5 tips to improve your conversion rate

Any well-structured marketing strategy is composed of a series of campaigns and operations. Each of these operations must have its own specific goal. 

And one of the most important goals is conversion.

In concrete terms: conversion is defined as the moment when a user performs a specific action that is determined further upstream. This can be subscribing to a newsletter, filling out a form, signing up or renewing a subscription, finalizing a purchase, and much more. 

These actions can be very diverse; what’s important is that they are always measurable.

The conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. It’s measured by identifying the actual percentage of users, out of the total audience, who take the identified action.

For example, if you email to 100 people with the goal of getting subscribers for a specific service, and 10 people actually subscribe as a result, this makes the conversion rate 10%.

So far, so simple. 

The hardest part is to significantly increase this figure.

For this, there are many factors involved, and they depend on the company, the context, the target audience, and the goals. 

Here, there is no universal recipe for increasing the conversion rate that works for everyone, so, we will focus on a few optimization tips, organized around five core themes.

1. First comes storytelling

In this post, we’re focusing on conversion rate optimization tips, thus on the final stages of the marketing journey that takes a user from awareness and consideration toward an action that they can take.

There is nothing more counterproductive, however, than rushing this stage of this path.

In other words, conversion is the culmination of a journey that can only start with communication. And good communication always comes from the ability to tell engaging, effective, coherent stories.

So: storytelling always comes before conversion. This is about the ability to attract attention, making your “voice” stand out from the crowd (a “chorus” that, in today’s digital ecosystem, is increasingly crowded and noisy). Thereafter, it’s a matter of keeping this focus constant—a challenge, in some ways, that is even more complicated, and one that has to do with engagement but also with a sense of trust that must be established.

Finally, then comes the time for the call to action, thus the actual conversion.

It’s a dynamic that has always existed and worked. With Digital Transformation and digital marketing it remains unchanged…or, rather, the mechanism is the same, but the reach is multiplied, thanks to the increase of channels and media. 

And what is the most powerful medium? 

We will see it in the next point.

2. The unparalleled power of video

When it comes to digital media, there is no doubt: video has the highest performance. 

First of all, it’s the communication tool that online users prefer, and the data could not be more telling:

– According to the most recent estimates, more than 3.3 billion people watch online videos on a regular basis. In 2019, this number was 2.78 billion. (insiderintelligence.com).

Moreover, video is the most suitable tool for getting messages across in a simple way, without excessive effort on the part of the recipient. Not only that, these messages remain sharply and durably imprinted in the mind of the recipient: they are, in short, more memorable.

Then there is everything related to engagement and generating interactions (just realize how social networks are increasingly video-based).

If you want to know more about the power of video—with lots of data to back it up—check out this post from our blog.

Now, let’s see some statistics that demonstrate how crucial the role of video can be when it comes to conversions and sales:

– 78% of marketers said video directly helped increase sales (wyzowl.com). 

– Using videos in the immediate pre-sale stages increases the customer response rate by about 60% (vidyard.com). 

– 92% of video marketing professionals reported a positive ROI related to their video campaigns. (wyzowl.com) 

– According to a survey earlier this year, more than 70% of sales leaders who aren’t currently using video in their strategies plan to do so soon (vidyard.com).

3. Know your audience…person by person

After all, each of these conversion rate optimization tips has to do with persuasion skills, which is something that originated well before digital marketing and marketing in general.

There are many basic lessons we can learn from persuasion techniques. But one of the most universal and important is this: it’s much easier to persuade someone if you know them. If you know what a person likes or doesn’t like. If you can understand their mood, their financial situation, their social preferences. Their needs, their possible desires.

It’s something very intuitive and does not need to be explained, because it’s something we all experience. 

But how does this translate to the digital world and specifically to conversion marketing?

The truth is that there has never been an era with more opportunity to know your target audience than the one we’re in today. This is related to Big Data, which is nothing more than the staggering amount of information that we are all constantly disseminating online.

A few examples include:

– Demographic Data: information regarding age, gender, marital status, employment, and income status.  

– Psychographic Data: behaviors, beliefs, values, interests, lifestyles. 

– Geographic Data: i.e., geolocation.

– Behavioral Data: this is data based on users’ web surfing behaviors, extracted from cookies.

– Contextual Data: a very broad field that concerns the context, the environment that surrounds us, from news, to sentiment, to market fluctuations.

– First Party Data: the data that a company collects directly from its users and customers, such as through CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and CCM (Customer Communication Management) systems.

Learning to collect this data in the broadest and deepest way is tantamount to having a very surgical understanding of your target audience, person by person. 

And the next step?

Set up conversion-focused campaigns that adapt based on the individual recipient, with tailored calls to action. 

This is the personalization breakthrough.

4. Breaking the paradigm of one-way campaigns

With personalization, you break the pattern of one-to-many marketing, encouraging higher conversion rates through the dynamics of one-to-one persuasion. 

But you can go even further, breaking yet another paradigm: that of one-to-many communication.

How? 

By implementing elements of interactivity between the company and your end target. 

In short, turning the monologue into a dialogue leads even more smoothly and naturally to the moment of conversion.

And here we will be very concrete. 

Relying on tools like Babelee’s Video Platform harnesses the power of three different tools in one fell swoop:

– the effectiveness of video, first of all; we’ve seen what a quantum leap this makes for digital communication;

– personalization, with the ability to create an unlimited number of videos that are automatically tailored to each individual viewer from a single matrix (for more on Babelee’s Video Personalization tools, see here);

– finally, interactivity, with the possibility of creating personalized paths that gradually lead to a call to action and conversion (for more on the Video Interaction side see, here).

5. Maximum attention to the very last steps

Here, we come to the last of our conversion rate optimization tips and we move to an aspect that is a bit more technical, but absolutely decisive.

Let’s project the moment when a user, perhaps within a video, clicks on your call to action, and is directed to a landing page where you finalize the conversion.

The “mission” is not yet accomplished. In fact, we are in one of the most delicate stages. 

First, you must watch out for loading times! 

According to a recent survey, 40% of visitors abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load (hobo-web.co.uk).

But, of course, it’s not just about that. 

You must also simplify the Checkout Funnel (i.e., the final path that, in the case of a sale, leads toward the conclusion of the transaction).

In this regard, just think of how simplified this “last mile” is on hugely successful platforms like Amazon. 

The same argument applies not only when the goal is a direct sale; but also when generating a lead or subscribing to a newsletter, for example (and we saw above that conversion is also involved in these cases).

Ultimately, this realization must be at the center of everything: all processes leading to the finalization of the conversion must be designed in a perfect omnichannel perspective and from a mobile-first perspective: increasingly, we are purchasing products and services, filling out forms, and renewing subscriptions through mobile devices.