Increasing conversion rates is part of any sales strategy goal. If you have the traffic coming to your website, you need to be able to develop strategies to turn those website visitors into customers.
We’ll give you some helpful tips for making that happen along with other information about conversion rates.
Let’s get started.
What is a good sales conversion rate?
Conversion rate can be a term that gets thrown around loosely. Every business wants to increase its sales conversion rate but what does that exactly mean; what is a good conversion rate?
Conversions rates will vary depending on the company and even the industry. A good conversion rate in a general sense is around 10%, with some of the top-performing companies nearing 11-12%.
Unbounce did a fantastic industry report looking at conversion rates – check out the report here to find out where your industry and conversion rates stack up.
Whether your conversion rate is at the top of 10% or around 5%, you can always find ways to improve your strategies to gain an increase.
How to calculate a sales conversion rate?
To calculate a conversion rate it’s the number of sales divvied by the number of leads. After that has been collected multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
Conversion rate = (number of sales/number of leads)* 100
Let’s look at an example.
If you had 200 sales last month and 800 leads come in, then to calculate the conversion rate would be (200/600)*100 = 25%
Your conversion rate for the month would be 25%
Best sales strategies and practices
Improving conversion rates is always going to be a goal for your business. It’s part of any successful sales strategy.
You’ll have times when things seem stagnant. Sticking with the same strategies isn’t always going to work. There are a number of ways to try new sales tactics and increase conversion rates. But, how?
Here are ways of increasing sales conversion rates.
Focus on good leads
A great sales strategy focuses on leads that matter. Leads can be any interest in a company, but the problem with leads is they can be good and bad.
Good leads are people that have a general interest in the company that may be ready to buy and are assets in the sales processes. Bad leads are not all that interested in the company. Good leads can generate sales while bad leads can take up time.
Narrowing down your leads will allow you to focus on the good leads only so you can have an easier time converting. Setting up your lead magnets to ensure good leads are entering the sales funnel will set you up for success.
To narrow down the process asking more questions or setting up more barriers for those bad leads can be simple ways to get good quality leads. It’s much easier for the sales team to sell to someone who is already interested in buying.
Looking to manage your leads? Check out “How to improve your lead management systems“.
Build trust
93% of potential customers read reviews online before buying.
Even ask yourself, if you purchase a product online without looking at the reviews or better yet, how do you feel when a product has no reviews?
Asking these questions shows us the value of building trust with our customers. Those reviews and other social proof methods build trust. They give the buyer reasoning and confidence in the product if they have good reviews.
Adding more social proof into the sales process is a great way to increase conversion rates. Having trust with your customers gives them the confidence and comfortableness of buying from you.
Utilize a product demo
Product demos are key to getting your audience to interact with your product. They can see the benefits for themselves and in turn, you can have higher conversion rates.
These product demos can work in two ways. It can either be like a free trial where customers can experience the product by themselves or it can be a product demo that is led by the company walking the customer through each amazing feature of the product.
Product demos also have another feature for increasing conversion rates and that’s generating leads.
To gain access to a demo customers should have to put in information to gain access. This way you can use that information to help with the demo and continue down the lead process.
CTA matters
Your CTA matters. At any part of your sales funnel, you need to be analyzing your CTA (call to action) if you want to increase conversion rates.
The best CTA’s are highly visible, simple to understand, are placed somewhere with purpose.
That last point is the biggest one. If you’re CTA is not in a position where it makes sense along the sales pipeline, chances are you’ll have lower click-through rates.
Let’s say in this article we added a CTA button exactly right here. It said, “Start my demo with Breadstack”. We can make the assumption that this would barely convert. Why? Because it doesn’t entice the reader to click.
It doesn’t make sense to add a CTA there because we’re not talking about Breadstack anywhere.
Now, let’s say we connected a sales strategy with one of Breadstack’s features and then added a CTA directly supporting that.
It could say “Check out the sales strategy on Breadstack” That CTA would have a much better CTR rate because it relates to the text and makes sense.
These examples can be said for the CTA position of your sales strategies; your CTA needs to make sense to increase conversion rates.
A/B testing
A/B testing just means testing 2 different situations. Testing for your sales strategy plan to increase conversion rates could mean having two different landing pages, or sales pages.
The marketing team and sales teams can set up 2 different situations you can change individual things about the pages and test which one would convert higher.
Using A/B testing is a fantastic way to increase conversion rates because you can really discover what works for your audience and what doesn’t.
Every time you test you’ll be able to continually learn more about your audience and have better information for the next time you set up a page or campaign.
User Experience
A bad user experience will immediately ruin your conversion rates. Users will most likely click off before entering your sales funnel or even wanting to learn more about the product.
A good user experience can ensure customers are continuing to engage your brand until they are ready to convert.
Every step of the customer journey needs to consider user experience in order to see a higher conversion rate.
Understanding what your customer likes, dislikes, pain points, and interest is all things that can help with the user experience. (this is why knowing your target market is so important)
A good user experience process will increase sales conversions. You’ll have customers less likely to click off and offer a welcoming experience from start to finish.
Use Exit-Intent Popups
Exit intent popups provide the user with a compelling offer before they leave the page.
To give an example of this, if you’re scrolling a page and then you decide to click exit, you’ll immediately see a pop-up come up before you fully can exit the page – this is an exit-intent pop-up.
These pops ups usually have an amazing offer with incredible value. They also have a great conversion rate. Exit intent popups can save cart abandonment and increase revenue by 30%.
It’s important to note exit intent pop-ups should only be used when a customer hasn’t taken action. If the customer is already through the sales pipeline, it could be annoying and cause the opposite reaction you’re expecting.
Improving sales strategies for conversion rates
Getting website traffic to convert isn’t the easiest task for businesses. It takes time and effort to develop a sales strategy that leads to higher conversion rates.
There are many ways to increase conversion rates that you can implement with your sales strategies. Focusing on good quality leads is often the simplest strategy you can start using within your business.
Whichever strategy you decided to use trying new methods is a great way to see what’s working and gives you the opportunity to learn more about your audience.
