What is The Conversion Rate in Marketing? Importance of CTA.

In one of my recent articles, I’ve talked about making money by blogging. Today, I will help you with some ideas on how to increase organic traffic on a website and how to increase your blog’s conversion rate and make your blog more profitable.

Introduction

If you are new to online marketing, you might have heard terminology such as “lead generation”, “marketing funnel”, “conversion rate”, “search engine optimization”, “call to action”, “affiliate marketing”, and more, but you may not be clear yet on what these terms really mean. Each one of these terms is not rocket science, but perhaps, each deserves its own post with explanations, best practices, and examples. I will touch briefly on some of these concepts. I’ll go over the “Call To Action” in more detail and even show you in the video below how to create a captivating CTA button. However, this article is going to mainly focus on answering the following questions:

What is the conversion rate in marketing? How it affects revenue coming from a website?

If you are interested to learn the other concepts, you have 3 options:

• Learn everything about online marketing step-by-step in the well established online training platform – the place, where I received my full and comprehensive knowledge and hands-on experience.
• Google each of them one by one and do your own research.
• Wait for my future posts where I will explain them in details.

Well, the 4th option would be to pay a lot of money for your training and possibly get scammed a few times before you find a true mentor or another company that can’t possibly be better and cheaper than the one I recommend.  

Let’s begin…

How to Earn Money From a Website

If you don’t have a website and not sure where to start, start by reading Сan You Make Money by Blogging? || Blogging for Beginners.

I am writing this article for people who are fairly new to online business. Therefore, I will refer to the affiliate marketing techniques in my suggestions and examples. If you are a beginner entrepreneur but decided to start right away with an eCommerce, Membership site, or some other kind of online business, you may still find my advice useful – simply translate my mentioning of “affiliate links”  to the products or services you are planning to offer to your customers/ members. Your website still needs all four features listed below.

Like any brick-and-mortar business in order to generate revenue, your website must:

1. Offer product(s) or service(s).
2. Have visitors/ potential customers.
3. Motivate visitors to buy your product or use your service
4. Provide a clear and simple mechanism for a business transaction.

Let me translate these 4 points to online marketing terminology.

Your website starts with choosing a niche. Your niche defines your content, the products/ services you promote and your targeted audience. As an affiliate marketer, you may come up with new ideas for products and services as you develop your site content, but they must be relevant to your niche.

The most important concept of your blog is content.

• It must be relevant to your niche.
• It must be keyword-rich, yet not keyword-stuffed
• It must be interesting, helpful and otherwise valuable for your readers.
• It must be engaging for interaction, constantly added and updated.
• It must be optimized for Google and other search engines (Yahoo, Bing).

The valuable, well-communicated and optimized content will rank you in search engines. Your goal is to rank your content on the first page on Google. If you achieve this goal, your website will receive organic (free) traffic.

Your organic traffic is your website visitors who came to your site via a keyword search. Your site’s visitors are your potential customers.

The quality content of your blog posts is the motivation for your visitors to become your customers.

Your affiliate marketing links are the glass door of a showcase where your products or services are displayed.

Your Call To Action (CTA) is a clear and simple mechanism to open that glass door of the showcase and complete the transaction.

What? Call to action? What’s that? – you may ask… I will tell you soon. First, let’s talk about our main topic of this article – the conversion rate in marketing.

What is Conversion Rate in Marketing?

The Conversion Rate is a percentage of your blog visitors who take the desired action. What the desired action is — it’s your choice. It may be visiting your affiliate link, visiting another page on your website or another site for more information, providing their contact information in exchange for a gift (such as a discount coupon for shopping or free download of an eBook), subscribing for your newsletters, leaving you a comment, or anything else you propose on your website.

Many different factors affect the conversion rate. Some of them are:

• The interest level of your visitors
• The attractiveness of your offer
• The relevance of your content to your niche  
• The relevance of your call to action to your content
• The ease of responding to your offer

How does the conversion rate affect the revenue generated by your website?

Is the conversion rate a direct indicator of your website’s revenue generation? No!

Indirectly – YES! It’s the next step toward the sale taken in your marketing funnel.

Let’s say that you prompt visitors to sign up for your newsletters. Then, the conversion rate would be the percentage of all visitors of your website who actually opted-in to sign up for your newsletters. It won’t increase your income right away, but it will increase your leads generation.

I am using some of the marketing terminologies believing that you’ll understand the definition from the context I used it in. Yes, you got it! A lead (also called ‘a prospect’) is a contact who has a higher potential to become a customer.

By signing up to your email list or newsletters, an anonymous website visitor becomes your lead because now you have this person’s email address, and you know that he was interested enough in your content to provide his contact information. You will keep in touch by sending your newsletters to him. There is now a good chance that this person will return to your website and act on another offer, which actually will generate income for you. For example, one of the newsletters you sent out to your subscribers included a product review that our prospect was looking for when he first visited your site, but the product wasn’t there yet, or he simply didn’t find it. Now he sees what he needs in your newsletter right in his email Inbox, uses your affiliate link to get to the retailer, and orders the item. You got paid your commission!

Another example of ‘the desired action’ would be to click on your link for a product you promote. In reality, you want your visitors to actually purchase this product, but from a marketing point of view, you can only prompt visitors to click on your affiliate link and visit the store. Whether she buys the product is not under your control, and not even something that can be tracked by your website’s analytics, because once your visitor clicked on the link, she left your website. The retailer’s website keeps track of where their visitors are coming from and credits you if this visitor ended up becoming a customer. The percentage of your post visitors who clicked on the link will indicate your conversion rate – not the percentage of people who actually purchased the product.  

The higher your conversion rate is, the better chance your website has to generate more income for you, but there is no linear connection.  

What is Call to Action (CTA)?

A call to action is a very important element of your blog post. It’s a clear and simple instruction on what you want your visitor to do. Having well-defined CTA in your post will significantly increase your conversion rate.

There are three main points to consider when designing your CTA.

• It has to clearly instruct your visitors on what to do.
• It has to tell your visitors how the action that you want them to take will benefit them (what’s in it for them)
• It has to be set apart from the rest of your content, be well noticeable.

Create separate Call to Action for each action you want your visitors to take.

Make your CTA short and direct.

CTA should NOT include any if-conditions. If there are any, explain them in your content that precedes the call to action.

For example…

1. Instead of saying “If you’d like to improve your own health and financial wellbeing and help other people to do the same, join for free our team at CTFO”, you’d say “Improve your own health and financial situation. Help others to do the same. Join for free our team at CTFO.”
2. Instead of saying “If you are interested in learning affiliate marketing, click here to start your free training.” You’d say “Learn Affiliate Marketing step-by-step. Click here to start your free training today. No experience necessary”, etc.

Besides short wording which gives clear instructions on what to do and how it benefits your visitor, you also want an eye-catching design for your CTA that stands out. A hyperlinked text within your content is NOT a call to action. Someone may click on your in-text link, but it won’t get clicked very often. The conversion rate via in-text links will be low, while well thought-through and designed CTA will increase your conversion rate.

• Make a blank line (or even two) before and after your CTA
• Use special characters to outline your CTA
• Use a bigger bold font and contrasting color in your CTA phrases. You may want to capitalize each word.
• As an option, you may design a special button for your CTA
• Another option is to use a clickable banner for your CTA

Let’s format a few examples for a call to action…

Example 1:

Assume that this is the end of the paragraph in your content followed by the call to action. The “Join for FREE Our Team at CTFO” phrase should be your associate link to the company’s enrollment page.

Improve your own health and financial situation.
Help others to do the same.

>>> Join for FREE Our Team at CTFO <<<

Example 2:

************************************************************************

Learn Affiliate Marketing Step-by-Step.

=> Click Here To Start Your FREE Training Today <=

No Experience Necessary.

************************************************************************

Example 3:

Example 4:

This screenshot is taken from another article on this website. This Jaaxy banner was provided by the affiliate program of the Jaaxy’s company-producer. The image link would be an affiliate link to Jaaxy’s free trial start-up page.

Let’s Put My Calls To Action to Work…

Are you curious about where these examples came from? I’ve written reviews for the companies I’ve used in these examples. They’re under the “Review” menu item at the top of this screen.

Since you are here learning what conversion rate in marketing is, you may also greatly benefit from the Online Entrepreneur Certification course offered by Wealthy Affiliate (WA). Not only they offer a comprehensive education for all levels of Internet marketers, but they also provide you with a top-notch secure hosting and website building solution. Jaaxy is an advanced keyword research tool, which was created by this company. WA offers free Starter membership and Premium membership options.

To find out how WA training and services can help you to advance your online business

The second company is the Direct Sales or Multi-Level Marketing business which carries CBD and non-CBD products for wellness and beauty. I joined this company because its CBD oil truly saved my quality of life; it helped me to get rid of most of the symptoms caused by Hashimoto’s thyroiditis autoimmune disease. It’s FREE and at the same time PRICELESS opportunity to help yourself and others to Changes The Future Outcome (CTFO) of their own and other people’s physical and financial well-being.

Find out how CBD products can help you with your ailments and how the FREE business opportunity offered by CTFO can help you improve your financial situation.

Design a Strong CTA button.

What have I just done in the section above? Yes, as the Header informed you, I created my own calls to action. And as I mentioned above, if you want your visitors to take more than one action, you create more than one Call To Action; you don’t want to jam them together somehow. So, I created two separate calls to action. Please increase my post’s conversion rate by responding to at least one of them, or even better, both. 🙂

I also recorded this video for you to show how you can easily and for FREE create an eye-catching CTA button similar to those I used in my CTAs above.

Here the URL to the FREE Da Button Factory website, which I used to design my CTA button: https://dabuttonfactory.com

Summary.

A conversion rate in marketing shows the percentage of your visitors, who take the action you want them to take. Google Analytics, a free tool offered by Google, could help you calculate your average conversion rate per period, per action.

For a better conversion rate, you need to create valuable content relevant to your niche which triggers the interest of your blog readers. You’d want to motivate your visitors to take your desired action and be very clear in showing them how to do what you want them to do.

The higher the conversion rate is, the better chance you have to increase the revenue produced by your blog. That’s, of course, if your blog is monetized and the actions you want your visitors to take eventually lead to earning you money. However, there is no linear dependence between the conversion rate and your sales.

Well-defined Call To Action will significantly increase your conversion rate. It may even compensate for the gaps in your content. However, if your content is perfect, and there is no CTA, your conversion rate would be very low.  

I sincerely hope that this post will help you increase your conversions.

Please review your existing posts with the focus on CTAs. Then, come back here and let me know in the comments below whether you found that most of your CTAs were corresponding requirements or they were pretty weak. Please be honest! I wrote this article because I want to help you improve your conversion rates and succeed in your business. I’d love to know if modifying your CTAs with my tips in mind has raised your income. If you have any questions, please also ask them in the comments field below.

Wishing you great success in your online business!