So you are interested in conversion optimization and want to find out what it is and how it can help your business? Conversion optimization is the practice of improving the performance of your website and forms so that you can turn visitors into possible customers. If your website isn’t converting 3-10% of your traffic into potential customers, then something might be wrong.

The practice of improving your website should be one of the top digital marketing strategies you focus on. Many companies that begin conversion optimization see an average of 60% improvement in conversion rates.

General Strategies To Increase Conversion Rates

1. Understand the Visitor. You need to look at who is coming to your website today. Not just the people you want to visit, but everyone. To understand your visiting audience, take a look at the sites they come from, what keywords they searched on, where they are geographically and what content they interact with. What you may find is that a large percentage are bouncing after a few seconds. This could mean you are doing a good job of driving the wrong traffic or that your website doesn’t match what people were expecting. Know who you want to visit your site and go after that audience. If you are getting the wrong traffic, try to understand why and you will be rewarded with better visitors.
2. Funnel Visitors to the Conversion. Look at the traffic coming to your website to understand the paths that people take through your website. Where page are they landing on? What pages are they looking at? Where are they exiting the website? Then make sure that your conversion action can easily be found and matches the content on that page, otherwise you will be asking them to take the wrong action and lower your chance to convert.
3. Be Worthy of a Conversion. Is the asset (whitepaper, webinar, event, ebook, download) you are providing behind the conversion useful to the visitor? Does it help them somehow in their daily life or job? Is it worth the person giving up their personal information and thus increase the amount of email they receive and a potential sales call if they give you their information?
4. Provide What is Promised (and more!). You only have one chance with most visitors filling out a form. Make it a great experience and give them what you told them you would. Don’t make your visitor jump through extra hurdles to get what they wanted. When you can, try to give them more than what you promised. It is all part of establishing your brand as better and therefore more memorable. Turn them into impressed fans right from the start.
5. Be Helpful. Always send a confirmation email that contains instructions, additional information and appropriate links so they can continue to do business with you.

If you follow these five simple strategies, then any website can convert at a much better rate and begin moving into more advanced conversion rate improving techniques. Next we’ll look at 10 of the common tactics used to improve form conversions.