Mandar Marathe
In our last webinar, inbound marketing expert, Mandar Marathe talked about the website conversion optimization and 10 ways to improve traffic, leads and revenue for your website. Mandar is the co-founder of BriefKase Digital Communications, a marketing agency, and a full stack digital marketer.
A number of interesting questions about website conversion optimization were asked at the webinar. In case you missed it, you can view the recording here:
And here’s the Q&A from the webinar session on website conversion optimization:
Email Marketing
How often should we send emails? Wouldn’t too many emails result in leads unsubscribing or leave a negative impression?
You should keep your client’s/customer’s privacy in priority. You can take a decision based on the click rate of the emails. Ideally, once or twice in a week is preferable. Too many emails a week might land you in your customer’s SPAM folder.
Is it a good practice to have an email verification process on the website for new users?
In the US, a two-step verification is mandatory. It’s called double opt-in. It’s not mandatory in India as such but I would recommend that you have an email plan in place. And if you’re going to send out a lot of email communication to users, it is better to have a two-step verification. Then you’d know for sure that the customers actually want to hear from you.
That also helps you to filter/segment your email database more efficiently. So you will have lesser junk leads and more quality leads. That way you would know that when you are going to send out an email blast, it’s not going to fall on deaf ears and people are going to open and read that email.
In case you have a structured email marketing approach, I’d definitely recommend double opt-in but if you are just collecting email ids and maybe sending out a newsletter every quarter/month, you don’t need a double opt-in or verification.
It also depends on the service. For instance, if you are a financial services business, you need to have a verification call or an OTP solution to verify your email id or your mobile number.
For more insights, take a look at our email marketing blog posts.
Search Engine Optimization
I have brought my website Alexa rank from 90,000 to 19,000. I have added ‘meta keywords’, ‘title’ and ‘meta description’. I am using ‘alt text’ for images. In addition, I am regularly publishing blog posts on the website. But I still don’t see my website in the first few search results on Google.
There are multiple facets to SEO. From what I can gather, you have been creating content for your website and you have been optimizing the content on the website, i.e. adding a relevant title, description, etc and optimizing the content on-page.
However, on page optimization is only 25% of the 100% optimization funnel. Google has more than 200 factors that go into determining your rank and on page elements contribute to about 40-50 factors of those 200 factors. The other ones would be building a presence off-page, which means trying to use social media to drive traffic to your website or trying to build a social media presence.
Here’s what I recommend:
- If you are a local business, create local listings on Google, Bing Places, etc.
- If you are a blogger and you are writing blogs on your website, reach out to influencers and contribute as a guest blogger on their sites, while linking it back to your website.
Focus on your off page strategy as well, as opposed to just focusing on your on-page strategy.
B2B Marketing Tips for Website Conversion Optimization
How can we use actionable keywords correctly for website conversion optimization in a B2B website?
You need to have relevant content on your site. If you have resources in the form of ebooks, case studies or product demo videos, try to use actionable keywords within each of these resources. For example, if you are a SaaS company, you could include a ‘Free Trial‘ CTA at the end of a case study, to encourage people to try your product. You could also suggest signing up for a ‘demo‘.
Whether it’s a blog, a case study, an infographic or even a landing page, try to use keywords like Why, How-To, Five-Ways, within the content and within the title.
If your business has a blog, try to have actionable keywords and CTAs at the end of every post and even on the sidebar.
Those of you who follow the LeadSquared blog would know that we publish industry-specific content. Under our real estate category, we have a real estate ebook placed next to the real estate marketing blog posts. So we use actionable keywords in those posts to drive ebook signups. And that really helps as far as website conversion optimization goes.
Can you suggest quiz sites or tools that an IT services company can use to drive engagement?
You need to create a quiz based on your industry and your product offering. Every service business or product business would be different.
LeadQuizzes lets you build your own quiz, have it white labeled and host it on your website. You can create lead quizzes for different objectives. For instance, if you want to just build a lead profile and you want to know more about your audience, you can build a lead quiz.
We created a quiz for our software client, CloudLanding where we tried to build a profile of the customers before actually offering a free demo of the product. So we asked questions like,
- What software are you currently using?
- What problems are you facing with the existing software?
- How many people are there in your company?
- Am I talking to the marketing manager or the chief marketing officer or the chief sales officer or the CTO / CIO?
- Is there a pain point that you’d like is to solve or address – if yes, what’s that pain point?
Ask these relevant questions in the form of a quiz and then give them a score.
When you are creating a quiz, try to think of it as profiling the customer. Create engagement and give something in return and build your own custom quiz.
Landing Page:
Are there any free tools to create landing pages?
Check out these sites
You might also be interested in this ebook on, The Secret to High Converting Landing Pages.
Wouldn’t multivariate testing during live environment execution diminish a brand’s unique personality? What are the other ways in which multivariate testing can be done?
I won’t say that it’ll take anything away. If you have a particular brand tagline and you want to use that brand tagline consistently across your offline or online communication, and you know that this tagline is working for you, then you would not want to experiment with that tagline or change the copy.
But there are different aspects of multivariate testing so maybe you can use different images and keep the same headline. Experiment with videos and customer testimonials, etc.
Check out the website, UsabilityHub. You can create a landing page and upload the design on the website. It basically shows what people’s first impressions are, after looking at that page. If people are able to remember certain specific things about that page, then you know which aspects are working.
You can do multivariate testing and A/B testing through Google Analytics. You can test not just your landing pages but you can test anything and everything on your website. From your checkout funnel, you could have two different pages created and on your server, using analytics, you could serve one version of the page to 50% of the visitors and the other version to the rest and see which checkout process is giving you more customers.
You could apply A/B testing or multivariate testing to different aspects. Maybe you could have five versions of the website’s homepage. Maybe you could have 3 versions of the product page. You could split traffic across these pages and then, at the end maybe, after you have collected considerable amount of data, you decide which page is working the best in terms of having the lowest bounce rate, having the lowest exit rate, etc.
Content Marketing
How can I use the same content and URL on two categories?
That would result in duplication of content and I would strongly recommend you to avoid using the same content on two categories or two different pages. Make sure you have canonicalization for your URLs. Don’t create duplicate product pages.
We recently had a webinar for on content marketing. The webinar covered aspects about website conversion optimization. You might find it useful:
Visit our blog for more tips on website conversion optimization, past webinar recordings and other marketing blog posts. And don’t forget to download the ebook on website conversion optimization!
