Wednesday, July 7th, 2021
The success of an ecommerce store, or any website, comes down to numbers. If you have lots of traffic to your website, you don’t need a huge conversion rate to achieve success. However, having more conversions per 100 visitors is always a good thing.
One often ignored aspect of conversion rate optimization (CRO) is design. The quality of your website’s design can play a massive role in boosting your conversions, regardless of the type of website you’re running.
We asked our friends at an NYC web design agency to help us create a list of the most overlooked simple design tweaks that can help you improve your conversions.
Boost Conversions
As we mentioned in the first paragraphs, there are two ways to increase sales or conversions on your website — increase traffic, or improve your conversion rate. Although the two are often intertwined, we’ll consider them separate categories for the purposes of this guide.
With that in mind, we can say that your traffic is handled mainly by your SEO practices, pay-per-click ads, social media presence, and other marketing techniques. Your conversion rates will also be affected by marketing, but other things like UX and overall website design come into play as well.
You can get more out of whatever traffic you currently have by focusing on improving your conversion rates through the following design tweaks.
Audio, video, and other high-quality media, can improve the design of your website significantly. Presenting your products or services in various ways offers a richer user experience, giving customers a deeper understanding of your offer.
For example, you could use help videos to present how each of your products is used or demonstrate a more detailed view of its features. You could also provide 360-degree views of your products, helping prospects understand what they’re dealing with.
Call-to-action buttons are crucial to the success of any website because they guide the prospects toward conversions.
In other words, calls to action tell your customers what you want them to do. However, if your prospects don’t even see the call to action, it is useless, so you should make sure they are as visible as possible on the page.
A neat trick to highlight a particular section of the page is to have a photo of a human model looking or pointing at that section. Your prospects’ eyes will naturally follow the model’s gaze, ending up on the desired button or prompt.
If you want to encourage conversions, you need to give your potential customers all the information they could possibly need in as little time as possible. There’s no better way to do that than with a well-placed high-quality picture.
Your prospects should be able to see your products from various angles and even zoom in on areas of interest. Image quality plays a massive role in conversions, so don’t shy away from hiring a professional photographer to take photos of your products.
The time of surfing the web exclusively from our desktop computers is long gone. Nowadays, roughly half of all users are accessing the internet from a mobile device at any given time. This means that if your site is not mobile-friendly, you could potentially lose a massive number of customers.
Our friends at Design Rush, one of the best ny web design companies, say that a responsive website is a must in 2021, so you should make sure to focus your design efforts on this aspect. Your potential customers need to be able to access all the necessary information and make purchases on the go, regardless of the type of device they happen to be using.
Users are no longer satisfied with a simple port of your desktop page either. They won’t pinch and pull the webpage to zoom in on what they need. Instead, one they’ll simply leave and find what they need elsewhere.
If there’s too much stuff on your homepage, customers might struggle to process all the information they see, diluting the message you’re trying to convey. Since the goal of your message is to convert, simplify the homepage, and be as clear as you can about what you want your prospects to do.
Use a color scheme that fits your brand and keep your call-to-action buttons within their own containers to make them stand out even more.
Although it is good to get as much information as possible about each of your customers, it is rarely a good idea to make it mandatory for them to sign up when purchasing. Customers who are not interested in your mailing list or are in a hurry shouldn’t be prevented from giving you their money.
The best way to get more customers to create a profile is to offer perks like quicker checkouts, discounts, or even digital gifts. That said, just because someone chose to check out as a guest this time doesn’t mean they’ll never return to your site again.
On the same note, make your checkout page as straightforward as possible. Your customers shouldn’t be distracted by other offers when they’re seconds away from purchasing an item. All of the information presented to the prospect at this point should be relevant to the purchase at hand.
If you’ve already gone through the branding stage, you’ve probably dealt with this step before.
However, suppose you’re designing your website and your brand simultaneously. In that case, you should probably consider the effects that different colors have on viewers and how your visual identity can fit with these perceptions.
For example, in Western culture, we associate the color green with wealth, while yellow is often associated with optimism and youth. Considering the message your brand is looking to convey will help you decide the color scheme of your website.
As we mentioned in the section about the homepage, too much clutter can confuse your prospects. If your potential customers are having trouble figuring out where to go and what to do next, you should probably add a bit of white space to your website.
On the other hand, too much negative space can make the page look unfinished or just odd. As is the case with most things in life, the trick is to find a balance.
A good rule of thumb is to have lots of negative space around important buttons or information that needs to stand out. Use common sense to figure out how much is too much, as everything still needs to look connected and belong to the same composition.
Think about how your customers will contact you. If there’s a brick-and-mortar facility your prospects can visit, its address should be easy to find on every page of your site. However, you should also have a well-designed contact page, as it can help you build brand trust and a stronger relationship with your customers.
If your product or service is highly technical, you’ll obviously need to make it easy for your customers to reach your support team. But having an open line of communication is necessary regardless of what you’re selling, as people will always have questions and requests to which you should be able to respond.
If you can present your product so that prospects think they could miss out on something great unless they act fast, you can significantly improve your conversion rates. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a massive driver for sales, so be sure to take advantage of it whenever possible.
You can create a sense of urgency through limited-time offers or showing when an item is low in stock. There’s also the promise of free shipping or added gifts if a purchase is made within a limited time frame.
No matter how high your items are priced, you should never hide their cost out of fear of scaring away the customer. There are few things more annoying from a customer perspective than getting to the checkout page only to learn that the item’s price is not as it was initially presented.
Always prominently display the price of your products. This will make the user experience infinitely better and make shopping easier for your customers. Shoppers don’t have the patience for cheap tricks nowadays, and they will leave your site if they suspect foul play.
Transparency is hugely important and can go a long way toward improving your conversion rate.
Hey, am Uttoran Sen - the CEO and Founder of the Guest Crew Influencer Marketing Community and a full time Blogger. Follow me on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.
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Hi David,
I love your blog and blog post on how to improve conversion rates. All of your 11 points mentioned are concrete and I strongly follow the same for my blog. Following the design strategy will truly improve the quality and sales figures of any e-commerce website.
Thank you for sharing such a brief research post.
Great Post! Thank you bud for sharing helpful and informational content. I follow the same points while web design. Conversion rates will also be affected by marketing, but other things like UX and overall website design come into play as well.
Twitter: techwork_dk
says:
Hi
Thanks for the tips. All good tips. Some of the is easy to follow and some requires a lot of work and skills. I love this blog and will soon come back for more.
It’s very smart to highlight making a contact form or contact page that important. I’ve personally found that not being able to be clearly contacted hindered me in my work. Color choices too, are very important, much more than we can imagine. Thank you for those few highlights – they’re really simple tips that I can check again on my websites to make sure they’re updated and ready to take on the world!
Twitter: MosClement
says:
Hi Uttoran,
There’s no doubt that design can grab users’ attention faster and keep them on a page. However, innovation can also positively or negatively impact consumers based on how you tweak your design. I like the fact that you added the use of rich media and quality images in this post. If used properly, they will attract more readers to your site and drive more organic traffic.
Thanks for sharing!
Hi Uttoran,
Thanks a lot for highlighting the importance of design in conversions. I agree, most people often forget about this. I really liked all of your tips about tweaking the designs. After reading your post, I have been able to identify some aspects of design that can be improved in my website. So, thanks a lot, I will be following your advice and fixing them and I will be sharing this article with fellow marketers to help them out as well.
Hi Uttoran,
I loved your article! These design tweaks sound amazing. I can see how tweaking them would help me increase the conversions. I see websites that have these design issues, and I will definitely be sharing this article within my network to prevent my friends from making these errors. Thanks a lot for sharing your insights with the readers, it is definitely a very helpful article. Looking forward to reading more of your amazing work.