Marketing is a very different game than it was five years ago thanks to the explosion of marketing technology that has allowed us to track everything and accurately measure impact and attribution. But with that ability to measure marketing’s impact comes an expectation to meet increasingly lofty, revenue-based goals. Ultimately, we need the traffic we garner to work harder for us, which is why so many marketers today are focused on one goal: a higher conversion rate.
Your conversion rate is the percentage of the time that an audience responds to your designated “Call-to-Action” (or conversion action) within the context of the channel they are presented with.
And this focus on conversion rate seems to make sense, right? Say 1,000 people visit your website where your conversion action is for your visitors to request a demo of your product. Even a slightly increased conversion rate could significantly impact your total revenue. Depending on your average deal size, moving your conversion rate from 3% to 4% could mean thousands of new dollars in revenue for your team.
I imagine by now we’ve sold you—but where do you start to actually move the needle on your conversion rate? A quick Google search will reveal dozens of articles with broad solutions, like “use A/B testing” and “build trust”.
Which, of course, are critical concepts to explore and infuse into your marketing. But if you’re looking for more practical solutions to start improving your conversion rate now, we’ve got you covered. Check out our tips to increase your conversion rate below.
Use Creative CTAs Everywhere
Can you imagine how many “download now” or “sign up” buttons your audience sees in a day? The answer is way too many times for yours to jump out at them.
While it’s true that positive words, affirmations, and action-oriented verbs are your best bet psychologically to illicit a click (read: conversion!) from your audience, there’s no rule saying that “download,” or “sign up” are the only two you have to choose from.
Simply adding a “yes” to your CTA can help increase your conversion rate:
But CTAs can also be a powerful opportunity to leverage your brand voice, test snappier verbiage, and build the authenticity factor with your audience. This example from Spoon University shows how you can use language in both a “yes” and “no” format that point your prospects in the right direction.
Optimize Landing Pages
While this may seem like an obvious tip, it’s a critical place to start for many companies who are losing out on valuable conversion opportunities by unintentionally making things difficult for their prospects.
What do we mean when we say optimizing landing pages?
The name of the game is simplicity and user experience. The purpose of a landing page is to drive your visitors toward a singular goal, but many marketers today fail to un-muddy the waters for their prospects.
Focus on assessing your landing pages for these three critical areas to start your practical improvements: CTAs, offer language, and design.
Keep your CTAs above the fold: Your visitors should never have to scroll down to reach the point of your landing page where they can convert. The CTA should always be in plain view as soon as they hit the page.
Make your offer clear: Your language needs to be precise enough for your visitors to understand exactly what they can expect to get from taking the action you have presented them with.
Pay attention to your design: Using contrasting colors and visually guiding your visitor to your CTA is critical for increasing your conversion rate.
This example from Hubspot embodies these principles:
With a dynamic CTA, clear language, and simple but engaging design, it’s clear that this landing page removes any roadblocks for Hubspot’s visitors to convert, and ultimately, helps them increase conversion rate.
Create Conversion Opportunities in Your Content
Many marketers often stop looking for opportunities to increase their conversion rate and conversion opportunities after a prospect has interacted with a landing page, and accessed your content. But by layering in both qualification and conversion opportunities within your content, you’re able to drive not just more conversions, but better leads that will ultimately convert at a higher rate.
This next example shows how additional conversion and lead qualification opportunities turn what would be a simple PDF into a conversion engine.
For this piece of content, you can see that the report itself is ungated to improve the user experience (Note however, that a click through from this landing page to the report is still a conversion! We’re just adding additional opportunities in this model.)
However, the content itself includes overlayed interactive elements that both qualify your leads (in the sales qualifying question section) and add additional conversion opportunities, with both a skippable form and two CTA options at the end of the report.
Learn about how interactive assets can improve qualification and conversion rates here.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re just starting to think about new strategies to improve your conversion rate, or are consistently looking to optimize the testing you already do, these simple tweaks to marketing activities you already have in places are sure to get you moving in the right direction.
What other simple tweaks have helped you move the needle and increase your conversion rate? Share in the comments below!