3 Apps for SMBs to Improve Conversion

Featured article by Alex Walker, Independent Technology Author

Improving the conversion rate presents quite a challenge for a lot of SMBs because many of them mainly focus on quantity over quality. They want to grow their business, so they put a lot of effort into using various marketing techniques to drive more traffic to their website, without getting a good look at the big picture and trying to attract the right kind of traffic.

Are you doing the same? Are you focusing your efforts on attracting as many website visitors as possible, because you think that you will increase conversions that way? More traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll convert more leads, so you need to develop an effective conversion rate optimization strategy to help you generate quality leads that will actually want to perform your desired actions.

Here are the most important tools you need to have at your disposal to improve your conversion rate and generate a high ROI.

Online Scheduling

Time is the currency of a great number of consumers nowadays, as many of them lead very busy lives and don’t want to waste time on brands that cannot meet their needs quickly and effectively. If a consumer has to jump through hoops to book an appointment or service with you, or perhaps register to an event, they will simply find what they need elsewhere. In other words, they will move on to your competition.

This is why your business needs to be available 24/7 so that your target customers can seamlessly schedule appointments and get their pain points resolved efficiently. Online scheduling is the key, as it will remove all the friction and save your clients a lot of time, making it easier and more convenient for them to get in touch with you.

Therefore, you should make use of good appointment scheduling software that will enable your clients to book appointments and services and register to events and classes anytime they want, anywhere they are, and on any device. That kind of convenience will improve their satisfaction, so they will convert easily.

You should use a piece of software that automatically syncs your online calendar with the one you’re already using and with all your devices, as well as enables automated email and SMS reminders so that you can coordinate more effectively. It should also enable seamless online payments and let you track your team member’s activities in real-time.

Heat Map

A heat map is a visual representation of your website visitors’ behavior. It refers to all the actions that your visitors take on your web pages and shows you which areas of particular pages they focus on the most.

You should definitely arm yourself with a tool that provides you with this two-dimensional representation of data where colors are used to represent values. The warmer the colors are, the more action is happening in the areas indicated by those colors.

Why is this important? Because you will have a much clearer insight into how your visitors are interacting with your website so that you can use that knowledge to continually improve it. You will know exactly where they are clicking, how long they stay on particular areas of a page, and how far down they are scrolling.

When you see where people are focusing their attention, you can analyze those areas and remove any friction that may be decreasing your conversions. You can also identify usability issues and figure out why people are bouncing back, so that you can improve usability and, with it, your conversion rate.

There are plenty of heat mapping software solutions you can choose from, but the most popular is the Crazy Egg Heatmap tool, so be sure to check it out.

Landing Page A/B Testing

A landing page is usually the first page your website visitors will encounter, so you need to make sure it provides excellent user experiences that will create the best first impressions and compel your leads to convert.

To achieve that, you need to measure the performance of your landing pages, so that you can continually improve them and generate more conversions. That’s where A/B testing comes in. After creating two different versions of a landing page, use an A/B testing tool to compare them and determine which one is performing better when it comes to conversions.

One of the best tools for this is Optimizely, the leading platform for A/B testing that’s very user-friendly and provides enterprise-grade statistics that can help you make smart, data-based decisions and optimize your landing pages for better conversions.

With these three apps in your conversion toolbox, you‘ll be able to effectively convert all your quality leads and increase your sales and ROI substantially. However, it takes time for all your efforts to start paying off, so be patient and persistent. Rome wasn’t built in a day, was it? Take the time and don’t stop improving all the elements on your website, because there’s always room for improvement and taking user experience to higher levels.

Alex Walker

Alex is a freelance writer with a diverse portfolio; from the market forces that drive consumerism to the balance of marketing and technology all the way to popular culture. Alex’s motto is: if it can be researched, it can be written.