Best CRO Practices?

What are your best Conversion Rate Optimization Practices?

What was the thing/s after which you noticed a substantial rise in your conversions for the product you're promoting?

Mine was:

Making Homepage lighter to about 6sec loadspeed, made reviews less pushy (no "buy this right now") and started building a friendly, expert in that field persona for my niche site. That proved to have a very positive effect.

What did you do to substantially increase conversions and what did you do to keep conversions going steady for a period of time?

Let's discuss below!

split-testing?if you can do this it makes a real difference.

bluematter said:

split-testing?if you can do this it makes a real difference.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply, bluematter! Do you have anything particular in mind? What do you use to conduct split-testing? G Website Optimizer?

6 second load times are wayyy too long. Download YSlow and cut some fat, because that's just plain not good (trying to be polite here). I've tweaked sites to 400ms and it makes a huge difference... especially when you're dealing with a lot of traffic. Read up on caching, and play with some wordpress plugins that help you with that.

As for a/b testing, I've had success with visualwebsiteoptimizer (google search, I'm not cool enough yet to post links)

Might want to consider kissinsights (again - google search, I'm not cool enough to post links) too, make a survey, and simply ask your customers what would interest them. You'll be surprised how many actually respond.

One of my mentors had a good saying - "You don't know what you don't know". Without the right tools, you're driving blind, so get informed, you know?

lotar,

Thanks so much for the feedback! I am starting speed tweaking right away! In the meantime, I managed to get it at < 4 seconds. You are right that it's way too slow.

I am going to research on split testing and make some surveys based on the searchterms you gave me.

I also decided to make a contentlocker survey form that asks my visitors essentially what they want. I will put it up today and keep it on for the whole week and see how it plays off!

Thanks again for your input, you have been tremendous help, I am not cool enough to post links myself, so I will give you some rep to help you get cooler faster!

I would appreciate it if you took a look at my site and shared some thoughts - if you can spare a few minutes, PM me and I'll send you the URL.

Thanks again man!

I thought I would post a quck update for anyone who is wondering what became of this.

Today, I started a visualwebsiteoptimizer campaign and a kiss campaign. Will leave them through the week and post here later with results.

I have yet to find a suitable free content locker (exchange an e-book for e-mail), so if anyone has any suggestions - I would greatly appreciate that!

I think this is what you are looking for
http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/landing-page-rehab/

anyone know of any good guides out there for conversion rate optimization? I'd like to get my hands on one. If you know of anything specific to e-commerce that would be very helpful. I made an e-commerce for my mother's retail business. it's getting targeted traffic alright (ranking on Google) but the conversion rate is so precarious.

Try split-testing, for good results.