An eminent author once remarked that a company's website is the door through which its customers enter to do business, and rightly so. No wonder marketing organizations across the world leave no stone unturned to drive traffic to their websites and hope this traffic will be converted into qualified leads that their salespersons can connect with and ink deals with.
The ability to drive sales revenues through existing website traffic goes a long way in enabling businesses to achieve high levels of profitable, long-term growth. One factor that plays a key role in boosting this ability is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Today, we’ll see what CRO is all about and look at various best practices you must follow to achieve high levels of CRO. But first, let’s try to understand the term conversion rate and how it can be calculated.
What Is Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of visitors to a company’s website who perform specific actions such as filling in a form, subscribing to the company’s newsletter, ordering a product, and so on. A website's conversion rate can be calculated using the formula given below.
Conversion Rate = (Number of Visitors Converted / Total Number of Visitors) * 100
For instance, you’ve defined a newsletter subscription as a conversion—if 10,000 people visited your website and 200 of them subscribed to the newsletter, then the conversion rate would be as follows.
(Number of website visitors who subscribed to the newsletter * Total number of website visitors) /100
i.e. (200 /10000) *100 = 2%
Having seen what conversion rate is and how it can be computed, let’s look at the definition of CRO.
What Is CRO?
CRO refers to all activities a company performs to maximize its conversion rate. The more effective its CRO initiatives are, the more qualified leads it’ll have; put another way, the efficacy of its CRO programs will have a direct bearing on the number of new customers it acquires.
We’ll now proceed to examine what constitutes a ‘decent’ conversion rate.
What Is a Decent Conversion Rate?
No universally accepted number makes up a decent conversion rate -- you must remember conversion rates vary from one company to another based on the industry, niche, revenue goals, channels used to generate traffic to its website, desired visitor demographics and so on. A report published by Statista revealed about 2.3% of visitors to the websites of online commerce companies in the US converted to dollar-giving customers. In comparison, this figure stood at more than 4% in the UK.
If you feel your conversion rate is low, you must find the right answers to a couple of key questions.
1. Is your conversion rate lower than the average in your industrial sector?
2. Do organizations with significant competition to your business enjoy a higher rate?
You must also consider a third possibility – you may have set goals your conversion efforts cannot meet.
In any case, you must develop a robust CRO strategy to achieve the desired conversions. Let’s see how.
What Does It Take to Develop the Winning CRO Strategy?
You must implement proven CRO best practices to increase your conversion rate in a big way. Here’re a few.
Include Text-based Calls-to-Action (CTAs) in Blog Write-ups
Your blog is one of the key elements of your website that plays a key role in increasing visitor conversions. Many companies present CTAs on banners but fail to make the visitors click them and perform the desired action. This is because readers of your blog posts often ignore information presented on banners. The problem is further complicated because most readers only skim through the write-ups and don’t read all of the posts.
You can overcome this challenge by including text-based CTAs in your blog posts. We’ve observed that CTAs consisting of a line of text containing a hyperlink to a landing page are often clicked by readers. Some of our clients have styled their text-based CTAs as H3 and H4, and this proved very useful in increasing the number of people who clicked the CTAs. We'll discuss enhancing conversion rates through your blog in a moment.
Insert Lead Flows in the Blog to Capture the Eye of Readers
A lead flow is a pop-up that can greatly improve conversion rates by attracting reader attention. Many of our customers have witnessed excellent growth in visitor conversions after including lead flows in their blogs.
You can use a variety of formats to include lead flows, such as slide-in boxes, drop-down banners, pop-up boxes, and so on. We’ve noticed that lead flows that utilize slide-in boxes have helped our clients increase clickthrough rates and submissions compared to CTAs at the bottom of their blog posts.
Perform Effective A/B Testing on Landing Pages at Regular Intervals
Landing pages are a vital part of your strategy to maximize conversion rates. You must conduct A/B testing on your landing pages to determine how visitors to your website respond to different versions of copy, offers provided, visuals, questions included in forms and other elements presented on the pages.
A comprehensive analysis of the test results will help you make suitable changes to the landing pages to increase conversions. One of our customers found out it could improve conversion rates by shortening the form on a landing page; the client realized visitors had to answer several questions, which hampered conversions.
Develop Automated Workflows to Help Your People Maximize Conversions
You must utilize state-of-the-art tools to create automated workflows to empower your team to increase website conversions significantly. For instance, team members can use the tools to dispatch e-mails automatically to prospects within your workflow. Later, when prospective customers respond to the e-mails, meetings can be scheduled immediately with just a click. Your people can also get notified in real-time when a potential client performs buying-intention-conveying actions, such as viewing the price catalog on your website.
Another primary application of automated workflows is reminding people who abandon shopping carts after visiting an online commerce portal. One of our customers uses marketing automation software to send emails to people who abandon shopping carts after visiting its shopping portal. The client found out that nearly 12% of the visitors bought its products after receiving an email. As you can see, the emails help the company significantly increase its revenue, which would otherwise have been lost.
Incorporate Chatbots in Webpages that Perform Well to Guide Visitors
Many of our clients have added AI-powered tools such as chatbots to high-performing web pages – such as product and pricing pages – to provide real-time support and assistance. The smart tools are of great use in delivering the information sought by prospective customers and engaging them very effectively.
It’s a good idea to program chatbots to respond appropriately to visitor actions. For instance, if a person visiting your website has spent more than 90 seconds on a page, the chatbot can step in to offer assistance and provide answers to any queries he may have.
I’d like to conclude by saying effective CRO strategies are critical to the success of organizations in the digital age and the best practices listed above help you multiply your conversion rates. At SunYello, our team of digital marketing experts has worked with businesses of all sizes across the industry, helping them transform website visits into revenue-fetching sales. We understand the needs of each of our clients are unique and earnestly believe technology is ONLY AN ENABLER in helping meet its needs – our strong focus on comprehending the specific requirements of our customers allows us to deliver perfect solutions that provide the best ROI.
Hope you liked this write-up. How do you convert website visitors into clients? We’d love to know.
