As water is to life, conversions are to a business. They either go hand-in-hand or don’t move at all. With billions of dollars being spent on advertisements online, we can see new strategies and ideas coming up every now and then.
All of this requires a lot of brainstorming. And why is it done? For more conversions!
Conversion Optimised Websites
The aim is to keep getting better. But then again, how good is good enough? Are we talking about 2% conversion rates? Or 4%? Or is it the 10% barrier that we are trying to penetrate? Well, provided that the lead quality is being taken care of, higher is always better.
And how do you go higher? A couple of thought-through changes here and there can still uplift conversions to a few points on the number line. However, dramatic boosts that last, require actual optimization.
This makes analysis important. To be better you need to know where you are lacking. In order to do that, you need to analyze your results and strategy.
This is all about figuring out if your conversion strategy is optimized enough. And that’s exactly what we will discuss in this blog post. The general mistakes and the correct remedies. So, let us not waste more time and get to the point.
How good is good enough?
A recent study about conversion optimization reported that an average ad campaign receives a conversion rate of around 2.35%. How much are you getting? Is your conversion rate below this average?
Well, if it is, there is a long way to go. And if you are just around the average, there’s still scope for improvement.
It might surprise you to know that being around this average number of 2.35% means that you are one of 65% of marketers. The same study also reported that 25% of the campaigns have a conversion rate of around 5.31%. And when we talk about how good it can get, well the numbers can really be surprising.
The top 10% of the campaigns are those which achieve conversion rates above 10%. The average is 11.45% amazing, right? Hold your horses, some of them even have conversion rates above 20%.
All of these stats are good to look up to. But do they explain how good is good enough? Well, as mentioned at the start of this article, the aim is to keep getting better. And to find out if your conversion campaign is optimized enough, you can refer to the checklist and the tips below.
Checklist: How optimized is your conversion campaign?
The next question that comes up is, how good is your campaign?
Conversion Optimization is an uphill battle. To get the best ROI you need to really brainstorm and toil. Let us take a look at a checklist of things you need to keep in mind that will help you with better optimization.
1. Don’t just follow your competitors
With the emergence of online marketing and business opportunities, success stories have started getting more attention than ever. A guy sitting in front of his PC writing a few thousand words every day starts making crocks of gold. Who wouldn’t want to know how he did that?
Well, pardon me if you feel that I went off-topic. The point was to state that what worked for him wouldn’t always work for you. Many marketers fail to realize this. Result? Time and money get wasted.
This is just one disadvantage of duplicating somebody else’s strategies, expecting those to make you a mint.
What’s better?
While designing a landing page, one can have two different types of approaches.
The first approach is the cliched one. You get done with the designing and launching of the page online. Later on, you keep tweaking a few design elements which give you occasional, and usually, short-lived conversion hikes.
Talking of the second approach runs with a more solid and long-term ideology. You look at the bigger picture and focus on bringing in some really useful changes. Changes that hold the potency to dramatically lift up your campaign’s performance.
These are the changes that one should dig into. A few of those are mentioned below.
- Make use of headings: Heading is the first text a user will read on your website. You have a part of a second to win. If your heading clicks, the user will read further. Otherwise, a welcome addition to the bounce rate.
- Update your text copy: This is about another use of text. As we know, text is the most common medium of communication on the web. And when it’s about text on a landing page, it becomes highly crucial to make every single word count. So, if you haven’t already, update your text copy now. Focus on making it more crisp and actionable.
- Keep the layout simple: Even if detailing is required, try to keep your page’s layout as simple as possible. Use big fonts and images to do the same. This will catch user attention without inflicting a tacky appeal to the landing page.
So, analyze your campaign design. Think it through. Make notes. And bring in the required changes. That’s the only way to the promised land (I just love to say this).
2. Lube your conversion pipeline
Is your conversion pipeline easy to go through?
It’s really important for you to ask this to yourself. It’s about the one common mistake that companies make. It lies in the sign-up forms.
In the example above, the lead form has just too many fields to be filled up. A sign-up form asking for this many details will be a turn-off for any user. A good sign-up form will be easy to fill up. Will ask for lesser details and will consume the least amount of time.
For example, ImageScape reduced its contact form from 11 to 4 fields. This helped them boost the conversion rate by 120%.
Source – 7 Ways to Increase Your Form Field Conversion Rate (by Up to 672%) by Neil Patel
Coming up with conversion forms like these requires brainstorming, but is crucial for your business. So, get your notebooks and ink down all your imaginative ideas for a better conversion form.
Also, as a marketer, you should make sure that the buttons on the landing page are uniquely highlighted. This doesn’t mean that there has to be a use of vibrant colors. That can, in fact, be a bad idea. The point is to place the buttons in the right spots.
This will enable the users to see and act upon your CTA.
Tip: Videos significantly boost conversion rates. Using an explainer video for your landing page can help your campaign.
3. Prepare a retargeting strategy and juice out the most from every campaign
A study by AdRoll concluded that going through a survey, 90% of marketers agreed that Retargeting is as effective, or more effective than usual email, search, and other display marketing campaigns.
This just means one thing. Retargeting is an important part of any conversion campaign.
Every visitor who leaves your website is followed around the web. Cookies do it. This comes to use when you retarget the lost visitors and run an ad campaign. With the help of cookies, your ads are displayed to the users who came to your website but weren’t converted.
This increases the chances of converting the users who have seen your ads or have responded to those in the past.
It’s just about juicing out the most conversions out of your conversion campaign. And when in doubt if your retargeting campaign is good enough or if it can be made better, run a test for yourself. Examine the following and tweak if needed.
- Types of offers
- Ad copy
- Cookie length
- Frequency cap
- Value propositions
- Ad size
- Placement on page
- Images used
Retargeting is vital for optimizing your conversion campaign. If done right, retargeting can get you more qualified conversions and more loyal customers.
4. Keep digging until you find your ‘Amazeballs’ Landing Page
No matter how specific we try to be, creativity and design stay fluid. What might perform, and what might not? We’ll never know without trying, right? This uncertainty calls for trials.
Sometimes you can get lucky. The first landing page that you launched gets a 10-12% conversion rate. Considering this happened in the first go, you are lucky here. Turns out, this is one rare affair.
No wonder, 66% of companies test multiple landing pages on their websites. It’s a series of infinite trials that go on until you find your sweet spot. That one sweet spot, playing around which you always hit the ‘homerun’.
And have you found that sweet spot by now? Well, if you have then Congratulations! This is the time you create more such landing pages repeating the steps above multiple times. And if you haven’t, you still need to make more landing pages, all with different settings.
You’ve to do this to observe what is working the best for you. Once you find out, just hit the ‘homerun’.
Also, make sure that you are not wasting time and money on pages that are not performing for you. If you have such pages, it’d be a good idea to rethink the amount of time and money that you invest in those.
5. Quality over quantity. Every-effin’-Time!
Getting a conversion rate of 12% and still not being able to sell more won’t make sense. It will just be a waste of your money, as every single conversion will cost you money.
What’s the solution?
The answer is simple. High-converting landing pages don’t always make the best business. Turns out, you need to rethink the design if your campaign is lacking quality conversions. It just goes as mentioned in the steps above.
You go through the checklist. Make sure you are moving in the right direction. Find your ‘amazeballs’ Landing Page. Boost quality conversions. REPEAT!
Final words
In 2018, digital ad spending worldwide rose up by 7%. It now accounts for 43.5% of the total ad spend i.e., $273.45 billion. This is evidence that the world is spending more money on online ad campaigns. That’s what drives more conversions. But does it come that easy?
As users are becoming more aware than ever, it is crucial to pay attention to conversion rate optimization.
Tweaking a few things here and there might give you short-lived results. If we talk of the long run, these won’t help. For that reason, to make the benefits and conversion hikes stay, you need to rethink and rework the loopholes in your conversion pipeline. Keeping this checklist and the solutions in mind will help you do that.