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Every business in the world wants to improve its 

. So it’s hardly surprising the search term “conversion rate optimisation” has seen a big spike in interest in recent years.

 into leads or customers at a decent rate, you’ll struggle to make money online. Conversely, get your conversion rate optimization (CRO) right and the benefits are huge – 

 on your ad spend by reducing wastage; drive more results from your organic traffic; delight your sales team by giving them a constant stream of qualified leads; the list goes on.

However, there’s a big difference between wanting to improve your conversion rate and actually doing it. Just 22% of businesses say they’re 

, while only 32% strongly agree they’re being strategic and proactive – as opposed to tactical and reactive – in their approach to conversion rate optimisation.

With that in mind, here are nine best practices to help you do more effective, impactful CRO in 2021.

Conversion rate optimisation is the process of improving a website or digital journey so that a higher percentage of visitors complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or submitting an enquiry. It involves analysing user behaviour, testing different page layouts or messaging, and making data-led changes to remove friction and make it easier for people to take the next step.

Best Practice #1: Test With a Clear Hypothesis & Goals

Conversion rate optimization should never be based on guesswork. If you’re rewriting your page copy or adding new calls to action (CTAs) based on nothing more than gut feeling, you’re not doing CRO – you’re just making a few tweaks and seeing what happens.

Instead, it should be based on data. Every time you make a change to your website or PPC campaigns or social ads (or anything else) with the aim of improving conversion rates, you should test your new “challenger” approach alongside a “control” subject – typically whatever you’ve got in place at the moment. For instance, Crazy Egg 

 that pitted its existing homepage against a new, much longer variant:

To run effective conversion rate optimization tests, you need to get two things in place upfront:

Best Practice #2: Build Your CRO Tech Stack

If you don’t have the right tools in place, you’ll struggle to do effective conversion rate optimization. In fact, legacy technology is cited as the number one barrier to increasing conversions.

I’m not saying you need to invest thousands of dollars to do CRO well. It’s just a case of picking the right tools – some of which are completely free – across the following key areas:

Best Practice #3: Understand the Most Effective Lead Gen Forms

There’s a good chance lead capture forms will be a big focus of your conversion rate optimization tests, especially if you’re a B2B brand.

Why? Because these are the tools you use to capture leads. A high-performing form makes a huge difference to the volume of leads you generate, so forms are an obvious starting point for your CRO strategy. Those forms come in lots of different flavours, such as:

A prime example is the registration form 

 uses to let users sign up for a free 14-day trial. It uses clear and concise language and only asks for three details: first name, last name, and email address.

Some of those form variants are more effective than others. According to 

, landing pages are by far the best performing of all signup forms – yet they’re also the least used.

On the flipside, popups are overwhelmingly the most popular type of signup form, yet they achieve the second-lowest signup rate.

The lesson here? Popups and Wheel of Fortune spinners might look flashy, but a high-quality landing page is hard to beat.

Best Practice #4: Keep Lead Gen Forms Concise

So we’re agreed – choosing the right type of 

 form is a crucial piece in the conversion rate optimization puzzle.

But there’s a lot more to it than that. Once you’ve identified the right type of form to use, you need to make it work for you. That means being strict with yourself about the information you truly need to capture from your leads (vs. the information you’d simply like to have).

 when more than three fields are included on a form.

Sure, in an ideal world you might want to capture your lead’s:

And lots more. But how much of that information do you need upfront? And how much can your 

 find by doing a couple of minutes of basic research?

First name and email address are possibly the two most vital pieces of information you need from a lead, and it’s even more beneficial if 

When it comes to lead gen forms, the saying “less is more” certainly rings true.

Best Practice #5: Drive Users to Take Action

If you want to improve your conversion rates, you can’t afford to be passive. Don’t just hope customers will come running to your site and 

 – you need to gently nudge them in the right direction!

To understand how this works in practice, look no further than Booking.com. Just look at all the tactics it uses within a single hotel listing to convince potential customers to book right now:

Within that one listing, Booking.com tells us:

Once you’ve read all those things, there’s really nothing stopping you from hitting “See availability”.

 an employee recognition software company.

Like Booking.com, Nectar uses a number of tactics to prompt users into taking action:

 as an example of how a company can drive users to take action. If you visit some of their product pages, you will be greeted with a couple of things:

Best Practice #6: Use Social Proof to Push Conversions

 is key for driving leads and sales, which in turn makes it an important element in conversion rate optimization.

One of the ways you can build trust is through social proof. Simply incorporating testimonials on a sales page has been shown to 

 by as much as 34%. But testimonials aren’t the only form of social proof you should be using – other examples include:

 also display social proof on his site in the form of testimonials and below them, logos of the organizations he’s been featured in:

The best thing about this? If you’re good at what you do, demonstrating social proof is easy. Your customers will be happy to review you, say nice things about you, and share your content – you just need to ask them!

Best Practice #7: Treat Conversion Rate Optimization as a Continuous Process

You’ve got your tech stack in place, you’ve set goals and hypotheses, and tweaked your lead gen forms. But your conversion rate still isn’t improving. What’s going on?

There’s a good chance the issues you’re seeing are down to your mindset.

 isn’t something to dip into every now and again. To yield the best results, you need to be doing it continuously, following each of these five steps before looping back to the start:

Best Practice #8: Create Strong CTA Buttons

There’s plenty of room for creativity in the world of web design and user experience. Generally, the more creative you get, and the more you experiment, the more you’ll discover unexpected tactics that drive results.

However, you shouldn’t experiment with everything.

One of the elements of your site that you probably shouldn’t be playing around with too much is your CTA buttons. The fact is, your visitors are used to CTA buttons. They look out for them and instinctively understand that when they see one, it’s a trigger to drive the desired action. In other words, it clearly roadmaps where they should go next.

When every other website is using CTA buttons, it’s not a great idea for you to rip up the rulebook and go in a completely different direction.

Your CTA buttons should incorporate a few key characteristics:

Here’s a pretty classic example of how this should look, from personal injury lawyers 

However, that’s not to say there’s no room for experimentation here. Stick with the basic design, but feel free to play around with the colour, copy, size, font, and location of your CTA buttons.

Knispel uses a bright blue CTA button that tells readers to book a free consultation and puts it close to a client testimonial, which is pretty clever.

Best Practice #9: Take Learnings From CRO Tests

I’ve already briefly referenced this, but it’s such an important conversion rate optimization best practice that it deserves its own separate point.

After every round of testing you perform, take the time to deep-dive into the results so you’re completely clear on what happened and why. As a minimum, strive to answer the following questions:

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be much better prepared to plan and launch your next test, which in turn increases your chances of making further conversion rate improvements.

Sure, there’s a lot of elements to this. If you’re new to conversion rate optimization, I’m not expecting you to put all this stuff in place immediately.

But if there’s one key thing I urge you to take away from reading this article, it’s this: always view CRO as a long-term project.

You wouldn’t “try SEO” by targeting one keyword for a month, then giving up if you don’t immediately hit the top of Google. In the same way, don’t expect to dip your toe into CRO for a short period and expect to find all the answers to your conversion rate problems.

Before you get started, plan multiple tests upfront, and commit to running each for however long it takes to generate the necessary data – whether that’s a week, a month, a whole quarter, or even longer.

Eventually, the incremental improvements you’re making will add up to a significant increase in your overall conversion rate.

Freya is the founder of the personal finance blog 

 that teaches readers how to grow their passive income, save money, improve their credit score, and manage debt. She has been featured in publications like Business Insider, Fox Business, the Huffington Post, and GoBankingRates.

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9 Best Practices for Conversion Rate Optimisation