How to Increase Conversion Rates by 112%

Conversion Rate Optimization Specialist

“Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” legendary football coach Vince Lombardi once said. Put another way, it’s not how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose.?If your organization’s marketing is one of your responsibilities, you know first-hand not only that results matter, but that only results matter.

Your business has likely devoted significant time, money, and other resources to a comprehensive marketing campaign, much of it in the form of inbound marketing. The success (or lack thereof) of your inbound marketing is, of course, measured by conversion rates. Increasing those rates in order to convert more consumers into your customers is probably considered a priority on your job description.

This begs the question, of course, of how to increase the conversion rate of your inbound marketing. Many people don’t know where to actually start. Perhaps the most effective tool for achieving that goal is to use the services of a conversion rate optimization specialist.

What is a conversion rate optimization specialist and what does he or she do? Well, let’s look at the general notion of conversion first. Conventional wisdom holds that website traffic conversions happen between 1 and 3 percent of the time. By doing the math we see that, on average, you’ll have three?conversions for every 100 visitors (assuming a 3% percent conversion rate). A conversion rate optimization specialist is tasked with growing that number; a truly effective specialist can increase your conversion rate by as much as 112 percent. Using our example, this would translate into an additional 3 to 4 conversions per 100 website visitors, thereby essentially doubling your qualified prospects (and making your sales force, not to mention upper management, very happy).

Here are some of the methods a conversion rate optimization specialist can use to generate the results you require.

• Evaluation of current inbound marketing program.

  A specialist will analyze your marketing by examining the following:

  • Message
  • Target audience
  • Content (including adequacy of call-to-action)
  • Analytics

• Once the evaluation is completed, the specialist can help you identify and utilize tools, tailored specifically to your product/service and target market, for increasing your conversion rate.

• Create vibrant, engaging content that is on point and is frequently renewed. Stale content is doom. If consumers aren’t enticed to visit your online presence often to see what’s new, they soon won’t be coming back at all.
• Ensure content is shared appropriately across all social media platforms you employ. If your message isn’t broadcast via all of your social networking sites (SNS), you are obviously limiting your marketing reach.
• There is no conversion without call(s)-to-action. A conversion rate optimization specialist will work with you to create and develop tools that persuade a visitor to take the action you desire. Such tools include well-designed interactive website landing pages that gather data sufficient to generate qualified lead information for your sales force.

Some business owners and executives consider a conversion rate optimization specialist to be a redundancy. After all, isn’t increasing conversion rates the job of your company’s in-house marketing professionals? What these bosses often overlook is that increasing conversion rates takes work. It requires careful analysis, detailed planning, creativity, innovative program development, and diligent monitoring of results and renewal of content, all of which amount to considerably more work than in-house staff (such as you, for example) can handle given other priorities. Your job is marketing. Their job is maximizing your efforts.