As business leaders who specialize in e-commerce website optimization and customer support, it's vital that you have a strategic business growth strategy that maximizes your resources. E-commerce conversions are measured in the form of website engagement, content downloads, newsletter subscriptions, and direct purchases of items. But it’s the website experience and the support from your customer service team and digital tools that motivate shoppers to buy.

Working in tandem, streamlined website experiences and quality customer support facilitate website conversions. E-commerce businesses rely first and foremost on their web traffic to grow their business, and supporting shoppers in their attempts to engage with your website increases the likelihood of generating high-value conversions at scale.

Now that you’ve got a better understanding of the importance of conversions, let’s take a deeper look at how to develop a conversion marketing strategy.

What is conversion rate in digital marketing?

Conversion marketing is the process of moving prospects who visit your website towards an optimal point of conversion. It involves using various channels, including chatbots, cart abandonment emails, website notifications, and other methods of conversational commerce to drive more people to take the desired action - ideally, to complete a purchase. In digital marketing, a conversion rate describes the percentage of website visitors who completed a desired action for your business.

What is conversion marketing?

Conversion marketing is synonymous with the term conversion rate optimization (CRO), which describes how marketers optimize the look and feel of their websites in order to drive more visitors to convert into paying customers. Strategic CRO involves calculating conversion rates and the cost per conversion to identify the number of visitors who must convert into customers in a given period of time to make the business economically viable.

E-commerce marketing managers often analyze CRO metrics when updating their annual business plans. Conversion funnel marketing involves a workback approach from the post-sale customer relationship up to the very beginning of the marketing funnel. So you can use conversion rates to calculate what percentage of shoppers must move to the next stage of the funnel to build a cohesive conversion marketing strategy. This will help you measure the success of your tactics and help you make necessary adjustments if you’re below target.

Types of conversions in digital marketing

Now that we’ve gone over conversion marketing and CRO, what are some examples of how to quantify conversions and increase your prospective buyer pool? Remember that conversions are more than just direct purchases. Conversions can be any action taken on the website that provides information about your customers, such as newsletter subscriptions, webinar registrations, entries into a promotion, and more.

The term conversion has a very broad definition, so we’ll define a few examples of conversions to help you better formulate your own conversion marketing strategy.

1. Content downloads

Sometimes, a conversion doesn’t have to be a direct purchase of an item on your website. It could be as simple as a shopper who chose to download a piece of content that you’ve provided on your site.

This guide was created by the team at Cook’s Illustrated, which sells cookware and other products for people who are passionate about making delicious meals in the kitchen. The guide provides helpful tips for people who want to program their coffee makers to ground fresh coffee in the perfect amount of time. It’s helpful content that relates to the items they sell and may motivate shoppers to purchase a new coffee maker as well.

Gated content is a method of collecting email addresses in exchange for an item of value, such as a guide or a tips and tricks sheet that shoppers can use at their own convenience. Once you have the email addresses, you can nurture these shoppers with timely and relevant email campaigns that slowly push them towards a more high-valued action like a purchase.

2. Product purchases

For e-commerce marketers, this is probably the most valuable conversion method. The direct purchase of a product or service demonstrates monetary value from that particular shopper. They’ve actively chosen to make the purchase and provide money to increase your brand’s total revenue for that quarter.

Nordstrom is an example of an e-commerce brand with a highly effective product checkout page. The basic information is acquired from prospective buyers who can choose their ideal delivery method and know exactly how long it will take for the item to arrive at their door. It’s a simple and efficient way to generate the conversion.

Once the purchase is complete and the item is delivered, it’s up to the marketers to determine how best to bring those shoppers back to the site to complete another purchase. It’s important to note that as buyers become more loyal to your brand, they become your top rated brand advocates - which in turn results in more purchases.

3. Event attendance

You may run a special event or promotion on a particular day where people can choose to attend the event and learn more about what makes your business special. Someone who fills out a registration form to attend that event is showing an active interest in learning more about your company.

Arguably, one of the most effective product launch events are those hosted by Apple. Each time a new phone, tablet, computer, or other groundbreaking device is ready for release, the team at Apple hosts a live event that viewers can also livestream from around the world. People may even be given a special discount code for participating in the live stream. This generates greater hype for the products and directly correlates to new sales for the brand.

This type of conversion is similar to a content download, but you can likely score this lead as one of higher value. This is because the shopper is demonstrating a willingness to hear about your company and, on some level, recognize they will be given a general sales pitch. Make sure to follow up with these attendees by crafting targeted emails that carry those people the rest of the way towards the ideal point of action.

4. Schedule a demo

This type of conversion is almost as valuable as an outright product purchase. If you have a more advanced or complicated product to sell, it will likely require shoppers to see a demo of how it works before they’re willing to give you money for the item. If a shopper books a demo to view the product, they’re signalling strong intent that they’d like to make a purchase. It’s up to your sales team to convince them they’ve shown interest in the right product.

How to increase your conversion rate in digital marketing

We’ve now defined conversion rate marketing and outlined some examples of the most common types of website conversions. Now, the logical question is what can you, as a brand, do to increase your conversion rate using digital marketing strategies and drive up your total revenue for the business?

Follow these five simple steps to formulate your conversion marketing strategy and start building a more profitable business.

Step 1: Understand your customers

This step is of paramount importance. You need to know who your customers are, what they care about, and how to appeal to their particular needs in order to build a bond with them. If you can’t understand what motivates them, you can’t build an effective conversion marketing campaign.

Use your website data to start analyzing your buyers. Categorize them into the types of shoppers who are most likely to buy your products vs. ones who are most likely to drop off the website. Then, look at the most common paths to the conversion point and start building audience profiles. Using these profiles, you can create more conversion rate opportunities with new shoppers as they arrive on your site.

Step 2: Calculate your current conversion rate & related KPIs

We’ve mentioned how important it is to calculate your conversion rate and your cost per conversion. Use those numbers to identify the number of monthly conversions you need to generate in order to make your website a profitable venture.

Again, let’s use the example of having 20,000 visitors per month and an average monthly conversion rate of 5%. In most cases, 5% is a very strong conversion rate that falls in the upper range of industry benchmarks. But what if your growth strategy is more aggressive? What if you need to generate monthly or annual recurring revenue that’s thousands of dollars more than your current conversions generate? This indicates that you need to increase your monthly conversions to achieve those high-growth targets.

In order to do so, you’ll want to analyze your other KPIs to find optimization opportunities. Identify what KPIs are most important to your campaign, such as:

• More website traffic
• Longer time on site
• Higher pages per session

This data helps you find new opportunities to improve the on-site experience in order to convert higher volumes of traffic that will drive up your revenue.

Step 3: Determine areas of improvement

No website is perfect. That’s why conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a crucial element of effective marketing. There will always be opportunities to improve on the structure, the flow, and the overall messaging attached to your website. Look at your analytics and determine where people are converting vs. where they drop off. What pages have higher times on site vs. pages with high bounce rates? Then, analyze what influences the more successful pages vs. what causes the negative performance on other pages.

Don’t pass up on those opportunities: find where people are losing interest, and determine the best way to fix those problems with new solutions. This will give you more opportunities to drive up conversions. The more opportunities you have to generate new business, the less you become overly reliant on one particular conversion path.

Step 4: Get the right tools to make it happen

You can say that you’ll improve your conversion marketing strategy all you want, but you need the right tools to implement effective changes to the site. CRO tools like those provided by Kindly have been proven to increase website engagement with shoppers as much as 34%. Kindly is designed to recreate in-store shopping experiences online using technology powered by AI and machine learning software, enabling an evolutionary relationship between your brand and your shoppers.

Step 5: Optimize over time

Optimization is a process that’s never truly complete. There will always be gaps in the customer journey and opportunities to convert more shoppers into buyers that arise over time. You just need to stay vigilant and look for those opportunities as they come.

Think about the shopping experience on your website. Is there a clear path to the most valuable items you want shoppers to buy? Do you have links to supporting content that can help convince people to buy? Are you incorporating conversational AI technology like a Virtual Shopping Assistant? These are all tactics you can use to improve your website experience and drive more conversions.

Successful conversion strategy marketing examples

Now, what are some examples of brands that have effectively implemented conversion marketing strategies to boost overall revenue? Here are three prime examples you can review and replicate for your own business.

1. Helly Hansen

Helly Hansen is the leading Scandinavian workwear, skiing, sailing, and outdoor apparel brand that relies on their e-commerce business to maintain a global brand. They needed a way to engage with website shoppers in real-time to achieve their business goals.

They wanted to do so using the right technological solution to optimize their website customer experience. Helly Hansen connected with Kindly after learning more about the success of their conversion optimization technology. The end result was greater website engagement that boosted average order value (AOV) by 25%.

2. Elkjop

Elkjop is the largest consumer electronics retailer in the Nordic countries, and their customer center processes 4.8 million queries each year. Elkjop relies on their website to expand their business into other markets, and they place a high premium on quality customer service to better service shoppers.

But as they expanded business into international markets, they realized that they needed a more optimized solution to maintain such high levels of service. By connecting with Kindly, Elkjop created an automated chatbot to handle the bulk of customer enquiries and remove some of the day to day headaches from their in-house team. Elkjop’s reliance on automated support increased customer satisfaction by over 80%.

3. Conrad Electric

Conrad Electronics is a German technological and electronics company. Over the years, Conrad expanded their business throughout Europe and internationally, currently shipping products to more than 210 countries globally. The cornerstone of their business is their e-commerce site, and they rely on website traffic to increase their total sales.

However, the traffic to conversion rate was not what it needed to be to grow the brand. As a result, they connected with Kindly to develop conversion optimization solutions that could provide quality customer support in global markets everywhere. Using Kindly’s CRO solutions, Conrad produced a 40% increase in onsite message engagement and a 17% increase in average order value (AOV).