14 Ways to Increase Conversions Through UX (and how to get started)
Conversions. The word that sends chills down marketers, sales people, and experience designers, across the world. As companies, teams are always looking to draw people to their goal and increase conversions, whether that’s getting new newsletter sign-ups, event registrations, demos booked, or e-commerce sales.
Luckily enough, there’s more than one way to skin the proverbial cat and with a multi-departmental approach, organisations can drive new conversions through UX in ways they may have never thought of.
Check out 14 of our favourite options for boosting conversions below:
1. Build The Ideal Landing Page
If you’re running an ad, discussing offers, or simply want to promote your product, don’t fall into the trap of thinking your homepage is the best choice to link to.
Not only does linking your campaigns to your homepage likely not achieve your wider objectives, but it’s far removed your goal of converting and is packed with distractions that lead customers away like the main menu and other buttons.
That’s why choosing the right landing page is crucial to conversion rate success. Unbounce released an article back in 2009 that holds true today in terms of what landing pages should be deployed, with homepages being the laziest and often the lowest converting ones due to the lack of clarity in action you want visitors to take.
Key Stats:
Landing pages with sign up forms have 23% conversion rate (Thrive My Way)
77% of landing pages are homepages (Klient Boost)
Where To Get Started:
Look at your objectives and think about what type of landing page would best fit your campaign to increase conversions. If it’s newsletter sign ups, you might want to build a lead capture landing page or a pop up on your page as an option.
For sales conversions, it may be just a product page with a description, price, and checkout buttons, being careful to place information in locations that are clearly visible on the page.
Once that’s established, look at your CMS whether that’s Wix, WordPress or Drupal (other CMS’ are available), and assess what tools you need, whether that be forms, pop ups, or e-commerce functionality to achieve your desired objectives.
2. Optimise Call-to-Actions
Regardless of your goal and channel, if your landing page/newsletter/offer is laid out in a confusing way, or button placement is out of the way, you will struggle to convert as many customers as you could have even if you have the best offer in the world.
Examples of CTA practices you could use to increase conversion includes using ghost buttons (we did a whole post on Ghost Buttons you can check out here), having the button more clearly visible on the page, or ensuring the button properly communicates purpose to influence the end user to take action.
Key Stats:
Using buttons in your email campaigns instead of hyperlinked text can increase clickthroughs by 28% (Campaign Monitor)
Information capture conducted at the top of the page outperforms other locations (Grow and Convert)
Personsalised call-to-actions perform 202% better than generic ones (Hubspot)
Where To Get Started:
Conduct some analysis on your clickthrough rates on existing call-to-actions on your website and campaigns. Are they performing as expected? Was there a particularly effective or ineffective week you can deep dive into to see what worked/didn’t work?
Look at button casings for your CTAs if you haven’t already within your platform and assess how compelling your wording, placement, and attention-grabbing your button is. Is it obvious? Does it emotionally appeal to the copy it’s near and its intended objective?
If you have heatmapping or recording software like HotJar or SmartLook enabled, we recommend analysing where the users cursor moves. With this information, you can see where users will typically be looking and optimise placement based on real data.
3. Simplify The Customer Journey
Don’t overcomplicate things. You may want your customers to be given as much choice as possible, with a customer flow chart that takes them everywhere, however, this is going to negatively impact your conversion rate compared to a journey that’s straight forward, requires few steps, and gets them to their required goal.
If it takes one too many pages to get to the checkout, support, or cart, you need a rethink of how customers should be traversing your experience to ensure they can convert.
Key Stats:
67% of the buyer journey is done digitally, having implications for how you layout your user journey (Apiumhub)
Maximising satisfaction within the customer journey can increase customer satisfaction by 20%, lift revenue 15%, and reduce cost to serve by 20% (McKinsey)
Where To Get Started:
Look at your existing user journeys and consider if it’s orientated to achieving your goals. What could be taken out to improve each step? What metrics do you have to show people are tuning out or not clicking?
As no customer is the same, think of your list of personas and what they’d need to convert. Some may need more information than others, some may be more direct, what touchpoints do you need to consider. You can then use all this data to draw a customer journey map (doesn’t have to be linear and you can have multiple maps for different personas).
This can include what channels your customers engage with before they get to your site, what pages they traverse through, what’s their end goal. We’ve linked a great guide from Qualtrics that covers the steps they suggest.
4. Turbocharge Site Speed
Speed can kill conversions. Simple as that.
We’ve all been there. Found a link we wanted to click on, the screen goes white, the wheel in the tab spins into eternity, and you opt to close the tab and get on with your day. How many seconds do you think that was? According to the stats below, likely under 3!
Site speed can prevent conversions from all sources, including your paid ads. This is why ensuring your website is quick and responsive is paramount to guaranteeing visitors at least make your landing page before proceeding to complete your set goals.
Key Stats:
79% of shoppers who have trouble with a webiste won’t return (Neil Patel)
47% of customers expect sites to load in 2 seconds or less (HostReviews)
Bounce rate increase to 32% if the site loads from 1 to 3 seconds. 5 seconds is 90%! (ThinkWithGoogle)
Where To Get Started:
First things first, do your checks via analytics or run tests. This can be done by either running the report within Google Analytics (Behavior > Site Speed) and looking at figures like ‘Avg. Page Load Time’ or Google’s FREE site speed checker which can do both mobile and desktop versions.
Some areas you can tackle quickly include –
Image Optimisation: If you’re a heavy user of visual content, the amount and file size of images can drastically increase load times. For best results, use tools that can optimise or compress images while retaining quality, e.g. for WordPress tools like Imagify work well.
Lazy Loading: Loading pages in one go can be resource-intensive on your infrastructure, especially if they’re full of images, video content, or just long. Lazy loading is an approach that focuses on loading content as it’s needed, e.g. when scrolling occurs, rather than updating in one go, meaning the bare minimum resources are need to be used upfront.
For more details, Conversionista also has a great guide on areas you can target for faster load speeds.
5. Review and Refine Copy
Copywriting is an underrated skill too often dismissed as just putting words on the page. Good copy doesn’t need to formal, funny, or fit any standardised approach. But there are three non-negotiables; the copy needs to be fit for your audience, the writing needs to acknowledge your goals, and must be spelled correctly (unless you’re making a pun of course!).
How many times have you come across websites that have lost credibility because of a spelling mistake? Or how many times have you reached a landing page or an offer and just not found it captivating enough to go further?
It happens. That’s why making sure your copy is on point, relevant, and communicates the customer pain points in a way that is resolved by going with your organisation is key for generating the conversions you deserve.
Key Stats:
80% of people will read your headline, only 20% will go further. (Copy Blogger)
The ideal length of an email subject line is 28-39 characters long (Buffer)
Incorrect grammar will scare away 59% of visitors (Real Business)
Where To Get Started:
Conduct a site and campaign wide overview of your existing copywriting policies. Are you adhering to specific lengths or headline conventions? Are product descriptions and offers compelling and highlight the benefits? Review what competitors are doing with their headlines and their content to determine areas you can differentiate or create a better experience through tone.
For email headlines and ads, take advantage of A/B testing facilities on your chosen platform to trial what works for you, whether that be trying emojis, headline lengths, copy lengths and more.
For spelling, you can introduce a policy for proof reading within your team to ensure more thorough checks are applied, or if lacking in time, tools like Grammarly can be useful in making sure you’re confident your message is getting across.
6. Explore Different Content Formats
Search engines used to be all about keyword stuffing pages to the brim to show up at the top of organic searches. However, nowadays it’s a content arms race, designed to draw visitors in to learn more, grow brand affinity, and ultimately, convert to goals.
However, this doesn’t just mean you need to get writing text blog posts. Software and channels that encourage different media forms have made routes like podcasts, video, and infographics much more desirable in an age dominated by text.
Moving away from just text content also has other advantages, including spreading a wider net to audiences that may not know you’re out there just yet.
Key Stats:
Bold and attention-grabbing imagery can improve user engagement by 80% (Xerox)
68% of visitors would rather learn about a product by watching a video than reading text (Hallam)
Where To Get Started:
Determine which channels have the most potential to drive demand for your products based on your ideal customer persona, e.g. YouTube for video, Spotify for audio podcasts.
Look at your existing content strategy and library alongside internal resources you have to assess what’s viable and what may need to be outsourced to an external agency. Also consider where you can embed your new formats, e.g. could you put a promotional video on your homepage, or link your podcast into the footer of your newsletter.
To help optimise content created, be sure to identify what existing posts can be updated or future topics can be created with new formats to save rewriting and harness existing copy.
7. Create Urgency (countdown timers, quantities left)
Urgency can be a great emotional driver to take action on a website and convert to your set objectives. Great examples are all around, though arguably, Ebay encapsulates many of them in one place.
To encourage bidding, Ebay pioneered online auction style selling, complete with timers (to encourage bids and attention from it being posted to it being sold), and the number of items available (so if a user saw there was one left, they would be more inclined to jump at the chance to purchase).
Another way this has been applied to good effect is through Amazon’s product pages where they tell you to ‘Order within x amount of time for same day dispatch’, creating urgency to make a decision even faster.
As per above, there are a fair few ways you can apply this to your own site and experiences, so incorporating these can help encourage conversions that may not otherwise be noticed.
Key Stat:
A well placed timer can increase conversions 400% (Brave Achievers)
Where To Get Started:
Have no use for countdown timers or remaining quantity indicators on your product page? No problem!
Timers are especially useful at driving sign ups to events like webinars or conferences when used for email marketing. Using your mail platform, embed existing countdown tools or look for extensions to add that functionality. For e-commerce, you could introduce stock indicators, highlight next day delivery qualifiers, or introduce pop ups about limited time offers.
You can also look to add urgency copy by including words like ‘now’ or ‘limited time’ to your emails or product pages to influence decision making.
What’s important though is that you ascertain when these tools are needed and how to apply them as doing them constantly could desensitise potential customers to the tactic.
8. Communicate Reduced Risk
Whether it’s free delivery and returns or warranty and money back guarantees on a new iPhone, having additional risk-reducing benefits of doing business with you can help set you apart from the competition and get the conversion. What’s pivotal though is that any policy your organisation has is communicated clearly to the customer to ease their worries about committing to a goal.
Though the above options are more geared towards e-commerce, anytime opt-outs for newsletters and the display of accreditation or testimonials are just some of the options that you can apply to your landing page to assure visitors that you’re their organisation of choice.
Key Stat
73% of people are more likely to decide to buy an item if it includes free shipping (SaveMyCent)
90% of consumers use online reviews as part of their research process before buying (Fan and Fuel)
Where To Get Started:
Look at what guarantees, warranties, and benefits you offer as standard and make sure they are clearly on display or accessible on your landing page. Is it clearly communicated on the page?
If your audience is more in the consideration stage, ask your existing customers for testimonials, get logos for any accreditations or credentials you have, and make sure to tactically place them where they’ll have the most impact.
Some risk can even be dispelled in something as simple as an FAQs on your website or against the product page. Ask Support or your Sales team what questions they get frequently asked and make sure they are represented on the page to minimise time going back and forth and secure conversions quicker.
9. Make Upsells or Cross-sells Easy
Ever been at the self-checkout in a shop and feel compelled to reach for the sweets/chocolate at the side? Adding upsells online can work in the exact same way, giving visibility to items they might not otherwise be interested in and increasing the monetary value of your conversions rapidly.
If you have a product that you’d like to increase conversion on, making sure it’s visible among other products in that range or complementary products can also offer greater visibility and chances to convert.
The best additional upsells are innocuous, blending into the scenery but in eye line. As per Econsultancy, some of the best places to do this are on product pages (think Amazon and the ‘Frequently Bought Together’ section) and during checkout itself.
Key Stats:
Tests by Growth Rock showed average order value (AOV) value to grow significantly ($55), while a second showed upsell options to increase conversion rates by double digits (13%). (Growth Rock)
37% of marketers don’t try upselling or cross-selling (The Sales Funnel Strategist)
The price of an upsell in addition to the original product should be aimed at 40% of the price of the item they’re buying already (Bitchatcha)
Where To Get Started:
If upselling and cross-selling is an avenue you can go down, ideally, you’ll need a good CRM in place that has details about customer purchases in place. This data will be what your experience will use to present recommendations to your customer.
Alternatively, you can review what products you have, pricing and relevancy to other products, with a view to manually create associations between products e.g. if person a buys this bag, show them this purse as a upsell. This must be done with great care, as sending irrelevant products through email or via automated recommendations can leave a bad impression on your customer base.
In terms of getting started with implementing upsell and cross-sell options, there are some great visual guides on how to do this step by step depending on your e-comerce platform:
e.g. WooCommerce: How to Add Upsell Products to WooCommerce – AVADA Commerce
e.g. Shopify: How to Upsell and Cross-Sell on Your Online Store (shopify.com)
10. Live Chat
Support is a vital part of not only helping customers achieve their end goal, but also yours. Deployed for everything from a helpdesk portal to your e-commerce store, live chat can help visitors get answers to questions they can’t find online, giving your customer service team the chance to wow them through a direct touchpoint.
This can also be great at complementing other options in this list, e.g. What’s your returns policy? How do I make use of this offer?, helping prevent a missed conversion opportunity.
Key Stats:
Visitors who chat with a business are about 3x more likely to convert than those who don’t (Tidio)
Customer satisfaction ratings for live chat are only second to those for telephone support (Zendesk)
For customers who have used live chat prior to making a purchase, there was a 10% increase in average order value (Forrester)
Where To Get Started:
Start by determining if you need live chat. Look at the tell-tale signs; high bounce rates at checkout or product pages and frequent queries that aren’t applicable to generic FAQs. Are there many questions that fall into this latter category? Do you have the resources in-house to conduct live chat?
If the answer is yes, look at your CMS or ecommerce platform and look for plugins or extensions you can add to your website to enable live chat. A few areas of initial consideration could include presenting preliminary questions in live chat to common questions to optimise staff time, and surveys post-chat for customers to provide feedback.
11. Greater Personalisation
One thing that will never go out of style for generating higher and greater value conversions is personalisation.
Think Amazon for example. With the data it collects from purchases, products viewed, and clicks, it can best put in front of you recommendations, what you can buy again, and what you’ve previously viewed. It feels like the company has invested in you and your experience with them, offering the things you’re interested in and what my interest you in future.
Taking a similar approach, you can personalise the content you put in front of visitors to maximise clicks and conversions by using information you already have at your disposal.
Key Stats:
Personalisation reduces customer acquisition costs by 50% (Forbes)
71% of consumers express frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal (The Drum)
Only 12% said they’d share data to receive more relevant ads, while 30% said there would be no circumstance for sharing data (TechRepublic)
Where To Get Started:
Harnessing personalisation through algorithms on the scale of Amazon or Google for conversions may be a bit of a big leap at first, but there are good places you can start.
Services like WooComerce and Shopify have their own product personalisation tools for enabling you to establish relationships, while email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor, HubSpot and MailChimp have ways of adding names, email addresses and segmenting audiences into categories so emails can feel more personal.
What you must remember though is that you will have to comply with data protection and privacy policies. Never understate the importance of consent and opt-in for using data for personalisation.
12. Highlight Offers
What’s not to like about offers? From affiliate ‘refer a friend’ gifts to free eBooks, getting something extra is a powerful way of attracting new customers or getting a conversion. Offers can make committing to your conversion goals more compelling through science, where the offer of coupons to some shoppers increased happiness and deceased stress.
Offers can be utilised and displayed in a number of ways; pop ups with codes to copy on arrival, codes in distinct areas of the page for users, strikethroughs on prices and so much more. This can also be combined with our earlier point on creating urgency to compound an offers effectiveness.
Key stat
74% say they ‘strongly agree’ or ‘somewhat agree’ with the statement that they’re always look out for special offers and promotions (Statista)
Coupon users spend an average of 46% more at checkout (Blippr)
Where To Get Started:
Assess what offers you currently have and find out the mechanism that would best achieve your goals. For example, a free e-book would require you to get a user’s contact details ahead of time. You could do this via a squeeze page, a landing page with a signup form, or a pop-up as basic options. A bar that runs across site may also catch users’ attention if placed widely enough for discount codes or offers.
Visibility will be key for presenting offers. You want to make sure they are well placed within eye line and capture users’ attention, which could mean high placement in email campaigns to having links in your social media bios.
13. Make Experiences Responsive
Long live mobile! By 2025, the UK’s smartphone penetration is projected to hit 94%, signaling a continuation of an increasingly online population for everything from social interaction to everyday purchases.
Portable devices use overtook desktop for web traffic back in 2016, and has since continued to be a battleground for companies looking to stay in front of potential customers wherever they go. This means to ensure conversions can be optimised, you need to have your website, newsletters, and experiences be responsive for the device they’re being viewed on.
This not only has implications for how your customers see your website (unresponsive sites become unrecognisable in functionality and layout when converted), but it also makes converting to your goals more difficult if your layout hasn’t been considered on a variety of alternative screens.
Key stat
60% of users say they would never recommend a website with a badly designed mobile site (Arobit)
74% use mobile to support their shopping decisions (Forbes)
At least 50% of emails are opened on mobile (Campaign Monitor)
Where to get started:
Responsiveness is variable depending on the channel you’re trying to convert through, though we do recommend looking at your analytics platforms to determine the ways your experiences are being accessed. E.g, using Google Analytics, you can use the Audience > Mobile > Overview, you can find out what proportion of visitors are mobile, desktop, or tablet based, enabling you to plan responsiveness around your audiences needs.
For adapting to mobile, you can adopt practices like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which can offer faster user experiences that are more favourably viewed in search engines when accessed via mobile. SEM Rush has a great piece on the value of AMP and it’s benefits here.
In terms of non-website formats, for email campaigns, most software, e.g. MailChimp, Campaign Monitor etc, include viewing options for in-browser, mobile, and tablet, enabling you to visualise a user’s experience before you send out. You can then make tweaks to ensure that your campaigns best suit their devices.
14. Optimise For Accessibility Requirements
Ensuring accessibility should be something on the mind of web designers and marketing teams when building an experience by default. From visual impairment to voice recognition, your website/app/experience would benefit by empowering conversions with accessibility requirements in mind.
This can mean accounting items like the colour contrast of your experience, the ease in which a user can tab to different elements, or how easy your website runs through a screen reader.
For more on accessible design, check out our dedicated post here.
Key Stats:
Captcha takes 65 seconds for blind users having to complete it via audio (PageWiz)
92% don’t have adequate form descriptions for those hearing forms via screen reader (Baymard Institute)
Where To Get Started:
There are a number of tools available these days to help dispel any confusion around making your experiences more accessible. For example, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is one of the predominant international standards with levels based on adherence. You can review the points that comprise web accessibility at different standards via the link here.
You can then conduct manual testing or harness multiple tools like web browser-based Wave, Axe, or accessibility checking tools in both the Android and iOS apps stores prior to launch to determine where compliance may be lacking and plugging those gaps.
Need a hand making more conversions?
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