You might have noticed that your website receives less traffic than it used to. You’re receiving some web traffic, but few visitors are resulting in leads.
What gives?
Online marketing is only effective if people who visit your site take the desired action. An entire industry is dedicated to increasing the number of conversions on your site through design and functionality. It’s called Conversion Rate Optimization. Or CRO for short. CRO employs data and analytics to ascertain modifications in design, copy, and layout.
1. Leverage Hick’s Law to Encourage Your Visitors to Engage
The Hick’s Law states that the more choices a consumer has, the longer it will take them to make a decision.
Hick conducted a study in which he set up two different displays of jam in a supermarket and observed decision making. One jam company had 24 flavors, and the other had only six flavors.
The results showed that, of the people who stopped at the table, 60% sampled the jam. There were 24 flavors of jam to choose from. Although 96% of people said they would buy a jar of jam, only 6% of them actually ended up buying one.
While only 40% of people stopped to taste the six flavors of jam, an astonishing 30% of them ended up purchasing it.
Applying Hick’s Law to Your Site Design
The takeaway here should be obvious. Reducing the number of options your visitors have to choose from will lead to a significant increase in your conversion rate.
You need to spend time figuring out what you want your website visitors to do on each page of your site. For a landing page this might be obvious. You would like potential customers to fill out a form with their contact information.
The answer might not be so obvious for other pages on your site. What is the main thing you want visitors to do on your homepage? Would you like your readers to see your latest blog post? Check out your brand new listings? Schedule a listing appointment?
2. Use Heatmaps to Find Out What Your Visitors Really Want
It can be tricky to design your website or landing page when you’re not sure where your visitors are looking for information. Even if the way your website is laid out and the way visitors can navigate around it seems obvious to you, it may not be obvious to everyone who visits your site.
Luckily, there is a clever solution to this problem. Heatmap software allows you to see where your site visitors are clicking and what they are doing on your site. Here’s how it works:
If you want to track the activity on your website, sign up for a service like Crazy Egg or Hotjar. Choose the pages from your site that you want to track, and the service will do the rest. The software will eventually create a heatmap that shows the average of where all users navigated and clicked.
How Heatmap Software works: Heatmaps
The more frequently users click or navigate to an area, the redder it will be. Areas they click or navigate to less often will be yellow, green, or blue.
The data from this study can be used to improve the navigation and encourage visitors to take a specific action on your website. This text is saying that if you want people to take action on your website, you need to make it easy for them to do so. This can mean having a sign-up form for an email list, a place to enter their address, or a section for browsing properties.
If you’re getting a lot of clicks in a certain area of your website, you might want to consider moving your navigation or call to action to that area. Alternatively, you could link the images or text in that area to a landing page or other relevant page on your site.
3. Branded YouTube Pre-Roll Ads
Based on current trends, it is estimated that by the end of 2022, 82% of all internet traffic will be video. Since YouTube is a popular site for finding new products and brands, it’s not surprising that 90% of consumers say they’ve found new brands there. We’re passionate about getting this strategy into your hands because it’s effective.
Pre-roll ads on YouTube are video advertisements that play before a video. Paying for ads is a practical way to increase brand awareness, build influence, and generate sales.
You can create an ad set on YouTube that targets people in a specific area. The ads are usually only 15-30 seconds, but they can be up to 2 minutes. If you want to establish your brand as a local authority, this is an extremely effective strategy. People will think of you first when they need to find an agent.
4. Facebook Live Neighborhood Farming
Maybe one-minute videos are more your thing.
If you want to get more business, try giving a monthly Facebook Live to your neighborhood. You can talk about the notable sales in the past 30 days, offer a free home valuation, and tell viewers how they can contact you. Your real estate farming strategy will only be as successful as your ability to target potential customers. We recommend increasing the video’s advertising budget to make sure you reach the right people in your target area.
5. Make Sure Buttons and Text Boxes Are Easy to Use on Mobile
Is your website mobile friendly? There is a very high chance that you are losing potential leads if your website is not optimized. NAR’s Real Estate in a Digital Age Report claims that 72 percent of home buyers used a mobile or tablet website or app during their home search. That’s a lot of lost leads…
When creating a WordPress site, you not only need to make sure that the theme you are using is responsive, but you also need to be sure that the buttons and text boxes are mobile-friendly.
This means creating text boxes and buttons that are large enough to be pressed by those who have difficulty using their thumbs. If you don’t have a way for your leads to contact you, they may get frustrated and give up.
Here are some of the buttons and text boxes you should pay special attention to on mobile:
- Call now buttons
- “Submit” buttons
- Personal information text boxes
- Page navigation buttons
- Drop down menus for property searches
6. Pay Special Attention to the Color, Shape, & Copy on Your CTA Buttons
The CTA buttons you use can have a significant impact on your conversion rate. You can increase your leads and closed deals by making subtle changes to the color, shape, and copy on your buttons.
The digital marketing community can’t seem to agree on what changes lead to increased conversions. That said, there are still a few rules that most marketing and CRO experts can agree on:
- Orange, green, and blue buttons seem to convert the highest
- Buttons whose color contrasts well with the background color convert well
- They are actual buttons, not just text links!
- They use specific action words in their copy- “Get My Home Value” or “Download My Free PDF” will work better than “submit” or the dreaded “click here”
- They’re in a strategic place on the page- Think headline, short copy, text box, button. Also keep the “F” pattern in mind, as well as data from your heatmaps.
Some good examples of CTA buttons that follow the principles laid out in the article are from Unbounce and Instapage.
7. Use A/B Testing to Find the Perfect Layout, Copy, & CTA for Conversion
Now that you have some new design ideas inspired by CRO for your website, you need to test them on your site. After all, there is no secret formula for conversion. Different changes or combinations of changes may have different effects, depending on many different factors.
To improve conversion rates, you need to use A/B testing, which is also known as Split Testing. Here’s how it works.
Whenever you make a change to your conversion rate, make sure to record it and compare it to your previous conversion rate. If you want a more accurate measurement, it’s helpful to switch between changes multiple times.
After you’ve found a change that increases your conversion rate, keep that change and make another small alteration to your site. Then, run the same A/B tests. After you’ve done this a few times, your website will be ready for conversion.
A/B Testing Landing Pages
If you want to improve your landing pages, A/B testing is a good place to start. Most landing page software tools, such as Unbounce and Instapage, have built-in A/B testing capabilities.
A/B testing with landing page software is great because it allows you to show different versions of your landing page to different users. It’s important to identify things like the day of the week or season that might affect conversion rates so they can be ruled out.
A/B Testing Other Pages on Your Website
If you don’t have access to landing page software such as Unbounce, A/B testing your website becomes more difficult. If you are using WordPress, you can test conversion rates by running one version of your page, then running a second version and comparing the results.
Send MLS Listings From Your Website to Facebook Ads Manager Automatically
After you have an effective landing page from A/B testing, you can set up a system that automatically sends your listings to your Facebook ads from your MLS. Instead of adding listings to your Facebook ads and landing pages manually, you can use a listings management tool to automate the process. This will save you time and reduce the chances of human error. You can avoid this issue by sending your MLS listings directly from your website to your Facebook Ads Manager. This means that all of the landing pages you have already worked on with the tips above can be easily accessed and linked to your website with just a few clicks.
8. Use Live Chat Buttons for Visitors Who Want Instant Answers
The more targeted your lead generation campaign is, the more likely it is to attract buyers who look like your best customers. The funniest paradox about lead generation is that the more targeted your campaign is, the more likely it is to attract buyers who look like your best customers. Some people who could be potential customers or leads may not want to contact you directly through a phone call or email. Is there anything else you could do to reach out to them?
Enter the live chat button. Small buttons that say “live chat” in the corner of your website offer visitors the opportunity to get their questions answered immediately. There will always be visitors who will just waste your time, but there will also be those who won’t.
The best live chat software will allow you to respond to live chat via text message. This allows you to answer questions and, ideally, get them to call you while you’re busy.
AI Chat Bots
Some companies offer programmable AI chat bots that can interact with your site visitors and answer basic questions. I personally would avoid these solutions for now, as many of your visitors will be offended that you handed them off to a robot instead of dealing with them yourself.
The Bottom Line
If there’s one thing you should do to your website to optimize for better lead conversion using CRO strategies, it should be to focus on your leads. Pay attention to Hick’s Law, use heatmap software to track visitors, make sure buttons are easy to use on mobile, design them well, use live chat, and remember to A/B test your change.
