Conversion Optimization Tip: Have a Clear Call to Action

One of the most essential skills to have if you own or consult on ecommerce sites would be the ability to optimize conversions. If you’ve already got traffic, it’s the easiest way to drastically increase sales, almost immediately.

Wikipedia defines conversion optimization as: the science and art of creating an experience for a website visitor with the goal of converting the visitor into a customer.

To illustrate this example in real life terms, let’s say we have a website that does 100 visitors a day from a certain keyword through Google. Right now, for every 100 visitors the site receives 1 sale. That’s a 1% conversion rate. By focusing on conversion optimization we may be able to increase that amount to 3 sales per 100 visitors, or a 3% conversion rate. That’s 3 x as many sales without any increase in traffic.

So now you have the basics of what conversion optimization is. Let’s see an example and focus on the main tip of this post, “having a clear call to action”. Here are some questions I ask myself:

• What is the purpose of this page?
• Is it clear what action needs to be completed to proceed?
• How easy is it to find my goal?
• Does the user have all the information required to make the decision to proceed?

First we need to identify the purpose and desired action for each page. Start at the homepage. What would you like the visitor to do? Click on a product category? Click on a product from a list of best sellers? Once you know what the desired goal is, you can begin the optimization process. It’s likely that the purpose of the homepage is to be used as an introduction to the products and services that your company offers. It’s also likely that once there, a visitor has to navigate further into the site to complete a transaction. In order for them to do so, they have to be able to identify and locate the desired action. Here’s an example:

Which would you click on?

I’m going to bet that most of you saw the big blue button before the smaller text, right? So, if this button was placed on a product page as the “add to cart” button, I’d bet the button on the left would increase the amount of products added to the cart, especially if the right example (the text) was buried with a lot of other text on the page – product descriptions, pricing, sku, reviews, and so on. Now as long as I had a clear description of what happens when you ‘click me’ and a use for doing so (adding a product to the cart, etc) I could expect that users would be able to complete the action more easily, thus more users WOULD complete the action.

The moral of the story here is to, in a nutshell: identify your sales process and how the user is intended to navigate through the site. Start at your landing pages and identify how the steps after correlate to how your pages are setup visually. Make sure it’s easy to determine the purpose and action required on each page, and that the action is easily found. Do this and you’ll be on your way to having a high converting website that does more (sales) with less (traffic).