What is the Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate can be understood as the website conversion rate or the percentage comprising the visitors on your website, blog or a particular page. It is based on your core marketing objectives and expectations from visitors. It must be noted that conversion rate cannot be categorised strictly, but generally it consists of the rate at which:
- Visitors on your website perform an action (purchasing/hiring/downloading)
- Build or establish a contact with you (filling forms like contact us/enquiry)
- Initiating a conversation with your live or online chat feature
- Subscribing to a recurring service like newsletters, notifications
- Navigating on your website or pages of websites and engaging with the content/menu/pop-ups
Depending on your target audience or marketing objectives, you can even assess the conversion rate of your website separately. For example, you may look for the ads conversion rate (number of people doing one or the other things from the points mentioned above or in some way fulfilling your marketing objectives), per page conversion rate, pop-ups conversion rate, conversion rate based on keywords, etc.
Calculating Conversion Rate:
Conversion rate is quite easy to calculate. Just follow the formula:
Conversion rate (percentage) = (No. of conversions / Total no. of visitors for the particular conversion) x 100
The number of conversions can be general and overall or based on a specific thing that you are looking for. The total number of visitors would also be measured accordingly based on the two factors. Always remember that conversion rate is a relative concept and not an absolute one. It is highly dependent on the factors based on which it is calculated and thus may vary in its final output again and again.
Nowadays, it is easy to calculate conversion rate as you can find out all the required inputs or figures in no time. This has been possible because of the accurate analytics feature. This is what it looks like, in case you are building a website with Strikingly:
Apart from Strikingly, you can even get your inputs through Google Analytics after signing up.
Importance of Conversion Rate:
Let us now look at the importance of conversion rate and the reasons why you should be working on improving the conversion rate of your website if you are not already.
- Conversion rate is a great way to analyse and review the performance of your website which can lead you to form reports or daily/weekly/monthly analysis on where your website is going.
- It can give you a great foundation for bringing changes on your website according to the results reviewed. Once you know about the things that seem to be working better with the visitors, you can easily use conversion rate to determine the key areas that require more focus and attention and are giving better results.
- Conversion rate can also help you ascertain the general market trends in your particular niche. For ex: if you have an e-commerce website and you observe that people are more interested towards the footwear section consistently (probably because you have great products there), you can compare this rate and data with the estimated conversion rate of the footwear e-commerce market.
- If you make any new changes to your website and are unsure about how they would perform for the audience, conversion rate can be really helpful in knowing whether you should continue with them, make few revisions or completely discard the idea of using them.
- Finding the conversion rate of some particular features or pages helps in restructuring the website layout and design as well, which can often lead to a better user interface and increase in the number of visitors on your website as well.
These were some of the many benefits of conversion rate, let’s now look at the tricky part, that would give you some comprehensive tips on increasing the conversion rate of your website.
How to Increase Conversion Rate?
One of the best ways to improve conversion rate is primarily to have your research work done thoroughly. With a decent research work, you can move about working on the improvement of conversion rate on your website, blog or any of the pages involved in the website. By research work, you can get to know what you want and set your marketing objectives, whether being an individual running a website or a company. With a clear set of marketing objectives, you can then do a competitor analysis to find out the market trends and customer behaviour in the general market online. This way, you can set a fairly good foundation for improving the traffic on your website and eventually leading to a better conversion rate, which can finally profit the company or your website. This is an example of a website that has been curated with a clear objective in mind and looks directly to provide the potential customers what they are looking for instead of confusing them, remember less is more:
Let’s look at the other ways to increase conversion rate after research work:
- Improve your SEO to improve conversion rate
SEO refers to search engine optimization, which helps your website rank better on the search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). With a better SEO, you can achieve a better conversion rate. This is possible because the primary objective of SEO is to make use of keywords, alt texts, internal/external links, marketing campaigns to gain more visitors and increase traffic. With more traffic (implying more people interested in your website), you have more chances of getting conversions on your website. Hence, look out for the content you run through your website and the way you market it online.
- Navigation
One of your primary goals has to be to increase and enhance navigation on your website. The easier and clearer the navigation would be, a visitor is more likely to contact you or make a purchase as doing so is not complex at all. With a better navigation, the users can explore your menu, other tabs and sections and freely enjoy the experience of going through your website. The two main pillars on which a strong navigation can be built are:
- Redesign your page
If after the research work or with the ongoing conversion rate analysis, you come to know that few pages of your website are receiving lesser response as compared to the others, you can simply take up the task of redesigning them. With redesigning, you can make your landing page more attractive and create a more simple outlook for the visitors so that they can get what they are looking for in less time.
- Optimize layouts
Optimizing the layouts of your website and including more features to make it attractive and eye-catching is also a great way to help your website’s conversion rate while also improving the navigation. For this, you can include features like pop-ups that catch the attention of the visitor. Make sure to include few but catchy lines in the pop-ups so that they do not appear as boring.
- The magic of testimonials
Yes, similar to word of mouth marketing, the people who have bought something from your website or have hired your services and have an experience of it, are the best way to attract even more visitors to do the same. Testimonials can subconsciously make the visitors think about the amount of intangible experience involved with your website (including the customer support, responses, incentives, etc.) and not just about the tangible ones. This can help in establishing a bond between you (as an individual or company) and the visitors even before they have turned to customers. You should dedicate a specific area for including the words of experience provided by the past customers (in case you do not take feedback from the customers, you certainly should!).
- Engage
Lastly, you should focus on building engagement with your audience or visitors for conversion rate. By interacting and giving quick responses to the visitors, you increase the chances of converting them into customers. One of the best features to include in this are live chat, newsletters, etc. Hence, the more engagement you create on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, chances are your conversion rate would improve as well.
Final Word
So, in this article you learned:
- What is conversion rate and its importance
- How to increase conversion rate on your website
Here at Strikingly, we care about your websites more than anyone. You can not only build a website with us, but also include all the features that we mentioned about earlier to make it one of the best out there and enhance your conversion rate. From templates to create a landing page to providing you professional SEO guides and various features like live chat, membership website, accurate analytics, etc., we are always there for you. Not only this, with our affiliate program, you would be able to generate a decent passive income with the help of your website.
