10 Highly Effective Conversion Marketing Strategies

No matter what industry you’re in, the success of your business depends on your ability to turn online visitors into customers.

Conversion marketing provides a way to increase the rate at which visitors become buyers.

In this guide, I will explain conversion marketing, how it works, and how you can use it to your advantage.

What Is Conversion Marketing?

Conversion marketing is the process of optimizing your marketing efforts to encourage potential customers to take a specific action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a demo. The goal is to move users through the sales funnel and turn website visitors or leads into paying customers.

Unlike traditional marketing, which focuses on generating traffic and brand awareness, conversion marketing prioritizes improving the user experience, removing friction points, and using persuasive techniques to increase the likelihood of a conversion. This involves tactics like personalized messaging, A/B testing, clear calls-to-action (CTAs), and trust-building strategies.

Why Is Conversion Marketing Important?

Conversion rate is an essential part of digital marketing because it determines the value of your online traffic. With conversion marketing, you can increase your total revenue without raising your prices or driving more visitors to your site.

Let’s compare two scenarios:

Scenario 1: You bring 1,000 people to your site and convert 1% into sales (10 sales), with an average sale price of $100. This results in $1,000 in revenue.

Scenario 2: You bring the same number of people to your site (1,000) but convert 2% into sales (20 sales). With the same traffic, you’ve generated $2,000 in revenue.

Conversion Marketing Strategies For Better Results

1. Find out where the problem is
2. Analyze user behavior with heatmaps and session playbacks
3. Create dedicated landing pages for paid campaigns
4. Carry out controlled A/B tests
5. Revise your CTA
6. Add limited-time offers and one-time discounts
7. Win the social proof game
8. Use remarketing to get more conversions at a lower cost
9. Revise your paid campaigns

1. Find out where the problem is

The first step to improving a low conversion rate is to find the problem areas causing visitors to leave without taking the desired action.

Once you find what negatively impacts your conversions, you can make the necessary changes to improve your results.

Start by analyzing the behavior of your website visitors. You can see how people behave on your site by looking at the data within Google Analytics.

You can use the Behavior report to get an overview of your most popular pages:

By clicking on a page, you can see:

• The average amount of time spent on the page
• Bounce rate
• The percentage of visitors that exit your site after viewing the page

With the Behavior Flow report, you can see where people enter your site, how they move through different pages, and where they exit.

Marketing funnels guide visitors from interest to purchase. They are based on the idea that buyers go through different phases throughout their purchasing journeys.

Funnels are divided into phases to match the buyer’s journey. Each uses different content to appeal to the buyer’s current position in the funnel.

You should lay out the sequence of pages visitors should follow from the first interaction with your business to becoming customers.

After you design your marketing funnel, you can create a funnel report in Google Analytics. This will allow you to track how people are moving through your funnel and quickly see if there are any problem areas.

Enable event tracking

By default, Google Analytics only tracks events that generate a pageview.

You'll need to set up event tracking to get a clear picture of the actions people take on your site. With event tracking, you can see when users perform actions like:

• Scrolling down the page
• Clicking a button
• Downloading a file
• Clicking on an external link
• Abandoning a sign-up form

Optimize for mobile

When optimizing for conversions, digital marketers often focus too much on the desktop experience. However, most of today’s web visitors use mobile devices. Optimizing for mobile should be your top priority.

2. Analyze user behavior with heatmaps and session playbacks

Analytics platforms give you a high-level view of your website performance but do not necessarily inform you WHY a customer took a specific action.

Let’s say you have an e-commerce store. After reviewing the data in Google Analytics, you can see that many visitors are exiting your product pages.

But what about the product page that is causing them to leave? It could be any number of issues.

Using heatmaps and session recordings, you can get better insights into what is driving your visitors’ behavior.

Heatmaps

A heatmap is a tool that shows you which areas of your web page users are paying the most attention to.

A heat map highlights the areas where people are scrolling and placing their cursors in different colors.

The darker the coloring, the more active that area is. You can use this visualization to see which areas are most important to visitors and then focus on optimizing these areas.

Session playback

A session playback is a video recording of a user’s visit to your site.

It is extremely insightful as you can see exactly what a user did during their visit with your own eyes.

Let’s revisit our e-commerce store example with struggling product pages to see how this can be used to optimize conversions.

When viewing a session playback, you see that many visitors tap the product images on their phones repeatedly, trying to get a closer look, but are unable to do so (this is also known as rage-clicking). After enough failed attempts, they leave the page.

In this situation, you want to add image zoom functionality to your mobile site.

By doing so, you’ll likely view later sessions and find that people can zoom in on the images and add more items to their carts as a result.

3. Create dedicated landing pages for paid campaigns

If you run paid ad campaigns (such as Google search campaigns), creating standalone landing pages to send your visitors to is essential.

When users click on an ad, they expect the content on the proceeding page to match the ad's messaging.

In most cases, the content on your homepage and other pages will likely not match the context of your ads.

When creating your landing pages, you want them to be simple without distractions. There should be one call to action, and the steps needed to proceed should be clear.

As I previously mentioned, the pages should be optimized for mobile, as the majority of traffic comes from that platform.

This means creating a mobile-friendly design and ensuring that the pages load fast and without errors.

Beyond improving conversions, dedicated landing pages can help you lower advertising costs.

With a better landing page experience, Google will give your ads a higher Quality Score.

A better Quality Score helps your ads get more impressions and can lower your cost-per-click (how much you pay for each visitor).

4. Carry out controlled A/B tests

Extensive testing is critical to maximizing your conversion rates.

What works best in theory may not be what actually works best in practice.

The only way to truly know what yields the best conversions is to test.

A/B testing is the process of testing different variables to see which yields the best results.

When you run an A/B test, your existing website is the control you are testing against (version A).

You create a variation of the control where certain elements are different (version B).

When visitors view your website, half of them are served version A, and half receive version B.

As your users receive different versions, you analyze the performance metrics for each version to see which is performing better.

The test runs until you have enough data to statistically prove the better version.

Here are some of the different elements you can evaluate in your A/B test:

Headline

Your headline is the first thing visitors notice when scanning your landing page. It should be concise and should grab the visitor’s attention.

It should relate to the product or service, and if you run ads, it should match the messaging of the ad. In addition to different copies, you can try testing different font sizes and colors.

Body copy

The page's body text should clearly present the value you are offering the customer. You can test different messaging, fonts, and colors like the headline.

Layout

You should design your pages to be easy to navigate and understand. You can experiment with the layout of your pages by arranging elements like images, icons, and videos in different ways.

Call to action (CTA)

You can test different wording and layouts for your CTAs to see what provides the best results. I’ll discuss this in more detail in the next step.

Forms

If your conversion goal is email subscriptions, your sign-up forms are an important element to test.

Including more fields in your form can give you more data on the prospect, but it can also create friction that causes them not to complete the form.

Only test one element at a time

When you perform your A/B tests, it is important only to test one variable at a time.

If you try running tests with multiple elements that are different, it will be difficult to determine the impact each truly has on your conversions.

Only testing a single change gives you a direct insight into how that element performs.

You can create multiple variations to test against your control, but each test should be performed separately.

As you grow in experience, you can consider experimenting with more complicated forms of testing, like multivariate testing.

A/B testing tools

To perform A/B tests, you’ll need an A/B testing tool. The tool will allow you to create different versions of your pages. It also tracks the performance of your variations so you can review the analytics to see which is better.

Here are some of the most popular A/B testing tools:

• Optimizely
• VWO
• Unbounce
• HubSpot

5. Revise your CTA

A call-to-action (CTA) is the messaging that directs a user to your conversion goal. The messaging typically appears within the button the user must click to complete the conversion.

For example, a button beneath an email submission form that says “sign up”.

Your CTAs should be specific to your conversion goal. Use direct language like “buy now” or “download now” to make it clear what action the user should take.

Here are a few examples:

• If you are selling products – add ‘Buy Now’
• If you are selling online courses – add ‘‘Enroll Now’
• If you want people to contact you – add ‘Call Now’ or ‘Contact us Now’
• If you are promoting an offer – add ‘Get Offer’

Experiment with different messaging in your A/B tests to find what works best.

Another way to optimize your CTAs is to adjust the button's color. This may seem trivial, but different button colors can lead to drastically different results.

There isn’t one specific color that works better than others. The best practice is to use contrasting colors.

6. Add limited-time offers and one-time discounts

A great way to incentivize your visitors to take action is to present limited-time offers.

The sales page for our digital marketing courses bundle provides an example of an effective promotional offer.

The limited-time 80% off offer is prominently placed in the header. The countdown timer, with its contrasting red color, creates a sense of urgency and stands out on the page.

A popup with a special one-time offer provides another $10 off.

The popup uses exit intent technology. The popup automatically triggers when someone moves their cursor to try and exit the page.

7. Win the social proof game

Social proof is showing your visitors that others have bought from you.

The idea behind social proof is that people often follow the actions of others and will be more likely to buy after seeing others doing it.

Social proof is especially important in digital marketing because people cannot easily grasp products and services in person.

Here are some practical ways you can provide social proof to your visitors:

Display customer reviews

Written reviews from previous customers are one of the most effective forms of social proof.

Many people will look for reviews on your site and even visit multiple third-party review sites before purchasing.

You can use positive reviews from external sites to boost visitors' confidence in your website.

Provide testimonials

Testimonials are similar to reviews but are usually a little more detailed. They are often part of a case study in which a customer explains the success they have had using the business’s product or services.

Reach out to your previous buyers to see if they want to share their success stories with others.

Endorsements from influencers

Today, many people look to the opinions of celebrities and influencers to inform their buying decisions.

Look to get support from well-known influencers in your niche. The influencer can then make a quote about the product or service and add it to your site as you would a review or testimonial.

Show notifications from recent purchases

Another form of social proof is to display browser notifications that show other people buying. The typical messaging for these notifications is something like “Mike from Ohio recently bought Product A”.

Our courses sales page, which we previously highlighted, does this well.

8. Use remarketing to get more conversions at a lower cost

Circling back to the average conversion rates across industries — the vast majority of your visitors won’t convert regardless of how optimized your site is.

You could have an e-commerce store with double the average conversion rate (10%), and 9 out of 10 people would still leave without making a purchase.

You can boost your overall conversion rate by remarketing to these people and bringing them back to your website.

Remarketing with Google Ads

To run remarketing ads on Google, you’ll first need to enable Google conversion tracking and add a piece of code to your website.

The pixel tracks your website visitors and creates an audience list within Google Ads that you can use for remarketing.

Google Remarketing uses dynamic display ads.

These ads will appear in front of your audience as they visit different websites in the Google Display Network.

The ads have higher click-through and conversion rates than normal display ads. They also have a much lower average cost-per-click (CPC) than search ads.

Remarketing with Facebook

Facebook remarketing ads function similarly. You first need to install the Facebook pixel so that Facebook can track visitors to your site.

You can then set these people as your target audience when creating campaigns.

Remarketing on Facebook has several advantages over Google and other platforms. The most notable being your options for ad types.

Whereas with Google, you can only remarket with display ads, with Facebook, you can use any ad type.

You can even create dynamic product ads that automatically show users ads for products they have visited on your site.

9. Revise your paid campaigns

If your paid advertising campaigns are not yielding your desired conversion rates, your audience targeting could be affected.

You could have the best product or service in the world and an awesome website, but if you present them to someone who is not interested, it won’t matter.

For Facebook campaigns, you should analyze how people of different demographics and interests engage with your ads.

If you find that one audience segment performs poorly (e.g., people in a certain age group), you can exclude this group from your targeting.

For search campaigns, you’ll want to analyze your keyword targeting. You may notice that traffic from certain keywords isn’t performing very well. Or you may find that you are paying for clicks for irrelevant search terms.

You can filter out low-performing and irrelevant search terms by using negative keywords.

A negative keyword is a search term for which you do not want your ad to appear. When you add one to a campaign, Google will make sure that your ad doesn’t show for that query.

For instance, let’s say you have a business that sells running shoes and nothing else.

Using a broad match type, you create a search campaign and add “shoes” as a target keyword.

With a broad match, your ad can appear for terms broadly related to the one provided.

Regarding the term “shoes”, this could very well lead to your ad appearing for searches like flip flops, high heels, or slippers.

Because your business does not sell any of these products, traffic from these searches is of little worth.

If visitors searching these terms end up on your site, they will quickly leave after not finding what they want, lowering your conversion rate.

You can avoid this problem by ensuring that you are only targeting the most relevant keywords for your business.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate?

A good conversion rate is anything above 2%. The actual percentage varies drastically depending on your industry.

If you sell commodity-type e-commerce products you can expect to convert more visitors than software as a service (SaaS) company selling high-ticket software that requires more consideration.

According to the Conversion Benchmark Report from Unbounce, these are the average conversion rates for key industries:

Average Conversion Rates Per Industry

Here is also a graph showing the average conversion rate per industry.

Key Learnings

A conversion is when someone takes a desired action on your website, such as a sale or email sign-up.

The conversion rate definition is the percentage of people that result in a conversion.

You can calculate your conversion rate with the following formula:

(Number of conversions / Total number of visitors) x 100

Conversion rate marketing is a marketing strategy focused on maximizing conversions.

With a successful conversion marketing strategy, you can grow your revenue without increasing your prices or the number of website visitors.

If your conversion rate is lower than what you desire, you can take the following steps to improve it:

• Find out where the problem is
• Analyze user behavior with heatmaps and session playbacks
• Create dedicated landing pages for paid campaigns
• Carry out controlled A/B tests
• Revise your CTA
• Add limited-time offers and one-time discounts
• Win the social proof game
• Use remarketing to get more conversions at a lower cost
• Revise your paid campaigns
• Enrolling in a good CRO Course is the best way to become an expert in conversion rate marketing.