Conversions (micro or macro) contribute to the success of your website or blog. As a matter of fact, it’s quite obvious that the main purpose of most of our websites is to achieve as many macro conversions as possible.
And before I actually talk about micro conversions and how you could potentially increase the conversion rate on your website because of them, let’s talk about macro conversions.
Conversions are associated with the transactional activities on a site, which we call ‘macro conversions’. For sites like Amazon, the ultimate conversion is when you buy a product from their website, right?
Macro conversions usually include the accomplishment of a single major goal a business has.
But that’s not all.
We have a few other simple actions that you can get implement on your website to boost your conversion rates. These are called the micro conversions and if done right, could have a huge influence over the increase of conversion rate on your website.
Macro and Micro Conversions
Macro conversions are the main goal of your site. Right from getting sales to generating leads, it could include anything that counts as the main purpose of business online. Most of the businesses rely on macro conversions to generate revenue and thrive.
Micro conversions, on the other hand, have an influence on the overall conversion rate of the business and include minor engagements and adjustments on your website and its content. The main purpose of these adjustments is to get the most amount of macro conversions possible.
Let’s say you found a very interesting article online that you share with your friends as well. Now, the goal of the website to which the article belongs is actually the sale of eBooks as they consider it as a macro conversion. However, you didn’t do any of that, you didn’t even look at the eBook they were selling.
Rather you shared the article and the best-case scenario, you signed up for their newsletter. Now while you definitely didn’t consider buying anything, with the time you start relying on the site. And sooner or later, you find one of their eBooks interesting and decide to buy it.
Now, in this case, micro conversions led to a macro conversion for you. The micro conversions were the sharing of the article and the signing of the newsletter, which ultimately directed you to purchase their eBook, thus leading to a macro conversion.
We are going to talk more about micro conversions in this article and how you could potentially use them for your benefit.
The whole purpose behind micro conversions
I’m sure you already understood that micro conversions are important. While running an eCommerce website or anything similar online, you are supposed to consider every visitor to your website since most of them could actually lead to a sale on your website.
Paying attention to just macro conversions is not going to help you. Sure, every visitor might not purchase anything from your website, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t try to get them to convert.
The whole fundamental of a micro conversion is to ultimately lead a visitor towards a macro conversion and that is something which almost every business online considers now.
For a new visitor who just discovered your site through organic search, he’s going to be very hesitant over buying something from your site. As such, it’s up to you how to convince new users and throw a bunch of small conversions before turning them into a potential customer. Micro conversions allow you to do that.
So, why should you track micro conversions?
Just like I mentioned, it’s obvious that every visitor on your website is not going to convert and lead to a sale or whatever your end goal is. But that doesn’t mean that this traffic is worthless.
There are a lot of instances when visitors just make calls to a business to understand their price models, want to know more about specific products, or just check the availability of your product in their areas. Often, they won’t end up buying your product but that doesn’t mean those users can’t be converted somewhere in the future.
Most of the companies follow the business model of getting new users to at least register with their email accounts. This is a great method of having people users in your email list that you could reach out to with your products. And while most of them won’t exactly purchase the product or even open your email, at least some of them would definitely end up converting at one point or another if they discover the value in the product that you are offering.
Okay, let’s forget about registration and subscription lists for a second. Let’s talk about the basics.
No marketer or business owner is ever able to get ALL their website visitors to perform macro conversions. However, there is a good chance that visitors that like your content or your product are eventually going to share your website on their social media. This ultimately helps you in getting more visitors and build brand awareness. And somewhere in the future, they might sign up for your newsletters or heck, even purchase products from your site, leading to a macro conversion.
Tracking smaller conversions are very important since they allow you to:
- Understand the behavior of your viewers.
- Nurture your leads.
- Build the right conversion funnels.
- Measure the effectiveness of your website and its overall content.
- Analyze the golden areas of your website.
Ultimately, if you are striving to have a successful business online, micro conversions are something that you should seriously consider.
What micro conversions should I use?
There are a bunch of micro conversions that are going to help your business generate more profit. If you are ready to witness the full potential of conversions and how micro conversions could lead to macro conversions, here are some of the micro conversions you should use on your website.
Newsletter Signups
Do you know that about 90% of the marketers use email marketing to distribute content organically?
Newsletters, as we all know, is an effective email marketing strategy. You can use it to provide regular updates to your customers regarding your business, new features, offers, promotions, or new services that you want them to try out.
Email marketing is such a method, that if done right, could potentially help you reap a lot of benefits.
Newsletters are very successful for businesses as they help you keep in touch with your visitors and actually have a group of people that you could call your audience.
This audience regularly interacts with your business, checks out your products and services, and have good faith in your business.
You have a strong connection with your email subscribers since you can communicate with everybody with a single email and get them interested in a particular segment of your business. This method is usually profitable over having an audience on social media.
Such users are very likely to contribute to a macro conversion in the long run.
In my guide on how to earn from WordPress, I talked about how memberships and newsletters on your website could help you grow your business exponentially and make good money at the same time.
Filling out forms
Forms, of any kind, are very helpful to a business that wants more interaction with its visitors.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a lead generation form or just a contact form, they help increase the engagement and keep your visitors on your site as long as possible.
A lot of businesses rely on personal communication. As such, they promote personal ‘contact us’ forms to gather the contact details of their visitors and hand them the business prospects and other important details personally. This could be done through calls and emails.
The bottom line is that these forms actually promote interaction between a visitor and the business. The entire process of filling out a form contributes to the completion of a conversion cycle.
For your forms to be effective, here are a few tips you might want to consider:
- Only ask for important details at first.
- Reduce the number of fields a visitor has to fill.
- Make your form mobile friendly (since 51% of the internet users browse through their mobiles).
Blog comments
A blog that has a higher number of comments shouts authority. Usually, when I see a blog that has a higher number of comments, I immediately feel that this very blog has a lot of information and definitely a great user engagement.
Getting people to comment on your blog is usually hard since most of them skim through articles. If a blog has more comments, it means the author is doing something good to engage his readers and get them to comment.
Readers of your content leave comments when they agree or disagree with your content, or just want to share their own thoughts.
Comments mean that the user has interacted with your content and actually want to share something about your content. This means that the visitor might likely come back to your site in the future. Sometimes, it’s to pick up the same conversation or discussion, and sometimes, it’s to talk about another one of your posts.
The bottom line is that you have higher chances of a macro conversion with users and viewers who interact with your content. Since comments are also an interaction, you should be assured that most of the time, they are likely to contribute to a macro conversion.
Encourage comments as much as you can. While you should respond to every comment, know that it is also your responsibility to answer users that ask you questions in the comment section.
Downloading/purchasing eBooks
For a lot of websites, eBook purchases could be considered as a macro conversion. At least for us, we do consider our ebook purchases as macro conversions (for now).
Offering eBooks is one of the best ways to generate micro conversions.
If you offer a free eBook download with every email signup or registration on your website, you could gather more emails that could add to your subscription lists, which is actually a micro conversion as well (as we talked about before).
Essentially, you could have your own eBook store where you could curate and sell eBooks revolving around the niche of your website. If your readers like the first eBook that they received for free with their email signup, chances are that they are going to purchase more of them in the future.
Micro or not, eBooks definitely contribute to conversions. Sure, they might not be a single source of your income or you might not be able to rely on them completely for generating revenue, but they are definitely a great idea to make some extra money off your website.
Serve VIDEOS to your viewers
In our times when businesses and organizations are doing everything in their power to distribute content through every channel, videos are often forgotten about because they require effort.
If you are a business or any other regular niche website in general, curating and providing your own videos is essentially going to make your business sound more authentic and trustworthy.
You can start by distributing your videos through general social channels, like YouTube, Facebook, or you know, just embed YouTube videos on Facebook pages and have a dedicated video for your own website as well.
About 87% of online marketers use video content and claim that they have helped increase the conversion rates on their websites.
Having a video on your landing page increases the chances of your customers to convert. It is such a tactic that has about 80% chance generally of leading to a macro conversion, so I don’t think you would want to miss out on it.
And the worst-case scenario? Even if it doesn’t lead to a sale, a video would definitely increase your brand awareness among your viewers.
Adding a product to cart
Since you already own an eCommerce business, you already know that not every customer that adds a product in the cart ends up buying it.
For a customer to buy a product, they essentially have to add it to a cart first. And in MOST of the cases, the chances of them buying a product is really less. Sometimes, it’s because of product unavailability in the customer’s area, sometimes it’s from the customer’s end as they are unsure about their purchase, or sometimes, there’s no reason for it. They most likely just want to save it for the future and buy it somewhere down the line.
However, such customers can actually be converted and directed to macro conversions where they essentially purchase products from your site.
A customer that adds a product to cart already trusts your business and is ALMOST ready to purchase your product. However, due to a few reasons (that I mentioned above), he might not end up buying the product.
Still, there are things that you could do on your own in order to essentially promote sales on your websites.
A common strategy to promote the already added products to cart to an existing customer is to display the same products on the homepage and other parts of the website. This reminds the customer that he has certain products added to his cart that he might be interested to buy now. A common example of this could be seen on Amazon.
And if you are running Google ads and similar ad campaigns, you can always use remarketing lists (which I talked about in my guide on Google ads) for serving your ads to such visitors that have seen a specific page on your site, or added something in the cart but not necessarily bought anything. You can re-target such visitors easily.
Product/Content Sharing options
Sharing is a great way to get your brand/business or content out there. This means that if a visitor of your site is sharing your website with his friends or family, they are a potential chance of leading to a macro conversion.
Sharing brings in more brand exposure and is basically free marketing. Right from just a single visitor to thousands of visitors, sharing could bring in any amount of people towards your website.
It isn’t an organic way of reaching out to people, but it definitely is a faster way and actually increases your chances of getting more conversions.
It doesn’t matter if you have blog content or a product to sell, I recommend you always keep those sharing buttons ready so that people could share such content on their social media platforms if they like it or find it informative.
For you to allow sharing on your website and to promote it in the first place, I always recommend that you install the sharing buttons on your website/blog.
This allows a viewer to share your content on any of the platforms that they use. Rather than copying the URL and then pasting it on the social media platforms, the sharing buttons allow your viewers to just click on their desired platform of choice and send it to other people right away.
Social media and brand mentions
If you don’t have a social media presence of your business, you are missing out on a large number of chances to generate conversions.
About 90% of marketers that have social media presence for their businesses claim that it has increased their exposure and about 75% of them have increased overall traffic.
Not only is it an ideal way to reach out to people, but it actually helps you interact with more people and answer their queries regarding your business.
Social media has been in favor of brands improving their social media profiles. You don’t see Nike being just a generic sports brand that relies on word of mouth for people to purchase their products. They are known for a great deal of promotion of their brand. And now, they have 115 million followers, just on Instagram.
Brand mentions are another great method to gain exposure for your business.
Suppose a customer purchases something from your website, something like a limited edition hoodie or maybe a limited stock book, they are most likely to mention the same on their social media profiles. And if you have a social media presence, this means they can even tag you in the same, thus getting more people interested in your brand.
It really is a simple tactic of getting more visitors interested in your business.
Browsing Multiple Pages
Visitors that browse multiple numbers of pages on your site are more likely to convert since they show interest in your website overall.
Pageviews do matter, but they can’t really be that effective for the overall conversion rate when a user is lost somewhere on your website and doesn’t really understand what he is looking for or looking at.
Just like I mentioned in my guide on On-Page SEO, proper navigation on your website contributes to a great experience overall along with a good conversion rate.
FINAL WORDS
Micro Conversions are ultimately one of the most underrated elements that could help you with your macro conversions.
And while it’s evident that you shouldn’t miss out on them, I definitely recommend you to make use of as many micro conversions as you can.
Being aware of conversions in general and tracking them at the same time is definitely going to help you scale your business. And if you can’t figure them on your own, having a wingman for such settings on your site won’t be a bad idea either!