How to make your website visitors say: "shut up and take my money"

Okay. All right. So today’s talk. How to make your website visitors say shut up and take my money. So a little bit about what we’re going to talk through today. So intro to me, who I am, what is CRO, which is conversion rate optimisation by the way, CRO tips, and any questions at the end. So today’s handsome speaker, that’s me, right there.

I’m Glen, I’m a Digital Marketing Strategist and I’m Founder of Dibble Digital. We offer a joined-up approach across website design, conversion rate optimisation, search engine optimisation, Google ads, and paid social. And having spent over 150,000 pounds personally on paid advertising, like I say, the website conversion rate optimisation is one of the highest ROI activities that you can do.

And here’s why, all marketing leads to your website. So it doesn’t matter what you do if you’re running posting organically on Instagram, you’re running Facebook ads, you go into a newspaper, you know, take a slot in a magazine. You’re in the newspaper. Twitter who? I need to update this graphic, clearly. But it doesn’t matter where you are.

People will find you and they need to get more information. So they’re going to contact you and the first place they’re going to go is to the website. So, having your website dialed in is one of the most important things that you can do. So what is CRO. So CRO is the equation, to calculate it,

you simply say right how many clicks am I getting to my website, divided by the number of conversions, that’ll give you your conversion rate.

So 100 clicks. If you get one conversion off of that, that’s a 1% conversion rate. Quick math’s. Conversion rate optimisation is the process of improving this conversion rate.

So what is a conversion? A conversion is typically an action that a visitor will take on your website to become a lead for your business generally. So these include filling out contact forms, calling your business, which you can track by phone number clicks on mobile, or using a forwarding number on desktop, or clicking on the email address, which is a bit of a lower value conversion, so to speak.

And you can also track many other micro conversions such as viewing high value pages, people, scroll depth on those high value pages, people clicking a map which shows intent to visit your location. But typically, we’re looking at these three here because these are the ones where people are actually contacting you, getting in touch and becoming a lead.

So a practical example for CRO. If I’m running a paid-out ad campaign for a client and they say to me, Glen, we’d like you to increase our sales by 20% this year. I’ll say, sure.

We have three options. Number one, we can optimise the ad account by 20%. Now if I’m managing your ad account that’s something I’m going to be doing all the time. We’re going to be constantly trying to optimise, constantly test new things. But you know, you’re talking like £300-£500 a month to do that optimisation. Option two, increase the ad spend by 20%.

So we can take the ad spend from £1000 to £1200, which is an extra £200 a month. Or option three we could improve the website conversion rate from 1% to 1.2%, and the eagle eyed amongst you will also notice that this improves this, and it improves this. So this crusty old fellow is Archimedes. And I bet you didn’t think I was going to whip out Archimedes

today but there you go. He says, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world”. CRO is the lever that elevates all aspects of your marketing.

Because all marketing leads to your website. So my promise for today’s talk, I’m going to give you at least three, well, there’s more than three, but I’m hoping you can take at least three away, actionable CRO tips to improve your website’s performance. I may convince you to say ‘shut up and take my money’. So if you didn’t get the reference, there it is.

So, part 1: Talk Your Customers Language. Clear beats clever. Don’t overcomplicate what you offer. Your customer needs to clearly understand what you sell in their language. A confused mind doesn’t buy.

So if you’re currently innovating seamless synergy across transformational growth landscapes, you look like this guy, bit smug, bit of a twat. Then maybe it’s time to build websites to get found on Google and turn visitors into customers. One sounds smart. The other makes you money. Clear beats clever. Always. So, talking in your customer’s language, you can do something called voice of customer research so you can understand what it is that your customers are actually saying, how they’re talking about your business.

And we can do this now aided with the help of AI. So I’ve got a ChatGPT prompt that I use, and I use it before I start any website project. And if you use ChatGPT, you put it on deep research mode. It’ll take about half hour go away and find this information for you.

But ‘what words and phrases do insert your [ideal customer profile] Use when talking about insert [your service]’ This will then go and look at real review sites, online forums and discussion groups and give actual quotes and examples that I might hear. And this will give you the way your ideal customer talks. So the actual phrasing they use and what they like and dislike about others in your space.

Use this information to position your business as the ideal solution to their problems.

Part 2: Trust Signals. So demonstrate you’re a trustworthy business. Your website visitors don’t know you from Adam, which means you need to demonstrate you’re trustworthy within 30 seconds. Then keep it up. So there are two types of trust signals that you can display prominently on your website. Number 1. Social Proof. Number 2. Credibility Triggers. Use these relentlessly every page throughout the site,

hammer it home. So social proof. Social proof shows that you’ve worked with others in the past, reassuring your website visitors that you’ve actually done this before, basically. So these include testimonials, no surprises. Case studies, I’ve done it before, I’ve done a good job. And business logos, these are great if you’re in the B2B space which quite a lot of people are, you know, other companies that you work with, you know, this companies worked with Champion, HP.

But if you put those on your website, you bask in the reflected glow of that business. So if that business has a presence, people know about it, makes you look good too.

Bonus points for getting them above the fold. So here’s an example of my website, which needs a lot of CRO, so don’t go looking at it. We’re rated 5/5 on Google. So above the fold being when you open the page up, that’s the bit you see before you scroll. And then business logos up here.

So it’s another website. Next, we’ve got Credibility Triggers. So credibility shows that you know your stuff or more importantly, there’s someone else who also knows their stuff, says that you do. So these include accreditations, awards. So this company you see is slap in ‘Which Best Buy’ across their products. And you know if you get that that’s really hard to get.

So they slap those everywhere. Or professional bodies so if you’re associated with a professional body. So this is a kitchen retailer, and they’re associated with the KBSA so. This is probably the most important part, CTAs. So a CTA is a call to action. If anybody doesn’t know what a CTA means, and that’s the thing where you ask the customer what is it you want them to do.

So what’s the next step? What do they need to do to effectively start doing business with you? So, a primary CTA is the highest value CTA on your website, so it should be positioned prominently across the site. Effective primary CTA should have low risk for the website visitor. Have high value for the website visitor.

Be unambiguous. Match the theme of the page. Be bottom of funnel meaning they’re quite far along the buyer journey, so they’re at the stage where they’re about to buy. Bonus points for being the first step in your sales process. Visible at all times on the web page. And using a different colour to the rest of the website.

So it stands out, people know exactly what it is they need to do to take their next step. Examples of poor CTAs. Get started. Get started what? So there’s quite a high, there’s quite a lot of risk there in that, so you don’t really know what you’re getting started doing. So it’s not great. High value. It’s not really high value.

Doesn’t really say what it is. It’s ambiguous. It doesn’t really tell you a lot. Talk to sales. What’s one of the biggest risks when engaging with the business is probably to have salespeople pestering you, people to want to talk to sales. That’s a high-risk CTA. So people aren’t going to click it. Request the brochure. It’s not

bottom of funnel at all, it’s, I mean, there’s a bit of value there behind it, but it’s not, yeah, it’s not something that you want to use as a primary CTA or Dibble My Schlibble! Stop being clever. You don’t need to be clever. Keep it simple. Strong CTAs. Talk to an engineer. So say if you were in an engineering business and you’re trying to solve a particular problem, if you can speak to an engineer, you can speak to an expert.

That is much better than talk to sales. Request a menu design. Very specific. I had this, I had you in mind here Kaye when I was putting this one in, but if you’ve got a, for example, there’s a menu design page on your website and you’ve matched the CTA to the specific purpose of that page on the website, that’s going to be much better.

You could have request a quote across every page of your website. But if you’re very specific about the call to action for that page, you’re going to get a much better result. Or this one, which is, so I did a project recently where I, I redesigned a kitchen company’s website. So they, they design and install kitchens. It’s quite a high value purchase.

They had this as their primary call to action across the entire site. Request the brochure. So what we said is what’s the first thing that that customer needs to do before they buy a kitchen from you? They need a design, first step in the sales process. Low risk, free, high value. It’s worth 250 pounds. It’s unambiguous. It matches the theme of the entire website, to be honest.

And it’s very, very bottom of funnel. So if someone’s going to fill that out or click this button, then they’re somebody that’s ready to go. So that’s an example of a very high value CTA versus some of the poor ones.

The secondary CTAs. So sometimes people aren’t quite ready. They’re not ready to buy. So they’re further back in the buyer and the decision-making process and the buyer journey. So in that case you need to give them lower value call to actions or lower risk or, you know, just stuff that’s a little bit of a simpler, you know, without pressuring them into being into selling, basically.

So, people up earlier in the decision-making journey. So middle of funnel, top of funnel, has to be useful, has to be helpful, has to be informative. Position you as an expert and then show intent to buy. Otherwise, they’re useless. So lead magnets are a good example of these. So you use lead magnets to say, you know, you’re going to give someone something for free, and then you can capture them as a lead, and then you can go email them or follow them up or however you would like to deal with it.

But here’s a poor CTA. Take the quiz. Win an iPad. So what you’ve got there is you’re going to lose the intent because someone might want to win an iPad. So you might get a lead, and you might waste your time, you know, trying to follow up and talk to them because they’re just not relevant. Sign up to our newsletter.

It’s high risk, isn’t it? So what? I’m going to get a load of emails, but what am I getting in return? Strong CTAs. Use our mortgage calculator. So calculators are fantastic because people can go on and they get immediate value just at the end of that process. You ask someone a load of questions, then at the end of it, because there’s already a sunk cost fallacy, you put your contact details in essentially, so someone’s already taking the time to fill out the form and the end of it,

you say, right, give us your details then and we’ll email you the results. Take our style quiz. So say if you’re a personal stylist or something, so you pick clothes for people. You know, take a style quiz. You don’t actually have to speak to anyone, but you can get a bit of information that will help you along your journey.

So. Alright, part number 4. Forms that people actually fill out. The number of fields on your form is quite important. So if you’re deciding the number of fields on the form you need to consider, is this proportional for what I need to know to deal with that customer’s inquiry? So some examples. If the customers apply for a credit card, they might need many fields.

There’s probably lots of stuff that you’re going to need to know. There might be credit checks that go on in the background. And I think someone will quite happily say, well, there’s quite a lot that I should probably be putting here. So it’s proportional. If you just sending out a lead magnet, you might only need their name and their email to fire them something over.

Just quite simple. But if you’re providing a bespoke quote, for example, then maybe you need 5 to 10 fields. So it has to be proportional to what it is that you’re offering. So only ask what’s required at the first instance. Then you can build more information up after you’ve got the lead effectively, once you started the conversation.

So number form fields, a study by HubSpot. They found that three fields was optimum followed by five. But there’s a clear downward trend on that graph. And here’s another similar study by Eloqua who I’m not sure who they are, but they’ve done a study and it’s good. They found that four and seven fields to be the optimum.

So, but as you can see clear downward curve. So limit to exactly what you need from someone. Tips to improve form conversion rates. So for longer forms consider splitting your forms across multiple pages so you can get you know there’s a plugin for WordPress it’s called Typeform. You fill in the first question, then it takes you to the next question, then the next question.

So the person doesn’t open up the screen and feel overwhelmed by this big list of things that they need to fill out. Use conditional logic so you can do that, it’s a similar process to above. But you, after you fill something in, it then reveals more questions. It keeps going down. Consider asking for less on the first form, then email up a follow up questionnaire to make sure you’ve got the lead, and then your sales team or you if you’re one person business can go and follow up and get the rest of the information you need.

And then use social proof and credibility triggers on the form page itself. It’s a lower form abandonment because people can get halfway through and go actually no I don’t really want to do this, but if you’re slapping him in the face with credibility the whole time, then that’s great. So this is an example from another marketing website.

This is one of these multi-page forms. So you fill out that and then the next question comes in, fill that out and the next question comes in. So you don’t feel overwhelmed. They’ve got you know lots of awards. So they’re putting credibility all here. But then if you were to scroll down on this page, which I haven’t included in here because you wouldn’t be able to read it, but it’s just credibility trigger, social proof, credibility trigger, social proof.

So that is. Yeah. Best in class. Okay. Part 5. Strategise – Test – Optimise. So the best time to start tracking your website performance was yesterday. By benchmarking your current conversion rate for a month or so, strategise to develop new ideas of what could improve the results on your website. Test your ideas to gather data and then optimise your website based on this data, using the insights to strategise again.

Rinse and repeat. And that in effect is digital marketing in a nutshell.

Okay. Here are two free platforms to get you started tracking your website’s performance. Google Analytics 4. Which is the new one, they had an old one which was better called Universal Analytics. But you need a degree to to work this one but if you just stick to the basic stuff, there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s going to allow you to do it.

And the other one I recommend is Microsoft Clarity. So Microsoft Clarity is very good because you embed that in your website. And what that will do is that will it will do session recordings. So you can actually go and look and see how is a user actually using my website. And not only that will give you heat maps to show that the areas that are most, most used, the most visited.

So you can, you can look at that, say, well, maybe I need to do more of that. And they do that because people actually read with their mouse. You wouldn’t believe. So if you’re watching these sessions, you can see if a persons reading that and then going, oh, that’s useless, and then flicking past it. So those heatmaps are very good.

You used to have to pay for platforms called, like a hotjar or something like that in the past, but this is free, so get that on your site. It’s good, also tells you when there’s dead clicks, as well as people clicking something that thinks a button isn’t a button and also rage clicks, why isn’t this working.

And that’s the perfect way to find, bugs with your site as well, because these rage clicks, they just, you know something’s wrong there. Okay. So the result, if you put some of these things in place and there’s a lot more that I could have covered. But for the sake of this being a short, shorter talk.

But yeah, that should be the result. Okay. Any questions?