Conversion is crucial to any company’s brand growth and performance. Your conversion rate is a critical key performance indicator (KPI) in digital marketing, used to measure the effectiveness of your landing pages, websites and other digital assets.
The only way to increase conversion rates is by implementing a robust conversion rate marketing strategy that engages prospects as they go through the buyer’s journey.
If you’re ready to elevate your conversion rate optimization (CRO) game and leave behind ineffective tactics that get you nowhere, then you’ve come to the right place.
In this post, we go over the most common CRO challenges plaguing businesses and other insights from our CRO services expert:
• Increasing Conversion Rates Through the Sales Funnel Stages
• How Are Conversion Rates Computed?
• How To Increase Conversion Rates
• Common Challenges in Conversion Rate Marketing (and Tips To Recover)
• Work With Conversion Rate Optimization Specialists
Increasing Conversion Rates Through the Sales Funnel Stages
Conversion refers to turning website visitors into customers, leads or subscribers, ultimately driving revenues and growth to your business. This process is best illustrated by the sales funnel stages, which map out the buyer’s journey.
The sales funnel stages begin with awareness, followed by several other stages that lead to conversion:
• Awareness: You attract a broad audience to your brand, creating awareness. Potential customers become aware of your offerings.
• Interest: Some site visitors show interest in your products or services and seek more information.
• Consideration: At this stage, your prospects actively evaluate what you offer and may even compare them to your competitors.
• Intent: The prospect clearly intends to purchase from your brand. They may request a quote, sign up for a free trial or add items to their shopping carts.
• Decision or Evaluation: This happens before people check out their shopping cart items. They can make a final evaluation, comparing the price and features.
• Purchase: This stage of the marketing conversion funnel is where conversion happens, and prospects become paying customers.
• Post-Purchase Engagement: At this stage, your brand engages clients to ensure customer satisfaction in an effort to turn them into repeat buyers and brand advocates.
It’s important to note that a marketing conversion funnel can vary by industry and business model. Some sales funnels may have more stages, and others may call each phase differently. Still, they all have the same concept of guiding leads into paying customers. A CRO services expert can help formulate custom sales funnels for your business.
TIP: Nurture leads at each stage of a marketing conversion funnel. Implement specific strategies at each phase to keep customers engaged, interested and moving through the funnel. If you don’t know the first step to fostering customer engagement, working with a seasoned conversion rate optimization services expert can help you formulate a custom CRO strategy that best suits your business’s specific needs.
How Are Conversion Rates Computed?
A conversion rate optimization consultant can help you determine the factors affecting your current conversion rate.
This rate is computed by dividing the total conversions you have made in a given period (say 500 closed sales) by the total number of site visits you have generated (for instance, 10,000 site visitors). Multiply the quotient by 100, and you have your conversion rate. In this example, your conversion rate will be 5%.
After determining the figures for this metric, you can consider the keywords, the marketing campaigns and specific strategies you applied to make specific adjustments and increase conversion rates. The job of a CRO services expert is to apply these adjustments based on your company’s data.
A Broad Look: How To Increase Conversion Rates
Conversion rate marketing is all about identifying and implementing strategies that help with engagement. To boost traction and increase conversions, any conversion rate optimization expert will recommend increasing engagement levels at every stage of the funnel.
One way to do this is by sharing information about your products and services and continuing to communicate with leads across preferred channels.
Keep in mind that conversion rates measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and other sales efforts at every stage of your sales funnel.
A conversion rate optimization expert can use this figure to quantify the percentage of website visitors who take any desired actions, such as subscribing to your newsletter, inquiring about a product or service, downloading a lead magnet, filling out a form and making a purchase. These factors can be implemented with a solid CRO marketing strategy.
Common Challenges in Conversion Rate Marketing (and Tips To Recover)
Nothing can be more frustrating to business owners and marketers when your marketing efforts do not convert your leads. Work with a seasoned conversion rate optimization consultant if you are experiencing any of the challenges described below.
Here are some common challenges you may encounter and conversion rate optimization tips to help you resolve them:
Low Website Traffic
This is one of the most common scenarios businesses face with a newly launched website or an under-utilized digital asset. You are not getting enough traffic to your site, affecting your ability to convert.
It’s important to note that conversion rates normally range from 1-5%. If you’re not generating enough site traffic, you should also expect to generate low sales.
Increasing conversion rates in this situation requires you to focus on increasing site traffic.
Tip: You can lean on strategies such as social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You can focus on boosting your revenue figures after reaching that point when you’re generating plenty of traffic for your site.
Lengthy or Complex Checkout Process
Studies show that 18% of shoppers abandon their carts due to a complicated checkout process (Ecommerce Booth, 2019). A complicated or lengthy checkout experience can prevent an interested shopper from becoming a paying customer.
Tip: Make things simple for your shoppers. For instance, enable Google Address Lookup to prevent users from having to enter several lines in the address section. This makes the process easy and convenient on a mobile device. It also helps avoid potential shipping errors.
High Bounce Rates
You can use Google Analytics or other tools to check how much time visitors spend on your site’s pages. Bounce rate is a metric in web analytics to measure the percentage of site visitors who land on your site and leave without further interaction.
A high bounce rate could mean that site visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for. It can also mean the user experience isn’t engaging enough.
However, before you interpret your bounce rate figures, consider the context and purpose of each page you create. For instance, single-page articles and contact forms can bounce higher. Still, they’re valuable to the overall site experience.
There are several other scenarios that you should look into that may contribute to your site’s high bounce rate:
• Your site’s design is unattractive or outdated, leaving a negative first impression on site visitors.
• You have broken or inaccessible pages, prompting a user to immediately hit the back button.
• The information immediately appearing on your site doesn’t match what the user expects.
• A poorly written copy can also cause visitors to return to the search engine results, looking for information elsewhere.
Tip: Since it’s impossible to determine which of these factors contributes to your higher bounce rate, it is best to go through each one of them and perform some diagnostic work and a site audit.
High Shopping Cart Abandonment Rates
According to one study, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.57% (Baymard Institute, 2019) This is a common phenomenon where site visitors view your products and put some items in their carts. However, instead of checking out, they abandon their carts before completing the purchase.
The most common reasons for high abandonment rates include:
• There is no sense of urgency to complete the purchase.
• The buyer wasn’t convinced that the products weren’t worth the price.
Tip: Perform A/B split tests to determine which factor is significant in cart abandonment. You can create a sense of urgency by running your offers for a limited time. Create scarcity by providing only a limited number of items in stock.
You can also tweak your sales copy by using the right trigger words like:
• Clearance
• Limited time
• One time only
• Instant
• Last chance
In addition, you can also offer a bonus incentive such as free shipping but only for a limited time. You can also provide a surprise gift for the first ten purchases. However, it is important to remember that creating a sense of urgency should be used in moderation.
More Tips for Recovering Cart Abandonments
Consider the following tips to help you recover from cart abandonment:
• One CRO strategy you can utilize is sending follow-up emails. Send a cart abandonment email one hour after the incident. Follow up with another email after 24 hours. Finally, make a last-ditch effort and send another follow-up after 48 hours.
• Use chatbots on Facebook or other messenger platforms using an abandoned cart series to automate your follow-up messages.
• Suppose the cart value reaches a certain amount. In that case, you can set up an exit intent prompt to pop up, offering a discount if the customer continues with the checkout.
• Another CRO strategy involves alerting your customer service staff for potential high-value sales. They can perform an outbound call to follow up with the customer and close the sale.
Lack of Personalization
More and more, users are finding value in personalized experiences and connections with their vendors. So much so that personalization has become an expectation for brands, rather than a nice-to-have. If you’re offering generic, run-of-the-mill user experiences to leads, you likely won’t convert them.
Tip: Use a personalization strategy catering to each customer’s individual preferences. You can set up custom product recommendations based on their previous purchases. You can also provide customized content and exclusive offers based on the products they’re interested in and their behavior on your site.
Work With Conversion Rate Optimization Specialists
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a systematic approach to improving the capability of your digital assets to convert leads into paying customers. Thrive Internet Marketing Agency provides effective conversion rate optimization services to boost site traffic, engage visitors and enhance user experience.
Our specialists can help you identify conversion barriers while optimizing site design to elevate the user experience. We also design personalized site features and perform A/B testing to determine how your brand can best engage visitors and convert them into customers and brand advocates. Contact us today to learn how we can take your business to the next level.
