Blog - Page 9 of 12 - Inbound Rocket

6 Big Misconceptions About Conversion Rate Optimization That Are Wasting Your Time

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a practice that never stops. There are always new things you can try optimizing to get even higher conversions. Previous articles around CRO included “The Basics Of Conversion Rate Optimization In Three Simple Steps”, “What is Conversion Rate Optimization and Why Should You Care?”, “How To Do Conversion Optimization With Almost No Traffic”, to name a few.

However, when talking to people in our area about the potentials of CRO, we still find that there are a lot of misconceptions about Conversion Rate Optimization.

Internet Marketing today is much more challenging than ever before. Technology and tools available to everyone are getting better every day, but this makes it also easier for your competitors to start using these tools, not to mention the ever growing improvement of the knowledge of the buyers of your product. All of these end up, with making it harder to achieve your business goals.

Conversion Rate Optimization turns out, is no longer something nice to have, but it’s turning into a must for every company. A lot of marketers are a bit skeptical at first, though, about a service that sometimes sounds too good to be true. If you’re the person responsible for lead generation in your company, or if you’re running an e-commerce website, implementing different experiments and learning from the results can dramatically improve the number of leads or orders you’re generating from your site.

When implementing these processes in your organisation, you will find that although a lot of the tips and tricks online look rather easy, it’s not such a simple process as expected. If you’ve been thinking of implementing different experiments on your website, but still have a few reservations, this article will help you set some misconceptions straight so you don’t waste your time.

Posted in Lead Conversion | no responses

8 Content Marketing Mistakes And How To Fix Them

Content Marketing is huge; we’ve been writing some articles about it already on our blog before. However, very few content marketers hit a home run every time to produce a new set of content and release it to the world.

Content marketing takes time, dedication, and a strategic plan to help you position yourself as a thought leader in your industry and a helpful resource for information your targeted customer is looking for.

We’ve all encountered content that took us hours to create and ended up with little to no traction and little to no conversion. Although it might feel like a failure to you personally, these, however, are excellent learning experiences and help you to define your content marketing strategy better. Mistakes can provide lots of insights, and if you look at them correctly, it can help you avoid making these mistakes in the future.

Knowing what to look for and how to fix the issues you find is the first hurdle to take. To help you get started on the right track in this week’s follow-up post on content marketing strategy, we’ve gathered eight insights into content marketing mistakes we all are making and how to fix them.

So, stop your content creation efforts for a couple of minutes, finish reading this post first and make sure your efforts will be even more successful.

Posted in Content Marketing | 6 responses

10 Web Metrics You Need to Track to Improve Conversion

At one point in the life of your business (as long as you’re building or selling something useful), you will start to attract an audience to your website. After all, your website is the online hub of all your inbound marketing efforts. If you’re implementing a good Inbound Marketing strategy and executing on it, then you will start to drive traffic to your website and your landing pages.

With every visit comes an opportunity for you to convert visitors into leads and customers. How well you manage to get these visitors and convert those visitors into leads and customers depends all on how good you’re at optimizing your website for the right metrics.

For any marketer, metrics provide a deeper insight into how your website is performing. They will tell you how many people are consuming your content, and what they are doing with it if they like it or not. By looking at the right metrics, you can figure out which pieces are working and which pieces of content should be improved. If your organization is already a bit bigger, it can also give you the credibility within the company that Inbound Marketing is powerful and that it is worth the investment.

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.

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If you’re trying to take your marketing efforts and your conversion to the next level, H. James Harrington in the above quote is certainly right. It makes sense then, to start looking for insights from your website. There are a lot of different tools out there (including our own Inbound Rocket plugin). But let’s look more into the essential metrics you should be tracking and how tracking these can help you optimize your website’s conversion performance.

Posted in Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Lead Conversion | no responses

6 Startup Founders Share Their Secrets On Startup Marketing

Let’s face it, when you’re getting started with your company, one of your main concerns is going to be growing your company. It doesn’t matter how great you think your idea is, and how big a problem you’re trying to solve if you fail to gain any traction everything might still be all for nothing.

We understand that, when you’re getting started, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to afford a marketing agency or even hire your dedicated marketing team. In the early days, you probably have to take care of the marketing yourself.

In today’s world, there are countless of different strategies to grow your business and do marketing. There are also tons of mistakes you can make as we showed you in an earlier article, but it’s often only a few tactics that will help skyrocket your growth.

In this post, 6 startup founders will share their top marketing tricks. Hopefully, this will give you some ideas on how to go to market and get your company off the ground. Keep in mind though that what works well for one company might not work that well for yours so it’s always important tot test!

Let’s dive straight into their answers, here they are in random order:

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Inspiration, Social Media Marketing | 3 responses

5 Ways To Better Personalisation And More Leads

Lead generation. A real pain in the…ahem, usually. Many marketing managers find lead generation to be a bit of an uphill struggle. You somehow need to convince potential customers that you are right for them while figuring out whether they are right for you.

So, let’s start with the obvious. You need to convince people that you are awesome, really clever and that you’re going to make them more money; no-one wants to hand over personal information unless they are getting something good in return. It doesn’t just end there though, to develop that name and email address into a hot lead you need to keep providing value and revealing how brilliant you are. Your marketing team needs to develop leads far beyond just a name and an email address or your sales team will waste a lot of time trying to sell to people that are nowhere near ready to buy.

Ok, second thing, deciding whether leads are right for you. Whilst you are proving your worth to a potential lead, you need to also decide whether they are any good to you. You don’t just need to generate more leads, you also need to qualify them at the same time. What a load of hassle, right? Not really. The real hassle comes when you don’t qualify leads. Unqualified leads eat up the super short time the sales team have in a day to deal with those potential clients that will help you to flourish. Unqualified leads also turn into poor clients – clients that you can’t do amazing things for and which end up costing more to manage than the amount of revenue that they bring.

Posted in Inbound Marketing, Lead Conversion | one respons

8 Simple Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rates

Email has been announced dead for multiple times over the last decade. However, as we’ve seen in an earlier post, email marketing should be an essential part of your marketing mix. According to a 2011 study by eMarketer an astonishing 97% of small business use email marketing to connect with their customers.

When it comes to email marketing, the first hurdle to overcome is email open rate. Because if you can increase your open rates, you’ll be able to boost your email conversion rate too. Makes sense, right? Even if you give away the most beautiful vacation to your subscribers, if they don’t open the email they will never find out.

A deep understanding of your customers as well as their needs and habits, their tone of voice and everything else that is part of their unique personality is key in creating an effective email marketing strategy.

One of the first step to always ask yourself if: “If I received this email from another company, would I open it?” But what if you want more? A weak open rate can be the sign of many different things. Let’s look at them and see how you can improve the open rates for your company.

Average open rate

Before diving into improving your individual open rates, let’s first look quickly at some averages. While an average open rate depends on different industries and email providers. As soon as you start diving below 15% it should be setting off some alarm bells. A lot of email providers give you the option to provide the industry you’re operating in and helps you to give the average numbers per industry. If you don’t know where you need to look, the amazing folks over at Constant Contact have a great overview that is regularly updated.

As you can see from the table the worst performing industry to be in concerning open rates is the insurance one with an average open rate of 6.95%. The biggest open rates come from the child care services industry with a whopping 40.25%. If you score even higher with your newsletter, there is time right now for high-fiving your colleagues 😉 but nevertheless you should always try to improve!

So what are the things to look at when improving?

Posted in Email Marketing | 4 responses

How To Write An Effective And Unique Value Proposition

Your product may be the best product in the world, with the most amazing features, your presentation to the outside world might be perfectly executed, and you have the best price in your category, but no one will ever know about all of these fantastic items if they don’t get past your high-level value proposition.

The value proposition is the number 1 thing that determines whether or not people are bothered with reading more about your product or hitting the back button. In this blog post were going to dive into the Value Proposition. What is it, what’s it not and how to create a winning Value Proposition for your business.

What is a value proposition?

In its simplest terms, a Value Proposition is a positioning statement that explains what benefit you provide for who and how you do it uniquely well. It describes your target buyer, the problem you solve, and why you’re distinctly better than the alternatives.

Posted in Inspiration, Lead Conversion | 8 responses

How To Do Conversion Optimization With Almost No Traffic

We already talked about the importance of Conversion Rate Optimization before and got the basics worked out for your company website to start with Conversion Rate Optimization. At its core conversion optimization is the idea of testing out different versions of your pages, different copy, different visuals, etc. to make the pages get as much conversion as possible.

“I have too little traffic to test; hence, I can’t do conversion optimization.”

However, to conduct a scientific test, you need enough visitors to increase your conversion rate and enough conversions to generate good results. According to Launchbit is saying that you need a minimum of 100 visitors to each landing page with at least 20 conversions for a test to achieve statistical significance (a recommended 95%).

But what if your website doesn’t quickly generate this amount of traffic and converts even less? This scenario happens to marketers quite often and leaves many wondering if split testing can be effective or if CRO is even right for their company.

The answers are: Of course it can and CRO is right for everyone. You just need a slightly different approach. Here’re a few ways that you can make CRO and testing more effective, even if you don’t have enough traffic.

Posted in Lead Conversion | one respons

The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Your Startup Online Without a Big Budget

Startup marketing is a whole different science.

“Build and they will come” doesn’t work.

Those overnight success stories are often the result of years of hard work. Startup marketing is challenging because of limited resources (time, money, or even talent). Every effort, no matter how small, must be flawlessly executed. Traditional strategies don’t always work. So what can you do when you just don’t have the budget for a big marketing campaign?

Let’s go over six things that can get your marketing moving in the right direction, without having to spend much besides sweat equity.

Posted in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Social Media Marketing | one respons

The 4 Rules for Converting Online Leads into Sales

One of the biggest challenges for a lot of B2B companies is generating leads. That’s why we started with Inbound Rocket in the first place, to help you as a business owner get more qualified leads from your website. But if your sales team struggles to follow-up on the leads you create as a marketer, then you’re effort are wasted.

When it comes to leads, traditional marketers would often wait for an optimum response time. However for online leads, this is a complete different story. When you get a new lead that comes from filling out a form after different page visits, those leads are still on your website and ready to start engaging. This means that these type of leads require a faster, more engaged response than a traditional lead which comes to you via offline conversions. You can easily compare these types of leads to incoming phone calls, for example, you would not let them wait for hours, would you?

In 2011, Dr. James Oldroyd performed a study called “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”. In this study, he found that most companies are not fast enough in the way they follow-up leads. From the 2,240 companies examined, only 46% followed-up with a lead within 24 hours.

The speed in which your sales team follows up on the marketing lead is essential. A slow follow-up means losing business to a competitor whereas a quick follow up is more than likely to lead to a sale.

We’ve put together 4 easy tips to help you turn more website leads into paying customers.

Posted in Lead Conversion | 2 responses

6 Big Misconceptions About Conversion Rate Optimization That Are Wasting Your Time

8 Content Marketing Mistakes And How To Fix Them

10 Web Metrics You Need to Track to Improve Conversion

5 Ways To Better Personalisation And More Leads

8 Simple Ways To Improve Your Email Open Rates

Average open rate

How To Write An Effective And Unique Value Proposition

What is a value proposition?

How To Do Conversion Optimization With Almost No Traffic

The 4 Rules for Converting Online Leads into Sales

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