All around the world, marketers are having sleepless nights over thinking about how to convert potential leads into customers. Businesses spend an enormous amount of money on creating and maintaining their websites, online promotions and other marketing tools to induce conversions. No matter, how big your business is conversion rates would still matter to you. But, for a beginner, the journey to create conversions is even tougher as the resources available to him are scarce. Before discussing the Conversion strategies, let’s quickly refresh our knowledge about Conversions.
Conversion Rate
So, what exactly does conversion mean?
Conversion in marketing context refers to the transformation of a prospect into a customer. In simple terms, anyone who visits your web page is a prospect. Prospect means someone who might or might not be a potential customer. A visitor who leaves some information like contact details on your web page is a Lead. Lead is a person who may be interested in your product but would require some convincing on your part. A visitor who actually purchases from you is your customer.
The percentages of people who are converted from prospect into customers determine the conversion rate for a business. The conversion rate for almost all businesses is quite low.
That is why there is a phenomenon called Conversion funnel in e-commerce language. The word “funnel” depicts the significant decrease in the number of people with each subsequent step. Drew Hendricks in one of his blogs on Forbes.com describes the conversion funnel through the popular AIDA model. AIDA is an acronym for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. Anyone who is familiar with marketing would surely know this. This model very clearly depicts the working of a conversion funnel.
- Awareness: This is the first and the broadest part of the conversion channel. Here, the purpose is to make people aware of your business. If people wouldn’t know about your existence, how would they ever become your customers? The more awareness you create, the more are the chances of conversions.
- Interest: You made them aware that you exist, but why should they care? There has to be something for them. Transforming awareness into interest is really hard and critical for a marketer. This is the phase where you would be able to get your leads. You have to create an interest and intrigue in them for your product.
- Desire: Many people might be intrigued by your product, but not all of them would desire it. Here, a lot of factors like price, quality, brand image, etc. come into play. You have to make them feel that they need your product.
- Action: This is the narrowest part of the funnel. Here the actual purchase is going to take place. There will be even fewer people who would convert their desire to buy into action.
A study published on Winthecustomer.com suggests that “80% of your website visitors never come back after the first visit. 15% may come back and go without leaving any information. 4% may leave some information but would not reach you proactively and only 1% may actually complete a transaction”.
And these are the numbers for the businesses who have already been in the industry for quite some time. Imagine the numbers for beginners for who even the first stage of the funnel is quite hard.
10 Conversion Strategies for Beginner Marketers
You have just started out. You definitely don’t have a huge marketing and advertising budget. Being new in the market, people are not really aware of you. To top it off there is fierce competition in the market.
With the little money that you have, even if you are successful in creating a great website, invest on SEO and drive traffic to your website, how will you increase your conversion rate? This is quite literally a million dollar question.
And today we will share with you 10 such strategies that will help a beginner marketer to increase conversion rates.
1. Focus All Your Marketing Efforts on Your Target Audience
Being a beginner, you might be tempted to attract the attention of a wider audience to drive more website traffic. With the help of many online marketing techniques, you might be successful in driving huge traffic to your website. But, that would not be beneficial to you because not all of them would require your product.
For e.g. your product is skincare solutions for teenage girls. With the help of email marketing, banner ads, pop-ups, etc. you are able to drive 1000 visitors to your website. Out of them, only 400 are females. Out of the 400 females, only 100 are in their teens. Did getting 1000 visitors for your website provide you with any benefits? No.
The better way to do this is to identify your target audience. Who are the people that need your product or service? Once you have identified them, focus all your marketing efforts on them only. It will save you a lot of money and efforts while giving better results.
2. Content Marketing
Another conversion strategy for beginners is Content Marketing. It is a highly effective, popular as well as affordable style of marketing. Content marketing is the creation and sharing of unique and valuable online content to your target audience.
Content can be anything, an article, a blog, a video, an image or a combination of these. The most important criterion is to create a content that is valuable to your target customer. When you know who your target audience is, you can create your content around the things that would interest them. A lot of tools like Google Trends, etc. would help you in finding out the top keywords used by your target audience.
3. Produce Superior Quality and Unique Content
Creating and sharing content these days is quite easy. But at times, people tend to overlook the quality part while over emphasizing on quantity. No doubt, more frequently you update content on your website; the better it is for driving traffic to your website. But, it is very important to remember no one is going to be interested in a crappy, poorly-written or copied content. Never compromise on the quality of your content.
The quality of your content will decide whether a visitor would come back to your website or not. If your content is unique and fresh and strikes a chord with the customers, you can easily reach the second phase of the conversion funnel.
4. Make Your Content Headlines Attractive
This is no secret that there is a lot of content available online for almost everything. A user has a lot of options to choose from and the time spent on deciding which website to click on is just a few seconds.
While your Google ranking is important, one more important factor is the attractiveness of your headline. A user decides which content to read based on the attractiveness of your headline only. Gone are the days when people adhered to maxims like, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”.
Now due to being spoil by choice, the cover (content headline) is the most important factor. If your headline is intriguing or attractive or incites curiosity, people are more likely to pay click on your website to go through the entire content.
5. Design a User-Friendly Website
When you design your website, design it from the customer’s perspective. Sometimes for the sake of being different, we deliberately complicate otherwise simple things. And it puts off a lot of visitors. On the other hand, being too simple or too common is also very dangerous. In this case, people are not able to trust you.
Try to avoid the extremes. Your website should neither be too simple nor too complicated. Do not add too much or too little information on your website. Too much information would slow down your website, thus decreasing the incoming traffic. Too little information would lead to the visitors abandoning the page due to lack of information. Make sure your website is user-friendly with all required product information, payment options, etc. If a person desires to purchase something, they should be able to do so without any glitches.
6. Improve Your Credibility
You are new in the market. People would be reluctant to make purchases with you since they don’t trust you yet. They would need some assurance, preferably from a reputed third-party about your credibility. To gain third-party references, you need to network a lot. Write guest blogs on highly influential blog posts and provide backlinks to your own website to improve your credibility. Try to get some media coverage. Talk to some newspapers or online news portals about your company, your products.
You can also ask your early customers to review your products on your website as well as third-party websites. Attaining certifications and recognition would also be helpful. The idea is the more an authoritative and independent third-party speaks favorably about you, the more people will trust you. And as more people trust you, your conversion rate will automatically increase.
7. Leverage Social Media
Use Social media extensively. Post a lot of engaging content on all social media platforms. Try to get people to follow you on all platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. As more and more people follow you, you can gradually push them through the conversion funnel.
Integrating your website with all your social media platforms is also said to be effective. Studies have shown that signup rates increase when people are given the social log-in feature. According to Drew Hendricks’ blog, studies have shown that 86% of users won’t sign-up for an account if it requires them to go through the registration process while 77% of users were comfortable with social log-in. Leveraging social media in the right way can significantly improve your conversion rate.
8. Increase Customer Interaction
For a beginner, customer interaction plays a greater role in increasing conversion rates. You need to build a relation of trust and respect with your customers. They need to know that you care for them and not just your profits. Interact with your customers as much as possible. Use social media, emails, forums, talk pages, live chat etc. to interact with them.
An honest and open interaction with your customers will help you improve your products and services. Make sure, all their queries are promptly answered. Do not make them wait. Ask for feedback and check if they are satisfied with the interaction. Keep all channels of communication open including phone and email.
9. Email Marketing
Email Marketing can also serve as an effective tool for increasing conversion rates. The idea behind email marketing is to keep on nudging your target audience till they take the desired action. But, don’t overdo it or you might land up in spam.
The email content has to be something of interest to the customer so that they actually open it. Easy Call to Action buttons should be included. The content should be short but engaging. It should be such that the person is compelled to go to your website.
10. Create an Urgency
A statement like, “ Sale ends in an hour” or “only 2 left in stock, hurry!!” create a sense of urgency in the minds of customers. Studies reveal that such statements are actually quite effective in increasing conversions.
It makes the user feel that everyone is buying it and if he doesn’t, he will be left behind. The fear being left behind everyone compels him to take prompt action. But, it is very important to note that overusing such statements might create opposite results.
If you see, “Sale ends today” sign on a website almost every other day, you are less likely to fell the rush of losing on a great sale.
Conclusion
As a beginner, driving traffic to your website is extremely crucial for you. But at the same time, you will have to pay attention to your conversion rates too. Only driving traffic to your website will not fetch desired results. Use all the above-mentioned strategies smartly and you will see an increase in your traffic as well as your conversion rates.
If you want to take the next step and improve your conversion rates in the eCommerce space, read 17 critical eCommerce threats killing your conversion rates.
