In this post we're going to go over three major catagories (with many sub categories) of things that you can focus on to boost your conversion rate and generate more leads.

All to often, businesses will generate major traffic by doing inbound/content marketing right, but fail to convert those visitors into form entries or phone calls. There are many many things that could be hindering your conversions, but in our time as a digital agency, we've come across three major things that many websites could do better with.

Implement any one of these suggestions, and you'll see a higher conversion rate and more leads generated on your businesses website.

Your UI/UX

Making sure your website is friendly, easy to understand and easy to navigate it one of the most important things you can focus on when it comes to boosting conversion rates.

The first thing you need to focus on is the overall design of your website. Is it laid out in an easy to understand manner? Does the website look modern and secure? If your site looks outdated and structured poorly, potential clients may subconsciously think that your business is outdated and structured poorly as well.

Does it present the relevant information to your customers? For example, if your target customer is a household looking for fencing services, don't include include irrelevant info/text, like a press release about a new hire on that specific page.

The navigation is also really important. Not only does it seriously impact SEO, but if the site's easy to navigate, bounce rates drop and more visitors end up on your conversion instrument (form, live chat..).

Other things to focus on are the text and contrast on your pages (especially if they're landing pages). Choosing a super simple and easy to read text will convert more than a super outlanding and unique font. Stick to the top 14 Google Fonts if you're looking for a free solution.

Contrasting colors and negative space make buttons and text easier to read and easier to click on. Which button looks better to you?

A great example of a landing page is Airbnb's "host" landing page. It's super simple, high contrast, and offers everything you need to see in the initial viewport (above the fold).

Adding a nice "dark mode" option to your site following these principles could be a great ideas as well.

Call to action elements should follow the aforementioned principles of simplicity and contrast. There are tons of studies and stats on CTAs, down to the optimal pixel spacing between button letters, but if you just follow simplicity and contrast, you'll be good.

The speed of your website directly impacts conversions. We offer a service called SpeedOpp that will drastically increase the speed of your site, if you're interested in taking a look.

• According to a survey, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• Amazon calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year.
• Google also worked out that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day.

You can make your site quicker by optimizing images, using a CDN and installing a caching plugin.

Gather Data & Revise

Data and testing are the two most important things you can do when trying to improve your site, even if it's DIY. Here are some things you want to track, why and how.

You can use this data to constantly revise your UI, design, layout and other things. For example, you may test button color -- maybe a black button with white text would get more clicks than a green button with white text? Whichever gets more clicks over 30 days wins.

Incorporating AB testing also may help you to increase the conversion rate using data. What is it?

A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. AB testing is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.

From Optimizely

We really like the Nelio AB Testing plugin to enable this functionality on WordPress sites. It allows you to change little things like colors and fonts, headlines on blog posts and even complete themes/website designs. It also allows for advanced testing like heatmaps and more.

Method of Contact

Typically, a conversion for a service business is when your customer contacts you. Your entire website should be designed to offer your visitor information on what you do, build credibility/trust, then push them to contact you.

That's why focusing on your method of contact is super important. The easier it is to contact you, the more leads you'll generate.

Forms

The most generic and widely used method of contact in modern websites is a simple form. "Enter your name, email and message... we'll get back to you." 50% of marketers say inbound marketing strategies, such as onsite forms, are their primary source of leads.

If you're going to be working on your WordPress website by yourself, there's not better form tool then WPForms. We like it because it offers an awesome visual builder and a ton of features and integrations, like conditional fields and PayPal payment processing.

You can't just toss a form on your site and expect it to generate the maximum amount of leads in that form. You need to follow proven design guidelines, collect data and revise, revise, revise.

Here are some guidelines, based on data:

• Limiting the number of form fields to 3 can slash form abandonment rates. (Quicksprout)
• Forms with dropdown form fields have the highest form abandonment rates. (WPForms)
• 37% of people will abandon a form asking for their phone number, unless the field is optional, which nearly doubles completions.
• 29% of people cite security reasons as one of the main concerns when it comes to completing online forms, followed by form length (27%).
• Customized forms convert more.

Address these issues, and you'll be on your way to a higher converting form. At Isotropic, we've found that customized forms convert more. What does that mean?

Say, for example, the first field of the form is "What is your name?". The submitter types in "Nick". We can use that data to populate the rest of the form questions with Nick's name (ex. "Thanks, Nick! What's your email?"), making him more connected to the form and lessening the chance of abandonment.

Conversational forms are all the rage -- think Typeform or Paperform. WPForms has an addon that allows you to build these types of forms called Conversational Forms for WPForms, which works super well.

We've also created our own competitor to Typeform called Isoforms (pretty much everything Typeform offers, but it's $4/month.)

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Conversational forms attempt to solve the abandonment issue - 81% of people have abandoned a form after beginning to fill it out. (The Manifest). Even if you're using a traditional form, WPForms has an addon that allows you to capture information as it's entered -- so you can reach out even if your lead doesn't click the "submit button".

Keep in mind, 19% of people will return to complete a form if the company reaches out to them through email or business phone to re-engage them.

If you capture these entries, you can also isolate where people are abandoning the form and remove the roadblock.

Live Chat

Live chat is another important feature to include on any modern website, as long as it does not impact performance.

You always want a quick site, and if your webhost doesn't have the power to load a JS based live chat on top of everything else, don't include it. Luckily, if you're not on budget hosting, you can most likely support it.

Live Chat Is The Future

According to Superoffice, "if a customer has a question, they are now more likely to visit your website and try to engage with a member of your team via live chat."

And if you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Live chat is instant and on-site, while an Instagram DM or email requires opening a new application. Even, with a contact form, there are multiple non (semi, in the best case) personalized fields.

Despite these benefits only 9% of companies use live chat on their website, which means that employing it not only means a better way for customers to connect (Emarketer discovered that 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat), but it gives you a competitive advantage.

There are two tools we recommend our customers take a look at when it comes to live chat: Facebook Messenger or Tidio Live Chat.

Facebook Messenger (AKA Facebook Live Chat) integrates with Facebook and requires you to have set up a Facebook Business profile. It's pretty easy to install to a WordPress website through Facebook's free plugin.

The Facebook tool is a great, simple and free live chat solution. However there are a few drawbacks. First, the tool adds about 1mb to the page, which can slow down loading times by a lot.

Facebook doesn't offer much support for the plugin, so if you're not technologically inclined, it may be difficult to figure out (we offer consulting though!). Another issue is that you can't disable it on certain pages through the plugin, customize it much or create complex chatbots without third party service.

A premium paid (there's a free plan too) solution that's a great alternative is Tidio.

The free plan is adequate and in our opinion better than Facebook, but the paid plan offers a lot of value. The platform lets you put all of your communication channels into one place, like email, live chat, tickets and more.

You can integrate with leading CRMs and email marketing solutions, such as GetResponse, or manage everything from the dashboard. There are also dozens of options for customization, as well as some really well designed web/standalone applications.

The main reason we like Tidio so much is due to it's robust chatbot builder. We can generate a single chatbot that takes care of pretty much any query thrown at it. This cuts down the amount of time needed to offer live-person support and helps customers find the answers they need -- a win/win for both groups.

Conclusion

This post should have offered you some actionable tools/principles to implement on your WordPress website that will boost your conversions rate. By following some of these guidelines, you should see an increase in your lead generation.

Especially if you're seeing high traffic to your site, but low conversions, you'll want to at least try some of the things mentioned in this post, or reach out to a professional agency (like us!) to boost that percentage. We offer consulting/audit services as well as web design and development.