There are all sorts of goals your businesses may have when it comes to digital marketing. Maybe you need to increase brand awareness. Maybe you're more interested in boosting traffic to your landing page or your website. Although the immediate goals and tactics will vary, ultimately the long-term intent is to increase sales or conversions (a sign-up of some kind, for example).Conversion is key to making all your digital marketing efforts worthwhile. Utilizing the appropriate digital marketing channels is important, of course, but you always need to direct some of your efforts specifically toward optimizing your conversion rate. There are a few different ways to go about it, but we recommend you observe how it's being done by the leading businesses (both in your industry and in others). It will also pay off to do a little spying on your biggest competitors. Symphonic Digital can help you learn how the masters approach conversion rate optimization and discover the best way for you to optimize your website's conversion funnel.Read on ... And don't forget to hit us up if you have any ideas or need a little guidance specific to your brand and your business goals.
Conversion Rate Optimization Basics
Before you learn how to optimize conversions, it’s helpful to understand exactly what conversion rate optimization entails. Your overall conversion rate is fairly simple to calculate. What percentage of visitors to your site end up making a purchase? All your marketing efforts should have the general goal of improving that number, but conversion rate optimization requires you to analyze each individual aspect of an entryway to your website to determine which areas can be improved to achieve higher conversions.Every website visitor is taking a journey. You want the end of that journey to be a conversion, but more often than not, distractions and barriers you've thrown up send the visitor off on another path.Think of CRO as fine-tuning that journey so the story ends up the way you (the storyteller) intended.
Optimize For Traffic ... Or Optimize for Conversion?
Bringing traffic to your website may be your first priority, since site optimization doesn’t matter if you don’t have any visitors. But after you have visitors, you need every advantage you can get to turn those visitors into customers. Imagine you have a website that gets 5,000 visitors every month, and out of those 5,000 visitors, you get 50 leads. Of those leads, you get five customers. If you wanted to boost that to 10 customers, what’s the best option forward? You could try to draw more traffic in, getting 10,000 visitors each month. Assuming the quality of traffic isn’t impacted, you could get 10 customers that way, but your conversion rate would be the same.If you boost your conversion rate rather than overall traffic, you can get 10 customers a month out of 5,000 visitors rather than trying to double the size of your overall visitors. More visitors will lead to more customers. The original scenario featured a conversion rate of 1 percent, but if you could boost that to 2 percent, you’ll have double the amount of leads and customers without having to spend additional money on building traffic.
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A Guide to Designing High Converting Landing Pages
Doubling the customer base without increasing traffic is a worthy goal for any business, and there are quite a few ways to accomplish this — but keep in mind that you shouldn’t pick just one. Optimization in the digital space always works best by integrating multiple strategies at once, so keep all of the following strategies mind when you’re trying to boost your conversion.
An Iterative CRO Process Starts With A/B Tests
Every change you make to your website should make it easier for your customers to convert.One of the hardest things for a lot of web designers and business owners to accept is that their preferences aren’t always compatible with the audience’s preferences. You may think colorful, large buttons and carousel photos that slide across your home page looks awesome, but your market might respond better to a more subtle, textual call to action. That’s why you have to leave your assumptions behind and solely base changes on data collected from your iteration and CRO efforts.Think of these tests as the scientific method in action. When you make any sort of change, you have to come up with a hypothesis first. What kind of result do you think you’ll get from the specific change? As the data comes in, it will prove your hypothesis either right or wrong, and you can make adjustments accordingly. The best part about an iterative approach is that you inevitably innovate and boost conversion simultaneously — often without even realizing it. Even something minor, like changing the color of a CTA button, can effectively function as both a website upgrade and a conversion booster. You just have to make sure you’re constantly testing your changes and analyzing the results.Testing is the most important aspect of CRO. There are plenty of methods you can try to boost your CRO, as you'll learn about in the next section, but discovering what works best for your unique business is essentially a game of trial and error. The first step to optimizing conversions with A/B tests is to use tools like Google Optimize. You don’t have to be super technical to crush it with Google Optimize, and the price—free—is just right.This tool offers the chance to conduct an A/B test—a randomized experiment using two or more variants of the same web page (A and B). For example, variant A is the original and variant B would have at least one element that is modified from the original. You might test a change to a call-to-action (CTA), change the color of a button, or remove an extraneous form field.
Optimizely empowers marketing and product teams to test, learn and deploy digital experiments
Once you're comfortable creating variants and experiments, you can expand the scope of your testing to get detailed data about what changes worked and what changes didn’t. When you’re looking to upgrade your site, having this data at your disposal allows you to pinpoint areas to make changes instead of picking things randomly that you think could potentially look better.Implementing CRO iteratively is ultimately more affordable than updating blindly. Let’s assume your website isn’t achieving a conversion rate that you’re happy with. You could implement a site-wide overhaul in an attempt to boost conversion, but reinventing the wheel may not be necessary.With an iterative process, you can gather data about specific problem areas so that you can simply apply a patch rather than scrapping the entire site design and starting over.
How Do Business Sites Optimize Conversions? Here are 3 Ways
1. Use CTAs The Smart WayOne of the easiest things you can do to boost your conversions is to include a call to action in all your blog posts. This is a fairly common practice, but not everyone does it the right way. The call to action is usually a "boilerplate" sentence or two at the end, and while that can generate leads, it’s not the best way to go about it. Instead, try to include CTAs within the text itself, styled as an H3 or H4, in addition to your end-of-page CTA. This could lead to more blog traffic becoming customers.Oh.. That reminds us ...
To learn more about conversion rate optimization tools, call me (Steffen Horst) at 1-888-964-3498 for a free consultation. Even if you don't end up partner with Symphonic, I can give you some advice on finding the best digital marketing agency for your industry
Ok ... Now where were we?Oh, right ... Anyway, the location of your call to action won’t matter much if you haven’t optimized the CTA itself. For the best results, keep it short and focused on exactly what you want the visitor to do, and make it stand out from the surrounding text. Implementing it within your text as an H3 or H4 can work, but you should still make it a different color than the surrounding text so visitors know they can click on it.2. Target Your Ads and Landing PagesWhile you probably already have pay-per-click ads for targeted keywords, make sure you optimize your ads that specifically target high-intent keywords to attract people near the end of the buying cycle, as they’re the most likely to convert. Additionally, whatever call to action you use for your ad needs to correspond exactly with the landing page that your ad brings them to. Nothing drives a potential customer away quite like getting to a landing page that doesn’t offer what they’re looking for, especially if the ad promised it.3. Leverage AI Chat BoxesMany times, site visitors will have questions about your product or service that are not answered on your website. Some of them may take the time to navigate to your contact page to send an email, but many consumers won’t bother to do so and will just bail instead. To keep them on your site and help them with their issue, you can automate messaging boxes to appear on pages if people have been browsing for a preset amount of time. This will allow your team to chat with customers in real time, increasing the likelihood of making a conversion.
Mastering Conversion Rate Optimization With Symphonic Digital
With so much involved in conversion rate optimization, the best route for some busy business owners may be to outsource the entire process. Symphonic Digital can integrate into your current sales and marketing team, giving you experienced professionals performing tests and gathering data for you. With the results in hand, we can devise iteration and CRO strategies that boost conversion rates. Contact us today to get started optimizing your conversion rate.
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