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Today, most marketing teams are structured to drive traffic towards websites, which then converts into leads for the sales team to close. Once this process starts to deliver results, marketers then seek to generate even more traffic, and hopefully even more success.

An oversimplification, but that’s the standard marketing playbook. Few marketing teams focus on getting more from existing traffic. That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in.

In this blog post, we’ll teach you all about CRO — what it achieves, why you should do it, and how your team can execute it. We’ll explain how you can drive more results from your existing traffic so your content can work smarter, and not harder, for you.

What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)?

I’m glad you asked. Many websites are designed to convert website visitors into customers. These conversions occur all over the website — on the homepage, pricing page, blog, and landing pages — and all of these can be optimized for a higher number of conversions. The process of optimizing those conversions is exactly what CRO entails.

CRO is a huge, often untapped opportunity for marketing teams, and you might be surprised by the oversized impact you could deliver by fine-tuning your website for conversions.

When Is Conversation Rate Optimization (CRO) Right for Your Business?

Once your sales and marketing engine attracts website visitors who consistently convert into leads for your sales team, you should start thinking about CRO.

Most businesses have a finite demand for products and services, so it’s imperative that you make the most out of your existing website traffic. Tools like Google’s Global Market Finder can show you online search volume to give you an idea of your potential customer demand. Once you determine the threshold of your customer demand, it’s time to nail down how to get more out of your existing website traffic.

Below are three formulas to help you figure out how to tackle CRO at your company, and what goals to set:

1. New revenue goal ÷ average sales price = # of new customers
2. # of new customers ÷ lead to customer close rate % = lead goal
3. Leads generated ÷ website traffic X100 = % conversion rate

To help you understand the impact CRO could have on your business, here’s an example of the formulas in action.

If your website has 10,000 visitors per month that generate 100 leads and subsequently, 10 customers each month, the website visitor to lead conversion rate would be 1%.

But what if you wanted to generate 20 customers each month? You could try to get 20,000 visitors to your website and hope that the quality of traffic doesn’t decrease. Or, you could get more leads from your existing traffic by optimizing your conversion rate.

If you increased the conversion rate from 1% to 2%, you’d double your leads and your customers.

The table below shows the impact of increasing your website’s conversion rate:

The key point here? Trying to generate more website traffic isn’t necessarily the right approach. Think of it like a leaky bucket. Pouring more water into a leaky bucket won’t fix the root cause — you’ll just end up with a lot of waste. Conversion rate optimization is about getting more from what you have and making it work even better for you.

Ready to take the first steps towards CRO at your company? Check out the strategies below, and start testing.

8 Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies to Try

1) Create text-based CTAs within blog posts.

While it’s good practice to include a call-to-action (CTA) in your blog post, these sometimes fail to entice people to take the desired course of action. Banner blindness is a very real phenomenon as people become accustomed to ignoring banner-like information on websites. This lack of attention, coupled with the fact that website visitors don’t always read to the bottom of a blog post as they “snack” on content, means a new approach is required.

That’s where the text-based CTA comes in handy. Here at HubSpot, we ran a test with text-based CTAs — a standalone line of text linked to a landing page and styled as an H3 or an H4 — to see if they would convert more traffic into leads than regular CTAs at the bottom of a web page. Here’s one of ours below:

In HubSpot’s limited test of 10 blog posts, regular end-of-post banner CTAs contributed an average of just 6% of leads that the blog posts generated, whereas up to 93% of a post’s leads came from the anchor text CTA alone.

2) Include lead flows on your blog.

Another test you should consider is including lead flows on your blog. Essentially, these are high-converting pop-ups designed to attract attention and offer value. You can select from a slide-in box, drop-down banner or pop-up box, depending on your offer. We experimented with the slide-in box on the HubSpot blog, and it achieved a 192% higher clickthrough rate, and 27% more submissions than a regular CTA at the bottom of a blog post.

Head over to the HubSpot Academy to learn how to add lead flows to your blog posts. They can dramatically increase conversions on your website.

3) Run tests on your landing pages.

Landing pages are an important part of the modern marketer’s toolkit. A landing page is where a website visitor becomes a lead, or an existing lead engages more deeply with your brand. These pages play an important role on your website, so you should run A/B tests to get the most from them.

But what should you A/B test? We know that a high performing landing page can have a tremendous impact on a business, so at HubSpot, we make it easy to test variants and eke out more conversions. You can quickly and easily test website copy, content offer, image, form questions, and page design. Check out these tips for effective A/B testing and our A/B testing calculator.

4) Help leads to immediately become a marketing-qualified lead (MQL).

Sometimes, your website visitors want to get straight down to business and speak with a sales rep, rather than be nurtured by marketing offers. You can make it easy for them to take this action (and immediately become a marketing qualified lead) with a combination of thoughtful design and smart CTAs.

Compelling, clear copy has the ability to drive action and increase conversions for your business. But which actions do you want to encourage so visitors can become MQLs?

Here at HubSpot, we discovered that visitors who sign up for product demos convert at higher rates than visitors who sign up for free product trials, so we optimized our website and conversion paths for people booking a demo or a meeting with a sales rep. Admittedly, this depends on your product and sales process, but our best advice is to run a series of tests to find out what generates the most customers. Then, optimize for that process.

The key takeaway is to look for ways to remove friction from the sales process. That being said, if you make it easy for people to book a meeting with sales reps, we do recommend further qualification before the call takes place, so the sales rep can tailor the conversation.

5) Build workflows to enable your sales team.

There are a number of automated workflows you can create that your colleagues in sales will thank you for. For instance, did you know it’s possible to send emails on behalf of sales reps, so leads can book a meeting with them at the click of a button? Or that sales reps can receive an email notification when a lead takes a high intent action, such as viewing the pricing page on your website? And if you work in ecommerce, you can send an email to people who abandon their shopping cart.

All of this is possible with marketing automation. Want to learn more? Master marketing automation with our helpful guide.

6) Add messages to high-converting web pages.

With HubSpot’s messages tool, it’s now possible to chat with website visitors in real-time. To increase conversions, you should add messaging capabilities to high-performing web pages, such as pricing or product pages, so leads convert rather than leave.

You can also make chatting action-based. For example, if someone has spent more than a minute on the page, you may want to automatically offer to help and answer any questions they may have.

HubSpot’s messages tool is coming in the spring of 2017, but you can apply to join the beta program here.

7) Optimize high-performing blog posts.

If you’ve been blogging for more than a year, it’s likely you’ll have some blog posts that outperform others.

The same is true at HubSpot — in fact, the majority of our monthly blog views and leads come from posts published more than a month ago. Blog posts are a big opportunity for conversion rate optimization.

To get started, identify the blog posts with high levels of web traffic, but low conversion rates. It may be that the content offer you’re promoting isn’t aligned with the blog post’s content, or your CTA could be unclear.

In one instance, we added a press release content offer to a blog post about press releases and saw conversions for that post increase by 240%.

Additionally, you should look at blog posts with high conversion rates. You want to drive more qualified website traffic to those posts, and you can do that by optimizing the content for search engines or updating the content to ensure that it’s fresh and relevant. If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can drive traffic to these pages from LinkedIn and Facebook using the ads add-on.

8) Leverage retargeting to re-engage website visitors.

It doesn’t matter what your key conversion metric is: The cold, hard truth is that most people on your website don’t take the action you want them to. By leveraging retargeting (sometimes known as remarketing), you can re-engage people who’ve left your website.

Retargeting works by tracking visitors to your website and serving them online ads as they visit other sites around the web. This is particularly impactful when you retarget people who visit high-converting web pages.

The normal inbound rules still apply — you need well-crafted copy, an engaging image and a compelling offer for retargeting to work. If you’re a HubSpot customer, you should take a look at how the AdRoll integration can improve your conversion efforts.

How to Get Started with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

We’ve shared a ton of information in this post, and at this point, you may be thinking, “where should I start?”

Here’s where the PIE framework comes in. Before starting a CRO project, we recommend prioritizing through the lens of PIE — rank each project based on its potential, importance, and ease. We used this framework at HubSpot with great results.

You should use this framework to answer the following questions for every strategy outlined in the previous section. Assign to each strategy a score between one and 10 (with one being the lowest and 10 being the highest):

1. How much total improvement can this project offer?
2. How valuable will this improvement be?
3. How complicated or difficult will it be to implement this improvement?

Once you’ve assigned a score for each strategy, add up the numbers and then divide it by three — this gives a score which shows what project will have the greatest impact. Then, work on the projects with the highest scores first. The framework isn’t perfect, but it’s easy to understand, systematic, and a great way to communicate to the rest of your colleagues which CRO projects are being selected and why.

Want to learn more about the PIE framework? Take a look at this explanation from WiderFunnel.

What’s next?

There are a lot of “best practices” out there, but ultimately, you need to find out what your customers respond to, and what drives results for your business. Here are three follow-up actions to get started with CRO today:

1. Use the three formulas to start the CRO conversation.
2. Leverage the PIE framework to help prioritize your strategy.
3. Make CRO someone’s responsibility.

What CRO strategies does your business leverage? Share with us in the comments below.

If you’ve logged into LinkedIn over the past few weeks, you may have noticed something different. Actually, everything is different, because LinkedIn completely overhauled its desktop site.

After Microsoft acquired the job search and networking website in 2016, LinkedIn announced it would redesign its desktop website to more closely mirror its mobile apps.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform, with more than 467 million members worldwide. However, LinkedIn members aren’t actually spending much time on the site. In fact, only 23% of LinkedIn users visited the site every month at the end of 2016. That’s not a great monthly active user number, and the website redesign was meant to “create more value” for LinkedIn members — and, hopefully, make them want to spend more time on the site.

For example, the LinkedIn desktop homepage used to look something like this:

Source: LinkedIn

And this is what my LinkedIn homepage looked like when I wrote this article:

There’s a lot behind this slick interface. Let’s dive into some of the biggest changes to the site since the redesign and how marketers and users might take advantage of them going forward.

6 Changes to LinkedIn You May Have Missed

1) A new homepage feed

Using a combination of human editors and new algorithms, LinkedIn will start surfacing more content and fewer status updates. The homepage feed will start suggesting organic, sponsored, and native advertising content users might be interested in reading. The feed will also help users follow trending stories … sound familiar? If LinkedIn is trying to make its user base engage more on the platform, modeling a feed in the style of Facebook is a safe bet.

2) More analytics

LinkedIn now provides more analytics about how other users interact with the content you share — not just who views your profile or who likes one of your posts. Now, users can see not only who likes their content, but which companies they come from and what roles they’re in.

Here are analytics from an article I posted recently on LinkedIn:

The platform also suggests other articles I might share with my network for even more engagement.

3) New (and missing) search features

LinkedIn refined its search capabilities so users can search all of LinkedIn with a single, unified search experience based on certain keywords. Now, users can easily toggle between different categories related to search terms without having to move between different categories of the site.

Check out what the results look like when I search for “content marketing:”

Whereas previously, LinkedIn users had to go into each of these sections (“People,” “Jobs,” “Companies”) in order to conduct searches, now users can search from one place to get all of the results they’re looking for.

Notably, LinkedIn removed some of the Advanced Search filters that were previously available on LinkedIn Premium and are now only available for the more expensive Sales Navigator tier of LinkedIn Premium. These filters include “years of experience,” “function,” and “seniority level.” 

4) Chat-like messaging

Soon, LinkedIn will roll out messaging that allows users to send InMail like a chat instead of an email. Users won’t have to navigate to another pane to send a private message — instead, they’ll be able to send a direct chat without leaving the LinkedIn homepage feed, as shown in the image below:

Source: TechCrunch

In another nod to Facebook’s Messenger layout, this change helps users easily spend more time clicking around the site. Plus, users might be less likely to send the dreaded default InMail message if they know it will appear like a chat instead of an email.

5) Calendar chatbot

Next, LinkedIn is introducing a chatbot. It will look at two connections’ calendars and find and set times for them to meet directly within LinkedIn’s messenger platform. It hasn’t been rolled out as of the time of this posting, but in another nod to Facebook Messenger and other bots, this is an addition designed to keep users spending time on the site. Stay tuned for more news when the bot launches fully.

6) New blogging interface

LinkedIn also now features a slick new publishing platform. Before, publishers had to navigate to LinkedIn Pulse to write an original blog post. Now, users are one click away from a slick, easy-to-use blog publishing platform.

Check it out:

Blogging on LinkedIn could garner more attention to your brand’s site if LinkedIn grows in popularity. In fact, content consumption on LinkedIn has increased over the last few years, so marketers should consider LinkedIn as a platform for reproducing or creating original content.

What’s Next For LinkedIn?

Amidst these changes, marketers should keep an eye on where their audience is spending time. If LinkedIn’s number of monthly active users increases in its next quarterly report, it might be worthwhile to invest more resources in running campaigns and creating content for the site.

We’ll keep you posted on more changes to the platform and its usage as that news unfolds. In the meantime, click around the new website and experiment with the new analytics capabilities to see if your audience wants to spend time on LinkedIn with you. And if you need guidance for running a strong LinkedIn ad campaign, download our guide here.

Do you publish original content on LinkedIn? Share with us in the comments below.

According to the latest Top Agency Trends Report from Agency Spotter, marketers and brands search for different services depending on the time of the year. Knowing which services to offer and emphasize at different times of the year could help your agency stand above your competition. These search trends, based on seasonality, come down to a couple of different factors based on what companies are looking to accomplish at different times of the year.

The report covers marketing services trends based on data from more than 120,000 unique users and three years, data on service seasonality, the top 25 agency services being searched, and the rise of project-based engagements.

Let’s dig in.

Marketing Services Searched More in the First Half of the Year

As companies begin the new year, they are looking to establish initiatives that are relatively quick fixes and do not take as much time to implement. Business leaders often take a look at their marketing data from the past year and see which areas need more attention or may have fallen down the to-do list.

Looking at the Trends Report, we can see that services like content marketing, PR, SEO, data analytics, shopper marketing, and events all perform better in the first half of the year. From the top 25 agency services for 2016, content marketing took the 7th spot as the most searched service from marketers all year. Interestingly, if you divide the list into H1 and H2, you can see that content marketing was 9th in H1 but did not even make the Top 25 in H2.

Content marketing is becoming increasingly important for all companies to utilize because it helps attract and inform customers and potential customers. But if you think about it, companies don’t generally set a content calendar at the end of the year — they tend to do that at the beginning of the year. Same thing goes for SEO and PR.

Check out the list below to see which keywords fall off or perform better at a certain time of year, and then optimize your site accordingly.

Agency Services Perform Better in H2

Taking a look at the data, services like ecommerce, branding, UX design, email marketing, and CRM automation all perform better in the second half of the year. These align with initiatives that take more planning and are services that many companies want to have ready before the start of a new year.

Design-based services like ecommerce, branding, and UX all have to do with experiences that directly interact with customers. A website redesign or branding makeover are usually planned in the middle of the year so that companies are ready to debut their new look in the new year.

As you can see in the report, ecommerce went from 18th most searched in H1 to 5th in H2, branding from 12th to 6th, and UX took the 9th spot despite not even appearing on the H1 list.

Services Shopped Consistently Year Round

There are also agency services whose demand remains stable throughout the year.

The big services like advertising, web design, digital, social media, and marketing perform all year. Use this data to better understand the behavior of your customers and when they are searching.

Finally, here are the biggest shifts from 2015 to 2016:

Knowing what services perform better throughout the year can help your agency strategically position business development, staffing, and other factors to help your agency rise above the competition. For more information about the marketing service industry, download the free Agency Spotter Agency Trends Report.