Here is an interesting stat from the State of Inbound report:
And here is another one:
It’s clear that generating leads and converting them into customers is something that businesses struggle with across the board.
So what is a conversion rate?
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.
The goal of your website is to attract visitors and convert them into leads that can be nurtured into customers.
Increasing conversion rates increase the number of leads generated and ultimately the number of opportunities in your sales funnel.
So where do you start?
Delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time on the right channel is probably the most important thing to understand when you are trying to improve your conversion rates.
You can do this by surveying your current customer base and developing your buyer personas.
A buyer persona gives you detailed insights into your customers that you can use to improve your messaging and targeting. The more you are aligned with your ideal customer the higher your conversion rates will be.
If you want your website visitors to convert into leads you need to have compelling offers in place to act as lead magnets.
In exchange for their contact details, you give them access to special content like ebooks, research papers, tutorials, webinars, guides or templates.
The more compelling the offer, the more leads you will generate.
Make sure your paid traffic is directed to a landing page appropriate to their search term or topic.
The more focused the content on the landing page, the higher the chance those visitors will convert into leads.
Never send your traffic to generic pages like your homepage. It will be the kiss of death for your conversion rate.
Remarketing to visitors who have left your site but haven’t converted is an effective way to increase your conversion rate.
People are busy, they get distracted, and some might need more convincing than others.
Remarketing through Google Display Network and Facebook offer an effective way to stay in front of your target audience and give them a chance to rethink their conversion.
You can also add an exit intent pop up to increase visitors time on page and offer them a last option to convert.
This is often a cause for hot debate among digital marketers. A long form might negatively affect your user experience but the more information you get, the better you can nurture those leads into customers.
This study showed that decreasing the number of fields in the form actually decreased the conversion rate.
The takeaway here is that you shouldn’t include unnecessary form fields but don’t hold back from gathering the information you need.
Unfortunately, most visitors will leave your website without converting on any of your great offers.
Creating one more opportunity for them to convert with an exit intent pop up form is a last ditch effort to capture those elusive leads.
Even if the conversion rate of your pop up form is low, a couple of extra leads every month could mean a few hundred extra leads every year and an improved conversion rate for your website.
The biggest problem we see is that businesses don’t test different ads on different channels in different formats.
They create a single ad and don’t test variations to see which converts the best. Testing allows you to hypothesise about your audience, the sort of messaging that appeals to their needs, and lays a foundation for improving your conversion rate.
The lower the cost per conversion, the further your ad budget will go and ultimately the more leads you will be able to generate.
Creating great content to publish on your blog is a great way to drive organic traffic. Creating that content takes a significant amount of effort and the only way to get value from your efforts is to generate leads.
By adding call to actions to your blogs, you can direct your blog readers to your offer landing pages and convert them into leads.
The closer your content is aligned to your offer, the better your conversion rate will be.
Slow loading times can dramatically affect your conversion rate. Slow page speeds reduce your conversion rate and increase your bounce rate.
Make sure your website pages are optimised and monitor your page performance to make sure you don’t lose visitors unnecessarily.
Creating trust is an essential ingredient to high conversion rates.
A whopping 63% of people are more willing to buy something from a website with user reviews. Products with 50 or more reviews have a conversion rate 4.6% higher than their counterparts.
The point here is that reviews and social proof are an important trust indicator for website visitors and can dramatically affect your conversion rate.
Generating enough leads to fill your sales funnel and converting them into customers is the biggest challenge businesses face across the board.
It is clear that there is no one size fits all solution to improving your conversion rate.
Your website can be an effective lead magnet and through consistent testing and monitoring you can increase its ability to convert your traffic into leads and ultimately into customers.