Would you rather have 100 casual acquaintances or 10 close friends?
It’s nice to know 100 people to invite to a party, but better to know people you can count on to show up. The same is true when it comes to marketing. It’s easy to get hung up on quantity — think website traffic — when you should really be focused on quality conversions.
Here’s why conversion optimization is so important and how you can improve yours.
Consider these conversion optimization statistics:
The bottom line?
Focusing on conversion rate optimization is one of the most effective things you can do as a marketer.
While strong calls to action (CTAs) are essential to conversions, conversion rate optimization is more than just testing different text or button colors.
There’s no magic bullet formula, but there are some fundamentals you need to get right before you do anything else.
If you don’t understand your buyers and how they make decisions, any conversion rate optimization tactics you try will just be lucky guesses. If you haven’t done buyer persona interviews in a while (or at all), that’s a good place to start.
Once you have some good insights from your customers, try to see your website from their perspective. Take the time to navigate it from your desktop and your mobile phone and evaluate all conversion opportunities. Ask yourself questions like:
Unless you can see how visitors are actually using your website, you’ll just be going by your best guess. That’s why heat-mapping tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg are so valuable. They show actual video footage of how users navigate your website, how far down they scroll before dropping off, where they click and more.
Once you have these foundational pieces covered, here are six good places to start optimizing for conversions.
Your website homepage content — starting with your hero area — is where you tell visitors who you are and what your company is all about.
Conventional inbound marketing wisdom might tell you the top of your homepage is too soon to close the deal. For some visitors, that might be true. Others may have already done a fair amount of research, and they’re ready to request a demo or talk to someone right away.
The placement of homepage CTAs and the language you use can make a big difference. Try testing offers, such as “request a demo” vs. “start your free trial.”
Using marketing automation tools like chatbots can also greatly improve conversions from your homepage.
If you’ve been using content marketing for some time, you should be generating the majority of your website traffic from organic search. Your blog plays an important part in that by answering common questions your buyers have. But once they arrive at your blog, what’s going to bring them back? A static CTA at the bottom of each blog post probably isn’t enough. Try implementing pop-up forms that capture attention and invite them to subscribe or check out your latest resource.
If you’ve been cloning the same landing page for every resource for the past few years, you’re missing a huge opportunity to optimize for conversions.
That’s because your buyers’ habits and the way they consume information is constantly changing. What may have been good enough two years ago might not be cutting it today.
You need to experiment with different layouts to find what works best — like how much information to gate behind a form or whether it’s worth gating at all.
However, there are some tactics that stand the test of time. Check out these examples of high-converting landing pages for more tips.
According to the 2018 Litmus State of Email Marketing Report, the average person will spend eight seconds reading your email.
That means it’s more important than ever to ensure your emails are both clickable and skimmable on any device.
To improve conversions, remember the three Cs: keep it concise, clear and clickable. More specifically:
There’s no question video needs to be part of any modern digital marketing strategy. By 2021, 75 percent of all mobile data traffic worldwide will be video, according to Cisco.
Not only that, but viewers are far more likely to retain what they watch compared to what they read. Make your video marketing count by including strong, relevant calls-to-action at the end.
If your website visitor is seeing a confirmation page, it means you’ve gotten them to convert! The only thing left to do is thank them and follow up with them later, right?
Confirmation pages might be the most overlooked opportunity for optimizing conversions because another conversion typically isn’t the goal. But you can plant the seed for future conversions.
Take a cue from e-learning websites like Udemy, which recommend related courses you might like once you’ve signed up for something.
Conversion optimization isn’t a tactic as much as an ongoing strategy. It’s a constant iteration of testing, improving and testing again.
Once you’ve made updates, go back a few weeks later to see the result. Are you getting more conversions? More importantly, are the right people converting?
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