How to improve your Conversion Rate is a massive subject for most marketers, if like most of us, improving your conversion rate is a key goal in your Sales and Marketing plan you’re in the right place. According to Unbounce the average landing page converts at 9.7%, so for every 10 people reading this blog then it would stand to reason that 1 person would go on to convert into a “lead” right? Not quite…in fact whilst most of us think of a conversion as a purchase or form fill a conversion can be a simple as an engagement or action that you want your audience to take. In this, the third of our Demand Generation key funnel stages blog series we’ll look at key strategies to improve your conversion rate.
Let’s start with the fundamentals of conversions and bust open some myths – firstly that they have to be a purchase or form fill. A conversion can be anything you want it to be and importantly there are many conversion actions before you actually get to a transaction or lead. Secondly not all conversions are created equal, indeed a page view or page scroll shouldn’t be weighted equally with a cart purchase or a direct call. Understanding the interplay between conversions and how they all need to work together to drive your ultimate goals is the key to driving up your overall conversion rate.
In order to improve your conversion rate you need to be clear on what exactly you’re trying to achieve so we’d recommend starting with a definition exercise to give you real clarity in your quest. For this blog we’re going to focus on first stage lead form fills and cart purchases – two very different conversions but of course yours need to be specific to your business.
Once you’ve defined your ideal conversion it’s time to start thinking about your customers again, specifically their journey with you both on and off page.
Chances are you’ve built a number of inbound or acquisition channels that drive high quality traffic to your site and if you’re spending hard earned cash on attracting visitors then it’s likely that you’ll be analysing the performance of each channel in detail. Off page conversions (in this case click through’s to your web estates) often take the bulk of the attention since they can be heavy budget drains but focusing your attention solely on off page will leave your conversion data severely lacking. If you’re not analysing your inbound performance, or looking for improvement be sure to check out the Attraction Blog here.
Simply put on page conversions are all the actions that a user takes on your website, from clicks to scrolls, hovers, video plays, downloads (of course) but even PDF views and even time on page every interaction tells a story. This is where you need to understand the mind of your audience.
Let’s take an example;
Which one is more valuable? Well without defining your conversions at detailed levels then actually it’s pretty impossible to tell – let’s try this out for size.
Now which one is more valuable? The point to these examples is that by understanding what your users do and defining their actions under different conversions you can empower your team or agency to make better, smarter decisions that improve your performance.
In this example we might chose to remarket to our contact page viewer audience with a personalised offer or we may even opt for a video platform as our remarketing channel as we already know that this user is inclined towards video.
As we always say at The Demand Generation Team “you can’t improve what you can’t measure and you can’t measure what you can’t track” so once you’ve defined with actions and interactions form the basis of your conversions then it’s time to start tracking.
Tracking conversions with Google’s Tag Manager is a straightforward (although sometimes not simple) process, in this example we’re working on a page scroll depth conversion to help us understand how far users are engaging with content. Tag Manager has scroll depth variables built in so can be quick to set up:
Using these tags and triggers we can then show specific events with Analytics that help us to segment our audience better, understand which channels are likely to drive the best conversions and of course, ultimately improve our conversion rates.
Tracking isn’t just about data, understanding what your audience are doing in real time can be a great way to see what’s going right and what’s going wrong. Session tracking and recording tools like CrazyEgg and Hotjar give you a unique insight into what users are doing and why they’re not converting – just be careful not to take one recording as a measure of success (or failure). The key to making these tools effective is to look for patterns in behaviour rather than one off’s.
Once you have your conversions defined and event tracking set up it’s time to look at what you can do to improve your conversion rates on page. Here’s our long list of measures you can use as levers and pulleys to improve your conversion rate:
Finally and last but by no means least is speed – according to research by the almighty Google a 1 second delay can impact conversion rates by up to 20% which could mean that video that takes 3 seconds to load on your home page could be losing you multiple conversions every single day. Focusing on speed and mobile usability as well as improving your engagement will also enhance your results from inbound channels and give you better conversions to boot.
If you could do with some practical help improving your own conversion rates drop your details below and we’ll be back to you in a jiffy
Posted by Helen Brookes on Monday 22nd March 2021