Marketers have an important job to do for their clients: They have to convert visits to their website into leads.
Whether you’re marketing for yourself or are an industry professional, the way you get those visitors to turn into leads is through a conversion path.
Conversions are very important, because, without them, your product or brand may never get off the ground. Want to know more about conversion paths and how to get more customers for yourself or your clients? Read on to learn more.
What’s a conversion path?
Put simply, a conversion path is a process of taking an anonymous website visitor and turning them into a known lead. You can do this in a couple of different ways ranging from collecting emails to getting someone to purchase a product on the site itself.
There are multiple kinds of conversion paths, so no single option is right for everyone.
4 common attributes of conversion paths
The four main kinds of conversion paths include:
- Call-to-actions
- Thank you pages
- Landing pages
- Endpoints, like purchases or other offers
Call-to-actions
Call-to-actions are sections of your website asking the visitor to do something. A simple call-to-action might be something like, “Click here to learn more.”
Thank you pages
After someone purchases from you or visits your website, you should thank them. If they click on the call-to-action, for example, you may have them go to a thank you page shortly thereafter.
Landing pages
Landing pages are the initial pages that you want visitors to go to and are specific pages on your website that offer the visitors something in exchange for their personal information.
For example, you could offer a free eBook download if they put it in their email, which allows you to get their email for your mailing list.
Endpoints, like purchases or another offer
Finally, there are endpoints, which could include a final content offer, a sale, or another item given to the customer in exchange for their information.
The stages of a conversion path
There are three stages in any conversion path.
These stages include:
- Attracting customers to come to your website
- Converting the customers who have come to your site into qualified leads
- Collecting information about those leads
Attracting customers to come to your website
The first thing you have to do in a conversion path is to attract customers to your website. You can do this by posting on social media, running ads, or by using good SEO to get ranked highly in the search engine results.
Converting the users who have come to your site into qualified leads
Once people come onto your site, your goal is to reduce the bounce rate. You want people to stay on the site for a long time and to make a purchase. If you see a lot of hits but few interactions, then you need to think about methods of converting those people to buyers.
Improving the website, adding offers, using pop-up email forms, and other options could help convert those potential customers into leads.
Collecting information about those leads
Collecting information is the last step. You want to add call-to-actions throughout the site to ask people for their emails or request that they give you other information, like an address or phone number.
What are the steps to creating a conversion path?
There are many things you can do to create a conversion path that works for your business, but these five steps will help you reach the most people and convert the most leads.
1. Create landing pages for the people you want to speak to
To start with, create your landing pages. Are you selling products to landscapers? Make a page that lists your best-selling items with a coupon offer to buy.
Do you sell makeup? Add testimonials and pictures to capture attention, and then add all product information with a pop-up discount code.
These are, of course, examples of what you can do to create a landing page that others stay on and interact with. What you do will depend on your business and your goals for converting users who visit your site.
2. Use calls-to-action to convert users to leads
There are many ways to include a call-to-action on your page. However you do so, you will want to be sure that your users find it appealing.
Some options for calls-to-action include:
- Asking the customer to make a purchase directly, such as by saying, “Buy this now to try it for 30 days.”
- Requesting more information from the customer to send them something. For example, “Just enter your email address here, and we’ll send you a free eBook.”
- Questioning the customer. For instance, “Are you ready to buy?” or “Do you want more information?” Then, tell them what to do. “Reach out, so we can help,” or “Click here to learn more.”
- Pop-ups that make people wait before clicking away from your site. For instance, when someone tries to leave the page, your pop-up could say, “wait, before you go, here’s a 10% discount code.” This could be enough to sway a visitor to stay on the page, which could lead to a conversion.
3. Close the deal with optimized thank you pages
After the user does something that you want them to do, like entering an email or completing a contact form, send them immediately to a thank you page. It should be customized to what the user just did.
For example, if they just made a purchase, you should have a thank you page thanking them for the purchase. If they just gave you an email address, you may follow up with a thank you page that thanks them for their email and send an email that provides them with an offer of some kind to say “thanks!” a second time.
4. Prevent hiccups as the user browses your website
Keep in mind that even the best website will lose possible conversions if there are broken links or problems with forms. Make sure all parts of your website are working and that there isn’t a long wait between pages.
People are quick to navigate away from pages with too many pop-ups, slow loading times, broken image links, or broken navigational links.
5. Get more from your target audience by making your content specific
Finally, make your content specific to the target audience that you want to reach. If you’re trying to talk to people who want to buy clothing, selling home goods may not be a good fit.
You want to make sure that the target audience, whoever is included in it, finds what they’re looking for on your site.
So, if you’re selling dresses to women, adding male content in your blog probably isn’t the way to go to keep traffic up or get the conversions you want.
How to Analyze Your Conversion Data
Once you have a conversion path up and ready to go, you need to start collecting data and analyzing it to improve your conversion rates.
To do this, you need to:
- Identify where the traffic is coming from
- Figure out which landing pages to send visitors to after they come to your site
- Determine who is leaving before converting to adapt your site to capture that demographic
- Check a funnel visualization
To start with, figure out where the traffic is coming from. If you find that you look into the analytics and see that most of your buyers are coming from New Mexico but you sell products that could go anywhere in the country, you may want to adapt your site to include more city-related search terms.
After you figure out where the traffic is coming from, you can also think about what kind of landing page to create. You might make one that refers those people to a landing page with local content, for example.
Not everyone will stay on your site, so you have to figure out who is bouncing early and why. For instance, if mobile users tend to leave quickly, that could be a sign that your mobile site isn’t working well. You may want to look into ways to make it load faster or work better on mobile devices in that case.
Finally, it could be helpful to have a funnel visualization. You can track where users are going and figure out when you’re losing those conversions.
As an example, imagine you have 100% of users on your main page. Then, 80% go to your landing page. If you notice that only 20% continue, you need to do work on your landing page to help improve your conversion rate.
Wrap Up
Good conversion rates can make a difference for your business. Conversion rate optimization makes sure you’re capturing as many leads as you can.
Do you want to learn more about optimizing your conversion rates? Read “Top 10 Conversion Rate Optimization Tools to Consider in Your Strategies.”
