your audience.
By splitting traffic between the two pages, the conversion rate of each page can be measured to see if the on-page changes have been effective in driving more conversions. If so, the changes can be incorporated into the main page, and another round of testing can begin.
Below, we’ll cover a few strategies for improving your conversion rate, all of which can be tested for effectiveness by splitting traffic between two variations of the same page. You can do this with any A/B testing platform, such as Optimizely.
FooConvert, our new conversion optimization plugin, offers multiple ways to convert visitors. We’ll be rolling out A/B testing in a later iteration, but you can still benefit from the existing blocks as soon as the plugin is available.
Three Strategies for Better Conversion Rate
Create Urgency With Scarcity and Time-Sensitive Offers
Urgency and scarcity are rooted in our cognitive biases to place higher value on items that are seen as limited or unavailable. These biases are often used by marketers to create an ‘impulse to buy’ among consumers. You have most likely seen this in ecommerce stores and landing pages in the form of ‘limited-time offers’ or limited quantity notifications, for example.
Like this CTA used on the WooCommerce website.
“Urgency and scarcity tap into that which makes us overvalue things perceived as limited or fleeting. This isn’t just marketing hype – it’s hardwired into our decision-making processes. When we see a ‘limited time offer’ or ‘only 3 left in stock’, it triggers a fear of missing out that can override rational thinking. Savvy marketers leverage these psychological quirks to create a powerful impulse to buy, essentially short-circuiting our normal decision-making process. It’s why flash sales and limited editions are so effective – they’re not just sales tactics, they’re exploiting the very architecture of human cognition.” Tam Vincent, from FooPlugins.
While this is an effective method to improve CRO, it’s important to be transparent about the time-sensitivity of a specific offer. It’s also more effective to give specific numbers and deadlines rather than a general ‘offer ends soon’ message.
FooConvert’s countdown bar (coming soon) is the best solution for WordPress sites that want to add time-sensitive offers to their landing pages with a fully integrated countdown bar. Essentials presents this case study about how introducing a countdown bar increased sales by up to 40%, and tools like FooConvert can facilitate the same success.
You can use countdown bars to instill urgency and scarcity, with simple CTAs such as “Don’t miss out – grab your exclusive offer before it’s gone!” or “Limited stock available.” FooConvert’s upcoming CTA block is another great tool to create eye-catching, persuasive CTAs that convert.
Use Personalization Strategies to Drive Results
Personalization is another strategy that can significantly boost landing page conversion rates, because it allows you to dynamically adapt your landing page based on the preferences of your target audience. In this regard, buyer personas and audience segmentation are crucial to delivering effective personalization.
The first step of personalization is to collect user data, such as demographics and behavioral data. These include information such as the age and location of your users, and the behavioral patterns that each demographic exhibits on your website, such as website visits, clicks, purchase history and time spent on specific pages. You can collect this data with a tool like Google Analytics, and from it you can create a series of buyer personas to segment your audience based on their data or position in the funnel.
For example, you may have a landing page which encourages users to sign up for a free trial. These customers can then be put into their own segment in your CRM platform; since you know they’ve already expressed interest in your product but haven’t yet committed to a purchase, you can create personalized emails with offers such as discounts or incentives to purchase the full product.
You can also implement dynamic content shifts on your landing page based on your user segments. For example, you can use FooConvert’s CTA block to display a discount offer to a user who is about to exit the page. Using exit intent as a trigger is an effective way to entice users to make a purchase.
A recent study concluded that 76% of customers thought personalized messages were key in improving their consideration of a brand. However, it’s important to be transparent when implementing marketing personalization, and you can do this with a clear privacy policy and obtaining explicit consent from users before collecting personal data
Technical Optimization: Speed, SEO and Design
A fast-loading, mobile responsive page is critical for increased conversions (especially since 53% of users will abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load). A bad technical performance can undermine your entire conversion rate optimization strategy.
Conversely, Mobify found that each 100ms improvement in their homepage’s load time resulted in a 1.11% increase in conversions. From this, we can see that technical optimization is an ‘invisible conversion booster’. WordPress plugins such as Jetpack or WP Rocket can help boost vital landing page metrics such as page load time, which will reduce your bounce rate and increase conversions.
Additionally, implementing more specialized plugins like FooGallery on your landing pages can help you load images much faster with Lazy Loading. Since it’s likely that the majority of users will visit your site on a mobile device, and because search engines like Google index on mobile, it’s also crucial to make sure that all of your landing page optimizations are perfectly responsive on mobile devices.
There are also technical design considerations to take into account when optimizing your landing pages:
- Visual hierarchy: A good landing page will structure elements to guide visitors’ attention to important information and CTAs using size, color, and positioning.
- Social proof: This is one of the best converting assets in your toolbox for landing pages. Reviews, testimonials and trust badges help to build credibility, and can significantly impact purchase decisions.
- Directional cues: Visual cues like arrows can be used to subtly direct visitors toward important page elements and CTAs, such as the ones that can be made with FooConvert.
- Pop-ups: Pop-ups can be effective in retaining customers who may be on the verge of leaving a page. A case study from Hotjar, who implemented a pop-up for first time customers to sign up for a free trial, shows how they achieved a 3% conversion rate and increased their sign-ups by over 60 new users each month. FooConvert’s pop-up functionality will streamline the process of setting up persuasive, high-converting pop-ups on your landing pages.
Create Effective Landing Pages with FooConvert
In this article, we’ve looked at some of the main principles of landing page optimization and how important they are for improving your CRO. Essentially, how you construct your landing pages should be guided by user data and behavior, so that you can create high-performing, dynamically tailored pages.
FooConvert will be the “secret weapon” that top-performing marketers will use to consistently outperform competitors in landing page conversions. It will be the ideal insider tool for achieving exceptional results with functionality like CTAs, countdown timers and pop-ups.
FooConvert will give you the ability to easily implement these tried and tested conversion strategies on your WordPress website. It will be available soon, on WordPress.org with the first version giving you a sample of templates to use. Be the first to try it out – sign up today…