There are a lot of ways to get started in marketing, but there’s no getting around the fact that you need some momentum. These eight tips will help you gain traction and build your brand with minimal effort at first.
There are many ways to get started in marketing. Here are some of the most common and effective ones.
1) Create a blog with your personal thoughts on topics you’re interested in or write about your experiences as they relate to these topics. 2) Write articles for other online publications who may be willing to publish them, but resist the temptation of simply submitting content that is already published on similar sites. This will help you build up a portfolio fast!3) Start thinking like an entrepreneur-figure out how much it costs per month and break down all expenses into categories such as rent, food, supplies & more4) Do keyword research (which can generate leads from search engines), figure out what keywords would make sense for your business5) Make sure that you have somewhere where people can find information about who you are6) Attract attention by posting tips/tricks related to your product7). Promote yourself through social media8). Attend local networking events
“How to get started on a project” is an article that will help you find your first steps in the world of marketing. It’s a great read for beginners, and it’ll give you some tips to make sure your first project goes well. Read more in detail here: how to get started on a project.
Most marketing teams today are focused on attracting traffic to websites in the aim of converting that traffic into quality prospects that sales agents can close. However, that is just half of the struggle.
Companies may achieve long-term, sustainable development by getting more out of current traffic and leads (rather than bringing in wholly new traffic). Conversion rate optimization (CRO) may help with this. In this tutorial, you’ll discover about the value of conversion rate optimization (CRO), why your company should care about it, and how to get started.
Optimization of Rate of Conversions
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is the practice of improving your website in order to create more leads. Content additions, split testing, and process improvements are all ways to boost CRO. Highly qualified prospects, greater revenue, and reduced acquisition expenses are all benefits of conversion rate optimization.
What is the definition of a conversion rate?
The proportion of visitors who perform a desired activity, such as filling out a web form, signing up for a service, or buying a product, is known as the conversion rate.
A high conversion rate indicates that your site is well-designed, well-formatted, and attractive to your target demographic. A poor conversion rate might be caused by a number of issues relating to the performance or design of your website. Poor conversion rates are often caused by slow load times, a faulty form, or text that fails to express the value of the offer.
What does a decent conversion rate look like?
A “good” conversion rate is determined by a variety of criteria, including your industry, specialty, objectives, traffic channel, and demographics of your target audience. For example, in the third quarter of 2020, the worldwide average conversion rate of ecommerce sites was 2.17 percent, down from 2.37 percent the previous year. However, in the United States, the ecommerce conversion rate was 2.57 percent.
Not only does the average vary by year and nation, but it also varies by specialty. For example, ecommerce sites in the food and beverage industry have a conversion rate of 5.5 percent, while those in the hair care sector have a conversion rate of 3.5 percent.
It’s time to improve your conversion rate if it’s lower than you’d like – whether it’s below average in your industry, lower than your best rivals, or just failing against your own objectives.
Conversions may occur on your homepage, price page, blog, landing pages, and other areas of your website. You should optimize each area to enhance the chances of turning website visitors into paying clients.
Let’s go through how to determine your site’s conversion rate before we look at the advantages of CRO. You’ll have a better idea of how much time and resources to devote to a CRO plan this way.
How to Work Out Your Conversion Rate
To determine the conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of visits and multiply by 100 to obtain a percentage.
Calculating your conversion rate is simple as long as you know how to define a conversion. It’s as simple as plugging in two numbers and multiplying by 100.
Assume you define a conversion as a newsletter sign-up, and you have an opt-in box on every page of your website. In such situation, increase the total number of newsletter form submissions by 100 to get the total number of website visits. In the past quarter, if you had 500 submissions and 20,000 visits, your conversion rate would be 2.5 percent.
This technique may be repeated for each conversion opportunity on your site. Just be sure to count the number of people that visit the sites where the deal is advertised. If you want to figure out how many people downloaded your ebook offer, divide the total number of downloads by the total number of individuals that visited the websites where the ebook offer is featured.
You can also compute your site’s overall conversion rate by dividing the total number of conversions for each conversion opportunity on your site by the total number of visits.
Where Should a CRO Strategy Be Implemented?
Here are four areas of your website where conversion rate improvement may make a big difference.
1. The home page
Homepages are ideal candidates for conversion rate optimization. The homepage is a chance to keep visitors and lead them further into your website, in addition to generating a first impression on them.
This may be accomplished by highlighting product information links, providing a free registration button, or even introducing a chatbot that asks visitors questions at any moment throughout their browsing session.
Page 2: Pricing
For many website visitors, a website’s price page might be the make-or-break moment. By changing the pricing intervals (e.g., price-per-year vs. price-per-month), detailing the product features associated with each price, offering a phone number for visitors to contact for a price quotation, or adding a simple pop-up form, CRO may assist a pricing page convert visitors into customers.
In only three weeks, Hotjar, for example, implemented a basic email opt-in popup form to its price page and received over 400 new leads.
3. Blog
For a website, a blog is a huge conversion potential. A blog may employ CRO to convert readers into leads in addition to posting meaningful and informative information about your business.
Adding calls-to-action (CTA) throughout an article or asking readers to learn more about a subject by giving their email address in return for an ebook or industry report are common examples of this procedure.
Landing Pages (#4)
Landing pages, by their very nature, are meant to encourage users to take action, therefore it’s no surprise that they have the highest average conversion rate of all registration forms, at 24%. A video from last year’s event, for example, may be included to an event landing page to attract people to register this year. To attract visitors to download a free resource, a landing page might be optimized with preview material from the resource.
You may be wondering how you’ll know when your company is ready to start optimizing for conversions now that you know where to look.
Formulas for CRO
The quick answer is that CRO is critical for every online company. That’s because, no matter how big or little your business is, you want to turn your website visits into qualified leads, customers, and brand champions in the most efficient, effective, and dependable manner possible.
Conversion rate optimization allows you to get more out of your current website traffic while also guaranteeing that you’re attracting quality prospects.
Although this is a simple notion, defining a conversion target isn’t as simple as declaring, “This page converted 50 people this month, therefore next month we want to convert 100 people.”
The 8-Week Conversion Rate Optimization Planner is a featured resource.
This planner is available for download.
You don’t simply want another 50 conversions from your website. Instead, you’d want 50 more conversions for every X number of visitors. (This is your conversion rate, which is the proportion of people who convert on your website based on the number of individuals who have visited it.)
Here are three commonly-used conversion rate formulae that your company may use to better understand, evaluate, and enhance your conversion rate at any moment.
Conversion Rate Calculation 1
As previously stated, the conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions (or leads created) by the number of visitors (or web traffic) and multiplying the result by 100 to obtain the percentage.
Conversion Rate Percentage = Obtaining Leads x 100 = Conversion Rate Percentage
Number of Net Customers who are new (CRO Calculation 2)
Divide your net revenue objective by your average sales price to get the number of net new clients you need.
Average Sales Price = Number of New Customers = New Revenue Goal
3rd CRO Calculation: Lead Objective
Finally, divide your total number of new customers by your lead-to-customer closing rate (which is your total number of leads divided by total number of customers) % to arrive at your lead objective.
Number of new customers x percent Lead-to-Customer Close Rate Equals Lead Goal
Here’s an example of how to use these formulas:
The website visitor-to-lead conversion rate is 1% if your website has 10,000 visits per month and generates 100 leads (and, as a result, 10 customers each month).
What if you needed to bring in 20 new consumers every month?
You might strive to acquire 20,000 visits to your website and hope that the quality of your traffic doesn’t suffer — but that’s a gamble you should probably avoid. Rather, by improving your conversion rate, you might get more leads from your present audience. This is less hazardous and more likely to result in better financial returns.
For example, doubling your leads and customers would need increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 2%. This is seen in the table below, which shows the beneficial effect of raising your website’s conversion rate:
COMPANY |
A |
B |
C |
Monthly Visitor Count |
10,000 |
10,000 |
10,000 |
Conversion Rate |
1% |
2% |
3% |
Leads Generated |
100 |
200 |
300 |
New Customers |
10 |
20 |
30 |
When you improve your conversion rate, you’ll see a significant rise in the quantity of leads produced and net new clients.
Not only that, but it’s evident that increasing website traffic isn’t always the best strategy for raising conversion rates – in fact, this chart indicates that you may expand your company significantly without growing traffic at all.
Isn’t it incredible? Consider the following scenario: Assume you’re attempting to fill a leaking bucket. You won’t solve the problem by pouring more water into the bucket; instead, you’ll waste a lot of water (not to mention, a bucket that will never fill up all the way).
Are you ready to take your company’s initial steps toward CRO? Examine the tactics listed below and begin trying.
Strategies for Increasing Conversion Rates
Here are some marketing methods for conversion rate optimization that you may test and execute at your firm.
1. Include text-based call-to-actions in blog postings.
While using CTAs in a blog post is considered excellent practice, they don’t always work to convince readers to do the intended action. Why?
People who have become used to disregarding banner-like material on websites have developed banner blindness. This lack of focus, along with the fact that site visitors don’t usually read all the way to the bottom of a blog article (rather, they “snack”), necessitates a new strategy.
This is where a text-based CTA may help. We did a test at HubSpot to investigate whether text-based CTAs — a single line of text linked to a landing page and formatted as an H3 or H4 — converted more visitors into leads than standard CTAs at the bottom of a web page.
Regular end-of-post banner CTAs contributed an average of only 6% of the leads produced by the blog posts in HubSpot’s limited test of ten blog posts, but the anchor-text CTA alone provided up to 93 percent of the leads generated by the blog articles.
2. Include lead generation forms on your blog.
Another conversion rate optimization aspect you may use on your site is a lead flow. Lead flows are high-converting pop-ups that draw attention while also providing value.
Depending on your offer, you may use a slide-in box, a drop-down banner, or a pop-up box. In 2016, we tested the slide-in box on the HubSpot Blog and found that it got 192 percent more clicks and 27 percent more submissions than a conventional CTA at the bottom of a blog article.
3. Perform landing page testing.
Landing pages are an essential element of the contemporary marketer’s toolset, and they’re crucial to conversion rate optimization, as previously said.
Because a landing page is where a website visitor converts to a lead or an existing lead connects more deeply with your company, it’s important to get it right. Run A/B testing to determine the optimum design and content elements for audience members while optimizing a landing page.
For example, A/B testing allows you to quickly and simply test alternative versions of your website text, content offerings, graphics, form questions, and web pages to see what works best for your target demographic and leads.
China Expat Health was able to raise their lead conversion rate by 79 percent thanks to A/B testing. One of the most noticeable adjustments was replacing the title “Health Insurance in China” with “Save Up to 32% on Your Health Insurance in China,” which provided visitors with an instant value offer. Customer testimonies were then used to back up this claim.
Get everything you need to start A/B testing your website efficiently now.
4. Assist leads in becoming marketing-qualified leads right away.
Sometimes visitors want to get straight to business, skipping elements of the normal buyer’s journey and speaking with a sales representative right away (rather than be nurtured).
You should encourage these high-intent visitors to take certain actions so that they may quickly become marketing qualified leads (MQLs) – and they can do so via a mix of smartly designed web pages, attractive and clear language, and clever CTAs.
Those who sign up for product demonstrations, for example, convert at a greater rate than visitors who sign up for free product trials, according to HubSpot. As a result, we improved our website and conversion channels for users who wanted to schedule demonstrations or appointments with a sales representative.
This, of course, is dependent on your product and sales procedure, but our best suggestion is to do a series of experiments to see what brings in the most people. Then, for that process, optimize. The objective is to seek for methods to make your sales process more frictionless.
5. Create processes to help your team operate together.
With the use of marketing automation software, you can design a variety of automated processes to support your staff.
It’s feasible to send automated emails with processes using marketing automation, for example. Then, with a single click, leads may schedule meetings with salespeople. Meanwhile, salespeople are notified when leads do high-intent activities like visiting your website’s price page.
Alternatively, if you operate in ecommerce, you may send a reminder email to those who leave their shopping basket. According to Moosend’s study, abandoned cart emails may be quite successful. They have a high 45 percent open rate. Only 21% of emails are opened and only 21% are clicked. Approximately half of those who clicked made a purchase.
Here’s an example of a Dollar Shave Club abandoned cart email.
Image Credit:
6. Include messages on sites that convert well.
Use live chat software to interact with visitors to your website in real time and provide assistance and direction as required. Add these messaging elements to your high-converting web pages, such as your price and product pages, to ensure prospects receive the information they need right away.
You may also use action-based messaging and chat bots. For example, if someone has been on the page for more than a minute, you may want to automatically provide assistance and address any queries they may have (again, a live chat tool, like HubSpot, makes this easy).
7. Make high-performing blog entries even better.
Again, producing blog entries opens the door to a large number of conversion opportunities. Even more so if you already have blog material on your site – at HubSpot, we get the bulk of our monthly blog views and leads from entries that were published more than a month ago.
To begin improving your blog content, find the articles that get the most traffic but have the lowest conversion rates. (This problem might be caused by SEO, the content offer you’re advertising, or your call to action.)
In one case, HubSpot included an inbound press release template offer to a blog post on press releases, which resulted in a 240 percent boost in conversions for that piece.
Examine your blog content with high conversion rates as well. You want to increase qualified website traffic to those articles, so optimize the content for the search engine results page (SERP) or update it as required to keep it current and relevant.
8. Use retargeting to re-engage visitors to your website.
It makes no difference what your primary conversion metric is: The harsh reality is that most visitors to your website do not take the action you want. You may re-engage customers who left your website by using retargeting on Facebook and other networks.
Retargeting works by monitoring visitors to your site and offering them online adverts as they browse other websites. When you retarget folks who visited your highest-converting web pages, this is really effective.
The same inbound guidelines still apply here: for retargeting to succeed, you’ll need well-written text, appealing imagery, and a compelling offer.
Take, for example, United’s retargeting strategy. United targeted customers who had seen their commercials and were already thinking about booking a holiday, based on data from prior ad campaigns. They pushed a 15-second video with a call-to-action to this specific audience.
If viewers were motivated enough to book a trip, they just had to click on the CTA to be sent to the United website. This turned out to be a tremendous hit. In only one month, click-through conversions straight from the ad accounted for 52 percent of all conversions attributable to YouTube.
(If you’re a HubSpot client, see how the AdRoll integration can help you convert more leads.)
Let’s speak about how you can implement CRO at your organization now.
What Is Conversion Rate Optimization and How Do I Get Started? (CRO)
“Where do I begin with CRO?” you may be asking.
The PIE structure comes into play. Prioritize your efforts before beginning a CRO project by prioritizing each aspect based on its Potential, Importance, and Ease.
For each technique listed in the preceding section, use the PIE framework to answer the following questions. Then, for each approach, give a score between one and ten (one being the lowest and ten being the greatest).
- What kind of overall improvement can this project provide?
- How significant will this enhancement be?
- How difficult or complex would it be to put this improvement in place?
After you’ve given each method a score, sum them all together and divide by three to get a score that indicates which initiative will have the most effect. Then, start with the projects that have the greatest scores.
The PIE framework isn’t perfect, but it’s simple to grasp, methodical, and provides a foundation for CRO cooperation and communication.
We’ve covered a lot of ground when it comes to conversion rate optimization, but we haven’t covered everything. If you still have questions, have a look at the answers to some of the most common ones below.
What exactly is the goal of conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) aims to increase the chances of visitors doing a desired action on a website.
What does a CRO strategy entail?
A conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy aims to convert more of your visitors into paying clients. While each CRO plan will differ from one organization to the next, the basic stages will remain the same. You must choose critical KPIs as well as your target audience. Then you must gather user feedback and other data in order to choose what you will test. Finally, you’ll perform A/B testing to enhance the conversion rate of various pages and portions of your site.
What are CRO tools, exactly?
CRO solutions are meant to make the process of improving your conversion rate easier or more automated. They might assist with lead generation, research, analytics, mouse tracking and heat maps, feedback, or experimentation.
What is a CRO test, exactly?
In order to increase conversions, a CRO test entails adding, rearranging, and redesigning items on your website. CRO testing may concentrate on improving the language, design, or placement of your CTAs, as well as the length of your headlines, among other things.
Start Using CRO
When it comes to CRO, there are several best practices available, but ultimately, you must determine what your consumers react to and what delivers outcomes for your company.
When getting started with CRO today, keep these three follow-up steps in mind:
- To begin the CRO dialogue, use the three formulae.
- Experiment with different CRO tactics to see what works best for your company.
- Use the PIE framework to aid in the prioritization of your plan.
Note from the editor: This article was first published in January 2019 and has been updated for accuracy.
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