Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate Optimization

At its most basic understanding, conversion rate optimization is about improvement. If you run a website or a social media page, you want to know how your content is doing.

To get a good idea of how your site is performing, you’ll look at a series of metrics and analytics that tell you what works and what doesn’t.

You can use CRO to measure how active any part of your site is, but it’s mostly used to learn how to acquire new customers, how to obtain new downloads, which features do a great job at attracting attention, and so much more.

Return on Investment

Return On Investment

At the end of the day, CRO is about looking at the numbers. You’re paying good money for ads to drive traffic to a specific website, blog, or page.  In turn, you hope that driving enough traffic will result in obtaining a new customer who buys from you.

The CRO numbers tell you if you’re losing money paying for ads that aren’t working, if you’re just breaking even and might need to make a few adjustments, or if you’re on fire and don’t need to change a thing.

For every dollar you spend on ads, what are you getting back?  In email marketing, for every dollar spent, the average person gets a return of $38.  That’s an impressive rate of return!

Not every campaign will see that number.  Some even lose money.

If things are moving a bit slow in your online marketing, you may be pulling out your hair and wondering exactly what you’re doing wrong.  It’s a natural question.  All you want is to create the perfect campaign and BOOM, you’ll be making big money.

The problem is, nothing ever works as planned.

Why You Need to Optimize

Online marketing is a fickle business.  Odds are, you’re not going to get it right the first time around.  A lot of the successful marketers have been around the block a few times, learned from their mistakes, and went back to the drawing board.  Don’t fret if you find yourself making these same mistakes.

The good news is, only a small change may be required to bring in the sales you want.  Or maybe you’ll need a completely new vision.  That’s the power of conversion rate optimization.

We all know that words can be extremely powerful.  Your ability to tell a story can make all the difference when it comes to copy that works and copy that fizzles.

Headlines and other facets of the process are equally as important.  Does your wording encourage subscriptions and buys?  Or discourage them?

So many marketers fail to properly engage regularly and follow-up with their customers.  Good business sense isn’t just getting the sell and being done with them.  You MUST foster a relationship with your customers.

Learn about them.  Grow with them.  Your product or service should evolve as their needs evolve to remain successful.

The attention span of an adult is about 2.8 seconds.  They want to read a quick headline and move on to the next one.  Therefore, it’s important to have a content strategy that matches the way people consume it: quick, easy, and visually biased.

Why Conversion Rates Are Important

Conversion Rates Are Important

All the issues pertaining to marketing go back to whether you could optimize your process.  You get to track what people do with your content.  If you don’t get the type of numbers you’d like to see, then you change the process with the hope that the numbers increase.

Let’s take a look at the different terminology you should know.

1) Total Conversions

If your campaign was successful, you should have a number of people who did exactly what you wanted them to do.  If you directed traffic from Facebook for them to sign up for your newsletter, the number of people who did that will be reflected.

Your success would then be measured by the percentage of people who saw your ad, those who clicked on it, and those who went through with the process.

2) Conversion Rate

Your goal is to get a certain percentage of people to act.  You can check the percentage of people who ‘bought in’ by dividing the number of conversions by the number of people who made it to your site.

3) Bounce Rate

The bounce is when people go to your site, but don’t act.  They show up and leave.  This is not a good metric to have!  If your bounce rate is high, that means people aren’t sticking around for whatever reason.

Bounce Rates are a sign of bad CRO

4) Exit Rate

This will show you what pages people are bouncing from.  Maybe they get through the first page, but then you lose them on the second.  So, the exit rate will reveal where people leave specifically on your site.

5) Engagement

If you have a high engagement or “time on site” rate, that’s a good thing.  It lets you know that people are lingering around on the site.  They’re browsing and not immediately leaving.  That means they’re considering their next move.  Sometimes they buy, other times they leave and come back later.

6) Average Page Views

This is another good indicator to see how long people are sticking around to view your site.  It averages how many pages visitors look at while they’re visiting.  The higher the percentage, the better, as it shows they aren’t leaving immediately, but hanging out awhile.

Improve Your Conversion Rates

Boost conversions to increase ROI

If it’s one common thread a lot of online marketers and business people have in common, it’s that initial struggle trying to figure out how to convert leads into buyers. It’s this area in which a lot of marketers get stuck. Their mind keeps going back to the same thing: we need more traffic!

If we need to make more sales, we think of it as a traffic problem. But a lack of traffic is rarely the problem. You can throw $20 into a Facebook ad and instantly generate enough traffic to sell your product or service. Yet, a lot of these marketers are throwing thousands of dollars at their ads, but the focus is still on driving traffic.

If you truly desire to become successful, it is important for you to know what the real issue is behind you not making the sales that you want. You’re not having a traffic problem. You have plenty of traffic as it is and adding more traffic will not help you if you do not know how to convert that traffic.

For whatever reason, your content, your blog, your websites, sales page, your opt in, etc. is failing at taking the plentiful traffic you already have and making them want to open up their wallets for you. Here are five easy tactics you can employ to convert traffic.

Strategy #1: Follow Amazon

Amazon might not be a perfect website, but just digging around and taking a good look at things can give you ideas and inspire you in ways that will help you convert your traffic. The people at Amazon are experts at converting traffic.

Amazon Conversions mean money in the bank

They pull out all the stops because they do all the testing find out what works and what doesn’t. If it increases sales, you can bet Amazon is already doing it.

Let’s look at a quick example. Have you ever bought anything on Amazon and went to check out with your items and noticed how they took away navigation options at the checkout screen? If you take away navigation at the checkout screen, it will prevent abandonment and lead to more sales because there’s nothing to distract them. It forces you to buy.

Strategy #2: Create a Tool

Number one way to build authority in your niche is by providing value to the customer. If you can give them value and you’re not 100% focused on pitching, you will increase your leads and your conversions. People want content that helps them and your job is to give that to them.

Have you seen the Progressive insurance commercials? What do they regularly boast their website has? They have a tool that allows you to compare insurance rates between companies. You might be thinking it’s not a good idea for a company to share rates of their competitors because they might end up losing money that way.

That’s not necessarily true. Other companies have calculators that show how much money you’ll be saving or a way to compare spends. Just offer value and it will attract people to you if you don’t think it will.

Strategy #3: Embrace Reviews

You might think you’re the greatest marketer who has ever walked the face of the earth. You can sell a bag of ice to an Eskimo. One of the top reasons why people struggle in converting is a lack of trust and authority. We’ve discussed ways to improve your authority, but there is still one group of people who can sell better than you and it’s imperative that you tap into their power.

Customers. No matter how good you think you are at selling, your customers are better at it than you are. At least that’s the way you need to look at. Why? Because nothing will sell your product faster and better than with good reviews.

Customer Reviews increase conversions

Nothing will sink your business faster than bad reviews. Listen to the people and embrace reviews. If you seek to improve bad reviews, good ones will always drown them out.

Strategy #4: Virtual Receptionist

You’re a very busy person. Constantly worried about posting new content, building relationships customers, playing out the future, and doing about 100 different things to make sure your business takes off. It can be time-consuming and complicated. But sometimes, you’re too busy to do work because you’re always on the phone chasing leads.

Converting isn’t an exact science. Someone can visit your site at 1 PM, yet not decide to buy until six that evening. It’s common for people that want to sit on it for a while and think the purchase through. But at 6 PM, you’re out of the office. Maybe your grabbing dinner, fighting traffic, or just unable to reach the phone. How many leads do you think you miss after business hours?

This is where the virtual receptionist can help you convert more leads and give you extra time to do your job. You might be thinking that virtual receptionist cost a lot of money, but compared to hiring someone new at the office, you can hire a virtual receptionist for peanuts. It usually cost between $200 and $300 per month. It’s worth the cost.

Strategy #5: Personalization

One of the newest strategies popping up these days is custom personalization. If you’ve ever done email marketing, and you know how important it is to speak directly to the person you’re sending the email to.

There are different types of emails to be sent to different consumers. You send one email to someone who just joined your list, and an entirely different email to someone who has been on your list long time.

You’re customizing your traffic in a way that makes it personal to the user. Some sites, like Product Hunt, have a bar over the top when you’re shopping it recognizes you as a person. It treats you like a person and greets you like person. This is a great way to build trust with your customers and the new visitors who come in.

Conclusion

The internet is an amazing tool you can use at your disposal to become successful.  No matter what niche market you’re in, you must pay attention to the numbers and adjust.  It might take you time to learn new strategies, but the only way to figure it out is by testing and knowing what the numbers mean. This is accomplished through conversion rate optimization, let us know if you need some help.

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