The Art of Conversion Rate Optimization
Marketing has a lot of fancy ways to say perfectly normal things. They even have a fancy name for the fancy names! Such as the “Marketing Funnel.” The funnel tracks progress from someone that isn’t a customer, to being a loyal, regular consumer. Without going through the whole thing, according to the marketing funnel, a potential customer is called a “lead.” In a digital sense, this is someone who has heard of your brand or product and has taken to the internet to look it up or peruse your website.
When people talk about getting “clicks”, what they’re talking about is leads. This is a person that’s heard of your services and is intrigued enough to investigate. However, we’re here to focus on the next stage of the funnel – Conversion. “Conversion” is a person that has gone from merely interested, to a purchaser. Your potential customer has become a customer, and your lead has become a conversion.
You might wonder, “why would someone go to a website that sells things that they need if they aren’t going to buy anything?” The truth is, not every lead represents an automatic conversion, and not every conversion becomes a repeat customer, or “promoter” according to the funnel. Depending on a lot of factors, your leads might just, go away.
There are several reasons for this:
- The customer doesn’t like your product.
- They’re researching.
- The customer found your website frustrating to navigate or non-user friendly.
- The leads aren’t finding your website at all.
- Your content is irrelevant.
- Things on your website don’t work properly.
- Your website has long load times making customers impatient.
Any one of these could be affecting your conversion rate, that is, the ratio of conversions to leads. Conversion rate optimisation is the process of finding out what it is that’s stopping a significant number of leads from turning away before converting, and then fixing it.
It’s important to note here that “conversion” doesn’t have to mean a sale. It can mean signing up to a mailing list, clicking the like button, following a social media page, or making an appointment.