If you are hoping to find some quick tricks to help you win at CRO then you may be disappointed. Because like it or not, the number of blanket rules and guaranteed wins in our field are limited.
Every website is different. Every audience is different. And there simply isn’t a set of hard and fast rules for guaranteed CRO success. There is only one guaranteed trick to help you win at CRO – and that is applying a robust methodology to your testing plans.
Green CTAs Tend To Outperform Red
Whilst we commonly associate green with progress — green means ‘go’ whilst red means caution – this doesn’t necessarily translate to a webpage. Furthermore, colours mean different things to different audiences. In some Eastern cultures red is the colour of happiness, joy and celebration. Whereas in many Latin American cultures, green is the colour of death.
The Real Trick:
The thing is, the colour cannot be considered in a vacuum. It is much more important to consider how the CTA colour contrasts to the page and the background images. First, look to message optimisation and route through to conversion concerns.
After that is sorted, use a predictive eye-tracking tool to test your colour combinations. If the CTA is not seen in the first three seconds, then consider changing your colour.
Increase Your Conversion Rate By Shortening The Forms
Most of the time, the user will have to fill in at least one form to move along the sales funnel. People don’t like forms, though. The more complex the forms they face along the way, the more likely they are to drop out of that sales funnel. Logically, then, we should make forms as short as possible…
The Real Trick:
Every website has a sweet spot. The user needs enough form fields for them to feel they can provide the relevant information for the site to deliver the required result.
In addition, rather than looking at stripping out form fields, testing the order of form fields can also yield strong results. Does positioning the typically ‘easier’ to complete fields at the top of the form, increase the percentage that starts filling in the form and therefore improve overall completion rates?
Adding Trust Seals Always Increases Conversion
Trust seals improve customer confidence, and checkout is the most crucial part of the process for many websites. So anything you can do to increase confidence in those last few seconds before they buy is good, right?
The Real Trick:
Not always. There are hundreds of trust seals being used, and consumers don’t really know that much about them. One of problems is the branding of the seals themselves. Your customers don’t know which trust seals they can ‘really’ trust, so you run the risk of reminding them how dangerous it can be to spend money online without reassuring them that they are safe with you.
As always, test which seals help and which ones hinder our sales funnel. Test what positioning actually works as well.
To Conclude…
In summary to win at CRO there are no quick tricks that you can always rely on. You need to follow a robust methodology to help you understand both your users and your site.
This involves research to understand user needs, diving into the qual and quant analytics to see what is helping and harming conversion, building your hypotheses and executing your testing roadmap. In depth research of this nature can be time consuming and is hard work – but it is the critical foundation of a successful testing program.