10 Tips To Increase Leads And Online Sales : Converting Website Design
Converting website design is all about customizing your website to generate more leads, more sales, and more income in your business.
When users come to your website from a Google search or referral link, you will have the option to convert them to paying customers. However, this requires more than stunning sales copy – you’ll need a solid web design that’s optimized across the board to make your visitors more likely to convert. Your website is like your online storefront: if it doesn’t look attractive and inviting, people just won’t want to shop there no matter how attractive your products and offers may be.
To help you get the most out of your next digital marketing campaigns, we’ve put together 10 quick tips on how to optimize your lead generation and online sales with converting website design. We’ll show you how to back up your sales copy with effective web design elements that make your site visitors more likely to convert into paying customers.
Mobile Marketing Tips That Drive Leads and Sales
Converting Website Design: 10 Tips To Increase Your Leads And Sales
Create one landing page per ad campaign
Our first tip relates to both website design and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategy.
If you are selling a product or service online, you must have identified ideal customers , representations of the types of people most likely to buy and benefit from your products.
We recommend that you create an ad group for each established customer personality when creating a PPC ad campaign. Each of your ad campaigns should target a single ad group (and by extension, a single buyer) with a highly targeted message designed to appeal to that specific audience.
To maximize results, digital marketers should design a unique landing page for each ad campaign. This creates an end-to-end advertising experience that is personalized and specific to an established ideal customer, making it highly relevant and more likely to drive conversions.
Implement a visual content hierarchy
A content hierarchy simply means that some content on a page is more important than other content and that the most important content needs to be highlighted in the right way to drive user actions.
There are many different tools that web designers can use to establish a hierarchy of content on the page and guide their visitors’ attention to desired actions. First, however, web designers need to understand how users are most likely to interact with the pages they create. In the United States, human users are used to navigating two types of content hierarchies:
- Z Pattern Hierarchy – For a website with lots of images and minimal text, a human user would be likely to scan the page using a Z pattern. This means scanning a page from left to right , then diagonally down to the left, then across the page again, as if reading lines in a book.
- F Template Hierarchy – For a website with a lot of text, most users would scan the page into an F template. Users may not read all the words right away. Instead, they can look at the top of the page, then start looking on the left side for clues as to where to find useful content, then scan again from left to right once an image or interesting text captures their attention. This F model is one of the most common outcomes seen when measuring how users interact with web pages.
By understanding the ways humans interact and navigate individual pages, conversion website design experts can position the most important design elements in the right places where they will have the greatest impact on conversions.
Use colors and contrast to emphasize key elements
Colors and contrast are two additional tools web designers can use to highlight the most important elements of the page and drive conversions.
If there’s an element on the page that you really want your visitors to interact with, make sure visitors notice it by giving it a unique color that contrasts well with the background.
If there are two separate but related elements on the same page, give them the same background color and your visitors will naturally group them together. In the same way that you can accentuate the similarity by using the same background color, you can accentuate the differences by using two different background colors.
The best conversion of web designers understands how to communicate and orient their potential customers using color and contrast.
Optimize the design and positioning of the CTA
A call to action (CTA) is a phrase on your website that tells your visitors exactly what action they need to take to take the next step in the customer journey.
How you design your CTAs and where you position them on the page are two essential parts of conversion rate optimization. Try the following tips to see improved conversions on your site:
- Avoid text-based CTAs or simple hyperlinks.
- Use a brightly colored CTA button to capture the attention of your website visitors.
- Pick a color for your CTA that contrasts well with the background.
- Place CTAs in the middle of the page above the fold, or on the right side of the top navigation menu.
Optimize lead generation forms
If one of the goals of your website is to generate leads for your business, you may have one or more lead generation forms present on your website. Optimizing the design of your lead generation forms can reduce friction for your visitors, leading to better conversions. Here’s how to get started:
- Place your form above the fold to attract potential customers.
- Shorten your lead generation forms by reducing the number of form fields and collecting the minimum information required.
- Include a clear value offer and promise of convenience and privacy when presenting a lead form to your website visitors.
- Include a powerful CTA in your forms to attract potential customers to encourage visitors to take action.
Use attractive visuals and human faces
When a visitor comes to your website for the first time, you might only have a few seconds to engage that person and capture their interest.
Ultimately, compelling visuals and images of real humans are two of the best ways to achieve this.
The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it processes text, and up to 90% of the information transferred to the brain is visual. From this point of view, a picture is truly worth a thousand words when it comes to capturing attention and engaging audiences.
Images of humans have an added dimension of efficiency when it comes to driving conversions. A photo of your team members featured on your website builds trust in your audience, humanizes your business, and puts potential customers at ease when dealing with you.
Incorporate social proof
The concept of social proof is based on the idea that when individuals do not know how to act in an ambiguous situation, they are likely to look to others for behavioral clues to inform their actions and decision making.
Here’s what that means from a marketing perspective: If a customer isn’t sure whether to buy from you or the competition, you may be able to influence them by showing that their peers have already bought from you and are happy with their purchase.
There are several ways to incorporate social proof into your conversion website design:
- Post case studies or customer testimonials describing your past successes
- The logos of companies you’ve worked with in the past alongside your lead generation forms and CTA buttons
- Raw data on your website showing how many successful projects you have completed or how many customers have purchased your product
- Publish testimonials from past customers on your landing pages
Refine options for your visitors
Your website should be designed as a sales funnel, with each page playing a role in introducing visitors throughout the customer journey, from initial awareness to final purchase.
If a page has too many links to different areas of your website, you increase the likelihood that a potential customer will exit your sales funnel. To avoid this, it’s important to avoid giving users too many options on each page that can distract them from the desired action you want them to take.
Build a responsive mobile site
One of the easiest ways to ruin conversions on your website is to design a website that only works on desktops.
In 2020, more than 50% of all Google searches are expected to come from mobile devices. If your website is not performing well on mobile devices, Google will avoid listing your web pages in search engine results and you will miss out on a lot of traffic and conversion opportunities.
To avoid this, a conversion website design specialist would create a responsive mobile website with elements that automatically change orientation to look and perform flawlessly on devices of all types and sizes. Marketers can use a free, mobile-friendly test provided by Google to verify that their website is working properly on all devices.
Minimize page load times
Page speed has a huge impact on user behavior, including conversion rates. We live in a consumer culture where your website visitors simply don’t have the patience to wait for a page to load slowly.
A case study published by mPulse found that pages loading in 2.4 seconds had a conversion rate of 1.9%, while pages loading in 5.7 seconds had a conversion rate of 0.6% – that’s almost 70% loss of conversions due to 3.5 seconds page load time!
Even Google has found that when a page’s load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the likelihood of page abandonment increases by 32%. When the load time goes from 1 second to 5 seconds, the probability increases by 90%.
The best way to keep your page load times under control is to audit your website using Google PageSpeed Insights.
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Thanks for checking out our exclusive guide to converting website design and reading our 10 website design tips to help you improve your leads and sales online.
For an even more in-depth look at how to leverage conversion-friendly design elements on your website, visit our full lesson on Directive Institute.
