The Complete Guide to Improving Lead Conversion Rate
Generating traffic to your website is important, but it’s only half the battle.
Every visitor could become a customer, but not all do. If your website traffic isn’t reflected in your sales, your lead conversion rate may need some work.
It may be time to think about how to fix that problem.
You probably won’t ever be able to get 100% of your site visitors to buy something every time they’re on your page. But there are strategies that you can put in place to drive digital sales.
Read on for our complete guide to improving lead conversion rate so you can turn visitors into customers.
1. See Things from a Different Perspective
If visitors to your website don’t have a good user experience once they’re there, they’re unlikely to stick around long enough to buy something.
Your lead conversion rate will never improve if the leads aren’t there in the first place.
The only way for you to understand if your website is giving your customers what they want is to pretend that you’re a customer yourself.
Mimic the User Experience from Start to Finish
- Use key words to find your website from a search engine
- Land on the home page and make notes of what you notice
- Spend some time browsing product pages
- Choose a product to “purchase”
- Add it to your digital cart
- Complete the buying process
Evaluate How It Went
What did you notice while pretending to be a customer?
Did you like the look of the homepage? Was the basic information about the company easy to find?
Did you like the way items are displayed on the product pages? Was it easy to add items to your cart and complete the process of buying them?
If you noticed any issues or problems when trying to buy something from your site, then potential customers like probably dealing with the same issues.
Knowing what the visitor’s experience is like and all the challenges that may be getting in their way is the first step to fixing them. That could result in a better lead conversion rate.
2. Give Your Leads the Attention They Deserve
A great way to start the process of improving your lead conversion rate is to get to know your leads.
You should be capturing leads either through a web form or an email sign-up or a blog subscription (or even better, all three).
Spend some time going through that data until start to notice patterns or different categories that you can use to group your leads into smaller lists.
Once you have that you can create email marketing campaigns to send specific messages to specific groups that will find the information useful or relevant.
Those are the basics of lead nurturing, but there are some important dos and don’ts you should know about the process.
What to Do:
Do keep track of who is engaging with your message.
After you’ve sent an email campaign, pay attention to who opened the email, who clicked on the links included, etc.
When you’ve done a couple of campaigns, you can start to look at this information over time.
Those who open your emails on a regular basis or click through links to your website are best potential customers. Anyone who isn’t engaging with your emails may have just been a one-time site visitor, and it’s a valuable lead.
Do share the information.
The marketing team should be in charge of trying to improve the lead conversion rate with lead nurturing. The information they get out of it, though, can be helpful to others.
Setting up meetings where you go over what you’ve learned with sales reps and/or customer service reps keeps everyone in the loop. It helps everyone who might work with a potential customer do their job better.
What Not To Do:
Don’t over email.
There’s no one answer to how often you should send out marketing emails. What you should always try to avoid is emailing for the sake of emailing.
Think about how often you have something to say that your leads will value.
For example, are you running a sale? Did you just get a new product that you think people would want to know about? Do you have a great idea for a new way to use a product that you want to share?
If you have content that is timely or relevant, send an email. If not, wait until you do.
Don’t get too comfortable.
Email marketing can give you a bump in your lead conversion rate, but it’s not a permanent fix.
Don’t get too excited by increased sales that you get comfortable. If the emails you send all start to blend together, your lists will stop opening them and your sales could slow again.
Refreshing the design and updating the voice of your emails on a regular basis will keep people interested and returning to your site over a longer period of time.
3. Get the Right Leads in the Right Way
There are a lot of different ways to get leads from your website. One of the easiest is by having visitors fill out an online form.
This form could come as a pop-up that visitors see before they continue on to the main page or it could be offered to visitors in exchange for a small discount on their next purchase.
However you get customers to the form, you want to make sure that the form is asking the right information so that you can use it to work on your lead conversion rate later.
Name and email are obvious things to ask for and those fields should always be required, but you may get a lot out of including some other optional fields as well.
Asking customers for their address, age or occupation could give you a lot of good information on how to reach them through email marketing and what kind of custom content they should receive.
Certain visitors will probably skip over option fields, but the ones that do fill out a complete form are probably more interested in your company and would make for better leads to target anyway.
4. Use Your Blog for Lead Conversion Rate Success
First things first: if you don’t have a company blog, the time to start one is now.
Once you do have a blog and are posting well-written, unique content on a regular basis there are a couple of ways you can use the blog to improve your lead conversion rate.
Keep Visitors on the Page
Blogs give visitors something to read, which keeps them on your website longer. The more time they spend on your page, the more likely they are to buy something from it now or return to it later.
Link to Yourself
Blogs are a great place to include internal links that direct visitors from one page on your website to another.
If you mention a product or service in the text of a blog post, creating an internal link to its page will encourage visitors to check it out.
Your blog post should also always include internal links to your contact page, your social media pages, and any place where customers can sign up for newsletters or email campaigns.
Keep an Eye on the Comments
Not every company blog lets readers comment, but you could learn valuable information if you decide to. So often read through your blog comments to see what people are saying about your site.
If there’s something that people think you’re doing well, try to find ways to expand on that. If there’s a common complaint about your site or the user experience, using that feedback to improve could also help your lead conversion rate.
5. Let People Know When They’re Running Out of Time
Time is a great motivator, especially when people feel like they have to do something before it runs out.
Time can motivate web users too, which can mean good things for your lead conversion rate.
Putting a clock on discounted sales or special deals on services can get people to make the jump from website visitor to online shopper.
No one wants to feel like they’ve missed out on their chance to buy something at a lower price.
Running deals for a specific amount of time can get customers to finally buy something they’ve been looking at for weeks.
Putting items on sale is also helpful for getting first-time buyers to commit to something, since it doesn’t feel like as much of a risk if the price is low enough.
Letting customers know when a product is low in stock can work the same way, since people may feel like they have to buy it now, before it’s too late.
6. Design to Convert
No one wants to spend time on an ugly website, but having a well-designed site is not just about getting visitors to stay.
It’s about improving your leading conversion rate too. It’s about getting them to buy.
Sticking to the best design practices for your website can improve your user experience and your lead conversation rate.
Give Choices, But Not Too Many
Potential customers don’t want to have to spend a lot of time trying to find what they want.
If you’re giving them too many categories to choose from or an overwhelming number of navigation options, they’ll give up and find a competitor to buy from.
Keep your homepage as clean as possible and give customers a few options for what page–a product page, your blog, a request form–they can go to next.
Use Your Space Wisely
The first place a visitor’s eye will go is the middle of the page, so use that space to communicate the most important information.
Calls to action, product information or targeted message you want to make sure the customer doesn’t miss should be centered on the page.
Navigation bars should appear at the top of the page or as a sidebar, so that visitors don’t pay as much visual attention to it. That way they aren’t being constantly reminded that they can leave the page they’re on.
Consider Color Carefully
Color is a powerful design element that you can use to represent your brand and improve your lead conversion rate.
Because of that, you want to make sure that the color scheme you choose for your website is sending the right message about your company.
If you sell garden tools, for example, it wouldn’t make much sense for the color scheme of your website to be blacks and darks browns, just like a funeral home wouldn’t want to use brights or neons.
Use color to create an immediate connection between what your website looks like and what your company does. Pick shades that work well together and relate to your overall message.
And don’t forget that white is a color too, and it can and should be used to contrast the other shades you’ve picked.
Making use of the white space on your page will keep things from looking too cluttered.
Also, by contrasting the colors you’ve chosen against the white, you can direct your visitor’s eyes to the messages or images on your site that you want them to pay the most attention to.
Simple Wins
The best rule to follow is to keep the design of your site as simple as possible. The easier it is for them to navigate through the process of buying products, the more likely they are to complete a purchase.
Starting Converting Leads to Sales
There’s no quick fix when it comes to improving your lead conversion rate and getting more sales for your business.
Putting these strategies into make will take some time and effort, but will be worth it when you see your increased revenue.
It’s also important to know that while putting these practices into place may take time, it doesn’t have to be expensive to do.
Our digital marketing team is ready to work with you to identify what updates your site might need and how you can get the most out of your marketing strategy. Please feel free to contact us at any time.
