What is Website Conversion?
The best definition to give the term 'Website Conversion' is when a visitor in your website performs a desired action on your webpage.
Let's say you have a website that offers free PDF books, but in order to get a copy, the interested individual should first follow you on Instagram or Twitter, sign up to your website, or provide an email address where you can send them your newsletter. The percentage of people who complete this kind of action makes up your website’s conversion rate.
What you determine to be a conversion depends entirely on the way your business operates. More often than not, ecommerce companies tend to focus on generating sales as a conversion, while service providers more so concentrate on generating leads and counting them as conversions.
In order for you to have a clear idea of what a website conversion is, here are some of the more desirable actions that most companies use to count as conversions:
Signing up for an e-mail subscription
Clicking on a specific button
Sharing content from the website on a social media platform
Subscribing for a mailing list
Generating a sale
Of course, there are a ton more. You have to remember that what you consider to be a conversion for your company might not be for another, as no two businesses are the same.
How to Calculate Conversion Rates
To calculate conversion rates, you have to take note of this formula:
(Total visitors that performed the conversion action/Total visitors of your website)x100 = conversion rates.
Say you have 10,000 weekly visitors to your webpag and 200 signed up for your company newsletter. If you translate these numbers into the formula you get the following:
(200/10 000)x100 = 2%. In this scenario, your website’s conversion rate will amount to 2%.
However, if you don’t enjoy doing the math, you can also use one of the free online conversion rate calculators.
What is Considered to be a Good Conversion Rate?
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: there’s no magic number that determines the best rate for any business. Usually, what is a good percentage for your company will depend on a variety of factors:
The industry you operate in
What products or services you offer
What you’re willing to spend on a marketing campaign
What your sales cycle consists of
As all of these factors can have an influence on your conversion rate, it’s impossible to pinpoint a specific number that every business needs to achieve. In order to determine a percentage for your company, you have to look around in your industry, see the average and go from there.
How Does Your Sales Funnel Influence Your Website Conversion Rates?
If you discuss conversion rates with marketers, you will most likely hear about the sales funnel as well. Most experts in the field will tell you that in order to earn more conversion, you have to be able to successfully navigate customers through the sales funnel.
You may be wondering, what connects the sales funnel and the conversion rate? Let me try to explain.
The sales funnel plays a vital role in turning prospective buyers into customers. It usually goes through four stages:
Awareness: People have just found your brand and are starting to get acquainted with it by looking at your website and seeing what you’re offering.
Interest: At this stage, website visitors are starting to turn into potential clients as they’re beginning to consider your company as an option.
Desire: When people reach this part of the sales funnel, they’re ready to make the decision. They already know what they want, so this is the perfect place to make your last effort to try to win them over.
Action: Here, the visitor does the action you wanted them to take in the first place. That can be anything from ordering an item off the website to signing up for your weekly newsletter.
As you can see, people usually need to go through at least three steps before completing the desired action. This means that each step should influence the visitor to get to the next one before finally getting to the “action” part.
That’s what makes the sales cycle so crucial when it comes to your website’s conversion. You have to invest in each step that the visitor has to take in order to influence them to reach the “final destination”. By doing so, you ensure that you will more easily reach your desired conversion rate.
5 Tips for Increasing the Conversion Rate
Now that you’ve learned what a conversion rate is and how to calculate it, you can go ahead and do it for your own business to see where you stand in comparison to the average for your industry. Let’s take a look at five tips that can help you increase the conversion rate.
1. Create CTA (call-to-action) buttons that pop up on your website
By having the right amount of CTA buttons, you will be able to guide users through the next steps in your sales funnel and thus increase your website conversion.
CTA buttons are one of the best ways to let your customers know what the next step is and to invite them to take that step, which makes them fundamental to your website.
2. Take a Look at How Your Audience Interacts with Your Site
If you’re struggling with the website conversion, it may be because your potential customers are having trouble navigating through your website. User experience (UX) is crucial when it comes to conversion rates and more often than not, businesses who struggle to make their customers convert need to think about redesigning their webpage.
In order to see if that applies to your company as well, you need to analyze the way your customers interact with your website. By doing so, you can see what makes them leave – is it a certain page or the overall experience?
When you finish analyzing, you can work on improving the website. It’s likely that you will see a boost in conversion rates pretty quickly after that.
3. Create a Site That Works Great on Mobile Devices
Nowadays, 40% of online transactions happen on mobile devices, which means that if you want to have a high converting website, it needs to be able to work on smartphones and tablets as well.
4. Make Navigating the Site Easy
More often than not, I see companies who, in their desire to make an aesthetically pleasing website, have created one that looks good, but is extremely hard to navigate.
The thing is, it’s not bad to have a good-looking web design; in fact, it’s probably recommended to have one. However, you should never sacrifice functionality over aesthetics.
5. Make Conversion Easy
Often companies will overcomplicate their sales funnel by making it a hard process to go through. That can happen when you ask for too much information right from the start or when customers have to go through a few unnecessary steps before finally converting. It’s important to make conversion easy for your clients, which means simplifying the process and the steps it entails.
We do have a lot more information for you on our site that could help improve your website conversion rate, so you better check us out!