Conversion marketing – a guide to increasing conversions in marketing

Conversion marketing is defined as marketing that has the intention of increasing the amount of conversions on your website or landing page.

The more common phrase for this is conversion optimisation (CRO). The purpose of marketing is to drive awareness of a product or brand, and in digital marketing it is to also generate website visits. CRO focuses on finding ways to better convert the people who are visiting your website from the marketing activity you are conducting.

Conversion optimisation naturally sits within marketing because the two areas share a common goal: sales. If you advertised shoes on Google, last month you may have had 10,000 impressions, 1,000 clicks, and 10 sales (that’s a conversion rate of 1%), therefore you’re getting people to your website, but you are only converting 1% of them. This is where CRO comes into the picture, you need to convert more of those visitors into customers to scale your business, increase profit and get better returns from your marketing spend.

Conversion marketing to get more sales

First of all, you need to be wary of implementing changes designed to increase conversions without first validating the theories you have with real data on user behaviour. The first step of CRO is to conduct research and analysis to understand your visitors and identify wants, needs, and points of friction.

Once you have this insight, you can then start testing changes to try solve the problems you’ve discovered.

Common activities in conversion marketing

Here are some of the things optimisers might do to increase conversion from marketing (not in this order):

• Adding product reviews & company reviews
• Personalising content for different audiences
• Creating landing pages for different PPC search terms
• Reducing friction in your sales funnel
• Improving the clarity of your proposition
• Making copy more persuasive and customer-centric
• Making your value proposition more persuasive
• Increasing website speed
• Improving calls to action and contact options
• Improving usability
• Improving accessibility
• Identifying and fixing any bugs

Whilst there are some ‘best practices’ when it comes to UX, it is always better to conduct research and analysis as part of your conversion marketing activity to ensure you understand what your customers need the most. We all bring cognitive biases to the table so it’s important to understand what the real problems on your website are, rather than your perceived problems that relate to your own personal taste, needs, or life experience.

Then you’ll want to A/B test your hypotheses to assess the impact your changes have on conversion rate.

Once you start to see improvements in your conversion rate, you’ll start to make more money per visitor, your cost per acquisition (CPA) on Google will fall, and return on marketing spend will improve. These outcomes allow for extra money to be put back into paid advertising or other marketing channels.

If you’d like some help with user research and conversion optimisation, you can give us a call on 0161 713 2434 or email [email protected] and get a free 15 minute website conversion audit call with a senior optimiser.