Conversion rate is all about getting customers onboarded. A customer’s onboarding experience, and how we manage it, tells us a lot about the baseline conversion rates we can expect from that customer profile. As such, there are a few high level tips from The Hit-Men Site to help increase these baseline conversion rates:
Manage your layouts for conversions:
What the layout of your website looks like has a substantial impact on how well customers convert. This is because it can affect their understanding of what they’re signing up for and what they’ll get out of the product or service. For example:
Buttons should be large and placed in an obvious location on each page so users don’t have to search around. Also, you should use icons for each action that leads to the conversion. Captions should be placed above the elements they describe. Additionally, give your customers information about your value proposition upfront, without having to dig around to find it.
Minimize page scrolling:
This is not the time to include a lot of content on your landing pages, especially if it’s written in long copy or if you need to make sure customers really want what you’re offering before they’re ready to buy. The point of onboarding is for users to get their first impression, but after that first impression there’s no reason for customers to scroll through tons of pages of info before purchasing.
How important privacy is depends on your industry and customers. Onboarding can be really different for ecommerce companies and those in the social media space. For example, many social media companies need to make sure that users aren’t logged into their accounts when they first arrive on their website. This is because on the way to the checkout page, they’ll want to be able to look at their feed and see what other people are saying about them on their Facebook page and Twitter account.
Introduce your product
When you first introduce your product or service, it may not have a use case yet. In this case, you want to create a sense of urgency so people understand why it’s important for them to sign up now. For example, if you’re introducing a social media site where people can create their own videos, then you might say that users who sign up now will get to create their first video for free. This is because once the product has been launched, the first thing people will want to do is create a video and it will cost money from here on out.
The other important aspect of a company’s onboarding process is making sure that your customers have a good understanding of what your “value proposition” is. With this in mind, I’ll leave you with what I consider to be one of the best onboarding guides ever created:
This guide was created by Noah Kagan , he used it as an employee handbook for his startup. While it’s not a technical guide aimed at developers, it gives you an idea of how to organize your company’s business, marketing and product teams around creating a great onboarding experience.
Enterprise customers
This is why you’ve likely heard the phrase “always be closing”. If you’re not converting well after customers have completed your onboarding flow, then it’s not because of any problems within the process. Rather, it’s probably because your value proposition wasn’t compelling enough to convert people in the first place.
If you’re selling to enterprise customers, you’ll want to manage the expectations of your product and services. This means that you should take the time to explain how it works and how it can benefit them. These customers are very particular about how they do business, so you need to adapt your onboarding experience to address their needs.
How-to guides:
If you’re selling a complex product or service, consider writing a series of blog posts that walk new customers through features and functionality. You could also sell these as PDFs or ebooks if they’ll be useful for more than one buyer.
Working with your customers:
Make sure that you’re including customer testimonials and reviews on your website. This will help build trust with new buyers and convince them that what they’re getting is valuable.
Before making changes to your product or service, run tests using signup analytics. See which ones are most effective at bringing in new subscribers and users so you can reverse engineer the onboarding experience you need to convert them into customers.
Post-landing page:
After converting, customers may be interested in social sharing, bookmarking, or learning more about your company and its offerings through other forms of content marketing. Consider adding a “How to Use” page filled with information about the product to help your customers get started.