Pondering how to increase your website conversion rate is positive. You are asking the right question. In this post, we guide you on some core fundamentals to improve your conversion rate.
We appreciate that talk of digital conversion, landing pages, and the inbound methodology may represent a new vocabulary. Let us help you.
At our recent Expert Exchange on behalf of Futurpreneur in Toronto, we were able to discuss business website goals and challenges. All the entrepreneurs are motivated to improve content engagement and leads. The advice builds on our post You have a website – what’s next?
Understanding visitors
Before we jump into designing digital conversion, we need to take a gigantic step back. Who are we trying to convert and why?
A process of conversion is relevant to advance visitors into leads. What you might offer as an incentive for someone to convert will depend upon who they are. You need to develop your personas. These are fictional representations of your customers. Many international blue-chip companies realise that developing personas allows them to understand their customer in a way that had never previously. It is a worthwhile investment of your time.
Landing pages
According to Leadpages, 85.9% of people surveyed in 2016, didn’t know what a landing page was.
“A landing page is a webpage that is designed to take web traffic, and convert visitors in a particular way, for a particular reason,” states Leadpages.
In preparation for the Futurpreneur Expert Exchange session, we analysed 16 websites. None were using a landing page. The shopping cart and contact us does not qualify as a landing page.
Simplistically, a Call-To-Action (CTA) button leads to a Landing Page that contains a Form and activates a Thank You Page and Content Offer delivery email.
Anatomy of a best practice landing page
- Normal webpage navigation, extraneous links are removed
- Contains a form with the minimal number of fields
- A clear, concise and action-oriented headline
- Explains the offer
- Includes a relevant image
Conversion analytics
You have already recognized that the conversion of your website is less than you desire. You must be looking at the numbers, to see how many visitors engaged with your content. That’s a great start.
If your conversion rate on a content offer, CTA and landing page is disappointing, it points to the fact that the action you wish the website visitor to take is not appealing to the customer or is not appropriate for that stage of the buyer journey. A rethink is needed.
- Examine your buyer personas.
- Use the buyer journey to map suitable content offers that will resonate with your persona.
- Build dedicated best-practice landing pages to deliver compelling offers to achieve a 20% conversion rate.
Inexpensive inbound tools include HubSpot Marketing Free and MailChimp (or equivalent) that reveal click rates, form submissions, and downloads.
The world of inbound marketing has much value to small business seeking to increase awareness of their business products and services.
Photographs courtesy of Jennifer Blunt Photography