- While bringing more people to your website is great, just getting people there shouldn’t be the ultimate goal.
- What you actually want is highly qualified traffic, so your conversion rate improves, too.
- From optimizing your funnel to creating targeted landing pages, there are a few things you can do to turn traffic into conversions.
- In digital marketing, there are lots of metrics of success, but there’s little that beats conversions.
Web traffic is awesome.
At its core, it drives so much of what digital marketing is and is the reason that many of us get up in the morning, or can’t sleep at night (depending on who you ask!) From SEO and paid search to sponsored posts and social media adventures, it’s all about getting people to go where you want them to.
The name of the game is traffic and the more of it you get, the better you’re doing, right?
Well, actually… no.
Well, kind of, but…
No.
Conversions > traffic
While getting people to visit the fabulous wonderland of pages and funnels you’ve created to impress and inform them is great (and keep up the good work), just getting people there shouldn’t be the ultimate goal. What you actually want is conversions.
Imagine you own a store selling high-end electronics, and you tell your marketers that the only metric that matters is footfall. The marketers would naturally focus on bringing in the largest amount of people possible, which in an average mall would probably mean middle-schoolers and retirees.
Unfortunately, though, you could drive visitor numbers through the roof, few of them would either be able or willing to splash out $5,000 on a giant Danish tripod-mounted speaker that looks like its capable of communicating with distant galaxies. Undeniably cool as the space speaker is, it’s just not what they’re looking for.
So, no sale and, as they didn’t find anything that they’re going to get in the future, they probably won’t come back either. Plus, everyone else that passed by got the impression that you were a store for teenagers and their grandparents, and presume you don’t stock that WiFi-connected wine bottle sleeve that everyone’s been talking about.
What you really should have told your marketers is that you’d like to focus on getting more of the right kind of customers and increasing your conversion rate.
How to increase conversion rate percentages
We’ve already established that marketing can’t just be about visitor numbers. Generally speaking, you actually need to sell to be successful. But that brings up another issue: exactly how to increase conversion rate figures that have been flatlining for ages.
Here at Redefine we know that digital marketing has to take a multi-faceted approach, not just in driving traffic to your site but in delivering visitors that are qualified prospects, effectively boosting your conversion rate, so your marketing spend actually delivers the returns you want.
Here’s how to do it.
- Optimize your funnel
The process of visitors becoming prospects, which then become leads and customers, is a lot more scientific than it might seem at first glance. Content and pages can be observed, visitor activity tracked, and weak links in your funnel can be tweaked, which might seem like a lot of work but for increasing your conversion rate it’s absolutely essential.
The first step is identifying the different stages of your customer’s potential journey, putting everything into a relevant funnel position (e.g. Initial Engagement, Research, Evaluation, Purchase). From there, you can more easily measure what the rate of flow is from one section of the funnel to the next and identify in what area you need to start improving.
- A/B Testing
Every company is unique, and their individual customers are attracted by different value propositions. If you want to know how to increase conversion rate numbers, then you need to know how to segment your customer base and find out what draws in different people. While advanced user metrics can tell you a person’s age, education, income bracket, or what they had for breakfast, finding out what really speaks to them is best performed through A/B testing.
This involves creating different messaging, putting it side-by-side in the same locations, then seeing how they perform and how visitors from the various avenues act at different stages of the funnel. This allows you to define which message best speaks to your target audience.
- Targeted landing pages
For everyone out there wondering how to increase conversion rate numbers, one of the first ports of call has to be what visitors actually see when they land on your site. You’ve already piqued their interest enough to come and check you out, so double-down on that curiosity. For different ad and campaign approaches, create landing pages that follow through on the offers made.
For example, if you’ve led out with a promise of 20% off the next order, create a button that makes it easy to go straight through to the sales page, rather than just giving visitors your generic product pitch. You already know what interests them, so make it easy for them to get to the next step.
- Focus on the follow-up
Once a prospect has been converted to a lead or made a purchase, they’re already far more valuable than new visitors. They’re people who’ve either signaled an interest through signing up to a mailing list or followed you on social media or gone all the way and made a purchase, so it makes sense that they’re going to be more receptive to your messaging further down the line.
As such, the approach to these cohorts through remarketing or an email campaign deserves just as much attention as general visitor acquisition in the first place. Your conversion rate depends on helping people make that important final step through the decision process, and your ability to master your follow-ups will determine how successful you are at that.
The ultimate metric of success
Boosting conversion rates and getting your digital marketing campaigns to actually deliver real returns is something we love doing at Redefine. There are lots of metrics of success that we use but there’s little that beats conversions and seeing our partners succeed and grow as a business. To find out how we can help your organization increase its conversion rate, just get in touch with our awesome team today.
