Any traffic that is directed to a website comes from a myriad of sources, from social media, banner ads, conventional advertising, etc., and isn’t uniform or equal.
The level of engagement and knowledge of each source also varies. It is important to take these individual traffic sources into account when you are trying to formulate your strategies for enhancing your conversion rate.
The main objective of your strategies should be to provide maximum value to your users, without neglecting your business objectives.
The users should have experiences that inspire and motivate them. You can do this by mapping user-to-conversion funnels.
Utilizing Landing Pages and Traffic Segmentation to Improve Conversion Rates
You need to be aware of one thing: The greater the number of sources used by marketers to drive traffic to the site, the more congestion there is going to be in the marketing funnel.
If you have several different traffic-generating sources guiding traffic to the same landing page, you’ll never be able to figure out what’s working and what’s not.
The situation gets even more complicated when you don’t use any landing pages for your digital promotions.
Under these circumstances, it’s extremely difficult to measure the origins of traffic, which sources are and aren’t working, and where to focus your marketing efforts to increase conversions.
But you needn’t panic, there’s a way to do all of this, and that’s through funnel segmentation.
Funnel Segmentation
Funnel segmentation is simply driving traffic from various sources, such as social media, email, pay-per-click, organic searches, and display, to different landing pages. There are certain advantages:
1. Matching messages
When you create a landing page for each source, you can match the message of the source to its landing page. It will be an exact match and the users won’t be confused.
Depending on the type of communication used for each source, you’ll get higher quality and relevance scores and a reduced bounce rate.
2. Reports and accountability
Generating reports for each source is easy. You get the real numbers for each inbound marketing channel, which makes it easy to compare and see the performance of each source and its impact on the conversion rate.
This helps quickly identify the channels that are performing better.
3. Segmentation of traffic, experience and results
This helps streamline your operation, making it more transparent and making you and your team more accountable for conversions.
It allows you to tweak the channel or channels that aren’t working well by optimizing them for higher conversion rates.
4. Testing
By using different landing pages for each channel, you can test and tweak just the landing page and source of any one channel without affecting the performance of the others, which can certainly happen if you’re using the same landing page for all your channels.
It also helps build a competitive edge for each channel, with each competing to outdo the other, making your conversion rates soar.
Optimizing Traffic
In order to optimize traffic to your funnel, you have to look for the sources that will create maximum conversions at the lowest cost.
There are many sources for generating traffic and conversions. It is important to pay attention to each to optimize traffic and eventually conversions.
1. Social media
Social media is perhaps the most important way in which you can gather customer demographics. It gives you unique insights into your users, such as what offers are the most popular and the reactions to the various messages and content you put out there.
The overall objective in the case of social media is to engage and inform. This is best done through providing content that is interesting and informative, educating the audience about your business and its products, and holding off on overt sales pitches or leads to landing pages.
The data from your past leads provides you with a comprehensive picture of your social media and helps guide your future content strategy.
2. Email
Email campaigns are a good way to personalize on-site target leads. Creating custom landing pages for email campaigns is a good idea, as they provide more opportunities for you to leverage your services and products directly to the users.
This provides you with opportunities to utilize your knowledge of your leads to create a more effective marketing strategy.
It is also important to understand how and with which parts of the messages the leads interact in your email campaigns. This can provide you with essential insights into their interests and an opportunity to collect more data about them.
Each campaign paves the way for future campaigns by adding more segments to your lead database, and enabling you to send specifically targeted messages to each segment based on their interests and buying cycle position.
3. Paid searches
Landing pages for pay-per-click ads should be designed in a way that reinforces and logically moves forward the messages of paid search ads.
So a landing page that contains the same message as the advertisement, and is closely aligned with it, provides the best chance for conversion of the traffic that is being generated by the paid search.
It is essential to experiment with the various elements of the landing page during the life of the advertisement to improve the chance of conversions.
4. Organic searches
During organic searches, when a query is returned, just the page title and meta description are visible to the searcher. Your meta description and title for the page should be very closely aligned to or duplicate the content on your page.
When they click on your link and are guided to your page, it should deliver on the promise made to searchers by your meta description and title. This is the reason for aiming SEO at having the right page rank for the right keyword.
You should also work toward incorporating long-tail keywords relevant to your business in your website, and also concentrate on building deep links so as to put the target page in the search result for any given term.
5. Display
Pay a lot of attention to your banners. You need to work toward banners that provide the most relevant click-throughs to your site.
Also, the landing page that is linked to the banner should reflect the spirit of the banner in look, style and message; there shouldn’t be any discrepancies that create confusion and are detrimental to conversions.
6. Direct
You need to personalize your website for the visitors that you can identify as returning customers by using tracking cookies or a login. If you are unable to track your customers, then keep your home page fresh and create new content and offers without changing the main navigation and search elements.
This helps keep the interest of the returning customers alive, and the newer content won’t affect or interfere with the experience of the first-time visitors.
7. Building relationships
It takes time to build personal relationships; this is also true for the visitors to your site. You can’t expect to form relationships in just one visit or overnight; it is a time-consuming process.
That’s why it’s important to get names and email addresses for as many visitors to your website as you can. This allows you to nurture and gradually build relationships. Creating content that engages and interests the users on a regular basis pushes visitors through the marketing funnel toward conversion.
Final Remarks
Just because one of your sources is not living up to your expectations and giving you the conversions you hoped for, that doesn’t mean you should give up on it. You also shouldn’t aggressively follow so-called high converting traffic that may actually turn out to be more expensive than you would think.
It is only through trial and error that you can discover traffic sources that are viable for conversions and don’t cost you an arm and a leg. When calculating your return on investment, you must also take into consideration average revenue and the cost of generating the traffic for each source that leads to conversions. This is the only way you can find out whether your conversions are cost-effective.