You want more sales, right?
Silly question – every business owner does! And to get sales, you need leads, which you can then convert into paying customers. That process – conversion- is the lifeblood of any marketing campaign, and your business can live or die by your ability to convert new customers. So one of the most common questions we get is how to we attract new prospects and reach new audiences, and then how do we increase conversion rates?
But first, you need to understand…
What Is A Conversion Rate?
A conversion rate is simply the number of people who click on your website, and then go on to buy from you. It’s been around in retail for a very long time, but in a world where at least 20.4% of purchases are made on the internet, it’s becoming much more important for all businesses.
Your conversion rate is generally a good indicator of how successful your marketing and sales efforts are, based on how frequently you can turn a prospect into a paying customer. If you know what your conversion rate is and you can monitor it over time, you can see a lot of benefits for your business. For example, you can:
- Understand and control advertising spend effectively
- Manage and hire new sales teams
- Determine your profitability on a granular level
- Allocate resources more efficiently
In digital terms, the definition of conversion rate is a little wider. Instead of it being a simple visitor-sale measure, it’s done as the percentage of visitors to your website that complete a certain goal, decided by you. It doesn’t need to be money spent, just an action you consider a success. For example, common conversion goals include:
- Purchasing
- Submitting their information
- Signing up for your newsletter
- Downloading something from your website
- Interacting with your online chat
- Making contact with your business to discuss further
And many more besides. This allows you to track success in a more detailed way, and really hone in on what you want your customers to do on your website.
How Do You Measure Conversion?
The age-old formula to work out your conversion rate is pretty simple. You take the number of visitors, divide it by the number of sales made, and times that number by 100. It looks something like this:
Conversion rate = number of visitors / number of sales * 100
For example, if visitors is 100,000 and conversions is 2000, then your conversion rate would be 2%
This gives you an idea of the number of people who visited you and didn’t buy anything, and those who did. The conversion rate formula was designed for retail stores, who would have a counter installed in their entrance doors to monitor footfall, which could then be compared to sales figures at the end of the day. It wasn’t a foolproof method, but short of a member of staff following customers around and logging when they purchased (or didn’t), it was as accurate as possible.
But in the digital age, measuring your conversion rate is a much more exact science. Thanks to things like Google Analytics and website cookies, you can see exactly what each visitor does on your website, how long they spend on certain pages and where they visit. All of this means you have more raw data, and more information than ever before.
You can even break it down further and measure your conversion rates for each advertising platform (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc), for each campaign, or even for each keyword. So you can refine your approach and get the best results from every campaign.
5 Top Tips To Increase Conversion Rate
The good news is, that your conversion rate isn’t finite. It’s something you have the power to change, and improve. Here are 5 ways you can increase your conversion rates with minimal effort:
Add Social Proof
Customers don’t blindly buy from you because you say so. 97% of consumers will look at reviews before making a purchase, and 83% of people trust reviews over adverts. So just adding some social proof can make a huge difference to your conversion rates. In fact, WikiJob increased its conversion rate by 34% by just adding some testimonials prominently placed on their website. So if you have reviews, case studies or testimonials – include them on your website! A good way of collecting reviews for your business is with Google Business Profile we have created an article about it and how it can help you.
Keep It Simple
There’s a rule in marketing called KISS, and it stands for Keep It Super Simple. Everything on your website should be simple to understand and use so that the buying process is as smooth as possible. Make it too complicated and you risk customers abandoning the effort. So keep it short and sweet. Offer clear instructions, make your call to action as obvious as possible, and don’t offer too many options.
A/B Testing
It can sometimes be difficult to tell what’s working and what isn’t, especially if you’re only making small tweaks, or if you’re running multiple campaigns at once. This is where A/B testing really shines. Take the same advert/campaign/page and create 2 versions of it. The 2 versions should be identical, with only 1 thing changed – the thing you want to measure. For example, A/B testing is often done to see the effectiveness of different headlines, page layouts and even colours. You can then test this on your audience using A/B testing tools, and see which performs best. Do this regularly to find what works best for you and your audience, and your conversion rates will start to rise.
Improve Your Load Speed
Did you know that around 40% of people will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load? Our attention spans are shorter than ever, and if your site doesn’t capture it quickly enough then your customers will go elsewhere. If you think this might be an issue for you, check your bounce rate and see how many people are leaving your website very quickly. Increasing your page load speed (and therefore the load time) keeps people on your website, dramatically increasing their chances of buying from you!
You can check your sites load speed for free on sites like GTmetrix and Pagespeed Insights both of these tools quickly assess your website’s speed and tell you the areas in which you can improve. The suggestions that come up are all things that we would normally help improve in our SEO service, we even have SEO packages to keep things simple.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Have you ever put a bunch of stuff in your cart, only to never actually hit buy? It’s very common in the eCommerce world – in fact it’s the single biggest point of customer loss. So if you sell anything online you need to create abandoned cart email campaigns. These are automated emails that go out after a set period of time whenever someone abandons their cart in your shop. You can remind them of their basket, send a follow-up and even include a discount to entice them back to buy. It’s a small change, but these prospective customers can be a huge boost to your conversion rates. Numerous Email marketing platforms integrate with both Woocommerce and Shopify to make Abandoned cart emails easy, examples include:
Of course, getting people from point A to point Buy isn’t always a simple process. That’s why many businesses hire experts to help. At Lion Spirit Media, we specialise in helping business owners attract new leads and then maximise their conversion rates, giving you the biggest pack in the jungle. Our experts might do content marketing and communications a little differently, but our unique approach is proven to be effective for businesses large and small. If you want to find out more, just get in touch with us today to book your free consultation.
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