As effective as online marketing strategies can be when it comes to gaining attention and bringing the clicks, there’s one step of the process that often goes ignored by comparison. Once you get their attention or get them on your site, you still need to make sure that they actually become a customer. This is the process known as conversion and it is the single most important thing to track when it comes to bringing new revenue to the business. Here, we’re going to look at a few strategies to help you increase those conversions.
Track them
The first mistake that a lot of online business owners make is that they’re not tracking conversions in the first place. This is especially true of those who outsource their marketing to a team that proves to not be quite as effective as they have marketed themselves. A lot of substandard marketing teams will use vanity metrics, such as clicks, to show the results of their efforts. However, conversions might be missing from the key performance indicators that you’re currently missing and now it’s time to change that. Google analytics tracks conversion ratings, as do Google ads so you can more specifically see what works and what doesn’t, allowing you make intuitive improvements and see how well they work.
Create a strong user experience
Usually, when we talk about conversion rate optimization, we’re talking specifically about the kind of experience that the user has on the website. If they come to the website looking for something specific, whether it’s through finding your site on a search engine or by following an ad, how easy is it for them to find it? Effective user experience design is about streamlining that journey as best as possible, through the effective structuring of website content alongside intuitive navigation. You can check the bounce rate of various pages to see where most people are failing to reach the next step, for instance, and see what you can do to make it simpler.
Ensure people land in the right place
As mentioned, some of your potential customers are likely to find your website by initially clicking on an online advertisement, be it in social media, a search engine, or an ad placement on a website. But where will clicking that ad take them? If an ad for a specific product takes them to a more general store page, they may not be willing to do the legwork of finding the product they want again. For that reason, you must ensure that your website utilizes landing pages that are specific to the products and services that you’re advertising. Don’t give your visitors more obstacles between them and what they want.
Use calls-to-action
You can have a well-written and convincing page that is full of content that sells the benefits of your services and products extremely well, but if you don’t give the reader the little push they need to take the next step, you will find that many of them simply do not. In this post, you can read about how calls to action are effective at encouraging potential customers to take a step closer to conversion, whether it leads them directly to a product page, to get in touch with your team, or to fill in a lead capture form that gets the sales process started. Make good use of CTAs throughout the website and make sure they’re written to speak directly to the needs of the reader.
Focus on the right people
You shouldn’t be targeting all individuals for conversion equally. Rather, you should be taking the time to qualify your potential customers, find out which of them are more likely to be good for business, and focus your energies on reaching out to them directly. In this article, you can see different lead generation and nurturing platforms. Alongside a sales team, these platforms can help you track and keep in touch with members of the market who, if converted, could offer the best return on investment for the business. This way, you don’t waste the energy of your sales team chasing up every individual equally, but rather you focus on those leads that are worth the time.
Use positive social proof
The vast majority of consumers and potential customers have a certain guard up when they’re interacting with a brand. They know that your goal is to get their money, so they’re not going to be easily convinced of the virtues you’re trying to espouse. However, having those same virtues coming from an independent third party voice can do a lot of good. Testimonials, reviews, and logos (in the case of B2B businesses) can help create what is called positive social proof. As such, showing them how many people already rate your business highly. If your potential customers already see that a lot of people support your business, then it makes them more likely ot believe it’s a business worthy of support.
Test everything
Once you’re tracking your conversion rate in your metrics, then you should do what you can to see what moves the needle closer to the results that you want. One of the most effective ways to do that is to spend time o nA/B tests. A/B testing effectively pits your existing marketing strategy, also known as the control (or version A) against the challenge (or version B), which takes a slightly different approach. Both are run in a limited capacity to see which of them has a better conversion rate when there’s enough data to make that call. This can be applied not just to the website and individual pages, but also to advertisements and other marketing efforts.
Improving the conversion rate of your marketing campaigns, website, and general sales process online isn’t a one and done solution. It’s an aspect of the business you need to track and continuously work on. However, few investments contribute so directly to your revenue, so the ROI tends to be worth it every time.
