Conversion is a completion of a specific action to your website by a visitor. It does not necessarily indicate the sales, but taking an important action that leads to the sales. These actions can be the following: filling out a form on the website, clicking on an Email address, subscribing, or downloading something. Conversion is a principal measure of success for any business, as it helps you monetize traffic to your website. Keep on reading to discover how to do it more effectively.
The percentage of users who take the desired action is called the conversion rate.
Conversion rate measures the overall effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and efforts, which gives an opportunity to find out the weak points of your campaigns and improve them to achieve better results and as a result increase conversion.
Making a profit is the ultimate goal of every business and the aim of every single action is to lead consumers to make a purchase.
Why is conversion rate so important for businesses, and especially e-commerce ones? The answer is obvious – the higher your conversion rate is, the higher is your profit.
Your consumers go through various stages before purchasing any of your products and services. These stages are represented with a consumer-oriented purchase funnel. The purchase funnel is a unique marketing model that consists of various stages of conversion: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation and the last and crucial one is a purchase. It’s during this journey that they get acquainted with the brand, make comparisons, evaluate, and become brand loyal. The funnel analyses not only your customer acquisition process but also conversion rates from one stage to another. This helps businesses find out weak points and improve their conversion rate optimization. For example, the number of your website visitors may be very high, but the quantity of those who are converted into leads and finally decide to make a purchase maybe not satisfying. This funnel gives an opportunity to see your weak points and use this data to make improvements.
A SlideShare published by SwayHub states that 39% of client-side marketers named conversion optimization a top digital marketing priority. The number of CRO (conversion rate optimisation) agencies is growing day by day and that’s not surprising. Millions of businessmen all over the world are willing to boost eCommerce conversions to reach better marketing results and increase profits. There are numerous factors influencing conversion rate, the most significant ones are the following:
The structure and design of your web-page is the first thing your user sees concerning your business. Well-structured and designed web-pages attract visitors more quickly. Such details as images, fonts, and even spacing are important elements to attract visitors.
Load time is also a very important factor to consider if you want to keep your customers on your web-page. Load time should be really short not to be an obstacle between your business and the website visitor.
As Tommy Walker, online marketing strategist and global editor in chief of the QuickBooks Resource Center states, “A good first impression isn’t just about design, but also how fast that design loads.”
Content is the most vital part of every website. Web-pages containing significant information and complete product data are more likely to attract visitors and turn them into customers.
Search Engine Optimization is another important factor influencing your conversion rates. Right keywords, meta-descriptions, links, reliable URLs can make your website easily found by search engines and generate really good traffic to your website thus making website conversion optimisation a crucial point.
Yes, the main goal of every business remains boosting conversion rate and making more profit. But there are questions that need to be answered before you step forward: How to calculate conversion rate?, What is the average conversion rate? , what is a good conversion rate for eCommerce? , how to increase conversion rate? and even what is considered good SEO conversion rate? and so on.
Calculating the conversion rate is actually not a difficult task. You need to divide the number of conversions you have received by the total number of people who visited your website and multiply it by 100%.
For instance, during the last two months, you had 18,300 visitors and 1960 conversions, your conversion rate will be 9,33%. You can even set up a tracking system provided by most of the advertising and analytics platforms. In this way, you will always know your average eCommerce conversion rate and will be able to make adjustments to improve it.
“Conversion rate optimization really isn’t about optimizing web pages – it’s about optimizing decisions – and the page itself is a means to an end but not an end itself.”
Michael Lykke Aagaard, International Keynote Speaker & Conversion Optimizer
Conversion optimisation is an endless world of opportunities. You just need to take the right one! There are numerous tips and tricks that will help you improve your conversion rate and impress competitors with something really innovative and unique. So how to increase the conversion rate in sales you ask? Follow these easy steps:
Research is one of the most important aspects of conversion optimization. You should have a clear understanding of the issue in order to find the right ways and solutions. Research everything: the difficulties conversion optimization faces, stages, opportunities, consumers and their basic requirements, competitors and the techniques they use, analyze best practices and success stories and create yours.
Breaking down the parts of conversion gives an opportunity to go through each step of conversion, to concentrate on every single component of the process, find out the strongest and weakest ones and analyze each part separately and make the needed adjustments.
We all love uniqueness, no one wants to see boring images and faded colors. Turn your page into a unique and creative one. Make your headline clear and impressive, create an effective CTA button, make your contact information visible, use real testimonials and badges, use relevant images instead of stock photos and add a video to your landing page, and of course, use a value proposition to make your website outstand among a wide variety of others.
For the content of your website to be effective, you should post only original, unique and interesting information, use effective keywords and include relevant links. The appearance of your website is important, but the content is crucial. Your website may be attractive, it may contain professional photos, but if the reader is not interested in the information you provide or your product descriptions are not complete, he will simply leave the web-page in several seconds. Compelling and worthy content will not only keep your customers interested in your business but remarkably affect your conversion rates.
The checkout process is the key one when we speak of conversion rate optimisation. What is important during the checkout process is to keep your consumer-focused on purchasing. No obstructions here. There are several tips that can be helpful in making your checkout process easy and smooth: simple page design, buttons confirming the order (send order, place order, checkout, etc.), clearly shown prices and shipping costs, highlighted fields and so on. To make the process even easier you can break down the segments leading to checkout. There are always consumers who are not following through with their purchase, and various marketing tips and tricks will help you force them to finish their purchase. These tips can vary from inducement and private messages to social media and promotions.
If you want to significantly improve your conversion rate, you should provide excellent customer service. This means being available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week via various channels. Email, phone, online forms, live chat, everything works, all you need is to always be there to listen to your customers, give answers to their questions, and satisfy their business needs.
A/B testing, also called split testing, is one of the most effective testing methods for CRO. It is also easy to run. All you need is to set up two identical marketing assets with a slight difference and choose metrics to determine which one performs better. You set a required time period for each page to run. When the predetermined period is over, it’s time to compare the results. The results will show which page performed better – received more clicks thus converting more customers.
A/B testing is a super helpful testing method and a productive way to measure and improve conversion rates.
A key point to remember towards reaching your conversion optimization goals is that conversion is just a part of a whole. Conversion rates are crucial, but it is not the only metric to focus on as it does not contain information about the number of pages during a visit and time spent, therefore you can’t totally measure your user’s engagement. Every stage of the customer’s journey is a unique story that needs to be discovered to be understood. The key to improving your conversion rates is to understand your customers’ needs, analyze their buying habits and decision-making processes and act accordingly, implementing the right conversion optimization strategy.
Try using innovative tools and techniques designed to measure and optimize your conversion rate, research and become better at what you do and the success is guaranteed.
