31 Conversion Optimization Tips – How to Increase Conversion Rates

Are you just getting started with conversion optimization and need some tips?

While conversion optimization tips and best practices have limited value, they can help define a starting point for your experimentation program.

If you are just getting started with experimentation, and have an interest in recommendations to improve conversion rate on landing pages and websites, we’ve compiled 31 recent conversion rate optimization tips.

Keep in mind we’ve often tested elements that lift conversion rates wonderfully in one situation, only to find that they don’t work at all in another. That’s why these tips should not be taken as recommendations, but rather as ideas that you could test.

31 Conversion Optimization Tips to Increase Your Conversion Rates

Remember, today’s cream may be tomorrow’s sour milk. So, test and learn from these conversion optimization tips for your unique business context.

Highlight your Value Proposition

1. Make your top three components of your Value Proposition immediately obvious on your landing page. Don’t sell features. Sell solutions to problems. Value Proposition is relative.
2. Select testimonials to support each product page’s main value proposition points.
3. Keep your hero area of your page focused on communicating a clear value proposition and a next step for users.
4. Try replacing rotating offer banners with static images and value proposition copy.

5. Add credibility indicators to your website; testimonials, reviews, awards, stats.

Michael St Laurent

Director of Experimentation Strategy & Product Development

Add Clarity

1.  Change the size of your price. Nick Kolenda has lots of tips on pricing psychology.
2.  Improve Clarity with larger product images on your category pages.
3.  Try a single step versus a multi-step form and check-out flow. Try Google autocomplete to make it easy to for users to fill out forms.
4. Clarify what happens next when users click a call-to-action. You can also add secondary text below CTAs to indicate what happens on the next page (e.g. Next: Enter shipping info.)
5. Increase Clarity with high contrast text on white background.
6. Test a one-column versus a two-column versus a three-column layout. Experiment with category images versus subcategory images on store pages.

Minimize Distraction

1. Eliminate as many links on your pages to reduce Distraction. Make your landing page more specific by driving to a product page instead of a category page.
2. Your privacy policy link should not take users away from the experience. Try a tab or a pop-up window instead.
3. Try sending users straight to the checkout instead of to the cart.
4. Test embedded lead generation forms on the page versus a new page versus a pop-up form.
5. Remove the navigation bar from landing pages.

Create Relevance

1. Include relevant and easy filters on your category pages. Do your category pages include relevant & easy filters?
2. Offer visitors self-segmentation to increase funnel relevance. Try reducing your page length to focus users on higher value content, and get insights about what they care about most. Worked for weBoost.
3. If you have a long page with a lot of content, try anchor link navigation or a page table of contents to help users find the content they’re looking for.
4. Match your landing page headlines to the words in your PPC ads. Test a “factual” approach versus an “emotive”. Worked for Sytropin.
5. Try increasing or decreasing video content prominence to see if it helps or hurts your conversion rate.
6. Test animation versus static content.. Worked for Hair Club.
7. Swap the right column with the left. Worked for BabyAge.com.

8. Make it easier for users to compare specs when you have really technical products. Category pages offer huge opportunities. Try a list versus a grid view.

James Flory

Director of Experimentation Strategy

Increase Urgency

1. Leverage your users’ scarce resource of time or stock to create a sense of Urgency.
2. Create additional benefit for filling out optional form fields by moving the optional form fields to the Thank You page.
3. Add “action captions” to your images and include your CTA link.
4. Try celebrating when a user qualifies for free shipping.
5. Highlight free shipping or free returns. If you don’t offer those, make the answers to those questions more clear to users.

6. Strengthen your CTA scent trail, by matching your key terms through the funnel. Test calls to action: “Order Now” versus “Get a Quote” versus “Instant Quote”, etc.

Nick So

VP of Delivery

Reduce Anxiety

1. Remove security badging and icons from your checkout flow. They might cause anxiety by adding FUD (Fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to the user instead of relieving it.

Start your experimentation program right

To drive even better results for your business, your conversion optimization testing should solve for real conversion problems. According to the “State of Experimentation Maturity 2018” original research report, successful experimentation programs at leading North American brands have a defined strategy, combining framework thinking with a defined process to how experiments are designed, run, and analyzed for future insights.

We recommend starting your experimentation program right by creating a defined optimization process, using the LIFT model to guide your page analysis, and making sure you are running experiments that can drive business impact through a solid prioritization framework.

When you have these core elements in place, you’ll be able to go from testing CRO tips and best practices to scaling your experimentation program to an organizational initiative.

What is your number one concern for launching that first experiment? Let us know in the comments!