No matter how sophisticated your marketing strategy or how beautifully designed your website, ignoring conversion basics will come back to haunt you.  Rarely are marketing teams blessed with the ability to own the full website experience and the conversion funnel, nor does company culture always lend itself to open minded feedback of creative experiences, admitting when a test or experience is not a winner, or the ability to step back and see things from a non-insider perspective.

Now that we’ve acknowledged the importance of conversion rate optimization and the challenges faced from a political standpoint, here are some basic steps you can take to improve conversion rate and squeeze the most success out of each marketing campaign.

1. Ever-Present CTAs

Your CTA should be “sticky” - meaning it is visible as a user scrolls up and down.  Better yet, as users engage further down every page of your site there should be additional CTAs that flow in seamlessly.  For example, feather in asset download CTAs, reword bottom of funnel CTAs to be softer, and give users the chance to click on and engage with non-gated content.  Don’t just rely on a CTA button within a stick navigation to do the trick.

2. Stop Talking About Yourself

Your audience doesn’t really care about you.  They don’t care about your culture, your growth, or what your product is.  They care about what your product brings them, the results they can expect to see, and the feelings they have after using your product.  So tell your story, but ensure it is in terms of the end user and include stats and bold statements about how it makes their lives better.  Bonus points for tweaking your messaging to appeal to an executive.  This means directly stating how your product is going to measurably increase revenue or measurably cut costs.  Because if there is no positive revenue impact and you cannot prove it, no Finance team will approve your product.

3. Speak Plainly

Jargon and insider language can be the death of a well designed site.  Are you sure visitors understand your corporate vocabulary?  As someone in Marketing, you see acronyms and made up work words everywhere.  Don’t assume someone outside of your organization gets you and review messaging with an outside resource to ensure your messaging is not deeply entrenched in your internal bias.

4. Site Chat

Site chat is just a must and expected.  Even if you cannot justify the cost of a manned chat app, many AI ones are just as good and can help retain and qualify your site traffic.  Ensure your site chat has the right tracking embedded so that leads acquired through it can be attributed back to the source channel.

5. Multi-Step Forms

This one can be a hard one to wrap your head around.  The idea of multiple clicks implies additional friction.  However, countless tests have proven that mult–step forms can far out-perform single step forms.  Lead with personal information and then ask more product specific questions.  A client of Clermont Digital’s with a large media budget saw an 85% increase to conversion rate just by implementing these forms.  85%.  Imagine the difference that could make to your program.

6. Only Ask What Is Necessary

Don’t ask for information you really do not need.  Seems basic, but is not often done. Rely on a ZoomInfo or similar partner to enrich leads and leave out fields that are known conversion killers - like phone numbers.  

7. Don’t Overlook Page Load Times

Are you regularly evaluating your page load times on various devices?  Don’t rely on your Tech and Product teams to handle this for you.  They have other demands on their time and this piece is too critical to Marketing to not routinely take a peek at.  Mobile pages tend to be the worst offenders and often have the most traffic.  Start there and ensure you are a squeaky wheel when numbers look poor.

In sum, don’t let team structure and politics stand in the way of making some basic conversion improvements that can make a HUGE difference.  Have questions or need more ideas?  Reach out!  At Clermont Digital, this is a subject we are passionate about and have seen firsthand the rocketfuel it can provide to any marketing campaign.