The average landing page has a 2.35% conversion rate. This means on average, only around two out of 100 people who land on your page will do what you want them to — give you their contact info, buy your product, or book a demo.
The top 10% of landing pages, however, get conversion rates of 11.45% or higher. That’s more than five times the average.
The secret? Conversion marketing.
This guide will give you the basics of conversion marketing and share some conversion marketing tactics that will bring your leads closer to becoming customers.
What is conversion marketing?
Conversion marketing is a set of techniques marketers use to increase a webpage’s conversion rates.
Depending on your goals, a conversion can be defined in many ways.
For example, conversions can happen when a potential customer:
- Books a live demo with your sales team
- Watches your pre-recorded demo video
- Subscribes to your newsletter
- Signs up for an upcoming webinar
- Hits the “Checkout” button
- Upgrades their existing subscription
- Shares your products with their friends
In short, a conversion happens when your website visitors or potential customers take an action you want them to take.
Your conversion rate, therefore, is the number of visitors who took action (i.e., conversions) compared to your total number of website visitors. So if 10 out of 100 visitors booked a demo, your website would have a 10% conversion rate.
Conversion marketing is different from other types of marketing because it focuses on your existing audience (the people who are already on your website).
Other marketing tactics draw in leads and generate website visits. Conversion marketing tactics ensure that those visitors land on an optimized page that makes them want to click further.
Why is conversion marketing so important?
Even if you have 1,000 daily website visitors from your social media ads, search ads, and engaging content, those visits are useless if they don’t do anything.
Conversion marketing optimizes your site so that the people who visit your site don’t just leave. They stick around, click on stuff, and—eventually—turn into paying customers.
Conversion marketers focus on getting your potential customers through all marketing funnel stages. They use behavioral and historical data to figure out how to get more people to convert.
Simply put, they look at what your audience is searching for, what people are clicking on, and what campaigns have converted well in the past and use that data to optimize future campaigns and marketing materials.
Conversion marketing is important because it directly affects sales. Optimizing communications at every stage of the customer journey allows marketers to consistently maximize clicks while minimizing spend.
7 Conversion marketing strategies to start using today
The act of optimizing your homepage, blogs, and other webpages for clicks is known as conversion rate optimization (CRO).
1) Understand your audience
To optimize your pages for conversions, you need to get to know who you’re talking to. A clear understanding of your audience’s priorities and pain points will help you create a website experience that they will love.
The simplest way to understand your website visitors is by talking to them:
- Send your leads email surveys
- Use exit intent surveys to find out why visitors leave your site instead of interacting with it
- Set up calls with your existing customers to build customer profiles
- Run a survey on social media that people can answer with a single click
Get a feel of what your audience wants from you so that you can give them exactly that.
For example, most content marketers agree that storytelling is a great way to grab attention and make your content stand out. But if recipe writers only talked to their audience, they’d know that their readers just want the recipe and will usually scroll past all the fluff to get to it.
Knowing your audience will help you avoid fluff that your audience doesn’t want.
2) Be direct with your value proposition
Understand the exact problem your audience needs you to solve, and then create a value proposition statement that conveys how your product solves that problem.
To create your value proposition, first find out how your audience describes their problem. Then, use simple language to show your audience that you have the solution. Lastly, craft your whole copy and add a clear call-to-action (CTA).
Let’s create a value proposition for a simple yet helpful product—the Squatty Potty.
Problem: “Using the toilet is an unpleasant experience.”
Solution (+How): “The Squatty Potty helps you comfortably get into the squat position, which loosens your intestines and reduces stomach aches.”
CTA: Learn more
This is what that looks like on their webpage:
Right on their homepage, they have a clear value proposition. They also have a “Learn the science” button for leads who want to learn more.
3) Reduce friction
If it takes 10 clicks to get from “add to cart” to “checkout,” your visitors will leave your website and probably never return.
The best user experiences are frictionless. Which means potential customers can get from your product page to your checkout page smoothly—without bugs, missing buttons, or obscure steps.
To reduce friction, find out how your customers are interacting with your website. You can use heat mapping tools to observe how your potential customers interact with your site and where they encounter obstacles that make them exit.
Charli Marie, for example, used a tool called Hotjar to see why her product landing page was only getting a 0.9% conversion rate.
She found that her visitors mistook the words “Buy Now” at the top of her page for a button. She also found that visitors didn’t scroll far enough to find the actual “Buy Now” button that appeared below the fold.
By observing what her visitors clicked, Marie was able to optimize her page. She removed misleading text and placed the purchase button above the fold, which means that visitors can click “Buy Now” as soon as they land on the product page.
Within a month, Marie’s conversion rate more than doubled.
You can also get more visitor behavior insights by looking at session replays—most heat map tools also have session replay features.
4) A/B test your pages
A/B testing happens when you make two to three versions of something—an email subject line, a landing page button, an article title—and publish both variations to see which performs better.
After optimizing your landing pages based on user behavior, the natural next step is to figure out how you can further improve them and get even more conversions.
Use A/B testing software like Optimizely and VWO: Visual Website Optimizer to easily set up different versions of your landing page.
Then, after a set amount of time, look at which landing page is performing better.
We recommend making small tweaks—change the color or text of your button, change the page title a little—for each version so that you know exactly what elements contributed to better conversion rates.
5) Nurture and retarget your leads
Most of your visitors won’t immediately make a purchase the first time they visit your site. They’ll click on an ad, land on your optimized product page, add that product to their virtual carts, scroll through your website, and then—right before they hit “Checkout”—exit your site.
Everyone does it. You’ve probably done it at some point. And while there isn’t a reliable stat to tell us how many people end up not finishing the purchasing journey, we can safely say that potential customers usually need to think about it before finalizing their purchase.
With that in mind, it’s vital to nurture your leads. If your website visitors signed up to your site or have given you their contact information, you’ve already gotten one foot in the door.
They’re already thinking about you, so give them a couple of gentle nudges to remind them why they hit that “Add to cart” button.
For example, you can;
- Optimize and automate your email sequences to include an abandoned cart email reminder
- Use cookies (with permission) to save shopping cart content
- Set up retargeting ads to stay top of mind
At this point, your goal is to continue nurturing your relationship with potential customers while also reminding them why they considered purchasing in the first place.
6) Create content for each stage in your funnel
Some marketers swear by bottom-of-funnel (BOFu) content to optimize for sales. Other marketers swear by top-of-funnel (TOFu) content to increase awareness.
Conversion marketers need to create both types of content and more. To optimize for conversions, you need to have content that brings your website visitors from one stage to the next, all the way through to the final conversion.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the three stages you need to create content for.
Top-of-funnel
TOFu visitors don’t know that they have a problem and don’t know what they’d need your solution for. They’re merely interested in learning more about your product and what it can do. They probably found you through a random social media ad or a search ad.
TOFu content is usually educational. It defines terms, gives a high overview of what you do, and states the problem you solve.
It almost never asks visitors to make a purchase. Conversion marketers know that TOFu visitors aren’t ready for that yet.
Instead, the common CTA at this stage is “Learn more” or “Find out more.”
Middle-of-funnel
After your visitors understand your product better, they move to the middle-of-funnel (MOFu) stage. They know that they have a problem—but are not quite sure how they want to solve it.
MOFu content is usually still educational, but with more mentions of the product peppered in. It doesn’t go for the hard sell. Rather, it aims to resonate with visitors and make them want to dig deeper.
At this stage, the common CTA is, “Book a demo” or “Chat with us.”
Bottom-of-funnel
Lastly, at the BOFu stage, your visitors know that they need your product or something similar to solve their problems.
This is where you go in for the hard sell. Use your product pages to show your potential customers that you understand their problem and that you can indeed solve it.
Then, tell your visitors what makes you different—mention certain features that other products don’t have, which might make them pick you over a competitor.
The common CTA at this stage is “Sign up” or “Buy now.”
7) Review your data
Always turn to the data. Conversion optimization is difficult because behaviors, preferences, and even target audiences change. Let your data guide you at every stage so that you know when you need to start re-optimizing your pages.
Some stats that you can look at are:
- Cart abandonment rate. How often your visitors add items to their carts and then click away.
- Email click-through rates. How many people click on links in your emails compared to the total number of people who open them.
- Length of the purchasing journey. How long it takes for your visitors to make a purchase.
- Cost per acquisition. How much you spend on ads to get one paying customer.
- Return on ad spend. How much money you make per ad channel.
- Time spent on site. How long your visitors stay on your website before clicking away.
- Interactions per visit. The average number of clicks a single visitor makes when they land on your site.
- Value per visit. How much each visitor spends on your site, on average.
- Conversion rate. How many people who land on your site perform your desired action.
Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and Raven to keep track of your metrics.
Wrapping up — Utilize conversion marketing tactics to boost your bottom line
The bottom-line is you want more conversions. And the way to get more conversions is to get your visitors from point A to point B as quickly and as smoothly as possible.
To do that, you need to get into the customer-first mindset. If you understand your audience, tell them how you can solve their problem, and then make it easy for them to access your solution, you, too, can achieve a conversion rate of 11.45% instead of the average 2.35%.