Conversion is easily defined as the act of converting a site visitor or user into a paying customer. Conversion itself works with your existing traffic; it is not concerned with driving additional traffic. If you are instead looking for new eyeballs or potential customers, you still need to attract or acquire them before.
To track conversion if you are not selling a product or service online, you must identify your goal for that visitor. What action should the customer take on your site? Having the visitor complete an action is in essence conversion.
A visitor watching a video, subscribing to your newsletter, commenting on a blog or forum, filling out a contact form, or registering for membership – all can be viewed as conversions.
The first step in conversion is to define your conversion goal
Once you have the goal defined, you need to track your conversions to find out if you are converting effectively. Generally, conversion is tracked with a basic rate of conversion based on how many visitors completed the desired action divided by the total number of visitors.
If you are using ads or multiple channels, though, you can break it down further by looking at how well each of those marketing channels converts.
Conversion rates vary for marketers, industries and even individual businesses, so while you can use the industry average as a baseline, it is more productive to compete with yourself on conversion rate. By focusing on improving conversions, you can not only reach the industry average, but even rocket above it.
Conversion is the long-term goal in the funnel. It focuses on your existing traffic rather than on driving awareness and traffic to your site. Although conversion is often seen as the last step in the funnel, it affects all phases of the customer life cycle.
The conversion is kept in mind at each step of the funnel, which is why we focus on optimizing each of those steps toward conversion.
Common conversion marketing strategies include:
- Recommending other products
- Targeted offers
- Showing ratings/reviews
- Email personalization
- Live chat
- Click-to-call
- Co-browsing or screen sharing
- Voice messages from the customer
- Automated guides
- Retargeting
Even though there are some common conversion marketing strategies in use, they are primarily utilized as a foundation.
Increasing conversion rates relies on personalized customer experience, enhanced customer service and making changes based on customer feedback.
Optimizing landing pages for usability and focusing your content as well as reducing barriers for your customers will also help.
Tracking your metrics will also provide insight into your conversions.
Feedback is key to increasing conversion rates
Here are 11 tips for landing page optimization to increase your conversions.