How to Increase Your Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate

Are you satisfied with your site’s traffic? How you answer this question will say a lot about you as a marketer, but how you interpret it might be even more telling. Are you more concerned with how much traffic your site gets, or with the amount of leads it's producing?

Directing at least as much attention to how good (or bad) your site's lead generation is as you do to the quantity of its visitors is important.

In order to even begin to boost your lead generation, one of the most telling metrics to track is lead conversion rate—the percentage of visitors who go on to convert and become active leads. 

Improving conversion rates is one of the most persistent, important parts of any inbound marketer’s job. 

The point of content marketing is bringing in more qualified traffic along with maintaining a clear path to conversion are the best ways to do so—a textbook case of “easier said than done.”

If you’re wondering how to increase your visitor to lead conversion rate, you’re not alone. While it’s impossible to address every site’s unique challenges, these best practices will get you started on the right path toward boosting conversions and marketing ROI.

Refine Your Buyer Personas

Your buyer personas are custom, idealized versions of your target customers that go beyond traditional demographics. Creating buyer personas based on market research, customer surveys and other insights is one of the first steps of any inbound marketing effort.

But creating buyer personas isn’t an exact science. Doing it once doesn’t necessarily mean you have alignment. 

Take a look at demographic data from your website analytics. Platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook provide robust insights into the kinds of people who visit your site and engage with your ads—age, gender, location, interests and more.

With an eye on demographic data, review the traffic that’s actually coming into your site, and the traffic that’s resulted in the highest conversion rates. How well does it align with your buyer personas?

If there’s less overlap than you’d hope, it might be time to refine or add to your buyer personas. If your existing personas all focus on the 18-35 demographic but older users convert best, it’s definitely worth building content that targets them directly.

Double Down On Conversion-Focused Design

There are definitely times when web design is more art than science, but optimizing for conversions is a balance of both.

When it comes to building a site to convert there are things that simply work—and things that don't. Details like clear calls to action, uncluttered design and alignment with design principles have all been proven to improve conversion rates substantially.

At a bare minimum, your site should adhere to these conversion-focused design rules of thumb:

• Keep your persona's needs in mind: What's in it for them? Sometimes you need to take a step back and put yourself in the users' shoes. Is your offer engaging? Does it solve a problem for the user? Are these messages being communicated or are you focusing on you? No one wants to be "sold." 
• Layout should be user-friendly: Using your site should be intuitive and easy. Slow load times, clunky navigation and poor content can all harm your conversion rates. 
• Keep it simple: Know the conversion intent for each page of your site and stay focused on it. Be sure your calls to action match that intent and are clean and visible. 
• Avoid friction: Make it easy for users to convert. Recently, I purchased a workout series. It should have been a simple process, but the company was more interested in selling their add-ons than the actual product. This made the process painful. At each "confirmation" step, I was forced to watch a 20+ minute video about an add on product. The entire checkout process took almost an hour! Now, this is an extreme example, but when someone is ready to make a purchase, be sure you remove the friction and make it as seamless as possible to execute. 

Once the basics are in place, you should further refine your site with ongoing A/B testing and user feedback.

Put Your Value Proposition Front and Center

With conversion rate optimization, often the devil is in the details. But too often that means marketers get bogged down in the minutia. While the small details can all be important, none are as important as what’s fundamentally appealing about your product or service and how it answers a question or solves a problem for your audiences. 

Make sure your value proposition is prominently featured on your site, especially landing pages and other conversion magnets.

Will a user be more likely to convert if the CTA is on the right instead of the left? Maybe. Will they be more likely to convert if they have a clear sense of what’s in it for them? Absolutely.

“When #leads are ready to make a purchase on your #website, be sure to make it as easy as possible for them to execute” TWEET THIS

Other Considerations for Conversion Rate Optimization

The advice above should give most marketers a good starting point to evaluate and improve their visitor to lead conversion rate, but it’s far from comprehensive. Some other ways to boost conversions could include:

• Improve your SEO: Search engine users often have high levels of purchase intent, making organic traffic pretty valuable. If your rankings show room for improvement—and they always do—a more thorough SEO audit is likely in order.
• Experiment with different marketing channels: Don’t be too narrow when it comes to the marketing channel you pursue. If you’re not already, try a new social media platform, sponsored content, PPC advertising or any of the countless other channels out there. You don’t have to stick with them forever, and one of them might be home to a target audience gold mine.
• Audit your sales funnel: Bringing in qualified leads is great, but without a funnel to usher them smoothly to the final sale it doesn’t mean much for your bottom line. Take a look at your funnel—where it works best, where users tend to drop off—and try different ways to make it better. This is another area where A/B testing is indispensable.

Ultimately, there are nearly as many ways to improve your site’s conversion rate as there are users in the world (that's a slight over-exaggeration, but you get the point). What’s optimized for one potential lead to convert is poison to another. It’s your job to find where most users overlap and build your site around it.