Conversion Optimization: The Complete Guide to Turning Visitors into Customers

Are you an owner of an e-commerce store, or manage a digital marketing team? If your answer is a yes to any one of the situations, you must know about the impact of conversion optimization for your business. Conversion optimization tactics increase your business’s potential to get a lot more customers. 

Conversion optimization is a step-by-step process of improving the percentage of website visitors who will probably take a desired action. That action could be making a purchase, filling a form, or even clicking a button. Most of the businesses focus on getting a lot more traffic, but that won’t yield great results in the long term. 

By focusing on conversion optimization, you’ll not just be getting sales but will also use data and test out a customer journey, maximizing your revenue. In this blog post, you’ll get to learn about conversion optimization comprehensively. So, let’s begin right away!

What is Conversion Optimization?

Conversion optimization is a systematic process which focuses on increasing the percentage of website visitors to complete a desired action, better known as a conversion. You need to understand that conversion optimization isn’t about driving more traffic but about getting the most amount of benefit from your existing traffic. 

This process involves utilizing the data, analytics, and other user feedback to know why the website visitors aren’t converting. Marketers use different strategies, such as A/B testing, to refine the elements of a website for improving conversion rate optimization. Some of those elements are headlines, forms, CTAs, and even page layout. 

The ultimate aim of conversion optimization is to improve the user experience and even to maximize the business revenue without increasing your marketing budget. 

Why Do You Need to Follow a Customer-Centric Approach to Conversion Optimization?

There are many conversion rate optimization strategies that are focused a lot on percentages and averages. Improving conversions is the biggest aim of CRO marketing, but taking just a numerical route won’t help you in the long run. 

If you get tangled in just data points, you won’t be able to see the real customers behind them. By following a comprehensive approach to your website’s conversion strategy, you can understand the motivations behind the conversions. 

Here’s a step-by-step guide to follow the right conversion rate optimization strategy:-

Before beginning, you need to understand that if you want success with CRO marketing, you must understand your customers. The insights that you’ll generate will help you build a strategy which will take your business and even the user experience to the next level. Let’s go ahead with the step-by-step approach now:-

Step 1: Know the Most Crucial Conversions

The specific conversions you want can vary quite a lot compared to other businesses in the same niche, and it also depends on your organization’s goals. In case you run an e-commerce store, a conversion may be a purchase made, or even getting sign-ups for a free trial in the case of services. When you’ve understood the desired action you need to target, you should try to optimize the rate at which customers complete the desired action. 

Step 2: Strategize Your Conversion Funnel

The next step is to take a closer look at each page of the conversion funnel. This process is better known as funnel analysis, and the ultimate aim is to find out why the visitors drop off, causing lost conversions. 

You can even calculate the conversion rate and know the reasons why your website visitors drop off. You can find it out with the help of a web analytics tool, through which you can visualize how traffic navigates your site. 

With the help of the right type of funnel analysis, you will be able to know about the high-exit pages and even analyze each step of the conversion funnel. It will help you get the knowledge regarding low website conversion rates with the help of many integrated behaviour analytics tools, which will capture how users will interact with your website. It can include heatmaps and session recordings as well. 

You will be able to dive deeper and even filter the conversion data by going through the important demographics. It can depend upon the geographic region or even social media traffic. With its help, you’ll be able to segment the users and customize your funnel to fit the different types of target audiences. 

Step 3: Collecting the User Data

Once you’ve learned about the most important drop-off points in the funnel, you should gather a good amount of information regarding your users. It is an important step in your conversion optimization strategy. 

It can happen that an issue can be quite simple in preventing a majority of your users from taking a desired action. But, at other times, your site will be able to function perfectly well, and your target audience may still not convert. In case this happens, you need to explore the reason behind the data and try to double down on satisfying your users’ requirements. 

When you focus on the final action, which is the conversion, you need to understand that many things happen before that happens. It is that there are many reasons why people visit your website, and there are certain barriers which cause them to leave. At last, there are also specific hooks which can even persuade them to convert as well.

Step 4: Establish Testing Theories

The next obvious step will be to tie together all of the insights that you have generated from the data collected in the previous step. You can do so by establishing several testing theories and even determining which funnel features you need to add or remove so as to increase conversions. 

It’s understandable to feel overwhelmed while drawing the right conclusions from a huge amount of data. But that’s where the next step will help you out in testing the hypotheses so as to find out which changes you need to scrap. In fact, you also need to do some trial and error to find out whether your hypothesis holds true or not. That’s why you shouldn’t stress out too much about getting things right on the first try. Instead, focus on carrying out the right type of CRO iterative process. 

Step 5: Test Out Your Testing Theories

So, it’s time to check the validity of your theories and even carry out data-driven optimizations that are primed to increase conversion rate. When the question arises regarding CRO tests, both quantitative and qualitative metrics need to be analyzed. One will help you know about the what, and the other one will give you the why. By carrying out the A/B testing of each page, you’ll be able to analyze the UX page designs and even funnel flows. 

Step 6: Review the Results and Build Upon Them

The last step is to review the CRO marketing that you did, and even check the results of your tested changes with respect to the conversion rate. It’s because these results will increase on an incremental basis as you iterate. That’s more of the reason why you need to monitor your conversion rate and even decide upon the areas of your funnel which need to be tweaked with the help of an ongoing CRO program. 

Conversion Optimization Strategies that You Must Follow

1. Craft Text-Based CTAs

It’s a great strategy to include CTAs in a blog post, but they sometimes fail to persuade visitors into taking a desired course of action. You need to understand that many people have become habituated to ignoring banner-like information on websites. This inattention, along with the fact that visitors don’t always just read to the bottom of the blog post, clearly means that you need to follow a different approach. In that case, text-based Call To Actions can be pretty helpful. 

2. Capture Leads from Your Blog Content

A lead flow is one of the best conversion rate optimization elements that you can utilize on your website. Lead flows are pop-ups that have high converting potential, which are made specifically to get a lot of attention and even to offer unmatchable value. In case you think that pop-ups should be avoided, you should think twice, as they are one of the most potent tools for CRO. 

3. Carry Out Tests on Your Landing Pages

Landing pages are one of the most important elements of a website conversion strategy, and are crucial for getting a good conversion rate. The reason behind this is that a landing page is the location at which a website visitor transforms into a lead. Another reason can be that the existing lead is engaging a lot more deeply with your brand. In case you want to optimize a landing page, you need to run A/B tests so as to identify your best design and even content specifics for different audience segments. For example, with the help of A/B testing, you can easily test out distinct versions of your website elements to know which one performs the best. The best part about it is that you’ll be able to find out issues which are hampering your conversions. 

4. Nurture Leads to Marketing-Qualified Status

There are instances when website visitors need to go straight to the topic of doing business, rather than following the buyer’s journey or speaking with a sales rep. So, to convert these high-intent visitors into consumers, you need to ensure that they easily become marketing qualified leads(MQLs). It can ensure action through having synergy between web pages, seamless copy, and impeccable CTAs as well. 

5. Use Workflows to Improve the Efficiency of Your Team

There are plenty of automated workflows that you can create with the help of your team by using the right type of marketing automation software. For instance, by using marketing automation, it’s entirely possible to send out automatic emails, and that too with defined workflows. The leads can then book meetings with reps in just a single click. On the other hand, reps will receive notifications when leads take high-intent actions like having a look at the prices on your website. In case you work in e-commerce, you can even send out emails to individuals who have abandoned their shopping cart with the help of a gentle reminder. 

6. Incorporate Messages into High-Converting Web Pages

By utilizing an appropriate live chat software, you’ll be able to chat with the people who visit your website in real time. Alongside this, you can even provide them with the support and guidance that they need. If you’re serious about increasing conversions significantly, you can add these messaging features to your high-performing web pages. Some examples of this phenomenon are the pricing and product pages. It will help the leads get the required information that they need in real-time. Furthermore, you can also make your messaging and chatbots action-oriented. 

7. Double Down on Your High-Performing Blog Posts

When you’re publishing blog posts, you’re bound to get many opportunities for conversions. It will hold even more true if you have existing blog content present on your website. If you want to begin optimizing your blog content, you should find out the posts that have a great amount of web traffic but low conversion rates. Alongside this, you should also look at your blog posts that have high conversion rates. It’s because you’ll definitely want to get a lot more qualified website traffic to those particular blog posts. You’ll be able to do so by optimizing the content for the search results or updating it as required to make sure that it’s relevant for your target audience. 

8. Utilizing Retargeting to Engage your Website Visitors Again 

You need to understand that most individuals landing on your website will not take the action that you desire. However, when you’re able to retarget in the right manner on Google & social media platforms, you’ll be able to re-engage your audience who left your site. Retargeting works just fine in terms of tracking the visitors who visited your website. Then, these individuals are retargeted through online ads when they visit other websites all across the web. It is quite impactful when you are able to retarget those prospective customers who have visited your highest-converting web pages. But you must keep in mind that the general inbound rules apply here as well. Some of these rules are crafting persuasive copy, spectacular visuals, and an offer that your lead can’t refuse. That’s the basic framework of how retargeting works in terms of CRO marketing. 

Using AI for Your Website’s Conversion Optimization

1. Personalizing Content

AI utilizes machine learning to analyze the huge user dataset, which includes the users’ behaviour, browsing history, and preferences as well. This helps a lot in understanding the user intent. Afterwards, it can be used to dynamically change the website elements, such as showing a unique headline, product recommendation, or even an exit-intent pop-up. The best part about it is that this will be done for each visitor in real-time. It will ensure that each user will see the most relevant version of the page. As a result, the probability of conversion will see a significant boost as well. 

2. Automated A/B Testing

It’s a known fact that traditional testing is quite slow and even manual, adding to the issues. AI-powered tools, with the help of cutting-edge algorithms, can test out many different variations all at the same time. As a matter of fact, they can automatically shift the traffic towards the high-performing variant when the test is running. It will significantly speed up the optimization cycle, which will make sure that there is a better experience for most of the visitors. Moreover, it will reduce the risk of long-term losses from the variants that aren’t performing well. 

3. Predictive Analysis

AI can easily identify the subtle patterns and even issues that human analysts might miss. One such example is that of a specific user segment abandoning their cart because of a particular missing element. AI can help in predicting which leads are much more likely to convert or even churn. This gives a great opportunity to CRO marketers to carry out targeted promotions and even support at the right moment when it is needed. 

Wrapping Up

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a game-changing marketer or an innovative entrepreneur; you need your target audience to click on that CTA at all costs. That’s more of the reason why every e-commerce marketing strategy must have a properly laid out conversion rate optimization strategy. 

The CRO marketing strategies you read above can prove to be a great starting point. However, they must get many more of your website visitors to act just like you want them to. You can take it from there with continuous iteration and carrying out the tweaks, which will make your whole website a lot more persuasive. 

Are you looking to get the best conversion rate optimization services for your business? If your answer is in the affirmative, you must opt for Kinex Media’s proven and impactful conversion optimization services. Get in touch with us now, and let’s discuss your CRO marketing requirements.


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