How to Convert More Visitors into Customers
Conversion rates are critical to your ability to turn leads into customers. If you don't focus on yours, you are missing out on a ton of sales.
Often we focus on traffic, advertising, and how to get our offer in front of more people.
But once you get to a certain point it becomes way easier (and cheaper) to double your conversion rate, rather than double your ad spend.
I live and breathe web development, startups, and conversion rates and I've been building tools to help manage and improve my own conversion rates.
They're currently free to use so please take advantage of them.
Let's talk conversion rates.
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Marketing is nearly a surefire way to get more visitors to your site. There's no room for debate there. If you want more traffic you can leverage paid advertising to get it.
Getting sales is the goal though. If your website can't convert that traffic, an infinite marketing budget wouldn't make you any more sales.
Why Conversion Optimization Matters
Let's say we make one sale for every 100 visitors on our site, so our conversion rate is about 1% right now.
We will also assume we make 10 sales a month and our goal this month is to increase that to 20. So what's the easiest and most cost-effective way to double our sales?
We could double our marketing budget and try to get twice as much traffic... OR we can improve your conversion rate!
If we make about 10 sales a month with a 1% conversion rate, that means we get about 1000 visitors a month. With the same amount of traffic, a 2% conversion rate would get us the 20 sales we are looking for.
And the point here is, getting a 1% conversion rate up to 2% might prove to be significantly easier than spending twice as much on marketing. With the same mindset, improving your conversion rate from 1% to 3% would get you the same number of sales as if you TRIPLED your marketing spend.
Hopefully, it's clear how impactful conversion rates are on your bottom line.
So what are typical conversion rates?
Good landing pages have a typical conversion rate of just above 2%.
But the top 25% of landing pages are optimized for conversions and hold conversion rates of 5% or higher.
The top 10% have conversion rates of 11% or higher.
There are many factors that contribute to these numbers and ultimately it depends a lot on your product as well.
But again, if you're not happy with your conversion rates and are able to get them from 1 to 10%, you should expect to get sales equivalent to what would've required you to spend 10 times as much on marketing...
Tools for Improving Conversion Rates
UserSurge is an excellent resource for getting more conversions on your website.
I use it on all of my websites, including this blog to grow my email list.
It lets you present modals, forms, and other widgets to your visitors without having to write any code or have your developer's make updates every time you want to tweak your design.
It's still being developed and we have a TON of really impactful features on our roadmap, but it's live and free for anyone to try out!
Here's a quick overview of how it works.
Select your starting template
A campaign is an organized plan to convert more users. The first step is to name our campaign and select a template to start out with.
The template is responsible for the content you want your campaign to display.
You'll start with a pre-built template that has some default or placeholder elements, but we can customize these things later.
You can choose between a few different pop-up modals, banners, and slide-in widgets (with way more to come in the future).
Customize and design your template
This step allows us to customize the template our campaign will use.
Depending on the type of template we are using, different customizations are available.
Additionally, to change any of the text in our template, click on the text on the preview.
Choose when you want to present it to visitors
To control when this campaign is shown to visitors we check for certain triggers and we make sure specified conditions are met.
Triggers
Triggers are certain events that occur such as a visitor leaving your website.
We call this page abandonment, and you can trigger pop-ups to catch the visitor's attention before they leave!
Conditions
Conditions can be configured to make sure your campaigns only display when you want them to.
This lets you target certain campaigns for certain visitors.
For example, you can set a condition to only display for new visitors. Then you can create a separate campaign with different text targeting returning visitors.
Publish your campaign
The last step is to hit publish!
Now it should be live. You can go back into your campaign and change anything else you want about it without having to make any changes to your website.
Let me know what you think or if you are interested in a certain set of features too. Reach me on Twitter or email.