No one likes low conversion rates. Even the most successful digital marketing efforts don't matter much if the plethora of visitors that stream to your website don't convert into leads or customers. So if you find yourself on the wrong end of the conversion spectrum, you may wonder just why that is the case. To answer your questions, here are 5 potential reasons why your website conversion rates are low.
1) Vague or No Calls to Action
Let's start with the obvious. If you don't tell your visitors about the steps they should take to convert, they won't do so. Even the greatest home page will have unfathomably high bounce rates if it doesn't lead anywhere. Calls to action (CTA), both in the form of buttons and within your website copy, are crucial to getting leads to convert.
Ideally, these calls to action should be specific to what your audience is looking for. That, in turn, necessitates building content around your CTAs: if you run a Facebook campaign looking to increase webinar signups, the campaign should probably lead to a page that enables visitors to sign up. If it leads to your home page, where you likely have multiple calls to action, your conversion rate will suffer.
2) Lack of Consistency
Message consistency is another crucial success factor within your conversion rate. Your external campaigns and internal CTAs set specific expectations that your landing and sign up pages should deliver on.
To stay with the above example, a CTA that promises industry insights in the form of a webinar but leads to a landing page that is about a different type of content or webinar will introduce cognitive dissonance in your audience. Once the message throughout your audience's journey to conversion stops being consistent, they will be less likely to become leads or customers.
3) Unfavorable Attention Ratio
Even specific calls to action that are consistent throughout can hurt your conversion rate if they compete with each other. Oli Gardner, founder of Unbounce, a landing page builder agency, introduced the concept of Attention Ratio, the idea that every landing page should only have a single call to action. As soon as you present your audience with multiple alternatives to click, they will choose neither due to the proverbial agony of choice.
Instead, every landing page should come with a singular call to action that relates directly to the content of the page. You may even want to consider removing your website's navigation on your sign up pages, leaving your audience with less alternatives to your desired conversion action.
4) Uninspiring Content
Great and singular calls to action are crucial in driving conversions. But if they lead to uninspiring or unoriginal content, you likely still won't get the conversions you are looking for.
Lead generation in inbound marketing relies on giving prospective leads something of value in return for their information. If your audience does not perceive the content you offer as valuable, they will be less willing to reciprocate with their contact info.
Think about it in the simplest sense: In 2016, your audience likely does not want to read a whitepaper about "2012 industry trends." An updated 2016 version of the same whitepaper, on the other hand, is much more likely to get your audience's attention and drive leads.
5) Wrong Audience
Finally, let's finish with a deceptively simple issue: perhaps the audience you are attracting to your website simply does not consist of the people who are interested enough in your brand and services to become leads.
If your desired target audience does not match up with your actual web audience, lack of conversion becomes a targeting and messaging problem. In that case, you should adjust your digital presence outside of your website, as well as your SEO optimization, to ensure that the two align more closely. A well-designed website with relevant content and convincing CTAs should help your conversion rates, as long you are targeting the right people.