Conversion rate optimization: How to turn traffic into sales?
If your visitor to customer conversion rate is currently 1 % and you want to increase that, you can:
- Increase your marketing budget or,
- Invest in conversion rate marketing.
Conversion rate marketing is cheaper than increasing your marketing budget, so this is a better option. However, you may have previously done things like changing the color of your CTA button or adjusting the headline wording. Those strategies may not have worked for you because they are only the tip of the iceberg of conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Follow the guide below for an in-depth understanding of CRO.
We will talk about the following topics in particular:
- How to conduct customer research correctly (and why your present technique is not working).
- How to assess the efficacy of your traffic generation strategy (and why it might be generating non-buyers)?
- How to Make Your Content Funnel Better (and key tests to set up)?
- For each stage of the funnel, below are some CRO suggestions (and how to apply your data to it).
Customer Research
As Steli Efti, the founder of Close puts it:
“Product-market fit is not a destination, but a moment in time. Some people think they need to iterate and pivot, then you will arrive in the promised land of product-market fit, and now it is only about growing. That is an illusion.”
When was the last time you took a sales call or listened to one? Is it this week? Is it this month? Now that you have decided to listen to a sales call, try to figure out what problems your clients are having and how your product would help them solve them.
You can ask questions (or pay attention to questions if you are listening to a call recording) to obtain a sense of the problem/solution. Questions like:
- What were some of the major issues they were having before your solution?
- What features of your product piqued their interest in your solution?
- What would the perfect remedy for their situation be?
Even if you are selling an e-commerce item, inquire about how it fits into customers’ lives and why they prefer it to other options. Because most e-commerce customers don’t make sales calls, look for user reviews on Amazon. In the review section, you’ll find a wealth of pain issues and reasons why happy clients are happy.
You won’t be able to offer the greatest solution or illustrate why your product is the best answer if you merely know your ideal customer’s age, title, or primary pain point. After you’ve figured out who your consumer is (at this point), the following step is to make sure your product or service is satisfying their needs and expectations.
Improve Your Product or Service
After listening to 10–15 sales calls, or reading 50 reviews, you should have a better understanding of what your target customers want and how your product or service addresses that problem uniquely. As a result, your next move should be to enhance your product or service. While this may appear to be a challenging process, it isn’t as complex as it appears.
Let’s look at three different categories of businesses.
E-commerce Business
If you offer kitchen tables, the design, structure, and aesthetics all have a significant part in the success of your product. This does not imply that you should change the actual design and aesthetics of your product (provided it is durable and sells).
Instead, you may see that the most common issue in your evaluations is that the tables were damaged when they came. Again, you may not be able to influence how the carrier handles it, but you may be able to enhance your packaging or exchange and return procedures. By optimizing those processes, you’ll be able to provide a better user experience, making it easier to boost your conversion rate.
SaaS Business
Improving a software company may appear to be a huge task, but it’s usually only a matter of adding new features or situating your product. For example, while your consumers may adore your product, many would like a more user-friendly UI. Instead of replacing the entire product, you might be able to improve the user experience by reorganizing the user interface.
Another prevalent issue is the difficulty of setup or integration. While you won’t have to change your product, simplifying your setup procedure or expanding your integration possibilities will boost your conversion rate far more than changing the wording on a banner or a headline term.
Service Business
Because there is no pre-existing product, improving a service business is one of the easiest enterprises to pivot and alter. All you need to do is maybe tweak some operational structures.
Let’s imagine you’re the owner of a marketing firm. On sales calls, you may find that most prospects want to know if you track conversions or just send deliverables (X blog posts and X links per month). You might shift your agency’s attention to reporting conversions in this situation.
Similarly, if you run a content firm, ensuring that the content is expert-level may be one of your major concerns during sales calls. You might not have expert-level content if you only have a few general freelance writers for all customer accounts. Instead, you should hire subject-matter experts who will be assigned to each client’s account. These are just a few examples of how altering the color of a button on your website may enhance conversions considerably more effectively.
Analyze your Traffic Generation strategy
You should have a good concept of what your customer’s main problems are and how to solve them by now. However, you may find that your traffic isn’t converting even after conducting customer research and repositioning/improving your product.
Contrary to popular opinion, experimenting with font size and other micro-adjustments at this stage isn’t always effective. Rather, the real solution is to examine your traffic goals and who you are attracting.
Let’s imagine you provide SEO services and your main clientele are Fortune 500 firms, using content marketing as your primary traffic generation technique. You might have three different blog entries in this case:
- The SEO Beginner’s Guide
- 5 Ways to Boost Your Online Presence
- How to Create a Google Analytics Account
Those all sound like wonderful SEO themes, and each one has a large search volume, so they’ll almost certainly create a lot of visitors. They will, however, most likely not turn into leads.
Why?
Because a VP of Marketing or Director of Marketing (at a Fortune 500 business) is unlikely to read a beginner’s guide to SEO or be concerned with Google Analytics setup. Instead, consider how you might target and entice individual decision-makers to your website.
These blog pieces, for example, would attract lesser traffic but more relevant prospects:
- How This Fortune 500 Company Discovered the Perfect Marketing Partner (and Grew by X percent).
- This Fortune 500 Company’s Exact Content Strategy (and How It Increased Sales by X percent)
However, content isn’t the only medium in which this holds.
Are you running advertisements for generic traffic linked to your service, or are you targeting a few important prospects, for example, if you run sponsored ads for an e-commerce product? Converting them is a lot easier now that you have the correct people on your website and the right offer in front of them.
Optimize your current funnel
You may start experimenting with basic CRO testing after you have the correct consumer on your website and the right funnel in front of them. Here are a handful of the most effective conversion rate optimization techniques for each stage of your funnel.
Homepage
Because your homepage receives a variety of traffic (TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU), optimizing it is usually the most difficult. Make your value proposition obvious so that anyone landing on the homepage knows exactly what you do and who you benefit from, rather than trying to optimize it for everyone. Make your unique selling point evident if you’re a service business where most people know what you do (like a marketing agency).
Most e-commerce firms are self-explanatory and don’t require a value proposition. Instead, your worth could be represented by a discount or a sale. The homepage’s purpose is to guide customers to the proper step of the funnel after they understand what you do. Ecommerce businesses, for example, should concentrate on logically categorizing their products so that customers can quickly locate the product category they require.
It should all be on the homepage, and if it isn’t, finding any single product shouldn’t take more than two clicks. The homepage of a SaaS or, service business should route users to the most relevant point in their journey. Marketers frequently make attempts to overcomplicate the homepage, when all they need to do is explain what their product/service does and then redirect the visitor.
Pricing pages (SaaS Service)
The most frequent layout is to have three to four pricing tiers, with the middle tier being promoted as the “best value” choice. It should also include a feature comparison list below the pricing, indicating what you’ll get at each price point.
Product/Checkout pages (e-commerce)
You probably don’t have a pricing page if you run an e-commerce store. Instead, the critical conversion pages are your product page and checkout page.
Here’s a simple checklist to go over as you’re optimizing your product page in particular:
- Make use of special offers.
- Provide high-resolution movies and photographs.
- Include all FAQs (dimensions, material, etc.)
- White space should be increased, and trust badges should be included.
- Include social proof.
- Make use of specific client feedback.
After you have optimized your product page, you will want to make sure your checkout page is as quick and straightforward as possible. With a platform like Bolt, you may also implement one-click checkouts on your website. If you can, you must gather credit card information, keep the checkout process as straightforward as possible. Use a process indication and reduce the number of form fields.
The fewer distractions there are, the better. Your buyer, on the other hand, should always be able to see what they are buying. Otherwise, they may choose to return to the previous page by pressing the back button. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should test the experience on a desktop and a mobile device.
Blog posts
Your blog is another important part of the funnel (especially for SaaS and service organizations). While most organizations assume that blog postings are a part of the funnel, few take the effort to incorporate each one.
First, if you have done your homework and finished the Analyze Your Traffic Generation process above, you should be receiving qualified leads to your blog posts. Then all you must do is point them in the direction of the best solution.
Using CTAs throughout the post is the most typical technique to reroute users. You may either construct a boxed CTA within the post or simply include it as text in it. A pop-up call-to-action is another innovative approach to convert visitors. Instead of asking for an email address, ask if they want to speak with a professional about the blog post topic right away and provide a phone number.
During a podcast interview, Grow & Convert’s Benji Hyam stated that he uses a similar pop-up when a reader has been on a blog page for more than two minutes. The pop-up included a phone number, allowing the reader to speak with someone about their problem over the phone. According to him, the conversion rate skyrocketed, and the method is still underutilized today.
Finally, have a lot of bottom-of-the-funnel material to reduce the sales cycle and get them to the point of conversion as soon as possible. If your service is expensive or your customer journey is extensive, you may want to give a lead magnet to get them to join your email list.
Pop-ups
While we have already discussed how pop-ups can be used in the content, they can also be used in other situations on your website. The idea is to keep them from being obnoxious. A customized pop-up offering the reader, the opportunity to speak with someone live about the exact pain area they are learning about is relevant and helpful in the content sample above.
As a result, personalization is one of the most important aspects of a successful pop-up. Another factor is to wait a minute after the visitor has finished reading your material before displaying a pop-up. If you have an exit pop-up, this is the lone exception. Finally, if you are trying to persuade someone to stay, offer them something of value and explain why it is worthwhile.
Re-engage with your visitor
Finally, even if a visitor leaves your website, you can retarget them via email (if you have their email address) or retargeting advertisements. While abandoned cart emails are one approach to re-engage users, you can also use a product like Tone to produce abandoned cart SMS texts.
Another alternative is to re-engage them through a platform like Klickly and make a one-click purchase directly within the retargeting ad. Use a nurture sequence to bring resistant consumers to the point of sale if you have a service or software business. You can run retargeting advertisements on Facebook or Google even if the visitor leaves without leaving any contact information. The best aspect is that retargeting can be used by any business from e-commerce to service enterprises to information products and SaaS.
Start converting now
Conversion rate marketing is one of the simplest ways to boost sales, but it is more than just changing the colors or adding a new phrase to your title.
Make it a no-brainer by enhancing and adjusting your offering to match your customers’ wants. Then, it is just a matter of A/B testing the various funnel stages and finding the ideal language to present your product’s worth. So, start putting your marketing approach to the test right now!