What is a conversion rate?

There are two names for the series of stages that incoming leads go through. Sometimes it is called a sales funnel, sometimes — a sales pipeline. The meaning is the same, but you can see the difference in mentality here. Ultimately you put as many clients as you can at the “start” stage and see how many of those will get to the end, which we will call “Won Deal” or “Active subscription” or any other result you want to achieve. As a rule, at the end stage, you will see much fewer clients than you have started with. This difference between the number of people you started with and the amount you end up with is called a conversion rate.

Conversion rate can also be calculated for each step of the sales process if you measure the difference between each intermediary stage your leads come through. In other words, there are certain actions your leads have to take before they get to the next stage, like “visiting your website” or “submitting a form”. If you calculate how many leads move forward to the next stage, you will get the conversion rate between two stages of the sales pipeline.

Conversion rate is a relation of the leads who pass a particular stage to the total amount of leads who approach it. For example, if out of 100 website visitors only 10 filled an inquiry form — you have a 10% conversion rate for this form.

Note: conversion is always measured in percentages.

Tips on how to increase conversion rates for your lead forms, newsletter subscriptions and sales calls from your website

Let’s discuss several stages clients pass and see what tools can be used to increase conversion on each step.‍

Conversion to sales phone calls

A minute of conversation on the phone is enough to start a personal relationship with a potential customer. It’s way better than 10 minutes of writing in a chat or over email. A phone call gives the client lots of information quickly and allows the client to get instant answers to their questions and concerns. Large studies on millions of leads have shown that calling leads within one minute increases conversion to sales by 2-5x. Below you will find some simple ways to generate more sales phone calls from your website visitors.

1. Let users request a call from you

People prefer to talk to you on the phone because they’d like to have a conversation with another person, usually to get some form of consultation. Giving your clients an opportunity to request a callback is equally good for both parties: your leads get a more personable experience and you can assess their pain points. Additionally, if you call fast enough (within 1 minute) — you are 5 times more likely to get a deal with your lead than if you’ve called 30 minutes after the initial request.

2. Make a CTA to your “call us” button

As we’ve mentioned in the section about email newsletters — it is important to minimize distractions on the way of users to the desired action. Provide a positive call-to-action written in an active language.
A phone button that stands out on your website with a bold promise is a very effective tool to generate more sales calls from your website. You can make it stand out more by using a contrasting color, adding animation, making it bigger.

3. Add a call CTA to a sticky header.

When you add a phone number form to your sticky header you will see that the number of sales calls will increase. It happens because users always see that they can also talk to you — and that’s what they request for you to call them!

4. Indicate that you are available (online)

Make it clear to clients that you are available to talk to them. It’s really impressive if you promise them how quickly you will get back to them. Substantially more people will leave their contact details if you promise to call them within 1 minute, than if it is not clear how long it will take for you to get back to them.

5. Have a call tracking turned on

With call tracking, you can record the number of calls from each marketing channel and compare their effectiveness. Advanced call tracking also allows you to see how well your sales agents performed and alter their actions accordingly.

How we can help

We in Convolo know how to improve conversions. We’ve designed a solution that allows your sales agents to follow up your leads in less than 55 seconds, which drastically increases conversions and produces a “wow” effect for every lead you get.

All calls are tracked, you can see both the visitor source and the lead source and listen to all calls to give feedback to your agents. A dynamic sticky phone button attracts the attention of website visitors in a way that is equally appealing both for desktop and mobile users. Together with our 55-second follow-up promise it becomes super powerful and generally gives companies 25-75% more leads and increases lead to skyrocket conversions by 200-500%.

Conversion to an email newsletter subscription

When you want to warm up your clients or keep them warm and sell something periodically you apply a nurturing email strategy, which may also be called a “newsletter subscription”. This is generally very useful information provided for free alongside regular offers to buy something from you. To make more people subscribe to your email newsletter we recommend the following steps. These hints also work great with any other form on your website. For example, lead forms.

1. Make top-notch content

It is very important to make good-quality content because poor-quality content will not attract subscribers and just waste your time. Your content should provide value to the target audience of your website and your product. Make sure your content is entertaining and gives insights. If it is not worth reading — it is not worth subscribing to. Control your metrics like time on page, browsing length, and bounce rate to make sure people read and engage with your content.

2. Reduce the information asked for

All you need to start sending emails to your potential customers is their email addresses. It is good to have additional details, like a name, age or address, but the more additional fields you have the less are the chances for a successful sign-up. Sometimes, through additional databases, email address also allows you to identify name and organization without adding excess fields.‍

3. Motivate users to sign-up with a lead magnet

Think of what your visitors and potential customers would like to have and offer it to them. Make a lead magnet — something really valuable that your prospects would like to receive and will be ready to give their email for. It may be partner discounts, a guide or some exclusive content.

4. Make your subscribers feel that they are not alone and that it is safe to sign-up

To increase conversion to your email newsletter it also helps to show your visitors that there is a number of people who already get your emails. Make sure that your future subscribers feel safe by showing them your data handling policy.

5. Remove distractions

If the main goal is to make people sign up for the newsletter — then don’t distract them from doing that! Don’t promote any other unnecessary elements. It should be one page; one desired action; one simple form to fill. Everything to focus your audience on the benefits that your email newsletter will give them.

6. Have a positive and actionable CTA

Every text should be written in a direct language, positively, to motivate the user to take action. Always make a positive CTA by focusing on what the user gains. Use the present tense to indicate that the CTA is happening right now.

7. Allow users to pick a subscription type

If your company writes on a lot of diverse topics — let users pick what content they would like to receive. It may reduce the number of sent emails, but it will increase the number of subscribers long-term because people are able to choose themes to their taste and avoid unnecessary ones. If possible, also let them choose email frequency.

8. Highlight the CTA button

The CTA button has the same importance as the text next to it. The button is that one thing that lets your visitors become your subscribers — give it the attention it needs, make it stand out through a bright color and maybe even some animation.

9. Make it a risk-free action

Your potential subscriber may worry that his email will be sold to a third party and start getting junk emails or maybe something worse. Never share or sell your subscribers’ data and let them know is risk-free to subscribe and they will be getting only what they subscribed to. Keep to that promise.

10. Make restricted content to create demand.

You can draw a lot of visitors to your website with blog posts. Among them, there will be some who will want to subscribe to receive these emails right in their inbox. At the same time, content that stays only behind a subscription form can generate many more subscribers. Create content for your audience which is worth a subscription. These may be toolkits, checklists, templates, and cheat sheets.

11. Create a specific landing page for subscribing to your email newsletter

Make this page solely focused on selling your visitors on the value of subscribing to your email newsletter and top this with a carefully crafted CTA. Draw more visitors by sharing this page in your social media.

12. Promote the newsletter on other pages of your website

Each page on your website can generate you subscribers. Just consider adding a block about your newsletter to “about” and “contact us” pages. With the help of your analytics you can figure out which pages perform better and allow users to subscribe to your newsletter from there.

13. Use pop-ups at the right moments

Pop-ups on page loading annoy visitors and bring no results, but pop-ups used at the right moment can significantly increase conversion rates for your newsletter subscription. Make sure that your pop-up appears about 60 seconds after page loading. This way you will ensure that the reader is involved and interested in your content.

14. Make your emails shareable

Most email marketing companies have an option that allows subscribers to share your emails with their friends. It is not a simple email forwarding, because forwarded email also allows the new viewers to unsubscribe the one who sent it to them from your list. Make word of mouth work for you.

15. Use sidebars to inform users of your subscription

You don’t want to distract our users with the newsletter option when they are browsing through the site, but we can do it where it is safe — you can notify website visitors about the email newsletter by adding information about it to announcement bars (at the top of the page), in the footer and on the sidebar. It is a good thing as long as it doesn’t disrupt the main user experience.

16. Add a sign-up option into your email signature

It sounds simple, but a CTA and a link to a sign-up form in your email signature may steadily drive up your subscriptions. Every day you will be emailing people and a call-to-action below your signature will do its job.

Conclusion

As long as sales exist the question of the effectiveness of every step of the sales process will remain. The best way to assess what works and what doesn’t is to keep calculating conversion rates and prioritize bottlenecks — parts of the funnel, where conversions can be substantially improved.

Keep on working on your conversions and good luck! After all, this is one of the most effective ways to increase revenue and profits in your business.