As a publisher interested in affiliate marketing, you’re likely to have one goal: increase traffic and achieve high conversions. One of the most important factors to do this is creating a positive user experience (UX).

One of your main focuses in evaluating your website conversions needs to be implementing a friendly user journey and making your website as easy-to-use as possible. There are a number of areas that can help indicate whether your website experience needs improving. For example, bounce rates are a great indicator of user-friendliness.

You may find that when analyzing your website, you have a high bounce rate, which means people are quickly leaving your site before clicking around or learning more. A bounce rate of 26-40 percent is excellent; one at 70% might mean it’s time to look at your UX.

As a performance marketing company in the fintech space, we work with a wide range of publishers – from bloggers to comparison sites, influencers to loyalty portals – giving us access to the data that can inform us on what makes a site perform well. The #1 finding we can attribute to success is that a well-designed and well-planned site is going to be much more profitable than a poorly designed one.

Here are seven tips to get you started on your journey to providing a great UX and an increase in those conversions.

Tip 1: Reduce Your Website’s Page Load Speed

Your website should load nearly instantly. Website visitors expect a fast and frictionless online experience. According to Edubirdie, 40% of people will leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load, and that’s just on desktop!

On mobile, about 53 percent of visitors will leave a mobile site if it does not load within 3 seconds. It’s important to remember that the longer your page takes to load, the more visitors you will lose and the less likely those visitors will be to return.

Google found that the average mobile page loads in 15 seconds. You can test your site on Google’s Page Speed Insights.

Here are a few ways you can reduce your website’s page loading speed:

• Optimize and resize your imagesHigh-resolution images are heavy and absorb more bandwidth. Choose the right format and quality.
• Minimize HTTP requests There are many different tools you can use to check the number of HTTP requests. This is important to do regularly. If you are using WordPress, WP Rocket might be a good option to help streamline your files and reduce your HTTP requests.

• Upgrade your hosting plan Your website might have grown too much and it might mean you need to upgrade your hosting plan.

• Manage your plugins
  Although adding plugins to your site adds extra features, they also increase the size of your pages. It’s important that every few months you check and delete any unnecessary plugins.

Check out this helpful infographic that showcases 9 easy ways to decrease your page load time.

Tip 2: Organize and Make Your Content Readable

Remember people have short attention spans, so make sure your content is easy to read. Usability and high-quality content are major factors of a good UX.

Here are some ways to improve you content’s readability:

• Avoid long chunks of text
• Include images to break up the copy
• Use header tags
• Use short sentences
• Use bullet points to explain benefits
• Divide the paragraphs into 4-5 lines
• Break the text up with white space (the space left untouched can transform a page into something elegant)

People generally land on websites to learn more about a product or about a particular subject. If your content doesn’t address their needs or there are too many options, they won’t stick around. Your visitors will bounce and your conversions will suffer.

A top tip for this is to do your keyword research and keep each piece of content relevant to the keywords you’re targeting. Search engines may penalize you if you use certain keywords that aren’t relevant to the topic on the page, and it hurts your UX as users may not be able to find the information they were initially looking for.

Tip 3: Create Appealing Calls to Action

If visitors are unsure what they should do on your website and can’t find what they’re looking for, they will leave your website and go elsewhere.

A page with a strong call to action (CTA) button will generate more conversions than a page with a weak one. Here are some ways to create a CTA that is appealing:

• Keep the button copy simple and personal It needs to be readable at first glance and use directional language so that people will understand instantly what will happen when they click on it.

  HubSpot conducted a test to find out which action words work better for conversions, see here:

• Offer solutions

  Identify the pain point and offer a way you can help; this is also known as your unique selling point (USP).

• Create urgency
  Why should the person signup or purchase your product? By creating urgency, you can successfully encourage an instant response or purchase. For example, “Apply for our beta program,” “Members only” or “Exclusive offers.”

• Keep to one per page or page section
  Aim for one important CTA per page.

• Test, test, and test again
  You need data to see how your CTA is working. A/B testing is a good strategy to evaluate whether your CTA is working or not and make sure to try out new tactics.

Tip 4: Incorporate Videos

More often than not, customers navigate your website by following visual cues. For most people, it takes more time and effort to read than it does to listen to or watch something.

Because people are busy, and as discussed earlier have short attention spans, consider incorporating a video to your website. Give them something short and that addresses their needs.

Often, watching something is easier than having to make them scroll and read.

Tip 5: Get Rid of Friction through Clear Navigation

An often overlooked area of a site that can negatively impact conversion rates is when there is too much clutter in the link navigation that take visitors away from the page. These links act as distractions and can undercut the goal of the page.

So what is the solution? You need to declutter the page! If you don’t want to lose those visitors, try these tips:

• Make sure your search functionality is prominent on not just the homepage but on all your pages
• Avoid dropdown menus (usability studies show that dropdown menus are not welcome)
• Limit the number of menu items
• Avoid format-based navigation, such as “videos” and “photos”
• Ensure the navigation is clear and easy to use
• Utilise white space

Tip 6: Identify What IS Working

It is important to compile data about your website visitors to examine what your users like and to find out which aspects of your site are unappealing. This can be achieved using conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools. These tools collect information about your website visitors with the goal of increasing conversions.

There are a variety of tools on the market that leverage heat maps, user polling, and user videos to show you how users are engaging with your site. Here are some examples of the types of tools available:

• User behaviour monitoring
• A/B testing
• Heatmapping
• Survey and form building
• Landing page building

Your search campaign might bring new users to your site, but with a CRO tool, you will be able to analyze the data and enhance the user experience. It is the process of improving your content and increasing your conversions.

Tip 7: Optimize for Mobile

Most of us are glued to our smartphones. We are reading and navigating the web on a 5- or 6-inch screen. I think that we can all agree that it is both frustrating and disappointing when we land on a website with tiny text and cannot read the buttons, let alone click them!

According to official Google statements, more than 50% of search queries globally now come from mobile devices. For those in the financial services industry, 39% of bank-related searches are initiated on a mobile device.

Share of online searches initiated on a mobile device, by industry

Source: Hitwise

Some statistics showcase that mobile users spend more money per purchase than those on desktop websites. As a publisher that relies on conversions, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile, it will be frustrating for visitors and customers will simply go elsewhere.

Conclusion

While UX is important to your site’s conversions, it is something that can take time and does not need to be tackled at once. Take it step by step and spend a dedicated portion of your time each week to seeing how the UX can be improved.

We hope the tips above are helpful and that by implementing some of these, you will not only see great conversion rates but hopefully you will keep customers coming back for more!

If you have any questions on how to improve your conversions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.

For those looking to put your UX to work in promoting financially-focused products and services,  we welcome you to sign up for our network by clicking here!