Do you want to optimize your conversion rate, but don’t know how to tackle conversion optimization in the first place?
This post will give you insight into what you can do to simplify your marketing and reduce your spend by 30% to 70% – while maintaining (or even improving!) your results.
“How can we significantly reduce our marketing costs without losing inquiries and customers?”
It’s in uncertain times and when results are lacking that the marketing budget first comes under scrutiny.
Yet it rarely helps – and actually does more harm – to cut marketing campaign and content costs.
The real focus should be: conversion rate optimization.
What exactly is hidden behind conversion optimization and how does it work reliably and efficiently?
If you’re looking for the German version of this article, click here.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Simply put, optimizing your conversion rate will help you achieve more conversions from the first interaction with your business (leads) to prospects, into inquiries, and ultimately into customers. And you can do this through your marketing campaigns and funnel WITHOUT increasing your budget.
If you can convert more clicks into customers with systematic conversion optimization, you can significantly reduce your marketing spend – without sacrificing results.
Sounds tempting?
The important thing is to work systematically.
This does not mean the unfortunately often used “system” by simply creating one or more landing pages, with lots of content and fancy design … and then we dump a whole bunch of money into Facebook, Google, LinkedIn or another channel.
With the hope that customers will “come out” in the end.
“The platform’s AI (artificial intelligence) is already doing that.” We hear that a lot.
If you have too much budget and are spending heavily regardless of the outcome, then this approach is certainly a valid option.
However, if you want to systematically and reliably reduce your budget, that is, spend less money, then you need to take a different approach.
Often you are also told that you “just need to test…”. Sounds logical.
BUT WHAT SHOULD I TEST? And what must come out of it?
Many make such statements just as “slightly nervous” as the subordinate clause: “It depends”.
So to the point:
Here now is a systematic approach you can use to optimize your conversion and apply conversion rate optimization as a daily tool and improve your funnel….
Preconditions:
You need to be able to see numbers. Especially numbers that show you your current conversions.
What you can’t see, you can’t measure and you can’t control, so you can’t improve.
You should know at least the following numbers:
- CTR % (Click Through Rate) per ad.
- CPC € (Cost per Click) per ad.
- LP conv. rate % Landing page conversion rate
- CPA (Cost per acquisition), i.e. cost per lead/customer/inquiry, depending on what action the visitor is to be moved to on your website.
The following conversion optimization options are sorted by priority, starting with the most important.
IMPORTANT: We assume that you already have a funnel (i.e. at least one campaign with landing pages that should convert traffic into leads, customers or inquiries).
If that’s not the case, build a funnel “progressively” according to this exact sequence, i.e. step by step to the goal, instead of throwing a lot of traffic (and budget!) at a landing page with the hope that it will convert.
Because if by chance that doesn’t happen after all, your budget is gone (or at least somewhere else 😉 ) and now a big, complex and often never-ending guessing game is in order.
The systematic and progressive process for conversion rate optimization looks like this and you can apply this sequence when you want to build a new funnel or campaign or optimize existing ones.
1 | Ad Performance
The biggest lever is the conversion optimization of your ads.
Ads convert a “viewer” into a “clicker”. That is, a person who sees your ad, finds it interesting, and is now motivated to click (and does).
What your ad needs to do to do this is:
- Interrupt while scrolling (this is what the image / creative does).
- Attract attention (this is done by the image and possibly the text on the image)
- Arouse curiosity (that’s what the “description” does, on Facebook above the image).
In order for you to find your converting ad, just as with your landing page, you shouldn’t just create an ad and hope it “works” (in other words, converts).
Instead, you should make sure (not just hope) that each one-cell component does its job and thus motivates a click.
You can do this with a very small budget (often less than 30 EUR per test) by using so-called microtests.
With microtests you find out step by step what your target audience wants to see and what motivates them (for example, to click your ad in the first place).
Sample calculation:
We would like to briefly explain why a better ad with a higher click through rate (CTR) and lower CPC (cost per click) alone has such a big impact on your marketing budget, provided you don’t change anything else in your funnel or campaign (especially not the target group, budget, colors, texts etc. really NOTHING! 🙂 )
Let’s assume that you currently pay 20 EUR for a lead, a click costs 2 EUR and thus your landing page conversion rate is 10%.
If you now get clicks cheaper, e.g. for 1.50 EUR – of course with the same message, so that the motivation of the “clicker” remains the same – then this alone reduces the cost per lead by 25%.
If the rest of your funnel or campaign remains stable, then you’ve already saved 25% of your budget by doing this.
If you spend 10,000 EUR per month, that’s a whopping 2,500 EUR PER MONTH and thus 30,000 EUR per year.
This doesn’t just work in theory.
It works in practice if you approach it correctly and systematically.
We have optimized numerous funnels and campaigns in the last few weeks and have been able to reduce ad costs by up to 70% – with the same results.
Let’s now turn to another set screw.
2 | Landing page Performance
If you now have a “magnetic ad” after a few microtests that appeals to your target group exactly and motivates you to click for 1.50 EUR, then keep this ad stable.
You only need this one ad for the time being.
With the traffic that this ad produces, you can now optimize your landing page.
You may wonder why we recommend only one ad, when everyone else says that you should feed as many variants as possible to Facebook.
This is also true (if you own Facebook shares), but only in the scaling phase, when all conversion stages of your funnel are tested and working. Here, however, we are still in the testing phase right now.
In the testing phase, you should only test one thing at a time.
Otherwise, your marketing will become even more complex than it already is and you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.
With the traffic of your ad you now optimize your landing page, the conversion rate of your landing page, to be more precise.
Via the previous microtests, you have found out what your target group wants to see and what motivates them. Now you offer more of that on your landing page.
Make sure that what the visitor sees on the website matches the content of your ad. Otherwise, trust is broken right at the first visit to your website, because from your visitor’s point of view, you have not kept your promise (of a certain content, a certain giveaway, etc).
A no-go.
The best way to start is with a landing page that initially has very little content.
Headline, subheadline, image, call-to-action, form – that’s enough to start with.
With this, you first try to get the user to scroll down.
This is the first “conversion” on your landing page that you optimize.
Because without scrolling, there are no conversions.
Tools like Hotjar or Mouseflow will show you the scroll depth on your page. If you optimize this and at the same time present a high-quality offer (digital or physical) on your website, you will optimize your conversion rate.
We aim for at least 10%, better 20% conversion rate on the website. Some of our landing pages even have 40% conversion rate.
Of course, this did not happen overnight, but is the result of numerous optimizations.
However, it is worth it, do the math yourself:
Let’s assume you currently have a landing page conversion rate of 10% and thus one conversion (lead, inquiry, purchase) costs 20 EUR.
If you optimize the conversion rate of your landing page to 20%, you will have halved your costs per conversion and doubled the conversion rate (which is sometimes amazingly fast with the right microtests).
If you invest 10,000 EUR per month in ads and you only pay half per conversion, then you will get twice (+100%!) as many leads/inquiries/purchases as before. With the same budget.
That’s a lot of cash.
You can use it to cut your budget in half to get the same result.
Again, it’s important to test only one thing at a time.
So after the ad, landing page conversion optimization is the next big lever.
With the two presented options for conversion rate optimization, you already have significant levers to reduce your budget by 30% to 70% or increase the number of your leads, purchases and inquiries.
You see: Always proceed systematically, from the top (Top of the Funnel or also “TOFU”) step by step to the bottom (Bottom of the Funnel or also “BOFU”).
And that’s how you keep doing it.
You can follow the same procedure if you want to optimize your emails. First, test the subject line (using the open rate as the first conversion), then the click-through rate as the second conversion.
The content of your email should also be validated with microtests so that you know, instead of just guessing, what your target audience really wants to see.
And it’s this “progressive” approach to conversion optimization that you can apply to your SEO content, retargeting, sales pages, organic social, and any other channel.
Important:
When using progressive conversion optimization to build your funnel, don’t try to optimize for the maximum per conversion step.
Otherwise, you run the risk of never arriving at your own target (purchase or service request of the target group).
Optimize quickly until you reach the goal and once you have reached it, then improve every other conversion point in the funnel – again, nice and systematic and progressive from the ad to the “bottom” of the funnel.
If you want to improve your conversions in such a way that you improve your campaign performance by 30% to 70%, use your budget much more efficiently and grow more profitably, then we would be happy to offer you a free Funnel Analysis Conversation.
We’ll walk through your funnel and campaigns with you and find the “conversion bug” that is currently costing you money.
You can then optimize this yourself (or we can do it for you).
If you don’t yet have a clear funnel that automates your marketing and parts of your sales, or don’t yet know how exactly a funnel works, we can give you a free training that shows you exactly how.