The essential guide to a good sales conversion rate
Ask any marketing team about their job and they’ll tell you that they drive traffic toward websites hoping to convert visitors into qualified leads.
But there’s much more to it than that. Squeezing more conversions out of existing traffic and leads can set a business on a long-term growth path. That’s the job of conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Let’s see how your marketing team can spruce up their CRO game and increase the conversion rate for your business.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- The importance of your conversion rate
- How to calculate the conversion rate
- Building a sales funnel
- Introducing a cart abandonment software
- Writing helpful product descriptions
- Understanding the importance of visuals
- Introducing CTAs in blogs posts
- Improving website speed
- Adding CTA banners
- Using live chat
What is a conversion rate?
A conversion rate is the percentage of site visitors who complete the desired action, such as signing up for a demo, identifying themselves via a web form, or making a purchase.
When you have a high conversion rate, it means that your website works, is professionally designed, effectively formatted, and most importantly, appeals to your target audience.
On the other hand, a low conversion rate usually means that your website is underperforming or lacks modern design features that prompt visitors to engage. Some of the issues might be low load times, poor product descriptions, and a lack of interesting content.
How to calculate the conversion rate?
You calculate the conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors and multiplying that number by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if you’re offering a free ebook for people who subscribe to your website, you are going to divide the total number of ebook downloads/subscriptions by the total number of website visitors and multiply by 100. So if you had 700 downloads and 28,000 visitors, then your conversion rate is 2.5%.
You can calculate the conversion rate for every conversion opportunity. Still, you can count the number of visitors only on the pages where you list an offer, e.g. offer a download ebook button.
Eventually, you can calculate your website’s overall conversion rate by dividing the total number of conversions for every conversion opportunity by the total number of visitors.
So how to improve the conversion rate?
You’re generating enough traffic but your competition still beats you in conversions. What can you do to turn the tables?
Build a sales funnel
You’ll have a hard time converting your prospects into qualified leads and loyal customers if you don’t have a well-thought-out conversion path.
This path is visually often represented as the sales funnel. The sales funnel shows you the position of your leads in their decision-making process.
It’s wider at the top and it gets narrow as they go deeper. It starts with awareness – that there is a solution for their problem, and ends with loyalty – where they become loyal customers of your brand.
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But how can this funnel boost your conversion rate?
In the awareness stage, you need to attract prospects who aren’t aware of your brand and products.
The discovery stage is where you engage them, learn about their needs, and educate them. Once you do this, you can send them an offer – in the evaluation stage.
The negotiations and the final proposal come in the intent stage.
Think of your business proposal as the final sales document that helps you win a new deal. It should be detailed enough for you to explain your services, while still being easy to go through it.
You can send the proposal in an old-fashioned way, as a PDF document, and hope it gets noticed. Or you can leap ahead of the competition and send a digital proposal with a stunning cover image, previous work, timeline, and even a digital signature that your prospect can use to close the deal in the purchase stage without having to print one sheet of paper.
Now, even when you convert leads, your job isn’t done. You need to re-engage your customers to keep them loyal and coming for more – the loyalty stage.
If you succeed here, you encourage your returning customers to spread the word about your brand, increasing your conversion rate even more. If you want to save time building your sales funnel, there are many popular sales funnel tools to help you.
Introduce cart abandonment software
Another issue that can affect your conversion rate is cart abandonment.
Research shows that the average cart abandonment rate for desktops is 65.75% and a staggering 85.65% for mobile customers.
You can check your website abandonment rate in Google Analytics to see how you fare against this trend.
But just imagine – you put all the effort in getting your sales prospects to the bottom of the sales funnel – and then the bottom falls out.
So how to keep the bottom on?
Many businesses solve this problem by using cart abandonment software. These solutions help your leads get back to your website to complete their purchases.
If you choose, the software can reach out to prospects who bailed out on other channels as well, such as texts, Google Remarketing, Facebook, etc.
Cart abandonment software uses real-time data to send a series of email reminders at the ideal moment. They can even offer new deals based on previous interactions and reward returning customers.
Write helpful product descriptions
The bulk of visitors to your website are not looking to buy – at least not straight away – they are looking for information. This is why you need detailed and well-written descriptions.
Each of these descriptions is a sales pitch on its own. As such it should cover all the features of your products, and more importantly – the benefits.
Remember, benefits always come before features.
Think about the pain points of your customers and modify your descriptions to address those.
They must realize that your product solves their problems, so you should provide value through content on the product page.
Your SEO specialist can provide valuable advice on how to modify product descriptions and add keywords that customers typically use to search for products.
It’s not only the text that matters but also the images and videos.
Get heavy on visuals
Speaking of images and videos, they are both catchy and connect better with website visitors than textual content. If you want to boost your conversion rate, you need to include plenty of both.
The human brain is much quicker to grasp an images or video-based message than read through a textual one.
Add more high-quality photos to your product pages and include a video of the product you want to promote. Video is always more engaging in explaining the benefits of the product.
The winning combination for product images is larger formats with descriptions showing on mouseover.
If you want to go one step further, you should introduce 360-degree product pictures that show the product from different angles. When DueMaternity.com, an online retailer for expecting and new moms, introduced 360-spin images, their conversion rate went up by 27%.
Post tutorials or how-to-do videos about your product on your website and social media. Such videos have a high call-to-action potential and encourage viewers to add the product to their basket.
Optimize for mobile users
Mobile traffic accounted for almost 55% of global web traffic in 2021. This means you should pay more attention to mobile conversions.
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, visitors might have issues finding what they came for, which leads to a poor conversion rate. Worse even, they may abandon your website and head straight over to the competition.
To avoid this, you need to build a responsive site that optimizes the content for different screen sizes.
For example, Better Proposals has optimised every proposal template to be responsive and easy to navigate on both desktop and mobile devices. Each proposal is a mini-website, with a seamless user experience on all devices.
Introduce CTAs in blog posts
It’s normal nowadays to include call-to-action (CTA) in blog posts but it’s not rare that these CTAs fail to motivate users to take the desired action.
Why is that?
Because of banner blindness. It’s a phenomenon related to people becoming used to ignoring banner-like announcements on websites. The lack of attention plus the fact that many visitors don’t always read to the bottom means that you need a different approach.
You need some text-based CTAs. If you don’t trust me, try running a test.
Choose up to 10 blog posts and in each one introduce a standalone line of text with a CTA linked to a landing page and styled as H3.
Also, keep the regular end-of-post banner CTA to see which one would convert more traffic into leads.
When HubSpot ran a similar test, the results were:
- 6% of leads from regular CTA banners
- 93% of leads from the anchor-text CTAs
Any questions?
Improve website speed
In today’s busy world people have a short attention span. This applies to your prospective leads who won’t wait for your website to load.
They want it now!
With every second of delay in your page loading time, you risk your conversions dropping.
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The situation is serious. Let’s say your business makes $1000 per day. A delay of one second can lead to a loss of $25000 over a year.
You can find your page loading speed using Google PageSpeed insights.
This shows the exact time your page takes to load on both desktop and mobile.
More importantly, the app gives you suggestions and solutions that can help you optimize your page speed.
Other factors impact your page loading speed. Such as your website host and hosting plan. A hosting package with higher bandwidth and performance can unlock your page speed and reduce loading times.
Media is usually more demanding than text and takes more time to load. Check your images and optimize them if needed using a tool such as TinyImage.
Add CTA buttons
Remember those CTA banners? While it’s true that text-based CTAs generate more conversions than flashy banners, you still need plenty of CTA buttons.
Those buttons are what prospects click on to reach the final check-out or sign-up stage.
This is why they need to stand out from the rest of the page for the visitors to spot them easily.
So what can you do about it?
First, change their colour and make them larger.
There have been studies and theories on the most ideal colour for CTA buttons.
While it’s true that it should be culturally, and demographically appealing to your buyer persona, and still appropriate to your brand, there’s no evidence that red converts more than blue, for example.
One way or another your CTA colour needs to pop!
So whichever colour you settle with, make sure it’s in high contrast to the rest of your page.
As with the textual vs. banner CTAs, you should test different CTA button versions to see which one has a better conversion rate.
Use live chat
Live chat helps you gain the trust of your prospects. The visitors automatically perceive your website as more authentic when they know there’s someone on the other side they can talk to – someone who can solve their problem immediately.
If your leads have any difficulties or questions while making a shopping decision, they can ask instantly. If you address their concerns right there and then, there’s a good chance they’ll buy from you.
Live chat has undoubtedly positive effects on sales, revenue, and loyalty. A study that included over 100 businesses found that 51% of customers are likely to purchase again from companies that offer live chat.
The same study found that 63% of visitors are likely to revisit a website with a live chat, while 38% of customers found live chat helpful in making purchases.
Live chat software is expensive but worth the investment. A budget-friendly option is to integrate Facebook Messenger with your website.
Wrapping up
When you look at all these conversion rate-boosting tips, there’s one thing they all have in common:
They improve the user experience.
You need to make it easier for prospects to find what they are looking for and if they decide they’re going to buy, to make their choice easier too.
