The Secret Method to Double or Triple Your Conversions Overnight

There are only two important things in digital marketing. The first one is traffic and the second one is conversion. This post is about increasing conversions. I know I have made a big claim about helping you double or triple your conversions, but in reality your conversions can go even higher than that. What you are about to learn here is not just a tactic but a strategy.

increase conversions

Tactics change from time to time depending on the trends and technology, but strategy remains consistent. The strategies I am about to reveal here have been consistent for 100s of years. These sales methods have been used even before the advent of the internet.

To make sales online, you need traffic. It doesn’t matter if you are selling display advertising space, other’s products for a commission or your own product. If you have got the traffic, you have the potential to make sales.

You may have tons of traffic, but if you do not focus on conversions, your revenue will be little to nothing. Here, conversion is defined as visitors to clicks, clicks to leads or leads to customers. (Read my post about top 7 digital marketing metrics if you want to know more about conversion metrics).

If you are selling display advertising, you may not be making much revenue if your banners are not positioned in strategic places. If you are collecting leads through a landing page, enough visitors may not be converting into leads if your landing page is not optimized for high conversions.

A lot has been said and talked about traffic generation online. Until now, enough attention and focus was not given to conversions. I think its because people have started to realize that there is a limit to how much traffic you can generate using a specific channel, but there is no limit to how much % increase in conversion you can achieve.

A simple tweak in the head-line of a landing page can give double the amount of leads. A change in the call to action text and colour may give a 50% boost in conversions. There are plenty of case studies like that all over the web. One thing is pretty clear now – you cannot afford to ignore conversions in digital marketing.

If you are paying for traffic, say $1 per click. You may be spending $10 per lead when your conversions are 10%. If you can improve the conversion ratio to 20%, you will be spending only $5 per lead. Double the number of leads, double the sales, double the profit, double the happyness!

How to Increase Your Conversions?

Traffic generation is easier than having good conversions. There are several tactics and methodologies to generate traffic. If you have enough money to spend, traffic is guaranteed. But it takes a lot of time and energy to get more conversions. Some marketers think that technology can help them achieve better conversions.

However, conversions cannot be achieved through money alone. Conversions cannot be achieved even with brains and intelligence. Good conversions can be achieved only by understanding your customers. The better you understand your customer’s needs, wants, hopes, fears and dreams… the more capable you are to create marketing material that converts better.

“You cannot split test your way to better conversions. Technology cannot be a replacement for your laziness to understand your target customer.”

If you want to convince your friend, mom, dad, brother, spouse or a child to do something as you expect, you know its going to be quite easy. That’s because you know them very well and they like you very much.

Imagine how nice it would be to know your customers that well! If your customers like you, then its even better! Ideally, you cannot know 100s of customers very well and they many never like you as much as your friends and family. But you can get as close to that as possible.

The better you know your customers, the better you can serve them which will lead to them liking you more. And since they like you more and you know them better, you can serve them even better and so on.

That’s when you can build an impeccable reputation, liking, following and respect in the world. Anyone who already has those has created immense value for their customers and the world. Look around, think about it and I am sure you would agree with me.

Ways to Understand Your Customers Better

You can learn more about your customers and their needs by having more interaction with them. In the digital age, it is easier than ever to connect, even face to face without meeting physically at the same place. Here are some opportunities to know your customer better.

  • Talk with your customers about their problems
  • Hang out where your customers hang out
  • Put yourself in their shoes, imagine how it feels to be them
  • Profile your customers and look for similarities
  • Develop your main customer avatar.
  • Develop additional customer avatars.
  • Once they buy your product, listen to their feedback.

Write Copy that Converts

Once you have understood your target customers as deeply as possible, write your copies. It may be the ad copy, landing page sales copy or the email follow ups. Now that you know your target customer very well, it would be much easier for you to convince them to buy your products and services.

You will naturally use the words they use in the copy. This helps in establishing connection. For example, a majority of your customers may be using the word ‘Win’ more than ‘Success’. If you use Success in your copy, it will connect with lesser people. The word Win will help establish the connection better. You will know these words only when to interact with your target customers.

A/B Split Testing for Increasing Conversions

If your landing page gets 1,000 visitors a day, you can use technology to create two different versions of the landing page and drive 500 visitors each. In the end, you can find out which landing page converted better and make the better converting page your primary page. Split testing can also be used in display or text advertising to find out which variation performs better. This is called split testing or A/B testing.

Many marketers start with split testing to increase conversions. They are good tech-savvy people but not real marketers. A real marketer understands that knowing your customers and writing good sales copy comes first. If you already know what words will connect with your target audience, there is no need to split test and prove which works better.

Split testing helps to find out things which you cannot learn by talking with your customers. For example, a green sign up button may get 20% more clicks than a red sign up button. This is something that can be found out only using a split test. Split testing helps to increase conversions marginally. If your landing page is converting at 5%, your tweaks may enable you to increase the conversions to 7% or even 10%.

If you do not know your customer well enough, your sales page may convert only at 1%. When it is 1%, you cannot split test your way to 5% or 10% conversion ratio. Split testing helps only when you have a good conversion % in the beginning – and that comes from knowing your customers well.

That said, A/B Split testing is the best invention since email for digital marketers. There are many tools which make split testing easy. Some of the popular ones are:

  • Google Analytics Content Experiments (Free)
  • Visual Website Optimizer
  • Optimizely
  • Unbounce.com (Also doubles as a landing page creator).
  • Convert.com

Split testing helps you prove or disprove your hunches. If your instincts tell you that putting a image of a young girl student will help you convert more visitors into leads, then it can be proved with split testing.

In the offline world, it would be difficult and costly to test such a hunch. Before online split testing, direct marketers used to run two different paper based or TV ads with two different phone numbers and found out which ad gave more responses. Such testing is very costly and involves a lot of manual tracking work.

But with Digital Marketing, such testing is easy and very cheap to execute. All the tracking is automated so its just a matter of checking which variant of an ad converted better. However, keep in mind that split testing only proves your hunches. It does not help you generate hunches. And you cannot generate meaningful hunches without understanding your customers well.

Doubling the Conversions Overnight?

The new marketing copy that you create after you have spent enough time in understanding your target customer is when your conversions can double overnight. With further split testing and finding out what works, your can triple your conversion rate. This “overnight” success does take some time in terms of investing energy and time in knowing what your customers want. But in the end, it pays. Not only you make more revenue and profits, your customers will also be happy to pay you more because you are solving their problems and making their life better.