Digital or online marketing has become more than ever before fixated with ‘conversion’ as measured by a ‘conversion rate’. Success nowadays of activities online is directly gauged via the conversion rate – the higher your conversion rate, the more profitable you are.

Given the often fierce competition across industry, to gain a competitive advantage over key competitors, conversion optimisation is a key success ingredient in online marketing.

For those who need a reminder on what is meant by ‘conversion rate’, this is measured by the number of website visitors divided by the actual percentage of customers who have completed a set action (payment,

This article shares some of our advice on how best to achieve better conversion rates in your digital marketing. Should you wish to increase your conversion rates, simply incorporate one or more of the below tips.

• Incentive – a key ingredient to increase conversion rates is to offer an attractive incentive. Developing a unique or great offer will increase your conversions. Recommend you trial a few different offers over a few months to ascertain which delivers the best conversion then run with the best performing offer. By trialling different offers and optimising market response – you are safeguarding against media budget burn and poor overall results.
• Re-targeting – to illicit conversions over a period of time, you need to remember that your target audience may not convert immediately. By using re-targeting across your website, social media assets and that of advertisers, your target audiences will be subjected to a range of ads and messaging which overtime will lead to increase conversions.
• Personalise – in order to personalise your messaging, ads, communications etc, you first need to capture email addresses of prospects and leads. Again, on occasion you may need to resort to offering something for free to glean an individuals email address but this is of critical importance such that over time a profile of that individual can be gathered which allows you to personalise the manner and ways in which you engage with your prospects, leads and conversions.
• Communicate – once you have harvested email addresses and are starting to cultivate a database, it is important to periodically communicate with your database so as to build a relationship. For a relationship to be fruitful, you need to understand that a balance between ‘giving’ and ‘selling’ must be struck. Giving such things as really compelling and valuable content (advice, videos, ebooks etc) are common tactics all of which serve to strengthen the relationship between you and your prospects/leads. Then, on occasion incorporate a few offers to encourage conversions.
• Refine Keywords in your PPC – many businesses use PPC (pay-per-click) advertising on Facebook, Google, Bing etc to generate traffic and attempt to gain conversions. We would strongly recommend that you look to refine and be more specific with your keywords – more is less! More targeted and specific you are with your keywords, the higher your relevance will be and accordingly, higher your conversion rates will be. Also – be sure that the keywords you have chosen are converting – if not, stop advertising on non-converting keywords.
• Landing pages – rather than sending traffic to your homepage instead, consider building unique landing pages that are simple and focus on converting traffic that arrives to the landing page into a lead. Forms or Click to call functionality should be used.
• Test, Test and Test again – to determine which banner ad, landing page, form fields etc work best, we can’t stress enough the importance of split testing whereby you send a portion of your traffic to one and the remainder to another thereby being able to report on performance across two or more variations.
• Tracking – successful online marketing encourages two or more methods for conversion – usually by completing an online form or by making a call. It is important that both are set up to track where leads have come from. Setup phone tracking so you have visibility on where your ads are coming from.
• Improve your message – copywriting is a skill not everyone can possess. Its value is seldom appreciated.

The better you can communicate your products / services, the higher your conversion rate.

The above are just some basic tips on how you can better optimise your conversion rate. Remember – optimisation should not be done as a once off but instead reviewed periodically and refined so as to continually improve performance. Similarly, conversion rate optimisation requires that ALL components of your online marketing are optimised.

The role of an online marketer is to never sit still – instead to continually strive to improve conversion rates. So ask yourself, can you improve upon your current conversion rates?

Written by Alisdair Blackman

Alisdair Blackman is Digital Rehab’s Owner & Principal Consultant and has owned, run and grown 4 successful digital agencies since 1996 and is an online marketing specialist.