How can you optimize your user’s journeys to create more sales and leads right away?
Many businesses struggle to figure out how new users learn about their brand. And then how to optimize each stage of the user’s interaction with their business so that more people buy or sign up for the company’s email list.
Conversion paths are the critical factors that impact your conversion rates. Let’s take a look at what conversion paths are, why they matter, and how to optimize them.
What is a conversion path?
A conversion path outlines the steps your user takes to convert. The end goal is to create sales or to convert new users into newsletter subscribers.
Here’s how a conversion path can play out in a typical business:
- A user clicks on a business’s ad link
- They arrive on a landing page
- The user reads and interacts with the landing page content. This includes downloading an ebook, watching a video, or reading a post
- They click on a specific call to action
- Your user signs for up your newsletter, buys your product, or does both
- They then arrive at a thank you page where they can carry out more actions
A user’s journey along your conversion path ends when they either abandon the path or take action that benefits your business. The goal is to get your users to drop in their email addresses to receive your communication. Or to purchase your product or service.
Why conversion paths matter
When you can chart out a conversion path, you’ll learn where a user stops interacting with your brand and makes an exit. You’ll get a clear picture of what isn’t working. You may notice browse abandonment, cart abandonment, or failure during the payment stage. Such insights help you improve your funnel.
Creating different conversion paths also gives you the opportunity to personalize them. You can use demographic information, search behaviors, locations, and other details to optimize your conversion paths.
Clear conversion paths create structure and benefit both your business and the customer. You’ll improve your conversion rate and your customer gets a better online experience in the process.
The key parts of a conversion path and ways to optimize them
There are four main parts of a conversion path. Whether you’re building one from scratch or attempting to study the ones you currently have, you’ll find the following components:
- Your inbound marketing like email newsletter campaigns, ads, social media posts, blog posts, and others
- The landing page a user arrives at after they click a link
- A call to action
- The thankyou page after a user has taken action
These four steps or parts of a conversion path draw new or existing users along a journey where every step either convinces them to go forward or abandon your website right away. Let’s take a look at each step and some factors you can optimize to improve your conversions.
Inbound marketing
Your inbound marketing is anything that brings potential customers into your conversion path.
Ads, blog posts, social media videos, and other content are the entryway that engages people. Since inbound marketing is the starting point, you need to ensure that it’s optimized. Here are some things you can do:
- Carry out research on your target audience. Learn what they like and what their pain points are. Use SEO tools, Google Analytics, and other tools to learn more about your potential customers.
- Create regular content via blogs and social media content.
- Use the right keywords and phrases in your content so that search engines and social media algorithms can understand the context of your content.
- Keep your content simple, friendly, and easy to understand. Trying to sound clever and sophisticated rarely works and only puts people off.
Once your audience is engaged, you can then lead them further down the conversion path.
Landing page optimization
Once a user clicks on an ad or opens a link from your email campaign, they’ll arrive at a landing page.
It’s critical to personalize your landing page for different inbound campaigns. A landing page for an ad campaign will differ from one that’s launched from your social media posts.
Since you may have many conversion paths, sometimes thousands, it’s not feasible to create a separate landing page for every single path. But it does help to make landing pages for different sources of incoming traffic.
For example, plan your overall marketing strategy so that your email content matches up to the landing page content when people click on a link within the email. Likewise, clicks from social media should lead to one that reflects what you posted there.
An ad by Humble Bundle on Social Media
The landing page matches the ad content
Your best bet at optimizing your landing pages is to use a solid landing page tool. Such a tool can:
- Create well-designed landing pages that match your website theme and create a good user experience
- Add optin forms, lead magnets, and digital downloads
A good landing page will also help you create calls to action buttons and thank you pages. But we’ll take a closer look at those in the following sections.
Calls to action
Put yourself in your user’s shoes. They’ve clicked on your ad and they liked the content on your landing page enough that they haven’t rushed to close the window. What next?
You need to provide them with some kind of action to take to complete the journey and to also strengthen your relationship with your potential customer.
A call to action button is a critical part of a landing page and the conversion path. You want to make your calls to action descriptive, specific, and action-oriented.
If you’re inviting your user to download something for free in exchange for their email, don’t just create a button with the word ‘Download’ on it. Say ‘Download your free ebook now’ or ‘Click to create a healthier you’.
Keep testing with different calls to action to see what works for you.
Thank you pages
When a user has bought a product or signed up with your newsletter, make sure that they get a dedicated landing page once they take action.
A simple message that flashes ‘Subscription confirmed’ or ‘Thank you for your purchase’ and nothing else misses the opportunity to engage your customers more.
Once a user has taken action, redirect them to a thank you page where you confirm that they’ll receive a weekly email, an onboarding message, or shipping details in a short while.
You can then create links and ask them to keep reading or to look at similar products. Such options keep people on your website longer and also creates a positive impression of your brand.
Create the best conversion paths to grow your business
Building your conversion paths isn’t a one-and-done activity. An important ongoing activity is to analyze how well your marketing is working.
You can use Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of your conversion paths. With experimentation and consistent tracking, you’ll find what works best for your company and audience. And you’ll be able to refine the communication paths that lead to more sales and more lead building.