Conversion Rate: The (Real) Score of Your Success

You do know about conversion rate. But you really didn’t give it the importance that you should have given it.

Did you ever think about “a good landing page”, a “beautiful landing page”, or a “landing page that kicks ass”? You’ve been thinking wrong. The only thing that makes a landing page good, bad, ugly, worthless, or just alright is the “conversion rate” of that landing page.

It’s all about landing page conversions.

The average conversion rate of a landing page (if at all there exists one, and if you are using landing pages in the first place along with metrics, tools, and features available for you to measure) is about 4.02% (source: Unbounce Conversion Report)

What’s the average conversion rate of an eCommerce store, you ask? According to a survey of Shopify Sites by Little Data, the average conversion rate of a Shopify store is 1.4%. If your conversion rate hits 3.3% and above, you are already on the top 20% of highest-conversion rates that Shopify stores can get.

Read:

What’s a Good Average ECommerce Conversion Rate?

The 4% is just a little more than the average “website conversion rate” — complete with the code bloat, content clutter, extra information, and the usual slow loading nature of websites — is at 2 – 3% (that too for eCommerce stores, built for purpose).

What about the average conversion rate of a “website” that you use for your business right now? It’s horrible and I don’t even want to go there.

Read:

How to Build Landing Pages That Convert

How to Build Websites That Get results

27 Jaw-dropping Ecommerce Landing Pages (from the top bananas of online retail to your everyday eCommerce stalwarts, get inspired to build your next high-converting master piece).

Don’t know how your landing pages stack up? Use this landing page analyzer and see how your landing pages are stacked up. Pick the industry benchmarks from this Conversion Report (with Conversion rates across industries worldwide).

Build Landing Pages With a High Conversion Rate (Improve over time)

It’s true that conversion rate is not the greatest way to measure your success as Dan Barker writes.

He advocates using the conversion rate in a way that is in line and in context with other parameters as well. He right in pointing out that not all visitors to your site are equal, higher conversions don’t always mean more sales, and that your conversions decrease with increase in traffic.

But Dan is talking about websites that are already established, get millions of visitors in traffic, and have a history of data to analyze performance.

For most other businesses, there’s nothing to talk about — no landing pages, no traffic, no data, and no conversions.

If you haven’t done it yet, stop right now. Go ahead and create landing pages (use Instapage, Unbounce or Leadpages) and create landing pages with the sole purpose of growing your conversion rates. A great idea is to give away something of value (called Lead magnets), coupons, or access to your products for free.

You can use an email service provider such as Mailerlite, Moosend, ConvertKit, or Mailchimp to help with email marketing automation.

Read:

15 Ways to Create a High-value Lead Magnet in 30 Minutes or less (No Tech Skills Required)

How to design landing pages that convert

Lookin’ Good Isn’t Enough (Get Inspired)

Most business owners and marketers worry about the “looks”. How pretty is my landing page? Does it look good? Is it Beautiful?

Looks have nothing to do with conversions (but it helps if a high-converting site is also good looking). There are ugly sites that convert and can give your pretty site a run for the money.

There are tons of examples of companies and individuals creating landing pages that convert better than their respective benchmarks.

Here are a few eCommerce landing pages that convert at a whopping 27% and above. Here are a few home pages (of regular websites) that convert better than any other website in the same business space.

The best part about all of the examples above (and below)? They look good and they convert really well. There’s no dearth of inspiration if you really look around.

The next time you go about creating landing pages, take a cue or two from these landing pages that you wish you’ve built them.

Read:

50+ Creative landing page Examples To Inspire You For Your Next Campaign

The Best Landing Page Examples You Gotta Save for Your Swipe File

Mobile landing page examples that Seriously Set the Bar

No landing Pages or Funnels? No Conversion Rate

All this talk about conversion rate won’t even matter if you don’t even have landing pages or sales funnels to begin with. In fact, if you just had a regular web page and if you call that a landing page (you don’t even have to read this).

Too many businesses make the mistake of working on comprehensive content marketing strategies, launching PPC campaigns, organic Campaigns. You put in years of work into strategies like SEO, email marketing, and social media.

Yet, they have nothing to show for it. Why? Because there’s no close.

All the work you put in for your marketing has to close somewhere. There’s a need for lead generation. There’s a need to nurture your leads with sales funnels and marketing sequences.

You thought you’d just launch your marketing campaigns and sit there? Not going to happen.

Note:

Industry benchmarks for Conversion rates of landing pages

Landing Page Analyzer

Think about how you “define” your landing pages again. How do you say if your landing page is “good” or “bad”?

Tell me all about it on Twitter, LinkedIn, or my LinkedIn Brand page.