With all the metrics available as part of digital marketing campaigns such as website visitors and social media likes, it’s easy for marketing teams to get lost in the numbers. When it comes down to it, the most important number small businesses need to worry about is their conversion rate.
If you can optimize your online marketing to achieve a good conversion rate and turn potential customers into loyal customers, you’re on the right track. So, here are some strategies to improve conversion rates.
What is conversion in marketing?
Conversion in marketing can be summarised as the percentage of website visitors who turn into paying customers or at least follow a desired action to enter the sales funnel. While there are various marketing platforms, generally businesses, especially ecommerce businesses, use their websites to convert customers through direct orders and payments or other CTAs like getting in contact with the sales team.
But why would small businesses bother focusing their marketing strategy around the conversion rate?
Benefits of Conversion Strategy
There are plenty of advantages to putting effort into a well-executed conversion strategy for the business to get more sales from new and loyal customers alike. The main positive impact includes the following.
1. Improved customer engagement.
When focusing on conversion, customers are encouraged to engage with the business by following a desired action stated within a call to action. When new customers are at the beginning of the conversion funnel, this action could be something like joining the business’ email list or signing up for a free webinar. Once potential customers have had multiple interactions with the business and made it through the conversion funnel, the CTA is based on actually purchasing products and services.
2. Increased sales.
By working on optimizing the conversion rate of a website and marketing campaigns, businesses will figure out how to achieve a good rate of sales. They’ll better understand the lead generation strategies that attract high-quality potential customers, the marketing campaigns within the sales funnel that nurture them, and the sales strategies that finalize the conversion.
3. Enhanced brand loyalty.
The potential for conversion doesn’t end once a new customer has made their first purchase. Customers have the potential to create multiple product or service purchases, whether buying multiple complementary products or upgrading their service for more support. Continuing the conversion strategy to encourage paying customers to keep interacting with the business will win over loyal customers, stabilizing revenue.
So, with the abundance of benefits of conversion strategies clear, how do you go about implementing conversion rate optimization?
How to Develop an Effective Conversion Strategy
There are multiple steps involved in improving your conversion process. When coming up with your plan for conversion rate optimization, consider including these elements.
1. Define Clear Goals and Objectives
When putting together any marketing strategy, you need to be clear on what you want to achieve e.g. more sales of a particular product, a higher average cart value, or more leads entering the sales funnel. Whatever your desired outcome, set yourself up for success by determining KPIs that will help you track progress toward your goals and objectives. For example, a high level of website visitors supports a high level of website conversions.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
To achieve a good conversion rate, you need to know what marketing campaigns resonate with your audience in particular. People tend to buy with emotions and justify with logic. Therefore, if you get to know your target audience well, you can make it much easier for your potential customers to make a buying decision. Build marketing campaigns around the features they would be looking for to satisfy the logical side of the buying decision, such as pricing that fits within their budget, as well as how they want to feel by making the purchase.
3. Optimize User Experience
If you’re going to boost your website conversion rate, you need to keep visitors on your website for long enough to make a buying decision. Make sure the website is easy to navigate and find key information including how to purchase your products. You don’t want to complicate the design and layout because website visitors will get frustrated and click away. A big user experience mistake businesses make is a slow website load time so check that first.
4. Create Compelling Content
Your website content is your chance to highlight your product’s value proposition and connect it to your ideal client’s pain points and goals. As well as optimizing the main web pages of your site, engage in content marketing. This is the publishing of relevant content to your website blog, email list, and social media platforms to get more qualified website traffic.
Blogs drive traffic to your website by using SEO principles to rank on search engine result pages. Email and social media marketing drives traffic to your website by creating a loyal audience on a third-party platform and including CTAs in the content such as reading blogs or product pages.
5. Implement Effective Tracking and Analytics
Having an in-depth understanding of the customer experience on your website helps you to optimize and improve your website for higher conversion. Using a tracking tool like Google Analytics will keep a record of the number of people visiting your website, where they have come from, what they did on the website, and whether they converted. Heatmaps are a visual representation of where website visitors spend the most time on each page of the website which can help focus your efforts.
6. Continuously Test and Refine
Don’t be afraid to experiment! If your conversion rate isn’t at the level you’d like it to be, what you’re doing now isn’t working so you need to try something new. Through analytics and research, establish where you are now, outline where you want to be and consolidate who you are trying to convert, and come up with an informed strategy for how to improve your conversion rate. Try it out and see what happens. Look at the results and make adjustments to keep progressing.
Let’s get into some of the top strategies small businesses and startups can use to boost their conversion rate.
8 Conversion Marketing Strategy Examples
The success of your conversion strategy relies on the marketing campaigns you implement to improve your conversion rate. Here are some of the most effective marketing campaigns to implement to turn more leads into paying customers.
1. Email Marketing
Not everyone who comes across your business will be ready to buy immediately. You can still encourage them to enter your sales funnel by joining your email list. This could be through signing up for some kind of free webinar, guide, or valuable email newsletter. Then you can send emails straight to their inbox that helps them move along the sales funnel and reach the point of conversion.
2. Landing Page Optimization
You don’t want your conversion strategy to fail at the final hurdle which is the landing page where potential customers convert, whether buying your product, inquiring about your service, or signing up for a free webinar. The design and layout should be compelling but clear. The copy of the landing page should speak directly to your target audience, resonating with their wants, needs, and priorities.
3. Social Media Advertising
Chances are your ideal client is spending a significant amount of time on at least one social media platform. So, social media advertising is a great opportunity to leverage popular platforms by running targeted ads that promote your products. It’s a very effective and efficient way to reach more customers because you can set up social media ads to target your specific customer profile.
4. Retargeting
Not all website visitors buy straight away. Not all website visitors keep engaging with the business by joining your email list or following you on social media either. But these leads aren’t completely lost. To convert more website visitors into paying customers, utilize retargeting campaigns. These are personalized ads targeted to previous website visitors, reminding them of your offerings and encouraging them to buy.
5. Exit-Intent Pop-ups
You can never be sure how long a lead is going to spend on your website. They might not read your website for long enough to see a call to action, never mind deciding whether or not to follow it. Exit-intent pop-ups ensure every website visitor gets the chance to opt-in to an easy ask by triggering targeted pop-ups when users are about to leave, offering incentives to encourage conversion such as joining your email list for a discount. It’s another way to avoid losing leads and encourage them to enter your conversion funnel.
6. Abandoned Cart Recovery
Some leads will get to the point of adding your products to the cart but still fail to convert. These are your hottest leads so don’t give up on them. You can set up an email marketing campaign to send automated reminders and incentives to users who have abandoned their shopping carts. It’s one of the highest-converting marketing campaigns businesses can set up.
7. Re-do Calls to Action
A small change that makes a big difference is revising the CTAs on your website as well as other marketing materials. Ensure the wording of the call to action is powerfully compelling. Consider the visual design of the CTA. For example, displaying it as a button helps the CTA to stand out from the rest of the webpage. Add more CTAs throughout the website and each webpage. Repetition reinforces the message so don’t hold back.
8. Highlight Testimonials
Use reviews from customers as much as possible because it makes all claims about your products more believable. You could have a testimonials page on your website, add quotes from reviews to product pages and sales emails, and even share videos of your customers talking about their experience on social media. Leads are much more likely to convert if they’ve seen customer reviews.
Drive More Leads and Revenue With Podium
Podium has the tools to turn your website into a conversion powerhouse. Whether you want to improve the user experience by adding a webchat function, or keep in contact with leads in your sales funnel through text marketing, or increase the number of qualified leads visiting your website through positive online reviews, the Podium platform has the tools you need. On top of that, it integrates with complementary software such as Mailchimp.
Using Podium has been a conversion game-changer for the thousands of businesses we support. Businesses like Trane Technologies who leveraged our tools managed to attract 187k inbound leads. What could you achieve with Podium?
FAQs
How long does it take to see results from a conversion strategy?
There are various factors in the speed of business growth and garnering results from new marketing initiatives such as business size, industry, and maturity. However, you can expect to start seeing an improvement in your conversion rate within the first 3-6 months of implementing your strategy.
What is the average conversion rate, and how can I improve it?
The average website conversion rate is between 1% and 4%. To improve your conversion rate, put together a conversion strategy that makes it easier for website visitors to become paying customers using the examples stated above.
