What’s A Good Conversion Rate, And How Can You Increase Yours?

What is your online conversion rate? How does that rank against your competitors? Everyone wants to crush their competition and increase their profits, but does success boil down to being the winner with the highest numbers?

In most games, metrics determine the victor. Most marketers are passionate about metrics and therefore like to win. Let’s pause and redefine what it means to win; let’s discover the psychology behind how your customers make decisions and use that information to sway them into action.

Essentially, let’s understand how you can score a high conversion rate that generates more leads and closes more sales.

What is a conversion rate?

A Conversion Rate is the percentage of website visitors who take action when you present them with an offer. This number details how effective your messages and calls-to-action are. A higher conversion rate means that your messaging and marketing strategies are effective.

You can narrow down that genre into a few different types of conversion rates:

• Lead magnet conversion rates are the percentage of people who saw your lead magnet offer and submitted their email address in exchange for the offer.
• Sales conversion rates describe how many of your subscribers purchased a product. For example, if you email out a coupon for a specific item, you can calculate how many of your subscribers actually used that coupon to purchase the product.
• Webinar registration conversion rates can provide information about how each person heard about your webinar (social media post, email, website, affiliate, etc.).
• Email click-through conversion rates explain how many of your subscribers are clicking on the links provided in your emails in proportion to who many subscribers are opening and reading your emails.
• Landing page conversion rates can reveal how many people accept the offer on your landing page compared to how many guests viewed the landing page.

What impacts your conversion rate?

Almost anything could impact your conversion rate, but here are the most common elements:

• Headline: If your headline isn’t catchy, who will click on it to read more?
• CTA. If your call-to-action is boring, misplaced, or blends in, then your visitors won’t notice it (and obviously won’t click it).
• Images. I
• Page loading time.

How do you calculate a conversion rate?

Whether you’re a math genius or prefer to stay away from numbers, you can calculate your conversion rate. In fact, tracking programs like Google Analytics or HubSpot often do the calculations for you. But for those of you who want to do this manually, pull out some paper and a calculator.

First, you need to find out how many people visited a certain page of your website and how many individuals took advantage of the offer you presented.

Next, divide the number of people who accepted the offer by how many guests visited the page.

Now multiple that result by 100.

For example, 1000 people visited my landing page “Free Content Planning Calendar.” After one month, 200 guests submitted their email address in exchange for the free calendar.

200 / 1000 = 0.2

0.2 x 100 = 20

20% of the guests who visited my landing page converted into subscribers.

What is a decent conversion rate?

A good conversion rate is ever changing. It’s higher than your last one yet lower than your next one. That’s generic, but solid.

Suppose you select a random number. “I want a CTA conversion rate of 15% by the end of the month.” That’s cool, but where in the world did you choose that number? What if your current rate is only 3%. A 12% increase in less than 30 days will be extremely tough.

Rather than choose an arbitrary number, compare to your existing standard. What was the conversion rate each month for that CTA over the past 3 or 6 months? Use those metrics to formulate a new conversion rate goal for the next month, 6 months, or year.

Don’t worry about the rate of your competitors; remember, so many factors contribute to a conversion rate, making it unfair to compare apples to oranges.

What is a good conversion rate in my industry?

Although we don’t encourage you to compare to others (apples and oranges, remember?), having a target bracket can be helpful. Here’s a chart to give you an idea of what a competitive conversion rate looks like in your industry:

• E-commerce: 1.6%
• B2B websites: 5% for a visitor to a lead, 30% for a sales-qualified lead to customer
• Landing pages: average of 4% across all industries (with rates as high as 30%)
• Facebook ads: 9.2%

How can you boost your conversion rates?

After you calculate your conversion rate, set goals based on your recent metrics, and compare to your industry average, you can further audit your landing pages and sales pages to figure out what is and isn’t working.

• Determine which elements of those pages snag your visitors or attract their curiosity. A user behavior report, which shows where most people click on the page or stop scrolling, could be helpful at this point.
• Make sure your offer is concise, clear, and stands out on the page. This may mean you need to remove other information off of this page so it’s not a distraction.
• Borrow ideas from your competitors. Don’t steal their products, but learn from their marketing style. If they’re accruing customers, they’re doing something right on their landing and sales pages!
• Offer different incentives. Your visitors may prefer a free ebook, or they may want a video series instead. Test out multiple options to see which one is the most popular.

What’s a good conversion rate?

What’s a good conversion rate for your business? That depends on numerous variables, which you can experiment with until you find a sweet spot. But a good rate is one that is higher than your last one.

Increasing these rates will boost your leads and multiply your sales. At the end of the day, you are discovering what your audience wants and finding a way to deliver that to them.

Need help determining your current conversion rates? Looking for someone to experiment with methods that could increase your conversion rates? Want to convert more leads than you competitors? The MindShift team can walk you through all three of those questions. Fill out the form below so we can start boosting your leads and multiplying your sales.