What is a Conversion Rate?

The world of marketing comes with its own unique language, and most of the lingo revolves around measurements of success. Assessing the conversion rate usually tops the list of ways to measure a business’s effectiveness at reaching or retargeting its customers.

A conversion rate is an assessment of a percentage of visitors to your website that fulfills a desired goal (a conversion) out of the number of visitors to your site. 

Basically, a conversion rate shows your company how well your marketing systems in place are working.

Your marketing strategy is going to be constantly evolving and changing. Because of the ebbs and flows of business, the economy, cultural shifts, and other factors, it’s important that companies create regular internal progress reports. Knowing your current conversion rate at any given time (and trying to improve it through tactics like Messenger Marketing) will allow you to tweak and improve your marketing efforts as needed.  

Making Sense of a Conversion Rate

Let’s dig a bit deeper into conversion rates and how they work.

A conversion rate isn’t just a measurement of how effective a company’s advertising is, and it isn’t indicative of the success of a single campaign. Conversion rates show how the visitors to your website are engaging with your content. Some of the many areas that a conversion rate covers are:

• Contact forms: Are customers using the form successfully?
• Downloads: eBooks and other free content downloads 
• Subscriptions: newsletters, paid monthly memberships
• Engaging with online chat features for any reason
• Upgrading membership or any other services
• Promotions: limited access, sales, and other promotional opportunities

Knowing your current conversion rate can better allow you to turn potential customers into paying customers. 

Is a strategy around understanding conversion rates really that straight forward? Yes, it absolutely is.

Your conversion rate can give your team the ability to answer these questions:

• Are the overall systems in place on our site working for the customer or are they creating too much friction?
• Do customers seem to have a difficult time accessing customer service, the appointment calendar, or sales?
• Are the current free downloads being used?
• Has the newsletter seen an increase or decrease in website traffic in the past?
• Have sales seen an increase since our website upgrade?

These are just a fraction of the questions your team can ask. There are so many insights that your team can glean from knowing your rate. 

How Conversion-Rate Intelligence can Affect Your Business

Your conversion rate can say a lot about your business’ shopping process, customer experience, or your accessibility to your clients. Let’s take a look at an example:

Let’s say your Facebook page is a key lifeline of your ecommerce business. You rely on it to get traffic to your website, and you use it to try and convert site visitors into paying customers. Your conversion rate is one way you can see how successfully you’re doing that on your ecommerce site.

In your ManyChat dashboard, you’ll see data regarding your website conversion rates at virtually any interaction your customers have with you via Facebook. With this information, you can see the number of visitors that convert to subscribers. The more website visitors you can convert to subscribers, the more traffic filters into your sales flow. You can then convert these subscribers into customers via your flows. Learning how to build a sales funnel in ManyChat is simple with the free video course. 

Touching the surface of a conversion rate is important. Seeing that your Messenger marketing opt-in isn’t converting subscribers can help you test out a new incentive, or seeing that your subscribers are going through the sales flow but aren’t buying, can help you diagnose and re-strategize your lead generation process or conversion funnel.

As you dig deep into problem-solving, consider these vital areas that your conversion rate gives you an insight to:

Finances: A missed sales opportunity is obviously going to affect your bottom line. However, those unutilized free downloads do, too. Not only does the creation of those eBooks and printable charts take time and resources, but they’re taking up space for other materials that can bring in more traffic and lead to more sales. You may also consider that your pricey advertising efforts and pristine website just aren’t generating enough revenue to justify the continued investment.

Staffing: The conversion rate can give you a general insight into team performance. Are sales higher than usual? Who on your team has been the frontrunner for the website or digital marketing efforts? Have recent changes been made to your customer service efforts? Who can you reward for their efforts? Are downloads not moving from the site at all? Is there a graphic designer you can engage with to revamp the aesthetic of the downloads section? Remember that just because sales are low doesn’t mean your entire marketing team is to blame. This is an opportunity to improve your marketing strategy with your team.

Current Needs: Knowing your conversion rate can highlight areas that need improvement or expansion in your company. Perhaps you need a larger team or a freelancer to jump on board to help with marketing improvements. It may be that your business needs to increase the price of client services to boost your reputation. Each company is unique and will have areas that need to be revitalized in order to drive website traffic to paying customers.

Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rate

Don’t panic if your conversion rate isn’t exactly where you want it to be. There are some conversion rate optimization best practices and keep it higher than it is right now. Here’s how you can implement changes:

Explore New Traffic: Are you advertising to your intended demographic? Jump back into Marketing 101 with your team and see if the message and the messenger align. Your site could be missing the mark when it comes to the product or services that you’re selling.

Landing Page is Center Stage: Is your landing page getting the attention it deserves? Does it match the other areas of your website? We’ve all seen an awe-inspiring and pristine landing page and clicked on “Shop Now” only to be taken to a basic and ineffective page. Avoid that by creating continuity throughout your site. Making sure that your branding (and your energy) is consistent is key!

Personalize Ads: It’s possible to create a cohesive message in your digital marketing and still personalize ads for website visitors. In your ManyChat dashboard, this could be going through your flows or assessing your bot messaging and observing areas where you might be able to improve the personalization.

Offer Incentives: You can’t want something for nothing. If you want to convert site visitors to subscribers or subscribers to customers, you’ll want to sweeten the deal and offer your target audience a reason you want them to take the action you want. In your ManyChat dashboard, you have the option to test different opt-ins via the Randomizer so you can see what performs well when it comes to driving a higher conversion rate. Have a few agreed-upon incentives, and test them out against each other.

Conversion Rates FAQ

What is a good conversion rate? 

A conversion rate isn’t a standard measurement that spans across all trades and industries. That means that whether your conversion rate is “good” depends entirely on your line of work. To calculate the conversion rate as it relates to your industry, try using this online calculator.

Is a conversion rate really that important to the success of my business?

If you’re an eCommerce business then yes, your conversion rate is a vital piece of information to know. Having those numbers will allow you to make changes you may not have had considered before. Knowledge is power and knowing your conversion rate can mean being a thriving business rather than just a business.

How can I sustain my improved numbers once changes are made?

Conversion rates aren’t entirely reliant on the success of you or your team. External factors like the economy, trends, and even politics can affect your website engagement. The best way to keep the majority of control over your conversion rate is to create a culture of continuity with your team. The changes you make to engage customers and clients need to be clearly communicated and documented for future hindsight. Keep your market research going at all times. The best way to engage a market is to know it well.

Key Takeaways

Conversion rates aren’t a sales tracker. They’re so much more in-depth! Your company’s rate allows you to notice patterns and areas of improvement for most of your daily operations. Remember, this is a measurement of the activity of what happens once people are on your website. It’s not enough to create site traffic. Are your customers or clients engaging with the website beyond the landing page? If your website conversion rate is lower than you’d like then follow the tips listed above.