Okay, so you have a website that brings in a lot of traffic for your business. But are you happy with the amount of business you get from your site? When you have a website that does not convert enough business leads for you, you have a leaking pipe in your machine, i.e., the business.
The problem with a leaking pipe is that no matter how much water (traffic) you push through, there will always be a significant amount that is lost. The size of which is determined by the size of the leak involved.
For that, a site not optimized to convert can have problems like high bounce rates, or the visitors may not simply click any buttons on the site.
Most businesses spend a lot on employee welfare and sales but little on getting data about visitors’ specific actions on their sites.
We recommend spending on optimizing your site first for conversion, then focusing on marketing activities and sales. For any business with an online business, the number one marketing asset they own is its website.
What is a Conversion?
In marketing, a conversion is an action you want your website visitors to take. This could be anything from making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter to downloading an eBook or whitepaper. The important thing is that it is an action that benefits your business.
For example, if you are an ecommerce site, a conversion would be a purchase. For a service-based website, it may be a landing page sign up, or just a message for inquiry.
All these actions are crucial in driving the visitors down the sales funnel and ultimately bringing business.
Here I have talked about two types of conversions: Macro and micro. For a travel or tourism company or a real estate company, booking for consultation or a request for a quotation may be the ultimate goal for the business.
However, often times customers are not ready to take the first step. Then we should track for more intermediary steps like a newsletter sign-up, an ebook download, or a coupon code sign-up.
Here’s what conversions look like in different stages of the sales funnel:
Source: Moz
So Macro conversions bring in the big bucks for your business, while micro conversions are minor actions that push the customer further down the sales funnel.
Challenges faced by Us
The problem with our website is that the number of calls we received could have been more satisfactory even though our website was supposed to be at the front and center of our marketing.
Here are some of the problems we have detected in our case:
- Our Site was vast but was not fast enough. The site needed to be fast. Here is one marketing stat that tells why. On average, a webmaster has just 50 milliseconds to have a first impression on a visitor. You might have heard, “The first impression is the last impression.” Well, that’s why one needs a really fast website.
- Conversions on the Website CTAs on different pages were quite low.
- Most of our design decisions were arbitrary, and there needed to be a way of making a data-driven decision regarding website design.
How we Overcame the Problem?
We Finally decided to Improve our Website
As a marketing agency, we often determined that improving the website should be our top priority as it will drive more business and sales. However, when some progress was made, it immediately halted because some other work or clients’ work took precedence. I am not saying to ignore your client’s work; I am simply saying that indecision and indecisiveness have hindered the growth of countless businesses. Don’t make yourself count as one of them.
Clearly Understanding What our Target Buyer Looked Like?
The main challenge we had was that we didn’t know who our target buyer was. Once we understood our target buyer well, we created personas that helped us understand what content would be most useful to them. We also realized we needed to focus on providing more value to our website visitors by understanding their deepest desires that can motivate them to take action.
Creating a buyer persona is simply answering a list of questions related to your target market, covering some demographics, interests, hopes, pains and destinations of your ideal buyer. Hubspot has a pretty good article that outlines how to create detailed buyer personas for your business. Highly recommend to check them out.
Improving our Site Speed
We all know that website speed is important. We’ve seen studies showing that even a one-second delay in page load time can cost you 7% conversions and that 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. But what can you do to improve your website speed and as a result, your conversion rate?
Moz has a detailed blog on improving Site Speed. Basically, you would want to ensure your Web Core VItals are glowing green which is the most important indicator of website performance. Here’s what we did.
- We image-optimized.
- We were in charge of the caching.
- These files were compressed.
- We sped up page loads (Moz has another great article about how to speed up time to first Byte). Anything under two seconds is regarded as a good web page load time, which is what we attained.
- To help our site load faster, we also invested in stronger hosting to make our site faster.
Here’s what result it got:
We Closely Tracked User Behavior
One of the major actions we took was to start tracking every button on the site. This helped us track user flow and identify drop-off points in various parts of the website.
Using this data and the knowledge of the Buyer Persona, we implemented changes in the websites. We tested different landing pages, buttons, and color combinations that helped us test the best combination that worked.
It took time. But it worked.
Result
In the end, our efforts were worth it. Not only we fixed our Website, making it super fast. We have nearly 5X our micro conversions in the site.
The first three of making changes bought in 3X more leads and some huge payoffs. It was certainly worth more than any other marketing activity we might have engaged in.
