Conversions are what it’s all about whether you’re efforts are online or off as conversions ring the cash register so you can pay employees, suppliers, and meet other financial demands. Conversion rate optimization ensures you get the highest conversion rate possible by marketing effectively and managing your sales process. By focusing on all types of conversion, not just sales, you ensure a steady pipeline of sales far into the future that supports your success and growth.
Below you can see a graphic I prepared a few years ago to outline all the marketing actions necessary for conversion rate optimization. You should pay special attention to efforts focused on building traffic to your online store (or even your physical store) that fit in the marketing concept of advertising. Of equal importance are actions to convert visitors once you attract them to your business. These actions fit into the other 3 Ps of marketing: product, price, and place (distribution).
Conversion rate optimization
Before we jump into a discussion of marketing strategies for conversion rate optimization, let’s look at the variety of conversions that support your business success. As mentioned earlier, if you focus solely on optimizing sales, you miss the point. Consumers don’t simply jump into a sale, although a well-crafted promotional campaign might work to drum up sales for some products. For instance, in pre-pandemic times, Costco offered free samples of products that drove an immediate increase in sales. Whether this translated into future sales is a little more tenuous. And, it’s sustained sales, hopefully increasing over time, that keeps your business afloat.
That said, you need to consider factors that contribute to a long-term increase in sales. Among these factors are:
- Awareness
- Trust
- Positive attitudes
- Availability
- Affordability
- Competitor actions
We often summarize the consumer decision-making process using the funnel concept. A marketing (sales) funnel looks like this:
Image courtesy of MarketingProfs
Not only is the visualization helpful in identifying the process consumers go through before converting, but it also highlights content and marketing actions appropriate to move more visitors to the next stage in the process. The funnel shape comes from the attrition that occurs at each stage whereby you lose visitors at each stage. By increasing movement down the funnel by a relatively small amount (2%) you can increase revenue by as much as 50%.
Micro-conversions (or top-of-the-funnel conversions) contribute to conversion rate optimization for bottom-of-the-funnel, including sales, as they provide opportunities to move consumers toward a purchase. Examples of these include:
- Attracting new visitors
- Subscribing to your email marketing — which is often referred to as lead nurturing
- Creating a login
- Increasing page depth — the number of pages viewed
- Decreasing bounce rate — visitors who leave after viewing a single page
- Increase repeat visits
- Increasing email open rates
- Improve CTR (click-through rates)
- in fact, any visitor action that contributes to a sale acts as a micro-conversion and you should monitor these metrics as a means for conversion rate optimization
To provide more concrete advice in addition to what appears in the visualization, let’s talk about how marketing actions lead to conversion rate optimization.
Content marketing
Content marketing underpins conversion rate optimization. Offering the right message at each stage in the conversion funnel optimizes the number of consumers who move on to the next stage. Recognizing where a particular consumer is along the conversion process using analytics tools helps you provide the right content at the right time since visitors often make several visits before converting.
Here are some strategies for content marketing designed for conversion rate optimization.
Make the content more personal
First, you need to find ways to make things personal for your business customers. You can do this in a variety of ways, but one of the best is by using the data available to you. Businesses have a lot of data on visitors, available through Google Analytics and email providers. Using this data to optimize your content to reach the needs of individual consumers results in higher sales figures.
For instance, personalized email messages with the subscriber’s name aren’t enough. Instead, use information about their products of interest and other data from visits to personalize content. A great example of this comes from Amazon and we likely all received emails offering discounts or additional options related to products searched on the platform. Often, this strategy involves remarketing to prior visitors by, for instance, displaying your offerings through social media advertising to people who visited your page recently.
Improve website content
Content is still king in terms of marketing. So, ensure you fill your website with the right content and develop content aligned with the customer journey, as shown below.
Image courtesy of Bright Vessel
One of the best ways to address visitors’ needs for information is by creating a blog section for your website. With a blog, you can add as much content as you like without clogging up the site. Blog posts must provide real value though rather than using your content as a chance to purely promote products or services.
Use strong CTAs
Like any good salesperson, don’t leave it to chance that visitors know how to convert. Using the right CTAs leads buyers where you want them to go and helps ensure they commit to a purchase by showing them what they need to do. There’s something of an art to getting CTAs right. If they are too subtle, then they won’t have the right impact. If they are too outlandish then they’ll stick out and ultimately turn customers off rather than hooking them.
Only use a single CTA for each page rather than making multiple offers to avoid confusing visitors.
Using video
Next, think about using video as a way to engage and convert customers. A big benefit of using video is that you ensure your marketing efforts are more dynamic and immersive. Explainer videos, for instance, offer a great opportunity to show visitors how your product solves their problem. For customers, videos showing how to use the product ensure buyers are satisfied with their purchase, which increases recommendations and improves reviews.
If you want to try adding video to your marketing promotion, perhaps in the background of your website, then consider using a professional video production company to produce a high-quality product, although you needn’t produce something worthy of an Academy Award to optimize conversion. You should also explore a range of different tactics to ensure that your video content hits home.
Other marketing strategies for conversion rate optimization
Speed
As well as improving the content of your website, you should also think about the speed of your website. Ideally, you should ensure every page on your website loads in just a couple of seconds as visitors have little patience with websites that don’t load fast. Mobile users are especially impatient and 53% leave if a page doesn’t load in 3 seconds. Any more than this and your customers likely head off to a competitor with a better website. Keep an eye on your bounce rate as this is an indicator your visitors find your site too slow.
Of course, it’s not just about loading times. You need to make sure that they can find the right information quickly too. Following a three-click rule helps you plan for effective navigation. Alternatively, think about using a chatbot as a means to provide around-the-clock customer support and answer questions.
Use social media
Social media is one of your greatest tools for boosting business conversions. If you want to see more buyers for your company, then, ensure you are actively engaging with them on social platforms and make it easy for visitors to share your content with their own social communities, especially when it comes to sharing reviews. This is as simple as starting discussions on buzzy topics, responding to user comments, and giving a shoutout to customers. Or, think about going further and using promotions like giveaways on social media. This can be a chance for guerilla marketing tactics that might even attract media attention. Once you have an engaged social media following, you’ll see an increase in visits and conversions.
Conclusion
We hope this helps you understand the ultimate ways to boost your business conversions. I’d love to hear from you. Use the comments section below to share ideas, ask questions, or suggest future topics for this site.