5 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips to Increase Inbound Leads

Your website is designed to convert website visitors into customers: on the homepage, pricing page, blog, and landing pages. These conversions can include anything from signing up for an email list, downloading a resource or requesting a demo.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who complete a form to become inbound leads. From your UI/UX to your choice of graphics to the ability to write persuasive copy, every element on your site impacts conversion rates. Optimizing your conversion rates means you’ll get more conversions without having to bring in more website traffic.

For example, if your website has 10k visitors per month that generate 100 leads and 10 of those leads become customers, your visitor-to-lead conversion rate is 1%. Imagine your goal is to double the number of customers each month. You could either attempt to drive twice as much traffic to the website— or you could optimize your on-page conversion rate. By increasing it to just 2%, your new leads (and new customers) double as well.

Ready to get started? Check out the strategies for optimizing your conversion rates:

1. Refine Messaging & Design Around a User Path

Mapping the user journey is the first step in understanding how to drive potential customers towards conversion. Understanding of your user path, compelling copy, strong CTAs, and thoughtful design all have the ability to drive action and increase conversions for your business.

Your landing page must clearly direct users to the action you want them to take. If the user experience is muddled or unclear, your conversion rate will take the hit. Let design guide their interest across the page, toward a single strong call-to-action.

Use copy to describe the value a user will get from filling out a form. Implement bold, colorful CTA buttons to point visitors to your free demo sign-up. By continuously testing and optimizing, you will be able to identify what messaging resonates with your audience and then use that insight to inform all of your marketing efforts.

2. Leverage Analytics Insights

The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing your goals. Leverage analytics to base your optimization efforts on hard numbers and demonstrated behaviors, rather than on gut feelings.

Pick the analytics platform of your choice (we use a combination of HubSpot, Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, and a few others) and then add tracking for your conversions. This allows you to see how users move through your site. Look for insight into where people enter your site, what features they engage with, how they spend their time on the page, what channel and referrer brought them in, what devices and browsers they use, and where users leave your site before converting. Identify which content or landing pages have the high conversion rates, then drive more qualified website traffic to those pages by optimizing it for search or leveraging it in paid marketing efforts.

3. Reduce Friction on Forms

Inbound marketing involves nurturing users through valuable content offers that give them a reason to convert. However, it’s not uncommon for users to drop off when they encounter a form — especially when it’s a mile long.

Our recommendation is to streamline forms as much as possible by eliminating unnecessary fields, or by utilizing progressive form fields, fields that capture different information if a user is completing a second form. This allows you to capture less information upfront, but still gain the information you need as a lead progresses through your funnel.

Reducing friction can be a simple way to increase conversions. However, you want to ensure that you are still capturing vital information about your lead. For instance, we recently added an “Industry” field to all of our forms so that leads can easily self-qualify through a Yes/No response. Your needs might be different, so test different lengths and content on your forms to determine what combination drives the most qualified submissions.

4. Test Continuously

CRO is synonymous with ongoing experimentation. It is all about continuously testing what works, what doesn’t, and where you can improve. For instance, landing pages play an important role on your website and in the conversions funnel, so they are a prime spot to A/B test different variables including button color, CTA text, number of form fields or the image on the page.

Testing (and the tools required to do it) is often quick and inexpensive and it can produce fast, measurable results. Aside from improving your on-page conversion rates, this process can also give your valuable data to inform other marketing efforts. Information gleaned from the testing process often provides deeper insight into who your customer is, what they are looking for, and how to communicate with them more effectively.

5. Use Remarketing to Re-Engage Visitors

Many of the users who come to your site won’t convert on their first visit. By leveraging remarketing, which serves your website visitors online ads on other sites across the web, you can re-engage them with targeted offers that drive them back to your landing page.

Remarketing is most effective when part of a synergistic strategy that includes organic SEO, data-driven content creation, paid and organic social, and paid search. With these all driving users to tagged landing pages, the remarketing audience grows while also generating leads from users in-market for services. From there, the audiences can be used to determine the effectiveness of the marketing messaging, provide unique content and offers to the specific audiences, and increase the likelihood of conversions. These audiences will also offer insights into similar individuals (lookalike targeting) and provide data to inform ongoing content topics as their search activity, engagement onsite, and display network placements details offer information on their interests and struggles.

Once your sales and marketing engine is successfully attracting qualified website visitors, CRO is key to getting more leads (and customers) from that website traffic. If you need help optimizing your landing pages or establishing an inbound marketing strategy, start a conversation with us here.