Conversion rate optimization, also known as CRO or conversion optimization, is the systematic process of testing and optimizing your website elements, including call to action (CTA) buttons, content and website design, to increase the percentage of site visitors who complete the desired goal.
In defining this concept, marketers often use purchases as a measure of success. CRO goals and metrics, however, differ per brand. Depending on your marketing needs and objectives, there are multiple CRO SEO goals you can set for your business, including:
- Sales
- Social media shares
- Form submissions
- App installations
- CTA button clicks
- Newsletter sign-ups
More of this in this article. Let’s get into it.
- How do You Increase Conversion Rate Optimization?
- How do I Increase my Sales Conversion Rate?
- How do You Reduce Conversion Rate Optimization?
- What is a Good Conversion Rate Increase?
- 5 Steps to Improve Conversion Rate Optimization?
- Conversion Rate Optimization Services
- 5 Ways Conversion Rate Optimization Services Can Increase Your Profit
- How to Increase Conversion Rate in Sales
- How to Increase Conversion Rate eCommerce
- Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
- How to Increase Conversion Rate on Site
- How do I Increase Conversion Rate on Google Ads
- What is The Average Sales Conversion Rate?
- What Are The Key Elements to Optimize The Conversion Rates Per PPC?
- What is a Good Conversion Rate Percentage?
- What is a Good Conversion Rate For B2B Website?
- Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
- Conversion Rate Optimization Agency
- How to Increase Conversion Rate in Digital Marketing
- How to Increase Conversion Rate in Retail
- How Can I Increase my Online Conversion Rate?
- What is The Goal of Conversion Rate Optimization?
- What to do When You’re Predicted to Get Zero Conversions?
- How do I Optimize a Conversion Campaign on Facebook?
How do You Increase Conversion Rate Optimization?
If your website is not generating enough traffic, you have an SEO problem. However, if your website is generating adequate amounts of traffic but visitors are bouncing or not following the intended conversion path, then you need to focus on CRO.
Read Also: Top 10 Sales Strategies to Boost Conversion Rates
Here are five steps for increasing conversion rate optimization on your company’s website:
Implement a Strong CMS: CRO is difficult to execute on an ongoing basis if you have a poor back-end content management system. It’s important to implement a CMS that lets your marketing team make changes or upload new content quickly and easily. Otherwise, you will struggle to organize, test and make changes that improve CRO.
Leverage Customer Reviews: Adding customer reviews and testimonials to your website is a great way to improve CRO. We helped one of our clients, a moving and storage company in the Pacific Northwest region, implement customer reviews on its website to increase conversions and user engagement.
Know Which Data to Analyze: There are a wide variety of data points companies can analyze when executing CRO strategies. You can look for barriers to completion, diluted or misplaced calls to action and easy-to-escape conversion paths. Start out by assessing your existing conversion funnel for each goal on your website. This will enable you to identify the problem areas where you are losing your audience.
Test, Test, Test: After you’ve identified your problem areas in the conversion path, you can begin A/B testing to learn how to improve conversion rates. Try changing the color of your calls to action or varying the amount of information you request on a form. See what works best for visitors in each area of your site.
Think Long Term: Conversion rate optimization testing is not a one-and-done solution. It requires dedication to testing over the long term. You should always be looking for new ways to improve site functionality and performance based on user behavior and A/B testing.
How do I Increase my Sales Conversion Rate?
From leveraging the power of video to creating automated follow-up campaigns, our experts shared some great tips.
Let’s give you the tips first, followed by their details:
1. Work with the right leads instead of a lot of leads
“It starts with the quality of the leads,” notes Fistbump Media’s Dan King. “So our Sales and Marketing functions work really closely together to ensure we’re getting the right kinds of leads who are going to be most likely to convert.
From a marketing perspective, we’re not interested in just driving lots of traffic and leads. We’ll consider fewer leads a success if they are the right leads. So marketing and sales work closely to identify the reasons people make their buying decision for various products/services, and then we create the marketing campaigns to specifically hit those points.”
2. Guarantee results
“If you are firm that your product or service will offer great value, you can guarantee results,” advises CocoSign’s Caroline Lee. “This is one tactic we implemented to help customers take quick action.
Wouldn’t you take action if someone guarantees you a certain outcome? Again, there’s a lot of risk factor involved in this, and implementing this strategy is based on the value you offer.”
Besides, Lee shares you can also “infuse ‘fear of missing out,’ this helps customers to spark action. Offer a limited time incentive to attract attention.”
3. Use video
The team at Care Lamps has recently tried to leverage videos in order to increase their sales conversion rate. Ian Turner explains, “We recently trialed adding a lifestyle video, showcasing one of our products in use. This has increased our conversion rate of this product by 0.5%.”
4. Inform that you are moving on
Dave Popple’s team at Psynet Group has noticed some interesting results as they told their inactive leads they were moving on. Popple writes, “the most effective thing that we did was to reach out and tell them that we are assuming they are not interested (after 2 months of no movement) and that we will move on.
This is not as much of a sales tactic as it is courtesy to stop calling and filling up their email box as well as a means to keep our sales team from wasting time. This simple message put 70% of our prospects back in play and half of those 70 have signed an SOW.
We calculate conversion as sales/first meeting with a consultant. We have a system in which the sales team generates interest and the consultant has the first meeting. This is probably closest to your sales/opportunities ratio.”
5. Tweak or change your call to action (CTA)
A couple of our expert respondents applaud the role that a clear and optimized call to action plays in boosting the sales conversion rate.
Jennifer Neylon from My Supplement Store shares, “We have found that adding more CTA or Call to Actions throughout our content has resulted in improved sales conversions rates.
For example, on our homepage banners, we have tested adding CTA buttons that link directly to products or pages, and have found that customers are more likely to click the button embedded in the banner than the banner alone. The same goes for adding CTA buttons in email marketing, etc.”
In the same vein, CarVertical’s Arnas Vasiliauskas comments, “Our key to boosting our sales conversion rates is to reinforce the value of our content by designing strong CTA headlines and forging a unique and relevant content body. We make sure that the audience’s attention is maintained by promoting engagement all throughout the whole content.”
Wicklewood’s Rosie Axford goes into the optimization details: “Test various uses of color on call to actions along the conversion funnel. Obviously, the most important place to look when you are increasing conversions is along the conversion funnel.”
“At all points on the conversion funnel, we have hundreds of different A/B tests running. Out of all the tests we ran, the most interesting test was on the cart page. The site had a progress bar that ran along the top of the cart page that told you how close you were to getting free delivery (when you spent £29), the default design (version A) had a grey progress bar and when you achieved free delivery it would turn green.
On the other hand, version B was green by default even if you hadn’t achieved the necessary spending. We found that Version B dramatically outperformed version A. In our initial test against a small segment of the site traffic, we saw an increased conversion rate of 8%,” continues Axford.
6. Work on your headlines
A click-worthy CTA with an equally engaging headline makes the best combination for improving your sales conversion rate opines Darren Litt from Hiya Health Products.
“Above all, you need to focus on two components — the headline and the call to action. Simplify what’s valuable or relevant about your product and state it succinctly. There may be other competing ads next to yours, so your headline should answer why your product is the solution.
Then add a clear call to action. What’s the next step you want your prospect to make? How can you present this call to action in an incentivizing way? What can you offer upfront to compel them to click and complete the call to action?”
7. Improve support with live chat
“When consumers want to learn about a product or service, live chat is one of the most effortless ways to go, it’s super beneficial,” points out Incrementors SEO Services’ Brack Nelson. “To add live chat to your site, you can use plugins like Chatra or Zopim.”
8. Set up a follow-up campaign
Shawn Breyer of The Hive Law appreciates following-up with leads. Breyer explains how they did it: “We created an automated follow-up campaign. We did this by setting up retargeting and emailing leads. We placed Google Ads and Facebook Pixels on our forms’ thank you pages.
We retarget them with Display Ads, YouTube Ads, and Facebook Ads. We also send them an automated email sequence. All these pieces of content include testimonials, education, and offers. Implementing this has increased our conversions by 37%.”
9. Use SMS alerts to increase your sales conversion rate
At Filter King, Rick Hoskins explains they use SMS alerts to increase their sales conversion rate.
“The customer chooses when they want to receive a reminder to replace their air and/or furnace filters. Filters need to be changed regularly and with life happening it is often that they are forgotten. SMS alerts go straight to someone’s cell to remind them. It is a free service we offer, which increases the number of subscribers.
Having an SMS alert is more advantageous than an email or app alert. Often notifications are turned off for apps, but never for SMS. Direct calls and SMS are still regarded as private lines. The conversation rate from these alerts is very satisfactory.”
10. Improve user experience
“Improving our sales conversion rate relies on our ongoing consumer research, website optimizations, and updates based on our website data in analytics,” Youtech’s Elizabeth Weatherby says.
“We can learn a lot when we look at our website analytics, click paths, heat maps, and more, to learn about where on our site we can make updates and optimizations to improve the online buying experience.
Our SEO efforts have allowed us to make necessary adjustments to our site design and set up to better assist users in converting. When we make updates to the way our services and vehicle offerings are presented, users gravitate towards certain styles and website booking formats than others. With these A/B tests and ongoing optimizations, we’re able to see our direct efforts when calculating sales from online bookings that came from organic users!”
How do You Reduce Conversion Rate Optimization?
CRO one of the best ways to optimize your website and increase conversions. But it comes with its own set of challenges and misconceptions, which must be addressed to ensure smooth adoption and implementation.
Challenge 1: Politics and People
People and politics make for two main elements that define the culture of an organization. While the former highlights skills and mindset, the latter speaks of influential power. The real challenge surfaces when there’s no democracy amid people. Moreover, when the influential individuals of the organization try to enforce their thoughts over factual data.
Solution:
- Educate people about the real benefits of CRO.
- Present competitive analysis
- Highlight the gaps in your current approach
- Show the data.
Challenge 2: Structure to Support CRO
Putting together a structure to support CRO is a huge challenge for most enterprises. A series of questions come up here. Is it worth hiring a dedicated conversion optimization team; would it add to overall organizational expenditure; who will take the responsibility in case of failures; and so on!
Solution:
Before getting into the depth of CRO, it’s important to draft a proper CRO process. Create a dashboard or platform to plan, update and record all your conversion activities. Share the statistics with your employees. Encourage them to contribute to conversion optimization and make smart decisions based on factual data.
Challenge 3: Insufficient Budget Allocation
Budget plays an important role when it comes to planning and running a CRO campaign. While companies back in 2013, spent as low of only 5% on CRO activities, the trend has improved with organizations increasing their spend on optimization. However, the problem lies in the correct budget allocation.
Solution:
Before zeroing upon an amount, organizations must analyze their ROI from CRO. They must invest in conversion optimization tools after thoroughly examining their goals and actual gains.
Challenge 4: Lack of Right Tools to Meet Business Goals
Marketers have a variety of tools to choose from to meet their business goals. For example, when deciding on an A/B testing tool, they have to make a choice between a:
- Frequentist-based statistical engine
- Bayesian statistical engine
Moreover, there are multiple tools that help marketers accomplish specific objectives. But using a combination of tools can make reporting a pain. So, how should marketers proceed? How to choose the right conversation rate optimization tools?
Solution
For selecting the correct tool, marketers must weigh the pros and cons of their actions. They must evaluate the tool based on how effectively and efficiently it will solve their specific business problems and meet their goals.
Challenge 5: Ending an A/B Tests Too Early
Ending an experiment in between just because your variation isn’t yielding the results as anticipated, doesn’t mean that it won’t stand a chance to win in the end. There are a plethora of tests which take time to showcase necessary results due to a number of factors.
Solution: The first rule of running an A/B test is to let the experiment run its course until it reaches its statistical significance. Give your test some time to breathe. If you still feel your experiment is on the verge of failing, do a deep analysis of the experiment.
Look for errors or bugs in the process and check your hypothesis again. Fix these issues, if any, and then run the test again for a significant amount of time to get to a concrete conclusion.
What is a Good Conversion Rate Increase?
A good conversion rate is between 2 percent and 5 percent.
The thing with conversion rate is that even a jump of 0.5 percent can be a big deal. Moreover, we must mention that the top brands enjoy better results.
Conversion Rate by Industry
Let’s find out what is a good conversion rate for an e-commerce website.
Here’s a small breakdown for a complete understanding of conversion rates in different industries:
| Bottom | Middle | Top | |
| Ecommerce | 1.84% | 3.71% | 6.25% |
| Legal | 1.07% | 4.12% | 6.46% |
| B2B | 2.23% | 4.31% | 11.70% |
| Finance | 5.01% | 11.19% | 24.48% |
As you can see, e-commerce conversion rates are very low especially when compared to finance, especially when you look at the top tier. Similarly, B2B website conversion rates are on the higher side.
The rule applies to all tiers, however. Let’s think about legal – if you’re around 4 percent then you’re in the average, if you’re around 6.5 percent then you’re in the top tier, and if you’re around 1 percent then you’re doing poorly.
This chart can help you figure out where you stand. But, we must mention that an e-commerce store with a rate of 3.71 percent might be making more money than a company that offers legal services and enjoys a conversion rate of 6.46 percent.
This is because legal is a niche that does not attract a lot of buyers. E-commerce, on the other hand, may attract more users.
Retail Sector ad Conversion Rates
According to this 2020 report, the industry’s average is 3 percent; however, some industries may enjoy a higher or lower conversion rate based on competition and demand. Here’s a breakdown:
| Industry | Conversion Rate |
| Consumer Electronics | 1.4% |
| DIY & Tools | 1.7% |
| Automotive | 2.2% |
| Home Furnishing and Decor | 2.3% |
| Major Chains | 2.3% |
| Jewels and Cosmetics | 2.9% |
| Sports | 3.1% |
| Others | 3.4% |
| Apparel and Footwear | 4.2% |
| Health and Pharmacy | 4.6% |
| Gifts | 4.9% |
This shows how conversion rates may differ for e-commerce. A store that sells gift items may enjoy a higher conversion rate than a store that offers sports goods.
A big e-commerce store that offers multiple products may have different rates for different sections.
Traffic Source and Conversion Rates
According to this Episerver research, conversion rates greatly differ based on source. This is why it is important to know how to calculate conversion rate.
The rate for some pages may be higher or lower than the average website conversion rate. This happens because users who reach your site through a specific channel might be more interested in what you have to offer than users who land on your site randomly.
Here’s a small breakdown:
| Traffic Source | Conversion Rate |
| Display | 0.7% |
| Social | 2.1% |
| Direct | 2.2% |
| 2.3% | |
| Referral | 2.6% |
| Organic | 2.8% |
| Paid | 2.9% |
As evident, paid traffic tends to convert better. This is why a large number of businesses buy ad space.
Device and Conversion Rates
We know that a large number of users use mobile devices to browse the web, hence it’s important to know how the rate changes from device to device.
Here’s a small breakdown:
| Device | Conversion Rate |
| Mobile | 1.82% |
| Tablet | 3.49% |
| Desktop | 3.90% |
This might come as a surprise to some but mobile users do not convert as well as desktop users do. Hence, mobile website conversion rates can be slightly lower than the typical website conversion rate.
It’s believed this happens because mobile users are often greatly distracted.
5 Steps to Improve Conversion Rate Optimization?
Randomly tweaking your websites and landing pages without following the conversion rate optimization process is like walking on a dark road without a roadmap. So below, we will talk about the conversion rate optimization roadmap that you should follow before implementing the CRO tips and tricks.
Step 1: Research & Data gathering
Marketers often tend to copy the most popular CRO strategies that have proven to deliver for other businesses. But, they fail. Why? Because what has worked for them might not work for you!
And this is precisely why the research and data gathering phase is of utmost importance. This helps you understand how visitors are reacting to your site and why they are doing so. Rather than optimizing purely out of gut feelings or copying CRO strategies, it’s better to take data-backed decisions. So, you should track and analyze your micro conversions before anything else.
Step 2: Hypothesis
Based on the quantitative and qualitative data you have collected, it’s time to form your hypothesis. So what exactly is a hypothesis from the CRO perspective? Here’s an example:
“If we add urgency messages like ‘Only a few left in stock!’ and ‘Sold out!’ just above the ‘Add To Cart’ buttons on our product page, we can have a 3% growth in cart additions.”
Now that you have your hypothesis (based on statistical data) ready, it’s time to implement the changes. But, how can you be sure if your hypothesis is going to work? Well, this is where A/B tests and multivariate testing comes into play.
But before you jump off to the testing phase, prioritize your work first. After steps 1 and 2, you may have discovered ample optimization opportunities and hypotheses. It can be a lot to digest all at once. So, you need to schedule everything as per the priority.
Step 3: Prioritization
Prioritizing your ideas and hypotheses will help you focus on the most important and serious problems on your site first. There are a lot of prioritization frameworks, but to cut things short, let’s take a quick look at the best few:
P.I.E. Framework
The P.I.E. framework is formulated by Chris Goward of WiderFunnel. The framework considers three factors: Potential, Importance, and Ease.
Here’s an example of how you can carry out this framework:
So, the PIE framework essentially prioritizes your worst-performing pages, with important traffic and ease of modification.
Step 4: Implementation and Testing
This is one of the most important steps of the conversion rate optimization process. Once you are ready with your data, hypothesis, and prioritization, it is time to test and implement. Testing of your hypotheses can be done primarily in three ways:
A/B Testing
A/B testing is a research methodology used to test user experience between two variants A and B. It is used to test simple optimizations like minor design and layout tweaks.
Example:
Grene, an eCommerce company, revamped its mini cart page and ran an A/B test that resulted in a 60% increase in revenues.
This is how their actual page looked like before:
They made the following changes to their mini cart page:
1. Added a CTA button at the top of their mini cart to facilitate a smooth and quick transition to the actual cart page.
2. Added a ‘Remove’ button alongside each item and the total value of products.
3. Increased the size of their ‘Add to Cart’ button to improve prominence.
Step 5: Learning and Reviewing
Now that you have your test results in front of you, either you will find that your hypothesis is correct or it has not turned out as expected. Generally speaking, if the test results come out positive then marketers tend to implement the changes straight away. But, if the results come negative, they go back to form new hypotheses.
But, you must dig deeper even if your hypothesis is correct. Always check if the cost of implementing the changes is doing justice to the revenue it is supposed to generate.
Also, if your hypothesis is wrong, review it for loopholes before discarding it completely. Recheck your test results and research data before you move on to form a different hypothesis.
Again, the best way to get primary and accurate data or feedback on any change you make is to directly ask your customers how they feel about it. So what’s the best way to do it? Well, traditional ways and long boring forms just don’t work anymore. Here is an interactive “Vote for your favorite #GoogleMarketingLive Feature” poll. It takes just a single click from the user and the brands collect real-time feedback on their feature/product updates.
Conversion Rate Optimization Services
Regardless if you’re in e-commerce, retail, B2B, or B2C, if you want to get more business from your website, you’ve got to know exactly how many of your website visitors become leads and sales.
Failing to accurately track your website leaves open the (strong) possibility that you’re spending money to send qualified visitors to a website that doesn’t effectively convert them into leads. That’s like paying money to send leads to a sales rep that can’t close. It makes no sense.
Your website’s visit-to-lead conversion rate is not only the most important website marketing metric, but it’s also an indicator of your website experience. A single bad experience on your website makes users 88% less likely to visit the website again. By removing friction and improving the experience, you’ll see your conversion rate increase.
If you want to accurately track the number of website visitors that convert into leads, you need three things—a conversion optimization agency that knows what they’re doing, a properly setup and configured website analytics platform such as Google Analytics, and a call tracking service with dynamic number replacement like that offered by Blue Corona.
Conversion rate optimization services pricing varies by your website and the number of pages you need optimized.
5 Ways Conversion Rate Optimization Services Can Increase Your Profit
We’re presenting the top five ways conversion optimization can benefit your professional services firm.
1. Reduce Your Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the count of how many people visit a page on your website and then direct navigate away from your site. If this number is high, you know that visitors aren’t finding what they thought they would find (or that they found their answer right away – but that’s another topic).
If you have a high bounce rate (generally over 60-70%), your page is most likely not relevant to the search performed by the visitor, or the quality of the page or its content didn’t appeal to them for some reason. There are a lot of reasons visitors might steer away from a given page on your site, and guessing at these is an exercise at futility.
Conversion rate optimization, on the other hand, can test variations of a page and offer metrics on the people bouncing. Reducing bounce rates means more people are continuing to engage with your site, accessing gated content, and continuing down the sales funnel.
2. Drive More Downloads
A high bounce rate on landing pages means few people are completing the registration form to access your gated content. Testing and optimizing these landing pages will result in a higher number of downloads and more visitors being exposed to your content.
After all, what’s the point in content that no one sees? Putting content behind a gate can be risky—unwilling to sign up for another mailing list, some visitors will forfeit accessing content that they would have otherwise found relevant and useful.
This means CRO is critical on these landing pages. You don’t want to send prospects bouncing away from both your content and your email list. But once you’ve optimized your landing page, the number of downloads are sure to grow. And so is our next topic, your email list.
3. Build Your Email List
As mentioned above, an increase in the number of downloads of your gated content also translates to more email addresses in your list. A larger email list means more potential clients. And this isn’t a list of random addresses – these are targeted visitors to your website.
The fact that they visited your page in the first page suggests that they have interest in your industry, content, services, and in pursuing a relationship with your firm. They might not become clients overnight, but getting them on your email list brings them one step closer to doing business with you.
For even greater email list efficacy, gather some other data on the landing page. Information like industry, company size, geographic location, or visitor’s position in their company can help you tailor your email marketing to them.
Advertising doesn’t just promote your services – it can also play an important role in driving content downloads, increasing both your expertise and visibility.
4. Create Better Pages
We’re defining “better” here as more effective at creating conversions. Design and messaging will not always align with conversion rates. This is because design choices and selection of the best messaging are fairly subjective endeavors.
But remember that with CRO, your bottom-line is the number of conversions. Strong design and messaging prowess are important – and can certainly help conversions – but it’s also possible to have pages you find less visually appealing increase conversions. Finding the right combination of design elements and messaging is what CRO is all about.
5. Improved Decision Making
Decisions based on guesswork and gut feelings have little place in the age of data. There are a lot of software platforms designed specifically to help you track conversion rate optimization efforts.
Some good examples of these include Optimizely and Experiment Engine. They offer hard numbers on the statistical significance of observed conversions and bounce rates. This helps you make informed decisions when building or redesigning your website that are backed by data.
This removes guesswork from the equation and grants your firm the confidence that its choices will pay off in greater conversions rates. This means more clients, higher revenue, and greater growth—all at very little expense.
How to Increase Conversion Rate in Sales
When it comes to improving sales conversion rate, it’s essential to keep in mind the B2B sales and marketing funnels.
Conversion only occurs at the bottom of the funnel. People at this stage are those who:
- Are aware of their business problem.
- Have done their research on the variety of solutions available.
- Are ready to make their purchase.
Prospects higher up in the funnel aren’t ready to convert yet. And because of this, your tactics to drive conversions will inevitably change across your funnel stages.
1. Invest time and effort into a blog
Having a blog on your site is one of the most important aspects of a good inbound strategy. Your articles should talk about your product or service and industry trends, as well as provide helpful guides for your readers.
Having good content on your blog helps you achieve several things.
Firstly, it helps you establish your brand as a thought leader in your field. This builds the level of trust your readers and potential leads have in you. It also creates the impression that your brand is one that is genuine in offering help to your readers and prospects.
Content marketing can help make your business one of those “top-of-mind companies” that prospects will think of when looking for a solution to their problems.
2. Create the appropriate content for the right audience
As we established right at the beginning, your strategies will vary based on the funnel stage your audience is in.
Those at the top of the funnel (TOFU) – or the awareness stage – are looking for more general information and might not have identified their business problems yet. For them, blog articles like industry trends, statistics, and general guides are most helpful.
Meanwhile, those at the middle of the funnel (MOFU) – or consideration stage – are already aware of their business problem and are looking out for solutions. For them, articles that compare software are the most useful to them, as they can review the features for themselves.
Note that those at the TOFU and MOFU stages aren’t looking to purchase just yet. Your goal when planning out content for them isn’t just to improve sales conversion, but to educate.
3. Optimise your content for search engines
So you’ve got a nicely designed blog page. You’ve got great content that can help answer the questions your intended audience might have.
But what good are these when no one can find your blog?
That’s why your content needs to be optimised for search engines. When coming up with your content strategy, you must also think about your audience’s search intent.
Ask yourself this: what kind of content or words are my audience searching for? You will need to engage in some keyword research before even starting to write.
Top tip: you should start optimising content that targets those at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Since these people are most likely to convert, optimising these articles helps improve sales conversion.
4. Use convincing copy on your opt-in forms
And while we’re on the topic of subscription boxes, the copy you use on the boxes also plays a role in convincing site visitors to give you their contact information.
Focus your copy on the value you can deliver to them.
For example, if you are a sales automation software company, your copy should focus on how you can help them improve their sales. You could say “Receive FREE weekly expert advice on how to improve your sales”.
5. Distribute your content
While you should invest heavily in a good content and SEO strategy, you shouldn’t only rely on that to get people to read your content.
Rely on other channels, such as your social media platforms, to advertise your content to your followers.
Also, get your colleagues to leverage their networks and share your content on their profiles!
This makes sense, especially on B2B-centric platforms like LinkedIn, where people often have more connections than companies. The greater your outreach, the greater the likelihood of someone reading your content.
And if you share more content designed to convert people, the more likely you are to drive conversion rates.
How to Increase Conversion Rate eCommerce
The global average conversion rate for e-commerce websites is around 4.31% and that of the U.S. is close to 2.63%. If your conversion rates are lower than these two benchmarks, let’s understand some effective ways to increase your e-commerce store’s conversion rates:
Use a Heatmap Tool
To understand why your visitors and potential customers leave your website, you need to understand what they do on your e-commerce store and how they interact with its elements. Now, I’m sure you have taken all the efforts in the world to have the best UI/UX for your store, deployed AI modules for recommendations and personalized targeting, and more. But why are they still leaving your e-commerce site?
Heatmap tools can give you a comprehensive idea of what’s going wrong and where the disconnect lies. For the uninitiated, heatmaps assess the behavior of your customers by studying where or in which section of your website they spend most of their time on. It works by assessing the link between the eye and the cursor movement to determine user behavior and offers you aggregated results from a diverse range of samples.
With heatmap results, you can figure out which sections of your stores are skipped often, which CTAs work best, which ones don’t get clicked at all, if people are annoyed by popups, and more. Optimizing your e-commerce store based on inferences and results will help to increase your conversions.
Optimize Your Paid Ads
Wrong goals could lead to wrong outcomes. Like I mentioned, having abundant website traffic as one of your goals could be the reason why your conversion rates are low. When people are clicking on your advertisements and paid campaigns, understand that your messaging is right and that your visitors are intrigued by your copies and images. But when they leave, you should also realize that you did not attract the right audience in the first place.
That’s why the second most important step in increasing conversion rates is modifying your target audience. Narrow down to a niche segment and target people in it to see if there are differences in conversion rates. Do split tests of your target audience groups and use solid results to make data-driven decisions.
Strengthen Your CTAs (Calls to Action)
Your visitors might be reading your content and looking at the images of your products or services and may even be really curious about them. But how excited are you to get them onboard? Well, CTAs are direct reflections of your intentions with your target audience. And if your CTAs read on the dull side, you will receive equal reciprocation from your visitors.
That’s why you need to make sure your CTAs excite people to take action immediately. Show them an imaginary clock that is ticking, give them FOMO, tell them that a single click can make all the difference. Instill a sense of urgency. With good CTAs, you can psychologically capitalize on the impulse of your audience and push sales.
Make Sure There Are No Hidden Surprises
Cart abandonment is one of the most plaguing concerns faced by e-commerce store owners. In March 2020 alone, more than 88% of shopping carts were abandoned. According to Baymard Institute, the average abandonment rate is 69.80%.
Checkout abandonment happens when your visitors leave your website after adding an item to their cart. This means they were interested in buying products or services from your store but something happened that made them abandon your website before making their purchase.
According to research, 18% of users abandon their carts because the process is too lengthy, and close to 50% of them abandon because of hidden costs.
This could either be because of a sudden increase in prices after a business adds shipping charges in the end before the consumer makes their payment, or because they were forced to create an account before making a purchase. Both of these instances are a major turnoff. Imagine your website is new to visitors who just stumbled upon it. They want to give it a try, but you forced them to sign up, stalling the sale.
To avoid these, follow the WYSIWYP (What You See Is What You Pay) model. Show the prices of all your products and services with the shipping charges upfront so your visitors don’t suddenly feel cheated.
Also, ensure you enable an option that allows your visitors to check out as guests. When you do this, you let your visitors experience the awesomeness of your brand before they register to another e-commerce portal, and then they can come back when they earn your trust. When they do, they are more likely to register on your website but this time they won’t even have to type in their shipping details.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies
Conversion rate optimization strategies can help you improve your results from the very beginning. In other words, you won’t have to start from scratch.
1. Identify your potential customer
Who belongs in your target market. And, sometimes more importantly, who doesn’t?
You want every marketing message to find its target. It must be so specific and compelling that your ideal customer can’t refuse it.
2. Survey users
Ask your users to complete surveys or polls. Keep the questions brief and few so you get more responses.
Avoid repetitive or boring questions. You’re looking for insights into your target customers’ specific wants and needs.
3. Collect and analyze data
Remember those metrics I mentioned earlier? Start tracking them. You can use conversion rate optimization tools like Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and Google Analytics to make sure you cover all your bases.
As you gather more data, look for patterns. Maybe most of your customers find you via Twitter, for instance, or read your about page before looking at your products. You can use that information to boost conversion rates.
4. Run A/B tests
We can’t stress enough how important it is to run A/B tests.
Tools like Crazy Egg have built-in A/B testing functionality. This means you don’t have to comb through the data yourself and develop a pounding headache. Instead, you know the “winner” and the winning variant gets the majority of the traffic even before the test concludes.
5. Discover the exact journey visitors take through your site
Mapping your buyers’ journey can yield lots of tasty nuggets of data. Do they read lots of your blog posts? Do they follow you on social media? How far do they scroll down each page?
6. Focus on the content that matters using heatmap analysis
The most important pages on your website, such as your landing pages and product pages, deserve special attention. Run heatmap analysis on those pages to see where people click and how they use the page. You can then optimize it for maximum conversions.
7. Create the perfect page with A/B testing
A/B testing doesn’t stop after just one test. In fact, you might need dozens of tests before you craft the perfect page.
Test your headline, body copy, hero image, CTA, CTA button color, font size, font color, and anything else that might impact conversions.
8. Don’t “guess”
Everyone starts out with a guess, but that’s where the guesswork should stop. Once you’re actively collecting data, make decisions based on what the numbers tell you.
9. Guide your customers
CTAs and directional indicators can help you guide your customers where you want them to go. Be strategic about where you place CTAs, arrows, navigational panels, and other elements.
10. Reduce friction
Remove any elements that give the user pause or promote objections. For instance, if you don’t need a paragraph of copy on your sales page, delete it. Or, if you want to make the information more digestible, turn it into bullet points.
How to Increase Conversion Rate on Site
1. Define your site’s goals
Before setting out on your conversion rate optimization journey, it is important to set website goals that you want to measure conversions and optimize for.
These goals could be any particular action that you want the visitor to take on your site that generates certain value for your business. Once you have created them, you must assess visitor behavior against these defined goals.
Below is a list of some of the most common conversion goals that you could set for various web pages:
- Page visits
- Form submits
- Click on links
- Clicks on elements
- Custom conversions
VWO Insights allows you to create goals as per your unique requirements and track visitor behavior for them so you can direct your website optimization accordingly and aim for improved conversions. For instance, if you want to assess how a CTA button on a particular landing page is performing, you can do so by simply assigning a goal for it.
2. Collect and analyze visitor data
When it comes to CRO, it’s best to avoid assumptions and estimations, and rely solely on data for all decision-making.
Constantly track and analyze your website data to learn more about your visitors and their preferences. It’s this data that should inform you where to direct your optimization efforts.
Following are some key data points that you absolutely must track to understand your visitors:
- Data on traffic and traffic sources
- Details of user behavior on your landing pages
- Bounce and abandonment rates for web pages and forms
- Click-through rates of adverts and marketing campaigns
- Information on return customers and average order values
- Net promoter scores (NPS) or other customer feedback
Once you have collected quantifiable data, use it to create your user persona, which is a representation of your ideal user. This must highlight all valuable information about your target prospects and users, including their interests, likes, dislikes, goals, and pain points.
The combination of quantifiable data and your ideal user persona will help you devise hypotheses to run insightful tests to better understand what works and what doesn’t on your website.
3. Perform competitor analysis
To have a competitive edge over your rivals, you need to know what their strengths and weaknesses are. You can then use that information to highlight your USPs and strengths over your competitors’ weaknesses.
Also, keep in mind that people research their options before making a purchase. They’re going to check out your competitors and how you measure up to them. By performing competitor analysis, you also get to step into your customers’ shoes and pit yourself against your competitor just the way your potential customers would. You can then focus your efforts on ensuring yours is the best site and product range they’re going to find.
4. Assess your current conversion funnel
Before you set out to fix what’s broken, be sure to understand in detail what a typical user journey and conversion funnel on your website looks like. This will help you gauge where visitors are hesitating and dropping off and the plausible reasons as to why that may be so.
You can use VWO Insights to track conversion rates across your funnels and identify specific stages in the journey where users might be losing interest so you can accordingly optimize them. At each stage of the funnel, you will have a natural drop off resulting from people failing to take the next step in the funnel for multiple reasons. You can then decrease that drop off by devising solutions to those probable reasons to nudge people down the funnel, thus boosting your conversion rate.
For example, one of the stages where eCommerce stores focus their optimization efforts is checkout, where an average of 69.23% shoppers are known to abandon their carts. A higher conversion rate, however marginal, will be a significant contribution towards tackling this pressing issue. A prominent example of a site that has improved its eCommerce conversion rate by simplifying its checkout process is Amazon with the one-click checkout.
To understand and optimize your funnels, you need to assess what your site does to move potential customers through the set stages. How are you leading them to a conversion? Where do you lose most visitors? By learning these answers, you know where to focus your efforts to increase conversion rate.
5. Define and clearly highlight your value proposition
Your value proposition is a concise explanation of why a user should buy from or subscribe to your products/services over your competitors. Therefore, the first step towards getting visitors to convert is to clearly convey to them what sets you apart and why buying from you is a good decision. Clearly stating and reinforcing your value proposition through multiple site elements can work wonders for your conversion rate.
Your value proposition should come across through your headlines, images, and copy and should primarily feature your Unique Selling Point (USP). Repeated marketing experiments recommend that your USP should be summarized in 10 words or less.
Let’s take Evernote as an example of how they redid their value proposition to bring out their product USP.
Their original tagline was “Remember Everything.” It nicely described the benefit that users could gain, but not the functionality of the tool they offered. Below the tagline, they highlighted 3 product features that illustrated how their tool works.
Here’s a look at their redesigned page:
It’s a succinct tagline that arguably better describes the functionality of the tool, while the text underneath the tagline further builds upon the value proposition. Before deciding which one to go with, be sure to craft multiple headlines, and A/B test them to find out which resonates the most with your target audience and influences conversions.
How do I Increase Conversion Rate on Google Ads
According to a report by Disrupt Advertising, only 57.7% of Adwords accounts have set up conversion tracking. This means that 42.3% of the respondents are not able to tell if their campaigns are successful.
Conversion tracking allows you to analyse the performance of your ads, your ad groups and your campaigns. This makes it easier to find the ROI for each investment, while it also makes it easier to measure the exact number of conversions.
Improve Quality Score
Improving your Adwords Quality Score can significantly impact your conversion rate in two ways: one, by lowering your campaign Cost Per Click (CPC), allowing you to get your ads in front of a wider audience for the same budget; and two, by serving as a metric for how good your ad experience is for the consumer.
The best ways to improve it are to:
- Focus on quality and relevant ads for your target audience
- Organise your ad groups
- Pay attention to your ad copy
- Keep your Adwords profile organised
- Focus on the right keywords
- Improve the landing page experience
Improving the wider experience of your Adwords campaigns will improve your Quality Score, and by the same token, increase the chances of seeing a higher number of clicks and conversions.
According to Google, the three main components that define how your Quality Score can affect a real-time auction are:
Overall, the Quality Score is Google’s attempt to reward quality and relevant ads, and a focus on improving it can lead to more successful Adwords campaigns.
Optimize your landing pages
The design of your landing page plays a key role in your number of conversions. A good ad campaign may bring more people to your landing page, but if it’s not optimized to facilitate conversions, then you’re likely to lose those potential customers before they convert.
A high-converting landing page is:
- appealing
- relevant
- easy to navigate
Every element should be tested, from the CTA to the colour of the buttons and their placement. Carrying out A/B testing allows you to minimize the risk of wasting your budget on a low-converting page.
Optimization should start by ensuring that your landing page facilitates the customer journey. Think like a user to spot the problems that can affect your page’s performance.
A good way to increase your chances of conversion is to align the ad copy with the landing page. You don’t want your ad copy to be misleading, as it risks losing the user’s trust. Similarly, you don’t want the copy to be vague, as this will affect the number of clicks.
The copy of your ads should align with the content of your landing pages. You need to live up to the expectations to increase the conversion rate and this can also improve your quality score.
Overall, the optimisation of your landing page should include:
Appealing and targeted copy
A good headline along with relevant content can make a landing page more interesting for your target audience.
Eye-catching visual content
As with the copy, images and videos can grab the audience’s attention and facilitate the conversion. The type of image, the size, the design can all affect the outcome of a visit.
A well-tested CTA
One of the most important elements to test on your landing page is the CTA. Your call-to-action button will affect the conversion rate and that’s why you need to test the ideal colour, size, placement for it.
Good user experience
User experience can significantly affect the conversion rate of your landing page although it can still be overlooked during the A/B testing. Your visitors expect a good user experience when visiting a landing page with a fast loading speed, a fully functional page and a properly tested form.
Every element of your landing page appeals to UX and accessibility can also be part of it. Conversion becomes easier when you ensure that your landing page is optimized for every single visitor.
Responsiveness across all devices
As with user experience, a responsive page that is equally well-presented across all devices maximizes the chances of conversion. The increased number of mobile users calls for a fully functional mobile page that takes into consideration a good user experience.
Except for the page speed, the copy should be also short and engaging, while the form has to be limited to a set number of fields to avoid losing the visitors’ interest.
Adjust your keyword matching type
Adwords allows you to add keywords that are:
- broad match
- phrase match
- exact match
A broad match keyword shows your ads to anyone searching for your selected keyword. For example, if you add “black iPhone price”, your ad will show up to anyone searching for it, no matter what order the words show up. This increases the reach of your ad campaign, bringing more clicks to it.
A phrase match keyword shows your ads to anyone searching for the specific phrase, either the way it is or as part of a sentence, such as “how to find black iPhone price”. This type of keywords allows you to filter your ads to a more specific audience, while still maintaining a significant reach.
An exact match keyword is the most specific type, only displaying your ad to anyone searching for the exact keyword you input, and in the same way that you’ve structured it. If the search is not an exact match, then your ad will not show up.
Ad campaigns that focus on exact match keywords can have a higher conversion rate as they attract a smaller, more highly-targeted audience. If your goal is to narrow down your audience then this can be a useful option.
However, if you want to cast as wide a net as possible in the hopes of attracting different types of consumers who might convert, a phrase match or broad match keyword might be more suitable.
It’s a good idea to test all the variations in order to determine which one works better for your campaign and your target audience. You can start by focusing on narrow results through exact matches and then scale up your efforts to expand your campaign reach if you don’t achieve your desired conversion rate.
What is The Average Sales Conversion Rate?
When it comes to conversion rate, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Conversion rates vary by industry, marketing source, average sales length and more. Low-ticket items are easier to sell, as there’s typically less risk involved. Meanwhile higher value leads are exceptionally difficult to convert as they require more time and assistance to decide whether or not they should make a purchase.
Buying a pair of shoes online in the sale is a lot different than purchasing a car or house, right? With that in mind, it’s always important to measure your performance against your specific industry to ensure that you don’t overestimate and undervalue your lead generation performance.
By comparing your conversion rate against the industry, you’ll be able to spot opportunities and prioritise the marketing channels that have the propensity to drive higher qualified conversions.
Average lead conversion rates for referral by industry
| Industry | Average conversion rate for referral | Average form rate for referral | Average call rate for referral |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency | 3.6% | 2.8% | 0.8% |
| Automotive | 1.8% | 1.1% | 0.7% |
| B2B eCommerce | 3.3% | 2.6% | 0.7% |
| B2B Services | 4.8% | 4.3% | 0.4% |
| B2B Tech | 2.5% | 2.0% | 0.5% |
| Cosmetic and Dental | 3.5% | 3.0% | 0.5% |
| B2C eCommerce | 3.6% | 1.3% | 2.3% |
| Financial | 7.1% | 6.1% | 1.0% |
| Healthcare | 7.3% | 4.5% | 2.8% |
| Industrial | 6.1% | 4.7% | 1.4% |
| Legal | 2.8% | 1.3% | 1.5% |
| Professional Services | 5.6% | 3.6% | 2.0% |
| Real Estate | 1.3% | 0.3% | 1.0% |
| Travel | 9.5% | 9.0% | 0.5% |
What Are The Key Elements to Optimize The Conversion Rates Per PPC?
There are some basic steps for the conversion rate optimization, and you should always ask these questions to yourself which are highlighted in bold points.
CTR– Focus to maintain high CTR
Potential keyword: By creating a strong groups of keywords, you will find it much easier to create the PPC ads. Remove all unnecessary keywords, or which are not giving your conversion.
Landing page: Try to put the maximum potential keywords in the landing page, and keep its loading page less than 3 seconds.
Multi ad-copies: Always create at-least 8–10 ad copies for each ad-group and try to put your maximum keywords in the ad-copies
Quality Score: higher quality score will reduce your advertising costs, give your ads increased exposure and lead to better ad positioning in both search and display networks. This increases Google AdWords conversion.
ASK YOURSELF
Relevance– How closely does the content match what your visitors are looking for?
Clarity- How clear is your message?
Anxiety- Are there elements missing from your marketing that create uncertainty in your customer’s mind?
Distraction- What is the first thing your prospects see? Does it help or hurt your main purpose?
What is a Good Conversion Rate Percentage?
Conversion rates can vary widely. Typically, you’ll see a good conversion rate within the 2-5 percent range. This should be considered average for websites. If your site falls below this, you will want to dedicate time to bringing your conversions higher.
Websites that are well-optimized, however, can achieve rates that are as high as 10-11 percent. While only a few websites will be able to reach this level, this means that brands should not stop working to improve their landing pages if they reach 4-5 percent. They still have room for improvement and more customers that they can bring in.
What is a Good Conversion Rate For B2B Website?
we present the average conversion rate for 25 B2B industries. You can use these benchmarks to compare your company’s marketing performance with the average performance of your competitors. Next to each conversion rate we’ve also included a suggestion that comes from our experience working with clients in that specific industry.
| Industry | Average Conversion Rate | Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Strategy |
| Computer Product Manufacturing | 1.1% | Publish detailed product pages that highlight quality, price, and the ways in which the product exceeds industry benchmarks, including customer logos if possible. |
| B2B Software / SaaS | 1.1% | Create a presentation deck on the problem they’re attempting to solve with your software, and automatically send to customers that submit their e-mail address. |
| Scientific Testing & Measurement | 1.3% | Have a section of the website dedicated to use case pages showing how the equipment or process has solved problems your customers have faced. |
| Higher Education | 1.4% | Create a pillar page containing personal success stories from students, outcome statistics, and graphics showcasing the degree program’s value not just to the student, but to communities. |
| Commercial Insurance | 1.7% | Use blog articles that contain ROI tables to illustrate how insurance is worth its price in situations businesses are likely face. |
| Solar Energy | 1.8% | Given the prevalence of local searches in this industry, create original geotargeted landing pages based on local keyword searches. |
| Investment and Wealth Management | 1.9% | Offer insights on specific investment and wealth preservation strategies such as Section 754 elections, featuring each insight in a blog post. |
| Commercial Construction | 1.9% | Design geotargeted, conversion-optimized landing pages for each service and subservice. |
| Pharmaceutical Sales | 2% | Illustrate your products’ value to physicians, pharmacists, or other target markets using summaries of the health studies conducted on your products, highlighting favorable patient outcomes. |
| Call Center and Customer Service | 2% | Create an FAQ that lists common pain points businesses face with customer service and how outsourced services create greater efficiency and ROI. |
| Rehabilitation & Recovery | 2.1% | Publish case studies and personal stories (while protecting patient privacy) that describe how patients have worked through their addictions, sharing on social media simultaneously. |
| Industrial IoT | 2.2% | Utilizing thought leadership and white papers that describe the near future (1-2 years from now) and the ways in which successful businesses will modernize using industrial IoT. |
| PCB Design & Manufacturing | 2.3% | Be a leader in educational content, publishing blog articles on the situations your target audience faces that necessitate the use of your products or services. |
| Engineering Design Software | 2.3% | Attract engineer-influencers by targeting technical keywords that only they would search for. Content should be very much “in the weeds.” |
| Shipping & Logistics | 2.7% | Produce custom infographics showing the value of your services over the competition, including price, durability, and logistical advantages. |
| Commercial Real Estate | 2.8% | Write blog articles that discuss the current state of the local market along with trends in pricing and value, keeping these pieces updated quarterly. |
| Heavy Equipment | 3% | Create a series of Capabilities pages featuring your equipment. |
| Lending and Loan Servicing | 3% | Use a FAQ approach, ensuring every question and answer has its own page, targeting specific, low-in-the-funnel searches around the type of loans your company services. |
| Commercial Energy Management | 3.1% | Create content “pods” of expertise around the major keywords that indicate an interest in your service or product, with each pod containing ~10 subpages tackling a more specific keyword within the pod’s container. |
| Medical Device and Equipment Manufacturing | 3.1% | Build a series of problem and solution pages targeting key issues that medical professionals face, citing clinical research on improved patient outcomes. |
| HVAC Services | 3.3% | Geotarget all landing pages and blog posts for the area or areas served along with transactional keywords targeted to local business owners. |
| IT Staffing & Services | 3.5% | Create a series of cost-benefit analysis articles that explain why outsourcing IT staff is more effective than hiring an in-house. |
| Staffing Services | 5.1% | Target location keywords for each of the markets you work in, each type of employer, and each job position you help fill. |
| Point of Sale (POS) Services | 7% | Provide videos and free interactive demos of the POS system that visitors can try before they invest. |
| Legal Services | 7.4% | Create in-depth, branded guides for the website that offer an appetizer portion of analysis around recent or highly searched for laws. |
Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Conversions are the fuel that keep websites alive. Every conversion represents direct revenue or future revenue, so the higher your conversion rate, the more money you stand to make.
Need to boost your conversion rates? These conversion rate optimization tools can help you get the job done, simply and painlessly.
1. CrazyEgg
CrazyEgg is ideal for mapping out the general actions and attention of your users, making it a great AB testing tool. It’s also one of the best-known heat map tools available on the web.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers pretty much every piece of information you’d ever need on your web visitors. And best of all, it’s completely free.
3. Google Optimize
Optimize allows you to test variants of web pages and see how they perform against an objective that you specify. Optimize monitors the results of your experiment and tells you which variant is the leader. To get started:
- Set up Optimize.
- Deploy the Optimize snippet on your website.
- Create your first experiment.
4. Optimizely
Testing is hard: It’s hard to come up with a good control group, find a large sample, and determine if your experiment is statistically significant. Luckily, Optimizely helps a lot with all of that … and then some. With Optimizely, you conduct tests across all devices and platforms, then figure out if it is significant or not. The software offers A/B, multiple page, and multivariate tests.
Optimizely’s tool gives you a full, robust report of test results, like shown above. You’ll see how interactions, and best of all — sign up clicks. Your report will tell you how many leads each test variant earned, so you can choose the best.
5. Unbounce
Unbounce helps you convert more of your visitors into leads, sales, and customers. Using our drag-and-drop builder, you can create and publish your own landing pages without needing a developer to code ‘em. Get conversion intelligence insights and enhance the intuition and skills you already have to ensure the best campaign performance every time.
6. Momentive
Through its two major subsidiaries, the holding company has become a global leader in developing high-performance resins, silicones, and other advanced materials. Momentive serves several markets, including automotive, construction, consumer goods, electronics, and oilfield exploration and production.
7. User Testing
User Testing offers a suite of different services to test your site and user behavior, and monitor differences that emerge.
8. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a tool that allows you to analyze how users interact with your Internet-connected product. It’s designed to make teams more efficient by allowing everyone to analyze user data in real-time to identify trends, understand user behavior, and make decisions about your product.
9. LuckyOrange
LuckyOrange is the perfect tool for you if you want more transparency to evaluate why users aren’t filling out your contact forms. It can automatically record certain sessions of user behavior for your eventual perusal.
10. Woopra
Woopra tracks both anonymous and identifiable customers as they explore and engage with your site, giving you unprecedented access into the psychology of your users.
11. Clicktale
Clicktale is similar to Hotjar, as it also offers heat maps to help you determine the most valuable real estate on your pages, scroll depth (where is the “fold” on your website?), click tracking, and also link analysis.
Using these tools, you’ll have the information you need to organize content, CTAs, and page design in a way that makes the most sense for engagement.
12. AB Tasty
AB Tasty, as the name suggests, is one of the most comprehensive AB testing and multivariate testing apps you’re going to find.
13. HubSpot
Picture Google Analytics meets SumoMe meets a CRM. Sounds cool, right? It starts with an exit intent popup CTA, then sync with your website’s existing forms to learn about your site visitors and their path through your pages.
Read Also: Email Marketing – How to do it Right For Effective Sales Conversion
HubSpot’s tools give you in-depth contact insights on prospects and current contacts in your database, and also pairs its contacts database with a dashboard that shows you on a high-level view of which marketing efforts are paying off and converting, and which ones aren’t.
14. SimilarWeb
Knowing where your website visitors came from can (and should) have a big impact on the type of content you create. With SimilarWeb, you can see where your traffic is coming from, which keywords are fueling your organic traffic, and what other sites are considered most similar to yours.
With this information, you’ll be able to optimize content for your biggest traffic sources, and dig in to see what competitor sites and doing to drive conversions.
15. WebEngage
WebEngage helps you understand how your outgoing messages are affecting your customers and conversion rates.
16. Owler
Owler allows you to see all the details on your competitors. This app digs deep into competitor clients, and even offline data.
17. ChartBeat
ChartBeat is a suite of tools that help you to “create, capture, and capitalize” on the attention of your users.
18. SiteSpect
SiteSpect optimizes the entire user experience from client-side look and feel to server-side functionality while centrally managing across channels, business units, and product lines.
SiteSpect’s elegant architecture sits in the flow of your digital traffic for full visibility of requests and responses, allowing for real time business impact. SiteSpect offers unprecedented site performance, scalability, data integrity, security, and the ability to optimize every part of the user experience.
Conversion Rate Optimization Agency
Bluetrain Inc.
In Canada, Bluetrain offers a vast range of digital marketing services to help businesses achieve their objectives. You can hire a professional consultant to assist you, or you can outsource an entire team.
Bluetrain starts by understanding where your company is and where you want it to be. They will identify where you need marketing help the most and customize a plan to suit you.
216 Marketing
Offering over 20 years of digital marketing expertise, 216 marketing provides innovative technology and marketing solutions. This CRO focuses on optimizing your web traffic and return on investment (ROI). They claim to ensure clients receive a positive ROI from their services.
216 Marketing can help your business identify its target audience, stay relevant, and house mobile-optimized strategies. They are also certified by Facebook, Google, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign.
To get started, you can submit an online quote or call them.
Add3
Add3 prides itself on providing immersive digital marketing strategies to help businesses achieve their goals. The average client sticks with this CRO agency for 5 years, and the agency has helped over 90% of their customers drive results.
Add3 has worked with many renowned companies, and this CRO agency uses an integrated approach to marketing, including the latest software and techniques. Call this agency to get a quote.
SmartSites
SmartSites is on top of the charts for results-driven CRO agencies. This agency is one of the fastest-growing in America, and many refer to it as America’s top digital marketing agency.
SmartSites offer free consultations, and you can reach them via email or phone. This agency also flaunts over $1 million in sales generated for clients, over 900 websites designed, and over 500 happy clients. You can rely on impressive ROI results with this agency.
Baldwin&
Baldwin& is an established CRO agency that intensely focuses on what its customers need. This agency loves to connect with its community through podcasts, and trending blogs. Consequently, many renowned businesses choose Baldwin& for their digital marketing needs.
The CEO of this agency is also the author of an Amazon Best-selling book on E-commerce, proving that this company means business. You can contact Baldwin& for a quote through email or a call.
BrandFire
BrandFire is a professional CRO agency that will help you build your business up from cultivating its identity to marketing your content. This is ideal for businesses who want an agency to help them from start to finish.
This CRO agency also has a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) certification. Many famous icons have profited from this agency’s expertise. You can reach out to BrandFire via email, phone call, or social media.
How to Increase Conversion Rate in Digital Marketing
Conversion is pretty much the Holy Grail of digital marketing, the goal everyone strives for, but only the best to achieve. Increasing your conversion rate is fundamental to increasing your return on investment and making the most of your digital marketing budget.
There is more and more information on how to do this and it can get confusing, so we’re sharing 10 tips that will help you increase your conversion rate and clarify when and how to use them to optimize your results.
1. Test, Test, and Test Again
A/B tests are your new best friend. For any change you are thinking of applying to your website, create a test page and study the results. Don’t just pay attention to the number of visits, but also to metrics such as the session duration, the bounce rate, and of course, the sales conversion rate.
Think of every element of your campaign (email subject lines, images, ad copy, etc.) and its possible variations and then subject it to rigorous A/B and A/B/C tests. This will let you see what your audience responds to and, based on that, your digital marketing efforts will be more effective.
2. Use Heat Maps
Heat maps let you get to know every detail about your users’ behavior when they are navigating your webpages. Which elements do they pay most attention to? Where do they get tired of your page? Are they systematically ignoring your CTA button? Once you have this information is power!
3. Optimize Your Forms
To be successful, any conversion strategy needs to rely on a solid lead generation campaign. In many cases, this involves filling in some sort of form.
You may think designing a form is simple and obvious, but your couldn’t be more wrong! The number of fields, the wording of the button, the colors, … these are just a few of the elements you will need to optimize and study to get the best results. Don’t forget to include some automatic filters to help make sure the data you are being given is valid and real. Quality before quantity!
4. Make Yourself Easy to Contact
Do you want users to communicate with you? Make it as easy as possible for them. Each person has their own communication preferences, and what may be simple and intuitive for some, may be extremely frustrating for others. To make sure you are able to respond to as many users as possible, be available on a variety of communication channels such as online chat, social media platforms, and via phone.
5. Include Clear Calls to Action
Calls to Action are one the most crucial elements in digital marketing, as they are often they are they thing that convinces users to take the action you want them to. To improve your conversion data, you need to include links, images, animations etc. that effectively bring people to conversion. Of course, don’t forget to run A/B tests to examine which ones are the most effective.
6. Create Community
If you want to get conversions in the long term, you need to gain the trust of your users. Communities are a great way to do this. With them, your potential clients will be able to develop a long term relationship with your brand. This strategy also helps to create User Generated Content, which is not only good for your social media, but also shows potential clients or customers that people like your products or services and are willing to vouch for them publicly.
7. Have a Social Media Presence
Social networks are a fundamental piece in any online marketing strategy, but there is no use in creating corporate profiles if you don’t have a content plan and coherent strategy to go with it. If you want your brand’s social media profiles to help you convert more, you will need to seamlessly integrate them into your communications and update them regularly with news about your brand, blog posts, photos and videos, and even user-generated content (if applicable).
8. Create a Sense of Urgency
“Accelerators” are one of the oldest tricks in the book in terms of digital marketing, but they are around for a reason! Offers that have “Last chance” or “Limited availability” and other strong statements that give users the extra push they need to convert. Use them wisely (don’t over do it) in the right moments and see how they affect your conversion rates.
9. Create Content That Attracts Traffic
Content marketing and native advertising are not just a passing trend. These strategies help attract quality traffic made up of users who are interested in your products, brand and sector. When creating this type of content consider the following:
- Relevant: is it up to date? Does it relate to your audience’s interests? Is it useful?
- Accessible: Is it easy to get to? Take a look at your website’s analytics to see what “forgotten content” you have and why this has happened.
It is also worthwhile to update older content that was popular on your website or other platforms. Just go through the content you already have and edit it to make it as attractive and current as possible. For example, if you have long videos, turn them into a series of 2-minute-long mini videos. If you have long articles that got a lot of views, use them as a base to create infographics and checklists.
10. Be Mobile Friendly
By now, you have absolutely no excuse for your campaigns not to be easily viewable on mobile devices. These devices are already responsible for the majority of internet traffic, and will only keep growing in popularity. If you do not want to miss out on a large amount of potential clients, you need everything you put to be prepared for all devices, from smartphones, to tablets, to desktop computers.
How to Increase Conversion Rate in Retail
Things never stay static in retail and everyone should be looking at how to do better within their own four walls, so here are five new ways how to improve conversion rate in retail stores.
1. Get them to buy more by suggestively adding on.
• Make sure your employees are selling a system or a complete solution rather than a single SKU. The margin you make on one-product sales basically pays for whatever your marketing and fixed costs took to attract the shopper in the first place. The profit comes from the second it.
• Make sure when an associate finishes with a shopper and sends them to the cashier that your associate tells them to look for the stocking stuffers by the register, or the spring bulbs by the counter.
• At the register, have a sign that lists the most common items often forgotten but so necessary. For a sewing store it could be new needles, rotary cutters, and scissors; for a paint store it could be masking tape, brushes, and a new ladder. The key is making the first few items cheaper than the others, so price doesn’t get in the way of reading down your list.
• Have signage that tells potential customers what a well-trained associate should say as a key part of your visual merchandising: Complete your new look with a scarf, or You can double the effect of the arrangement with a mirror vase, or Surprise the kids with these cookies using your new mixer.
• Make sure to use the basics of retail merchandising. Take one main product and put two companion products alongside it.
2. Get them to buy more expensive products by upselling
• Signage is one of the most underutilized conversion assists retailers can use to directly affect sales. While signs are more passive than your associates, signs like Good, Better and Best or Upgrade your gift put doubt in the shoppers’ mind about what they might have settled for.
• Employees are the most effective at upselling because they can build trust, listen to that specific customer, and recommend a specific upsell based on their 10-minute interaction. That all has to be trained for when it comes to more expensive purchases, the more time you invest in the process, the more likely shoppers are to buy an upgrade. To be able to increase conversion of lookers to buyers, your associates must be drilled to compare and contrast products so they can upsell with ease.
3. Limit selling the promo stuff.
• The more shopping feels like work, the less shoppers will invest the time, especially if they have to hunt and pick for their size or model. Racks and racks or piles and piles of sale goods are just as much work to go through as hundreds of sneakers on a shoe wall or unending product videos and pages online. Many simply give up and only the most dedicated bargain hunters persist.
4. Curate selection and go deeper.
• One of the biggest ways how to improve conversion rate in retail stores is simply to have the product in stock. No one wants to invest the time, energy, or patience of driving through traffic, finding a parking place, and walking into your store on their lunch break to discover you don’t have what they could have purchased online on their phones. To improve sales conversion rate of browsers to customers, offer less similar products but have a deeper run so you never have to apologize for letting a shopper down.
5. Remove friction.
• People hate to wait. Have a policy on who stays at the register and how to help in a rush. No one wants to stand there while one associate is as slow as molasses; they simply put their stuff down and walk but never tell you.
• Hide the line. Teenage retailer Gilly Hicks had their cash wrap at the back of the store, so you couldn’t see how long the line was as you walked in. Disneyland has a science around how to keep the wait queue from appearing as long as it really is. Creatively use islands of displays and find ways so you don’t look like a busy Starbucks and casual shoppers don’t even walk in to have a chance at finding a new treasure.
• Staff for the rush. It’s great to want to give staff 6-8 hour shifts all the time, but that often isn’t possible. You need those floaters who can work 3-4 hours at your busiest times – and not just to give the others breaks. Only if the flow of customers is manageable will employees feel they can touch everyone personally with a greeting and engage your shoppers.
How Can I Increase my Online Conversion Rate?
1. Use a CRO planner.
Getting started with conversion rate optimization can seem like a daunting task.
The first step to improving your conversion rate? Use a CRO planner.
With a CRO planner, you’ll be able to analyze and develop a strategy for increasing your conversion rate.
For example, with HubSpot CRO planner, you’ll find instructions on how to conduct a site audit, identify areas to improve your conversion funnel, understand users on your site, and go through the process of A/B testing and experimentation.
CRO planners can be helpful because they take through the entire process from A to Z.
2. Shorten your forms.
One reason that users don’t convert is that there’s friction in the process. For example, if you have a long form, visitors might be hesitant to fill it out.
It’s your job to eliminate hesitation, not create it. By shortening your forms, you’ll create trust among your audience. Plus, it takes less time to fill out so users are more likely to complete it.
3. Include social proof.
Did you know that 92% of consumers hesitate to make a purchase if there are no customer reviews and 97% say customer reviews factor into their buying decision?
Without a doubt, your reputation and online presence impact your conversion rate. That’s why you should include social proof on your site.
You can link to your Yelp or any other directory page where customers have left reviews.
Additionally, you should also add testimonials and reviews right on your site so visitors don’t have to go to a third-party site.
It should be apparent that your customers have enjoyed using your product or service. If it isn’t, your conversion rate will suffer.
4. Track how people interact with your site.
It’ll be hard to improve your conversion rate if you don’t understand how users are interacting with your site.
But how can you see where visitors are getting tripped up? With website analysis tools, you can see screen recordings of users on your site. You’ll see what they click on, if they skip over an offer, or if they stop filling out a form in the middle.
Additionally, these tools should include heat maps of your site, so you can see what elements stand out and what draws the eye.
A tool like Crazy Egg or HubSpot’s website grader can help you see what you’re doing well and diagnose what areas of your site you need to improve.
5. Add live chat.
When a web visitor doesn’t convert, they might have a question or concern about your product or service.
To avoid losing potential customers, you should consider adding live chat to your site.
With live chat, your customer service or sales employees can alleviate concerns of prospects who are on the fence.
6. Test your offers.
Sometimes it can feel like you’ve checked everything — you’ve written strong copy, included social proof, and have optimized your forms … but you still aren’t converting.
When this happens, it’s time to check your content offers. Do they align with your audience? Are they creative and compelling? Do the offers make sense for the page they’re on?
Think about your current offers and answer those questions.
For example, offering a free trial or consultation is fairly generic. Instead, you could offer something like HubSpot’s Website Grader. With this offer, the customer is getting a lot out of it. They’re getting actionable advice, for free, and they don’t need to clear out time on their calendar to get it.
Tangible and compelling offers always perform better than a generic offer. To improve conversions, you need to analyze and test your content offers.
7. Communicate your value proposition.
On any landing page, your value proposition should be clearly communicated. To do this, you need to have a solid understanding of who your audience is and your buyer persona.
Write your copy specifically for your target audience. For example, you can address their goals, motivations, and pain points.
Additionally, you should discuss the benefits of your product or service over the features. Benefits will help your potential customers imagine their life with your product, while features are easy to skim and ignore.
Your copy should communicate how your product or service can solve your audience’s problem. If you aren’t converting, you should check and see how well your copy is written.
8. Incorporate multimedia elements to your landing pages.
Have you ever ordered something at a restaurant and when it came out, it looked completely different than what you imagined?
You don’t want this to happen when people download your content offers. To avoid this, include images and videos of your product or service on your landing pages.
Multimedia elements make your site feel more trustworthy. Plus, it’s the preferred way of consuming content.
To improve your conversion rate, try adding images of graphs and charts, or video testimonials to your site.
9. Write strong CTAs.
A huge component of conversion is your call-to-action (CTA). Your CTA could be to download an offer, share a post on social media, or subscribe to your email newsletter.
Whatever it is, you need to include CTAs throughout your website and landing pages. Usually, this means that they’re clear and easily accessible.
Typically, each landing page will only have one call to action, but be incorporated several times on a page. For example, this blog post has three CTAs that lead to one offer. One at the bottom of the page, one in the text in the introduction, and one that pops up after scrolling down the page.
The important thing to note is that you can access the CTA no matter where you are on the page.
10. Meet your audience’s expectations.
When someone clicks on your site after reading your meta description on Google or seeing your search engine ad, your landing page needs to follow through.
You have to deliver on the promises that were made in that copy. For example, if a user sees this post in Google, they’re going to expect to find strategies to improve their conversion rate. If they clicked through and this page only had pictures of puppies, they’d be confused.
If a landing page doesn’t deliver on what a user thought they were getting, they won’t convert. That’s why you need to think about the entire process from seeing an ad, going to your landing page, and downloading an offer.
If a landing page isn’t converting, review your social media posts and search engine descriptions to see if you follow through on the promises you made.
What is The Goal of Conversion Rate Optimization?
Conversion rate optimization is important because it allows you to lower your customer acquisition costs by getting more value from the visitors and users you already have. By optimizing your conversion rate you can increase revenue per visitor, acquire more customers, and grow your business.
For example, if a landing page has a conversion rate of 10% and receives 2000 visitors a month, then the page will generate 200 conversions per month. If the conversion rate can be improved to 15% by optimizing different elements on the page, the number of conversions generated jumps by 50% to 300 per month.
There is always room for improvement when it comes to increasing conversions, and the best companies are constantly iterating and improving their sites and apps to create a better experience for their users and grow conversions.
What to do When You’re Predicted to Get Zero Conversions?
If your ad set is predicted to get zero conversions, you may not have chosen to optimize for one that happens frequently enough. To figure out the right one, check your pixel data. See how many times each event happens per week. If you’re not seeing enough of any single pixel event, you may want to first focus on building up website traffic and a customer base.
Here are some ad set creation options that we recommend trying if you’re predict that your ad set will get zero conversions:
- Optimise for a more common conversion: It may be tempting to jump straight to optimising for purchases, assuming that’s what you ultimately care about. However, purchases are the rarest type of conversion. If we predict you’re going to get zero of your chosen conversion, try optimising for a more common one instead. For example, instead of optimising for purchases, optimise for adds to cart or Page views. Both events are more likely to lead to a purchase than, say, someone engaging with a post on your Page, but may occur frequently enough that we can consistently get you that result. Purchases may not.
- Optimise for landing page views: This conversion event drives higher quality traffic than link clicks do, since a landing page view only occurs when the Page you want to send people to loads. (If someone clicks a link, but then closes down your Page before it loads, that counts as a link click, but not a landing page view.) However, it’s still more common than most other conversion events. It’s a good choice if you do need to build up more website traffic and a customer base.
How do I Optimize a Conversion Campaign on Facebook?
One of the most important metrics social marketers track on Facebook are conversion rates. Typically, a conversion refers to the point at which a user converts from being a browser to a buyer.
For many marketers, conversions are a top priority. A good conversion rate is one of the best measures of success and is key to delivering a strong ROI.
Conversions are not only about driving purchases. They are also about driving actions. Perhaps the goal of a campaign is to increase newsletter subscriptions or for shoppers to add products to a wish list. All of these actions can be considered conversion events.
Facebook ranks as the number one social media site for driving conversions, which makes creating effective Facebook ads all the more important.
Follow these tips to convert your next Facebook campaign into a success.
1. Define your conversion event
Before you try to convert anyone you should have a clear sense of what action you want people to take after seeing your ad.
Types of conversions supported by Facebook include view content, add to wishlist, initiate checkout, and purchase. You can also create custom conversion events if you have other goals in mind.
Don’t expect one ad to serve all of your conversion goals. Create separate ads for each goal, consider where these goals fit in to the consumer journey, and target accordingly.
2. Keep destination front of mind
An ad is only as good as its landing page. When you’re determining where you’d like the conversion to happen, make sure you have everything in place to deliver on your ad’s promise.
Here are a few steps you should take to prepare your landing page:
- Implement Pixel. Once you’ve identified the page where you’d like the conversion event to occur, you’ll need to add the Facebook Pixel code to the page in order to track the event.
- Aim for Continuity. If your ad promises one thing, make sure the landing page delivers. You don’t want to have a user looking for shoes land on a pants product page. Design and language should carry through here, too.
- Optimize for Apps. Since an increasing number of people are open to purchasing on mobile, you may want to drive people to your app. In that case, make sure you register your app and integrate with Facebook SDK.
3. Create eye-catching visuals
It takes only 2.6 seconds for a user’s eye to choose where to land on a webpage. The use of eye-catching imagery increases the chances their eyeballs will land on your ad. Most first impressions are informed by design, so treat visuals as you would a handshake.
- Don’t overload images with text. In fact, Facebook recommends you use text sparingly in images, if at all. Instead of crowding visuals with text, consider moving copy to the designated text area. If you must include text, use Facebook’s Image Text Check tool to get a rating.
- Size to spec. Low-res visuals reflect poorly on your brand. Check out Hootsuite’s handy image size guide to make sure your assets meet the right size specifications.
- Use GIFs or videos. Opt for movement over static imagery to nab users’ attention. Don’t forget to test vertical videos for mobile devices.
4. Keep copy short and sweet
Crisp copy is often the second element of a strong ad, but if there’s too much, a user might not even bother to read it.
- Get personal. Using personal pronouns like you and your suggest a relationship between brand and audience. But be careful with “we.” A recent study found “we” is better used with returning customers.
- Avoid jargon. Speak in your audience’s language, not a technical vernacular no one will understand.
- Keep it brief. Too much text can be intimidating, so focus on the essentials and scrap the rest. The Hemingway app helps with this.
5. Include a direct call-to-action
Since conversions are all about motivating actions, a strong call-to-action is essential. Strong verbs like start, discover, find, and explore are great if your conversion goal is to have users visit a product page or learn about your company.
If your goal is to drive purchases or subscriptions, be direct with phrases like “buy now” or “sign up.”
6. Broaden your audience
When creating an ad, opt in to “targeting expansion,” and Facebook will find more users similar to those you have specified in the “interest targeting section.” Not only does this allow you to reach more people, it also has the potential to drive more conversions at a lower cost per conversion.
Don’t forget that you can also create Custom Audiences. If you have data sets such as an email subscriber list, you can upload it to Facebook to find pre-existing customers on Facebook.
Go a step further and use your custom audiences to identify Lookalike Audiences, which are new users that have similar profiles to your customer base.
7. Optimize for conversions
By now you’ve got a lot checked off on your optimized conversions checklist, but don’t forget to literally check off the “conversions” box on Facebook. You’ll find this option under the “Optimization for Delivery” section in the Budget and Schedule form.
Selecting this optimization method is optional, but a few case studies have proven its effectiveness. For example, Save the Children tested both conversion-optimized ads and traffic-optimized ads to determine the most effective way to encourage donations. At the end of its trial period the organization found that ads optimized for conversion generated four times more donations.
8. Choose the right ad format
Depending on your campaign goals, certain Facebook ad formats may serve your needs better than others.
For example, Adidas determined that using video with Facebook’s collection feature would be a good format to showcase the multiple features of its Z.N.E Road Trip Hoodie. As a result, Addidas was able to decrease cost-per-conversion by 43 percent.
Here are a few things to consider when choosing the right format:
- Carousel and collection ads are ideal when you have multiple products or various features to highlight.
- Facebook Offer ads allow you broadcast special deals or discounts you may use as purchase incentives. If someone visits the ad, Facebook will send notifications reminding them to redeem.
- Facebook Canvas ads are best suited for high-impact visuals and experiences that live well on full screen.
- Bonus: Download a free guide that teaches you how to turn Facebook traffic into sales in four simple steps using Hootsuite.
9. Track across multiple devices
Regardless of where you’ve determined your conversion event will occur, you should make sure to track clicks and conversions from mobile to desktop. Even if your campaign is only intended to run on desktop, Facebook recommends you install Facebook Software Development Kit on your mobile app (if you have one). This will allow Facebook to capture more audience data and expand the target audience.
10. Consider link click optimization
If you’re ad isn’t driving enough conversions in the first few days, Facebook may not have enough data to properly deliver your ad. Facebook needs approximately 50 conversions per ad within the first seven days to effectively deliver the ad.
To see how many conversions you’ve tallied, check the Ads Manager. If you find that your ad has fewer than 50 conversions, Facebook recommends that you optimize for link clicks instead of conversions.
11. Convert your analytics into insights
As with any social media campaign, it’s important to carefully monitor performance analytics and adjust accordingly. What worked and what didn’t work? Take note for your next ad campaign and try to replicate your success.
Final Words
Where To Go From Here
- Set a SMART Goal. Determine what your desired conversion will be. Don’t limit yourself to a single type of conversion such as a “Schedule Consultation” form. Creating different conversion opportunities will help attract different site visitors at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
- Begin using Landing Pages. Create landing pages to drive conversions through your website. Landing pages can also be used in conjunction with paid search, television, radio, direct mail and social media campaigns.
- Optimize your website / landing pages as outlined in the steps above. The time this takes will be well worth it.
- Measure your results and review them on a regular basis. Try to identify what works well and what doesn’t. Make adjustments to get the optimal conversion rate.
