Online marketing usually relies on driving traffic to a website. Traffic will generate leads that the sales team can convert into customers. While this may be a simple explanation for a complex process, it’s what most marketers aim for.
Tracking how many visitors to a site became a customer is a great way to measure the success of your marketing strategy. If you’re not getting the results you want, you may need to improve your conversion rate optimization techniques.
Conversion rates and how to optimize them
A conversion rate is a metric used to determine the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. While some techniques will generate traffic to a website, it may not always lead to increased sales or revenues. If this is the case, you’ll need to study why you’re not able to convert leads into customers.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a set of strategies that help businesses turn visitors into customers. To optimize your conversion rates, you’ll need to understand where your current techniques aren’t succeeding.
Best ways to optimize your conversion rates
Marketers have more channels available to them today than ever before. They can use social media, webinars, and videos to promote their products. Making people aware of a product or service is only the first step.
To help convert leads into customers, marketers should follow these best practices—since 53% of marketers believe CRO is vital to their marketing strategy according to Invesp.
Conduct extensive testing.
Whether you use emails as your main channel or social media, you should keep track of the key metrics.
With emails, it’s easier to do A/B testing. Instead of sending out the same email to all your subscribers, you can send out two different ones and, depending on which one performed better, you can use that format for your next campaign.
As you can also easily segment lists, you can test out different campaigns for different types of subscribers. Using extensive testing and verifying the results before sending out a new campaign to all your subscribers can help improve your conversion rates.
Adopt a consistent brand identity.
There’s something comforting about a consistent brand identity. Whatever marketing channels you use, you should use a consistent look and feel for all your materials. If a customer gets an email that leans heavily on user-generated content, but your website uses all illustrations, your customer may be confused and bounce. Across all channels, the average conversion rate is 3.5%, so, if you’re getting less than that, it could point to a brand identity issue.
Use personalization.
The more information you have about your followers and subscribers, the easier it is to increase your conversion rates. Using personalization will help you to deliver content that speaks to the people behind inboxes and screens. If it feels like a personal message instead of a generic email, customers are more likely to trust your company.
How to measure your conversion rate optimization
You’ll be able to track your success using these strategies with analytics. For every change you make, you’ll notice a change in your subscriber or customer’s engagement.
With an improved strategy, you’ll notice an increase in your conversion rates. If you’re not seeing an improvement in your sales numbers of signups, you’ll need to adjust accordingly.
Does it really matter?
Conversion rate optimization is something every marketer should be practicing. As people’s behavior is always changing, maintaining a single strategy won’t be enough to ensure success. Adjusting with your customer’s expectations will help you stay ahead of your competitors.
What now?
If you aren’t seeing the conversion rates you expect from your website traffic, you’ll need to optimize your marketing strategies. To improve your rates, you should test your different marketing campaigns before sending them out to all your customers. You may also need to review your brand identity across all platforms and create content that uses personalization for improved results.
Lead generation and conversion go hand in hand, so you may also want to find out more about lead generation tactics that improve conversion rates from this blog post.