When it comes to converting traffic into leads, there’s not a lot our Customer Success team doesn’t know. So, I grabbed two of our finest players for a chat about all things conversion. Say hello 👋🏽 to Helen Azoia, Onboarding Manager and bot builder extraordinaire, and Abbie Baisden, Customer Success Manager and in-house conversion pro.
My question for them was simple; what are your 5 top tips to help clients improve their conversion rate? They told me that it’s simpler than it sounds, and that the best thing to do is go back to basics – these things, they tell me, are super important and easy to do, but are commonly forgotten or missed.
Call To Actions
Helen – The first tip I’d give is that you need to check your Call To Actions (or CTAs). It seems obvious but we see it surprisingly commonly amongst clients that sometimes when we start looking through their pages to see what we can optimise, they don’t have any CTAs at all! This seems to be true especially on sub-pages and blogs, which means that you’re missing an opportunity at every point of contact that the potential customer has with your site.
Bots can be a really handy tool to use here. Lots of buttons on one page can sometimes be overkill, so we make use of our bots to reduce the number of buttons. We like subtle, subtle is good.
Abbie – To add to that, I definitely think trying out different CTAs is important, even if they’re on the same page, to attract different levels of interest. Not all of the people that visit your page are ready to buy, but they may chat to a bot to get more information on your product or download some resources from you. All of them count as leads, and you can follow up with appropriate contact to these potential customers based on the information you now know about them – who they are and what they’re interested in, all based on the interactions they have made with your page.
And here’s where our SmartProfiles swoop in to save the day. Our SmartProfiles allow our clients to see who has visited their site, what pages they have visited and how many occasions (including times and dates). You can also see which companies people are visiting from to allow you to gauge interest across different industries and markets, as well as the size of the company to allow you to ensure your traffic is coming from the right types of client (and therefore that your outbound marketing is doing its job).
Armed with this information, you can helpfully slide into their DMs with alllll the benefits of your product and how it could meet their needs exactly. Smooth.
There’s an example of our SmartProfiles right there 👇🏼 It’s our Marketing Operations Manager’s SmartProfile, no marketers or GDPR rules were harmed when filming this video.
Check your traffic
Abbie – Another thing it’s super important to do is to look at where your traffic is coming from, and ensuring it’s the right traffic in the first place. Knowing where your visitors are coming from can give you helpful insights into the effectiveness of any campaigns you’re running. Knowing who those visitors are, and whether they’re the right kind of visitors for your business will mean you can see whether those campaigns are being targeted to the right people. It could also indicate that your messaging is off, and so is attracting the wrong type of client to your page.
Helen – I’d definitely agree. And the thing is, this isn’t always really obvious by looking at the traffic volume alone. Some of our clients get a decent amount of traffic but when we plug in our platform and check where it’s coming from, we realise quickly that they are from the wrong country, market or sector. It’s much more difficult to convert people who aren’t the target for your product than it is to ensure that your visitors are from the right target market. You can also use a whole host of free tools to check your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to make sure you’re at the top of the results in the searches relevant to your product or service. Also, any traffic you pay for through an agency, speak to them about who they are targeting and what key words they are using so you know you’re on the right track.
So, quantity is important, obviously, but the quality of those visitors is just as important. Those visitors are your potential leads, and we only like quality leads here.
Make it easy
Helen – One thing that I think is important is that you don’t make customers jump through hoops to get in touch with you. We have definitely seen it on some sites where it’s just plain hard work for the customer to actually get in touch with the business. Some websites just leave an email and hope people take the initiative to actually leave the site, open a browser, open their email, paste the address, and compose an email. Some have lengthy forms to fill out, which even the brawniest of us struggle to wade through, and this just puts people off. They won’t bother contacting you, especially if your competitor makes it easier than you do.
So, make it easy for your customers to contact you. Again, this is something we use our super handy bots for. We created some awesome fine-tuned bots for SpeedScreed Ltd., which allows potential customers to get in touch, and then the platform helpfully collates the data to make it quick and easy for you to get back to these customers who you now know are interested. We’ve got an example of the bot below… Pretty cool huh? 😎
Check out a video of SpeedScreed’s extra-helpful bot 👇🏼 This is what we mean when we say “just make it easy for your customers”.
Pay attention to the people who don’t stay
Abbie – Another tip for improving your conversion rate is actually to look at where people are bouncing (leaving your site). Bounce rate tells you they’re leaving but you need to know why they’re not converting. For example, it could be that again, you’re not targeting the right customers. Let’s say you aim for businesses which make between £1-5m a year in revenue, but all you’re getting in the door is small businesses with revenue that’s less than £500k, then it would hardly be a surprise when the bounce rate on your pricing page is over 95%.
We often see high bounce rates on pages where, for example, the header is pricing, but the page doesn’t contain any pricing information, only a form to capture information to provide a quote. Obviously, it’s kinda irritating when you’re looking for information and get led down the garden path only to meet a dead end. Customers click away because it immediately irritates them and they might associate that distaste with your brand… potentially forever.
Easy to navigate
Helen – Make your site easy to navigate. We have all been there – searching an unfamiliar page and you’re trying to navigate but everything is overlapping because it’s in mobile and the whole thing is just a hot mess? 99.9% of the time when that happens, we close the page and look elsewhere. This does overlap a bit with what I said before but I don’t think I can say it enough: make it easy for customers to find what you want them to find. A common one I’ve seen is where you have a Hamburger menu but no top tabs at all, and whilst it might look pretty, it does make it harder to find things.
Abbie – UX and functionality is as important as the design of the site too. I won’t name names but there are some pretty big ecommerce companies out there whose websites are horrendous to use. I’m sure you can think of a few. One particular very large global online retailer’s website on desktop is so ugly and difficult to read and has too many tabs. I’ll bet most of their users probably don’t even use most of the functionalities on there because they’re too hard to find.
The way your site looks can make a huge difference to the amount and level of interaction your customers have with your site and this in turn affects the number of conversions you’re getting. Try different things out to see what works. And no, football pitch green is probably not a shout for the block colour on your main page.
Key takeaway
I think the message from our experts is pretty clear; keep it simple, make it easy for customers to find things and be as proactive as you can with the information you have about the people visiting your site. You can read more handy tips in our Complete Guide to Conversion, where we explain all the numbers and what it means for you. It’s a doozy, so sit down with a cuppa and get ready to become an expert. You got this.
