All businesses spend effort on improving their conversion rates, but many still don’t have any form of strategy to capitalize on their activities. You can spend all the money in the world or have the most traffic in the world, but if your conversion rates are low you’ll be losing money, leads, and time. Optimizing marketing efforts is, therefore, a no-brainer to help convert more leads and sales this year. But how?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) means improved user experience, a higher amount of leads, and increased revenue. But it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. Eight in ten businesses (78%) are still dissatisfied with their CRO performance.
Fear not, here are some top tactics to quickly help boost your conversions and improve your ROI. Next stop? World domination…
If you aren’t already doing this, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Prospects expect targeted and relevant marketing. It’s not acceptable anymore to send mass emails that are generic and non-personalized. You can target your emails based on what you know about the prospect: Purchase history, interests, geographical location, company size, job role, and so on. Get started by building segmented email lists to send your emails to.
Landing pages are the holy grail of conversions. They are pages specifically built to capture marketing information by hosting content or offers. It goes without saying, then, that your first step to improving conversion rates is improving your landing page performance.
How? Well, if the page looks clunky and poorly designed, your prospects will click away in seconds. Remember, you want them to ‘want’ to give you their valuable data, so you need to put the effort in to get the conversion over the line. After a nice design, focus on ease of use. Nobody wants to spend more than a few seconds filling out a time-consuming form. Make it simple and easy, but keep in the essentials like name, email address and phone number (if required). Additionally, make sure the form is easy to spot. Too many landing pages have the form hidden at the bottom - you can’t expect your time-pressed prospects to hunt about for the form so don't bury it. Lastly, the content on your landing page needs to be short, concise and informative. If you want a conversion, tell them exactly why they should fill out the form.
There are tools out there like Instapage, Unbounce and Leadpages that make it easy for you to create landing pages that convert well.
This is my favorite technique of them all. Is there a better way conversion tactic in the digital age than converting in real-time? I don’t think so. And best of all, there are loads of tools readily available to help you convert in real-time, from HubSpot to Intercom to Drift.
My favorite is Drift, which allows you to have live chats with your web traffic, as they browse your website, via your mobile device - named ‘conversational marketing’. What this means is you can solve your customer pain points as they are on your website and provide them with the content they need. Live chat is an easy way to engage with your potential buyers there and then.
For example, if a prospect wants to solve a specific challenge, you can quickly point them in the right direction and convert them immediately. If you aren’t convinced, live chat platforms can help you increase conversions by 4-8x. ‘Conversational marketing’ also presents an opportunity to ditch the need for forms as you can capture conversions on the chat platform, rather than ask prospects to give over their information.
Mobile traffic makes up the vast chunk of traffic on your website today. Failing to optimize your site for mobile is a major fail. If the website isn’t optimized for mobile, you will lose your visitors and see increased bounce rates (the number of visitors who immediately click off your page). With mobile users expected to go beyond the five billion mark by 2019, and 67% of users more likely to convert from a mobile-friendly site, you should be taking this very seriously. If anything, today’s sites need to be more mobile-friendly than desktop!
For a smooth mobile experience, make sure your pages are responsive, tailor your content offerings for mobile and make sure your pages load quickly.
The easiest way to improve conversions is to get your advocates to recommend you. But, in order to do that, you need to make the process attractive and reward loyalty too. Reward customers with discounted pricing, free shipping, vouchers and exclusive content or items. There is nothing more powerful than an advocate.
Your call-to-actions (CTAs) are the action-orientated copy that is designed to make people proactively do what you want them to do i.e. click a button to get a guide. If you get them wrong, it will put your visitors off. Naturally, active words work best - ‘download now’, ‘get your free guide’, or ‘find out more’. You should also create a sense of urgency if you have something that is particularly compelling, for example, a one-off product deal or an upcoming webinar.
Similar to your landing page forms, your CTAs should be highly visible (next to the form if on a landing page).
The goal of remarketing is to bring back the 98% of website visitors that don’t convert the first time. It’s an essential lead generation technique to help grow your business.
Remarketing helps you save money, get more leads and conversions, see higher audience engagement and maximize your ROI. It’s all about re-engaging with those who have previously visited your website - as an added bonus, remarketing ads are also pretty cheap!
Your prospects are looking for the best value, not necessarily the cheapest option. It might seem counter-intuitive, but it’s not best practice to ram sales spiel down their throat every time. Instead, build value, which can take longer, to improve conversions throughout the year. The more value you create, whether that’s in pricing, volume, or information, the better relationships you’ll build, the more credibility you’ll have, and the better your conversions.
These steps will help drive conversions and increase your marketing ROI. The more conversions you make, the more sales you can make. In the online age, think about a high-performing website, with optimized pages for search engines, that’s easy on the eye and direct.
Rukham is the Content Lead at Mailmunch. He believes trust should be the basis for all marketing communications.
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