In digital marketing, there are two important terms you should remember: leads and conversion. 

Leads are the people who have the potential to become customers by following through with a purchase on your website. They are usually the ones that are actively looking for information and who will find value in the content you publish. If you meet their needs they will buy your product or sign up for your services. To know more about the strategy for making your own brand, visit copywriting services.

When a sale goes through on the digital platform, the lead turns from being a casual website visitor into an actual customer. This process is called a conversion. 

Conversion plays a crucial role in marketing your products or services. It is the primary source of sales on your website and it measures how effective your content marketing is to customers. 

It uses a specific formula to get the percentage of sales made on your communication platforms. Through this standard formula, business owners (like yourself) are able to find the metric on how many viewers are engaged in your website and what types of content they respond to the most. 

Knowing this percentage is important because it lets you analyse what added website features work best for your prospective customers and increase your sales. It can also help you assess whether you should continue to market your brand with those add-ons or try something new.

To understand the value of conversion and how it is calculated, it helps to understand the definition and use of conversion rate optimisation. 

Conversion rate optimisation is a strategy used to increase customer leads through added website features like blogs, home pages, pop-ups and landing pages. It entices the viewer to keep interacting with your website and encourages them to take action, whether that be in subscribing to your monthly newsletters or watching a video in your channel. All these activities, including spending time browsing your site, increases user trust and makes them more likely to make a purchase.

Utilising conversion rate optimisation effectively in your business starts with understanding what it is and how it works. From there you can find the right fit for your audience to include these tools as part of your ongoing marketing campaign. 

What is conversion rate optimisation? 

Conversion rate optimisation is the percentage of online users who have engaged and taken action on your website. This action can be in the form of:

• An online survey
• An email subscription 
• A button to book a call for services
• A sign-up button or account creation 
• A product purchase on the website

The kind of action you want your website visitors to take will depend on what outcome you want to have at the end of your content marketing campaign. Let’s say the goal is to increase subscriptions for your email newsletters. To do this, you will need to include a website feature, such as a pop-up, landing page or sign up link that website visitors can click on and input their email addresses. 

Getting this right will depend on how well you understand people’s interaction across your platforms and what media and content types they prefer to take in. It’s crucial to be able to gather this information to help increase the engagement and value of your content and improve your conversion rates. 

Conversion matters in this strategy because it actualises the website’s goal, meaning you can only count the action as a conversion when the website visitor completes or follows through with it.

Using conversion rate optimisation can offer business benefits for your website including: 

• Focused customer insights. Get insights on what specifically works or doesn’t work for your website visitors. With this information, you can plan and produce conversion rate optimisation features that offer better customer engagement and increase the likelihood of more sales. 
• A steady return on investment (ROI). Conversion rate optimisation provides hard data on which website features are bringing in conversions and which aren’t. By choosing to continue with the features that are performing, you are able to ensure that your website is producing conversions, leading to a steady return on your investment and positive cash flow. 
• Increased customer experience. Online users appreciate customer-friendly websites. By applying conversion rate optimisation features that appeal to online visitors, you satisfy their need for easy-to-understand and convenient website features that will make them more inclined to engage and purchase. 

As well as being able to provide detailed information on your customers’ interests and preferences and improve the website’s overall look and function, conversion rate optimisation provides conversions on both a micro and macro level. Here’s how the strategy is categorised into two types:

• Macro-conversions. This is the type of conversion that leads to an immediate sale or purchase of a product or service. Examples of these are website purchases, quotation requests for services and subscription to the website’s regular content release (newsletters, sales info etc). 
• Micro-conversions. This refers to the conversion that does not instantly equate to a sale but will eventually lead to it. Some examples are email sign-ups and account creation. 

These conversion rate optimisation applications offer small businesses the potential to widen their customer reach and entice more people to interact and engage with their website. To know how well or effective the process is for your business website, you need to calculate the conversion rate optimisation percentage your website has.

How do you calculate conversion rate optimisation?

The conversion rate optimisation formula consists of calculating your total visitors and dividing that by the number of online conversions. Multiply this by 100 to get the percentage. 

(Conversion rate formula. Image from Hubspot)

Here’s an example of how you can apply the formula to your business website: 

Let’s say you’re looking for the conversion rate of people who purchased a product from your website over the last month. The total number of purchases made on your website is 5,000 and your total number of visitors for the past month is 100,000. By dividing 5,000 by 100,000 and then, multiplying it by 100, you will get a conversion rate of 5%. 

Conversion rate = 5,000 product purchases from website / 100,000 website visitors x 100 

                           = 5% 

The higher the percentage, the better your website is doing in terms of conversion. 

What’s great about this formula is that you can use it to find your business website’s overall conversion rate, your marketing conversion rate, and even keyword conversion rate. This provides you with a more holistic idea of what’s working and what isn’t in your communication channel. 

By calculating your conversion rate optimisation, you’re able to find out where your business sits in generating effective leads and be able to plan what you can do to further boost conversion rate optimisation and increase sales in the long run.  

5 ways you can boost your conversion rate optimisation

There are plenty of things you can do to increase your conversion rate optimisation. Here are five effective marketing strategies that can help attract more people to your website, boost traffic and turn leads into potential customers. 

1. Add a pop-up to your website

We’ve all encountered at least one pop-up during your time browsing the web. This is a small window that suddenly appears over the web information to advertise a product, make an announcement or invite the online user to subscribe to the business newsletter. 

Having a pop-up added to your website can be a good way to remind visitors to take action and subscribe to your content or submit their email addresses so you can inform them about new product releases. 

Be careful when using pop-ups because they can be distracting and (somewhat) annoying to website users. To avoid this and make the most out of the added feature, we recommend that you: 

• Make sure the pop-ups aren’t intrusive. When pop-ups immediately appear on screen after the link has been clicked, it can distract and possibly turn off online users who haven’t had a chance to see who you are and what you offer. Delay the pop-up for at least 30 seconds. This gives the user a bit of time to look through your page without interruption or being pressured to take action before they are ready. 
• Have the pop-up appear only when the reader is about to exit your website. You can prompt your viewer to stay online by programming the pop-up to appear before the online user closes the page. This can leave a lasting impression and entice them to take action and follow through on your pop-up request. 
• Have the pop-up appear only once per website visitor. Multiple pop-ups appear pushy and desperate. Be polite enough to ask once, then give them space to think about your information and browse on their own. 

2. Be straightforward and create a powerful CTA 

One major turn off for visitors looking through your page is content they can’t understand or relate to. The easier it is for them to absorb the information, the more inclined they will be to stay on your website or landing page and continue to develop trust and knowledge of your brand and offering.  

To really connect to your readers, it’s important to provide information in a language they understand so they’re able to internalise your brand’s message and be more encouraged to take action on your website. 

Using simple and clear conversation and avoiding unnecessary jargon when you’re writing will help increase your conversion rate optimisation and get your message across to website visitors in a relatable and effective way. In time, you will find that the more people understand your message, the more they will be encouraged to purchase your product or services.

Adding a powerful call to action (CTA) to your content is another good way to boost your conversion rate optimisation. This is because a CTA can get website visitors engaged and energised to follow through on the action, which can result in a higher conversion rate and more revenue for the business. 

3. Include testimonials as social proof

When website visitors see other people enjoying your products or services, they feel more at ease and comfortable with their own purchase, knowing that you’re not about to deceive them with a faulty product. 

This is the effect of social proof on businesses. 

Social proof includes reviews and testimonials posted online from people who have completed a transaction or interaction with your business. It provides visitors with additional insight into the brand’s product quality or performance and overall credibility. The more positive feedback people see on your website, the better they will be able to trust in your brand’s ability to deliver and make a purchase or subscribe for updates. 

Ultimately, visitors trust what other people have to say because many of them are unbiased and not tied to the business. 

4. Generate high-quality content ideas

Content is the king of online marketing. Delivering high-quality content comes from solid content ideas, strategies and execution. Well structured content that is posted regularly can help people find your website a lot easier, especially when looking for answers to questions they may have through a search engine. 

In order to generate good content ideas, you will need to: 

• Think about your content needs. You will need to analyse which topics are most relevant to your target market and what media they will be most receptive to. 
• Understand SEO. Search engine optimisation (SEO) can help you identify techniques to get your website listed higher up in relevant page results, allowing more people to find your business through a search engine query and click through to visit your site.  
• Know what your audience wants. You can ask your target market directly (through surveys, interviews and group studies) or analyse what they’re reading through data-gathering programs like Google Analytics or Google Trends and deliver more of what they are looking for. 
• Look at questions people are asking online. Community-based platforms like Quora and Reddit show you what kind of questions or discussions your target market has online. You can then use this information to produce content that answers your target market’s questions or is relevant to their interests and preferences. 

Once you have a list of ideas to choose from, you can begin to go through the process of content creation. To turn your idea into great content, follow these steps: 

1. Shortlist your content ideas to the ten most promising topics. 
2. Define a schedule for when to release these ten over a month. 
3. Identify what kind of medium you will use to deliver the content effectively (i.e. blog, video, social media post, etc.)
4. Create the content and then review it to make sure it is relevant to the target market.  
5. Identify what communication channels you are going to release them in (e.g. business website, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, video streaming services like YouTube or Vimeo, etc.) 

The more you prepare, strategise and execute your content, the more online visitors will be drawn to your website, increasing your chances of gaining conversions.

5. Tell powerful stories

A powerful story can be the driving force behind a conversion on your website. Stories that are interesting and evoke emotion have the ability to touch people’s lives and linger in their memories, much more than just stating facts and figures. 

By integrating storytelling into your content, you’re able to humanise your brand, make viewers feel like they’re a part of the story and allow them to empathize with you. When this emotional connection happens, website visitors will feel more attached to your business and choose to patronise it over other products or services. 

Ultimately, conversion rate optimisation offers businesses the possibility of growing their brand through identifying and leveraging effective campaigns to increase lead conversions. By gathering the necessary data from your website and information on your social media visitors, you can calculate your conversion rate and see where your business stands. 

You can use conversion rate optimisation to measure the effectiveness of any new marketing strategies you implement, like pop-ups, calls to action and customer reviews, and know-how effective your content ideas and storytelling are.

In time, you will find that improving your conversion rate can result in more detailed customer insights, a better online experience for your target market and best of all, a positive return on your investment.