We’ve all had the problem. You’ve built up a functioning digital marketing strategy that drives plenty of traffic to your website, but that’s where the success of your marketing ends. Your visitors don’t turn into your leads at the rate you want or need, which means that your marketing efforts matter little in the long run. What do you do?
First, you determine why your visitors don’t advance further in their buyer’s journey. Then, you use that knowledge as a guide to help you adjust your strategy, and maximizes your conversion rate. Here are 3 reasons your website does not convert, and what you can do about each of them.
1. It Doesn’t Match the Source
The first reason your visitors don’t convert to leads is relatively simple: they don’t get what they expected. Driving traffic to your website is great, but if you accomplish it based on flashy designs that don’t match your website design, or promises that your landing pages don’t keep, that traffic won’t amount to much.
As a result, your visitors get annoyed. If they don’t get what they expect, they will not only bounce immediately, they will also hesitate before visiting again in the future. Your conversion rate suffers in both the short and intermediate term.
What You Can Do: Establish Consistency at All Levels
Your traffic-generating methods in all channels should promise only what the related landing page can fulfill. In fact, you may want to consider setting up dedicated landing page for your individual campaigns, which accomplish just that. A search ad that advertises a free trial for your subscription software, for example, should lead to a landing page directly related to that free trial.
2. It Lacks a Clear Call to Action
Even if you’ve hit the right audience, and your messaging is consistent, your conversion rates will suffer if you don’t incorporate clear calls to action throughout its individual pages. Our online attention span is now at 8 seconds, meaning that your visitors won’t like having to comb through your website just to find what they’re looking for.
What You Can Do: Implement Relevant CTA Buttons
Instead, you should aim to guide them, implementing clear calls to action throughout the website. Ideally, these calls to action should come in the form of easy-to-distinguish buttons, which in both design and color stand out from the rest of your content.
And once again, your call to action buttons should be consistent with the reasons your audience visits your site in the first place. If you sell medical equipment, a CTA button that drives visitors to your medical industry newsletter can be very effective to increase your lead generation and conversion rate.
3. It Confuses the Visitor
When implementing the solution to step 2, it’s tempting to begin plastering your site with plenty of call to action buttons and making sure you create enough pages to cover all potential reasons for your audience’s site visit. But in fact, that very action can also depress your conversion rate.
The Qual der Wahl (German for ‘agony of choice’) is a real problem in digital marketing. If your audience has more than one choice of action at their disposal, the chances increase they will choose neither. And once they start getting lost in your navigation, they will leave the site and start over rather than keeping up their search.
What You Can Do: Streamline Your Navigation and Pages
To optimize your conversion rate, you need to make your page and its calls to action as simple and streamlined as possible. That includes cleaning up your navigation, ensuring that visitors can reach their preferred destination in just a few clicks.
In this space, we’ve also talked about the importance of attention ratio, which should ideally be 1:1 – meaning that every page on your site should have a singular goal, and all links on that page should lead toward accomplishing that goal.
That means, if possible, a single call to action on your landing page, and one that relates directly to the reason your visitors are on your site in the first place. If they’re looking for your new white paper on the importance of renewable energy, the sign-up form to receive that gated content (or the button to that sign up form) should be the prominent, and ideally the only link on your page.
In Conclusion
There are myriads of reasons why your website might not convert a respectable amount of traffic into an equally respectable amount of leads. But at the end, they can all be boiled down to the above three feelings your visitors get when they visit the site. If you’re suffering from low conversion rates, and need help in boosting your lead generation, contact us today.
