5 quick hacks to improve your website conversions

If you’ve got people already coming to your website but not getting the number of leads/sales you need, you’ve good a couple of options.

  1. Go find some more traffic
  2. Optimise your website to convert better

Traffic can be pretty expensive. Increasing conversions can be very cheap. That makes the latter a great place to start. As an added bonus, when you do go get more traffic later you’ll convert more of them. Double whammy.

There are a few quick easy things you can do to help convert visitors.

1. The 3 Second Rule

When someone lands on your website, you’ve got 3 seconds to leave a good impression.

The first thing will be the header, so make sure this area communicates quickly and effectively how you improve your clients life.

There should be:

  1. Your unique selling proposition which is short, sharp and to the point
  2. Great design to instill confidence
  3. An image which shows the end result of your client using your company
  4. Something to get the visitor to continue reading

To get them to continue reading, you might have a button which promts them to click, scroll down and continue reading. Another option is to have the first part of the content right underneath your header only just visible, so that it is cut off by the bottom of the browser. This creates a psychological want to scroll down to see what is covered up.

website header conversions
The icons are cut off to encourage scrolling

2. Testimonials

Testimonials add a level of social proof to your website – one of Robert Cialdini’s Principles of Influence.

There is a right and wrong way to do testimonials. The wrong way is to slap them all on one page, or in a rotating banner on your home page.

The thing is, nobody cares that much. They don’t want to spend the time reading through pages of testimonials.

Instead, sprinkle testimonials throughout your site. Choose the ones that are most relevant to that particular service or product. Generic testimonials suck. Place them within the actual content. Not off in a sidebar that no one looks at. Put them right there in the main body of the content.

Website conversions testimonials
Testimonials inline with home page content

Make them stand out and have all the necessary information.

  1. Name
  2. Image
  3. Company and position (if applicable)
  4. URL (we don’t add the actual link though)

3. Establish Authority and Trust

Another of Cialdini’s Principles, authority shows your client that you mean business and know what you are talking about. Spend some time thinking of anything impressive you or your business have done which demonstrates your ability and trustworthiness.

Some examples might be:

  • Major clients that you have worked with
  • Accreditations or awards
  • Associations or memberships that are relevant
  • Real life images of your team or product in action
  • Images of your team with prominent industry personalities
  • Research and development that you have been involved with

A side note for online businesses: Even though you do all your dealings online, it can help to have a phone number and physical address in the footer. This legitimises your business as a bit more real, for those people that might need that to feel comfortable. Very few people will likely call, but the difference in trust value can be enormous.

4. Personality

Personal connections are getting more and more important as people get sick of being just another number as a client for large businesses.

Yeah, it is hard to develop a real connection by someone just reading your website, but you can do a few things that show you are real people with actual feelings and lives.

Not everything has to be super serious in business. If you like to have a a bit of fun while you work (I hope you do), let that come through in your copy. In some industries, a level of professionalism might be expected, but you can still open up a bit in certain places on your website.

website personality
The first thing you see on our website, which many of our clients love

The best place for this is your About page – typically the second most popular page of a website. People want to know who you are.

Here’s some examples:

  • Team photos that aren’t boring corporate shots – maybe from a home envorinment or pulling a face when you mouse over them
  • Unexpeted lines that get a laugh. On our contact page we ask people to swear first to get it out of the way
  • Real images of the office or team at work, having fun
  • As above but with video
  • Stories. People love stories. Write about how you got started and why/how you’re making a difference (or make a video of it)

5. One clear Call to Action on every page

It blows my mind how ofter I scroll to the bottom of someone’s website and am greeted with an empty footer that doesn’t tell me where to go next. I’ll scroll back up the menu and dig through the different options until I find something that sounds like it might be what I want.

Wouldn’t it be nicer if you just told me what to do next right there are the bottom of the page?

On each page, think about what one thing you want the visitor to do next to bring them closer to a sale. Is it to call you? Fill out a contact form? Drop in their email address?

Also take a look at how many things you are asking people to do on any one page. Are you asking them to call you, opt in to a newsletter, get a freebie by putting in their email and fill out a contact form on the sidebar all at the same time?

Don’t do that. Try to make it really obvious what the next action is for the visitor. This often means removing parts of your website and simplifying it.

More is not better.

Call To Action
An obvious CTA as the last element of the home page

Now go and do it

These things aren’t difficult – you just have to think about how you can apply each one to your website. Take some time out with a pen and paper an brainstorm some things for each section. Then get your tech guy to make the changes.

A killer headline and header image could increase your conversion rate by 50%. If you find that out in 6 months, you’ll kick yourself that you didn’t do it sooner.

To sooner the better. Make a basic change and let me know how it goes for you in the comments.

Implementing the Ask Formula “Deep Dive Survey” with Gravity Forms

The Ask Formula is so hot right now.

That’s because it is crazy effective at finding out what your clients really want. It allows you to segment your client base into “buckets” with distinct demographics and interests so you can deliver the right information to them. As you know, the more value you can give to your clients, the more you’ll generally get back.

Gravity Forms is (probably) the most popular premium forms plugin for WordPress*. It also happens to be pretty good at building the surveys from the Ask Formula.

* I didn’t actually research that

A picture says a thousand words. And a Camtasia video is 30 frames per second. So here is the equivalent of 38,430,000 words showing you how to implement the Ask Formula’s Deep Dive Survey in Gravity Forms.

An alternative to Gravity for longer questionnaires is Content Snare. It can be used to collect information from clients or as a client portal for documents and files.

Summary, for those non video peeps who have some tech knowledge

  1. Install Gravity Forms
  2. Install your CRM/autoresponder Gravity Add-On
  3. Create a new form
    1. Add Pagination (click Page under Standard Fields) – Default settings are probably fine
    2. Add a textarea for the “Single Biggest Question”, make it Required
    3. On new pages, add your additional segmentation questions (2-4). All Required.
    4. On the last page, add Name, Email, Phone fields
    5. Name & Email required (not phone)
    6. Change Phone validation to International
  4. Change the Confirmation to redirect to your thank you page (or at least change the message)
  5. Delete the admin notification if you don’t want to get an email every time someone fills it out
  6. Set up your CRM/autoresponder feed. Active Campaign is the bomb.
  7. Create a page and add the form
  8. Profit

When you are have responses and are ready to export

  1. Export entries to CSV
  2. Import to Google Sheets or Excel
  3. Score column = length of question 1, multiplied by 1.5 if phone length > 0
  4. Rank column = PERCENTRANK function of the score column
  5. Top 20% column = if rank > 0.8
  6. Analyse the top responses. Get the book to learn about that.
  7. More profit

Side note: Gravity Forms is also the bomb. We’ve used it to create everything from feedback forms to web design questionnaires to creative briefs.

Free Gift: Brand New Landing Page Software

A good friend of mine sent me an awesome deal today.

Landing page software has become all the rage recently. This is because they make it crazy easy to create sites and landing pages that capture names and email addresses. This software goes one further and gives you the ability to build those lists and email your contacts without any extra software.

This is the kind of thing they create with little to no effort…

ebook-simple-optin

Ben from FusionHQ has sent me a code which gives you access to their awesome new landing page builder for an entire year, for free. It’s normally $47 per month.

No credit card or commitments of any kind. That’s pretty cool.

Why?

Because it is just being released for the first time and they want people to try it out.

This isn’t normally the type of thing I’d post on here, but recently I’ve heard lots of people asking about this kind of thing… and when it’s free there’s nothing to lose 🙂

Try it for yourself and get your first professional looking, mobile responsive squeeze page up in minutes. You don’t even need an existing autoresponder.

Just follow the link below and put in the coupon code, to gain instant free access (usually $564):

Click here to claim the deal!
Coupon code: CHIMP2014

Remember you MUST enter the coupon code CHIMP2014 into the coupon code box below the “Buy Now” button to apply the freebie. And it is only valid until September 18!

Hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

How To: Manage your own Adwords

We’re a business that deals in Adwords… why on earth would we want to tell you how to manage it yourself!?

Simply put, many businesses just can’t afford to have someone else manage Adwords for them. Managing an Adwords account properly can be a very time consuming process to properly track, monitor, modify and report. This is why Adwords management can (sometimes) be an expensive venture.

This is especially true in the very early stages of business when there just isn’t any cash flow yet.

Now, we’ve taken over a lot of Adwords accounts that were previously self-managed. These accounts are almost always getting very low click through rates, have poor quality scores and are paying WAY too much per click.

Paying too much for ad clicks is very easy to do, so the Do-It-Yourself route is NOT for everybody. You must understand that if you don’t pay attention to what you are doing, you can slip up and waste money very quickly. If you go down this self managed route, please make sure that in the beginning you use a prepaid Adwords account, where you have to manually add balance using your credit card. At least this way, the risk is minimised.

Ok, with that out of the way, I want to share one of the best ways I have found to learn the basics of Adwords and apply it to your business.

It is a book by Perry Marshall, aptly named: “Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords“. It’s available as a digital Kindle download, or on paper.

You’ll want to have a highlighter or pen ready, so you can note down various numbers and bits of information which you can directly apply to your ads. This is why I love Kindle – as you are reading you can select pieces of text to highlight, and then access them all later online at kindle.amazon.com. This is seriously awesome.

If you apply the things you learn in this book, you’ll be ahead of most of the self managed AdWords guys out there.

It goes through everything from how to select keywords, how to bid, how many ads to make, and how to interpret the results. Even the best way to build an ad is covered – there are a lot of ways to write a 4 line ad which can make huge differences to your click through rate.

What I love about it is that it is so specific about everything, from processes down to exact numbers to aim for.

For $12.99 and a couple of reading hours, you don’t have much to lose. Grab it here.