What is the Customer Conversion Rate?

Your customer conversion rate is the percentage of your total visitors who take a desired action, such as purchasing or signing up for marketing emails. It represents the effectiveness of both your sales and marketing efforts at generating paying customers.

The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors to your site or landing pages. Then, that number is multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.

Key Takeaways

• Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that take a desired action, like purchasing or signing up for a newsletter. It is a crucial metric for sales and marketing teams.
• Benchmark your conversion rates against industry averages to identify areas for improvement. Increase conversion rates by optimizing landing pages, offers, website speed, and lead nurturing.
• Analyze conversion rates by traffic source, campaign, keywords, and other factors to determine the most effective lead-generation activities. Improve low-converting areas.
• Optimize the sales process by determining lead quality earlier, nurturing leads appropriately to sales-qualified status, and improving sales team effectiveness at converting leads.

Here is the conversion rate formula:

Conversion rate = (Number of conversions / Total number of visitors) x 100

If you had 5,000 visitors to your website last month, and 100 of them made a purchase, your e-commerce conversion rate would be:

Conversion rate = (100 purchases / 5,000 visitors) x 100 = 2%

So, in this example, sales and marketing teams measure the effectiveness of campaigns in 2% of your traffic becoming paying customers. Understanding your conversion rates helps sales and marketing teams measure the effectiveness of campaigns in driving leads and sales.

Why Conversion Rates Are Important

High conversion rates mean your sales and marketing operations effectively turn your traffic and leads into paying customers. Here are some reasons why conversions are a top metric:

More revenue – Higher conversion rates directly translate into more customers and revenue for your business. A minor 1% increase in conversion could result in tens of thousands in extra profit each year.

Identify improvement areas – Benchmarking your conversion rates helps you quickly see lower-performing pages and campaigns compared to best practices. You can focus optimization efforts on these high-upside areas first.

Prove campaign results – Marketing teams use conversion rate stats to measure campaign, channel, and workflow performance. If the cost per conversion is too high, marketers adjust their strategy.

Optimize sales process – Low conversion rates may indicate ineffective sales nurturing, unqualified leads from marketing, or issues closing leads during the sales process. Analyzing conversion by lead source helps determine where the sales process needs improvement.

Plan and forecast – Historical conversion data allows you to predict lead volume and sales based on future traffic and campaign projections. If you get 100 sales from 1,000 leads on average, you know roughly how many leads you need next month to achieve revenue goals.

How to Calculate Conversion Rates

While there are sophisticated tools and platforms to figure out conversion rates for you, understanding the basic math behind it is essential. The steps to calculate any conversion rate are:

1. Define your conversion goal. Usually, it is a purchase online or a form filled out like a newsletter sign-up offline. Be specific in what counts as a conversion.

2. Determine the period to measure – Monthly, annually, by campaign duration, or another interval. Use consistent periods for accurate trend comparison.

3. Identify the number of conversions – How many goal completions happened over your set time frame? Example: 43 newsletter sign-ups last month.

4. Identify the total visits/traffic – How many total website visitors, landing page views, phone call leads, or other traffic happened during that period? Example: 323 organic website sessions last month.

5. Divide conversions by total traffic – Divide conversions by the total number of visitors, then multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage. Example: 43 conversions / 323 visitors = 13% conversion rate

The level of sophistication in calculating conversions is much more profound for many businesses, but this covers the basic concept. You define what counts as a conversion, determine a time to measure, gather conversion and traffic data, divide conversions by total traffic, and get your baseline conversion rate.

Industrial Benchmarks for Good Conversion Rates

A singular conversion rate percentage doesn’t tell you much. It would be best if you had context and comparison. The best way to do that is to look at conversion rate benchmarks by industry. This allows you to gauge your performance and see opportunities compared to top competitors.

For example, the average e-commerce conversion rate is around 2-3%, but the top-performing e-commerce sites convert over 5%. If your online store is only at a 1.2% conversion rate, you know there is likely lots of room to improve.

Here are some average conversion rates by industry studied in 2022:

• Ecommerce – Average 2.35%. Top performers 5%+
• Financial Services – Average 5.31%. Top performers over 15%
• Software as a Service (SaaS) – Average around 5%, but enormously varies based on price point and target customer
• Education and Training – Average 7.38%. 15-20%+ for high-ticket online courses
• Nonprofits – Average less than 2%. Top performers near 3%
• Lead Generation Service Companies – Average less than 1% as expected. Shallow volumes but high value.

As shown above, conversion rates vary drastically across industries, business models, and product types. Use these aggregates as a starting point, but identify conversion benchmarks from industry research specific to businesses most similar to yours.

How to Increase Low Conversion Rates

If your conversion rates are lower than expected for your niche, here are proven conversion rate optimization strategies to improve performance:

Optimize Website Pages and Landing Pages

Your homepage design, product pages, blog, contact pages, pricing pages, and landing pages play a huge role in converting traffic. Use conversion rate data, user recordings, and usability studies to improve page design, content, offers, and calls-to-action, which drive the most traffic. This aligns pages better with what visitors want and need to convert.

Improve Page Load Speed

Page speed significantly impacts conversions. 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Improve web host servers, implement image compression, browser caching, lazy loading, and other speed optimizations. This makes happier visitors more likely to buy, sign up, and convert.

Personalize Marketing Outreach and Offers

Tailored email, social media, and advertising messages convert higher than generic outbound marketing. Use behavioral data and lead scoring to segment contacts and customize messaging and offers to their preferences—personalized CTAs, landing pages, and pricing all lift conversion rates.

Nurture Leads in The Sales Funnel

Add lead nurturing workflows through marketing automation to segment and engage prospects until sales qualify. Send a targeted sequence of blog content, special offers, and product webinars to warm up cold leads over time for higher conversion success during sales contact.

Improve User Experience and Trust Factors

Boost conversion rates by improving UX through customer feedback surveys, user testing, support enhancements, and building credibility markers like security seals, customer logos, and social proof. This establishes more visitor trust and comfort to convert.

Offer More Payment and Fulfillment Options

Allow customers more payment types, currencies, shipping options, and self-service account access. This removes friction and meets diverse customer preferences to complete conversions with the methods they desire.

Analyzing Conversion Rates In Depth

While overall conversion rate is essential, conversions vary drastically for different segments. Here are ways to break down conversion data further to find optimization opportunities:

Conversion Rate by Traffic Source and Campaign

Your conversion rates often differ significantly based on the channel driving traffic and specific campaigns. Identify lower converting channels and underperforming campaigns for improvement focus.

Geo and Device Conversion Variations

Do visitors from certain countries or regions convert higher? Do mobile vs desktop visitors convert differently? Dive into the geo and device data to uncover differences and optimization ideas.

Analyze by Keyword, Offer, and More

Looking deeper into individual keywords, specific offers, and outreach programs also exposes areas ready for conversion rate lifts. Micro-conversions also matter; analyze form fill rates, downloads, and other steps in the funnel before final conversions happen.

Improving Sales Processes and Conversions

Beyond website optimization, improving sales workflow and processes significantly impacts conversion rates. Here are sales-focused ways to convert more incoming leads:

Score and Qualify Leads Earlier

Identify higher potential leads earlier and faster using lead scoring models and instant qualification via chatbots or assessments. Accelerating high-value leads into sales conversations converts more successfully. While nurturing leads over time until sales are ready based on engagement scoring.

Optimized Sales Nurturing till SQL

Many leads that enter the top of your sales funnel are not yet ready to effectively convert during sales chats. Implement optimized nurturing tracks by lead score and profile to educate prospects over time in preparation for sales conversations. Ensure you qualify nurtured leads as Sales Qualified Leads before handing off.

Improve Sales Team Conversions

Provide sales reps conversion rate benchmark goals and coaching to meet them. Have sales and marketing collaborate closely monitoring conversion stats from each lead source and campaign. Together study the highest converting sales reps practices to replicate across the team, optimizing tactics and pipelines further.

Real World Examples Of Customer Conversion Rates

Here are some real-world examples of customer conversion rates across different industries:

Ecommerce:

• Amazon – Reportedly over 8% conversion rate. Extremely high for ecommerce.
• Apple – 1.39% average conversion rate across their online store in 2021 according to SimilarWeb data. Low compared to other tech retailers.
• Warby Parker – Over 4% conversion rate on their online eyewear store. Above average partly thanks to their innovative virtual try-on feature.

SaaS Software:

• HubSpot – Over 7% free trial to paid conversion rate thanks to optimized workflows for free users.
• MailChimp – 2.4% conversion rate on their homepage to sign-up flow. Low as expected given the mass-market focus.
• Moz Pro SEO Software – Over 17% conversion rate from free trial account signup to a paid subscription according to the company. High for B2B SaaS.

Financial Services:

• Charles Schwab – 8.5% applicant to new account conversion rate.
• Progressive Insurance – 5.85% quote-to-purchase conversion rate, over 2x higher than competitors.
• Rocket Mortgages – 13% loan application completion conversion rate with their guided online application helping conversion.

As you can see, conversion rates vary quite a bit across companies, even competing closely in the same niche. Use these real-world examples along with niche research to set competitive conversion benchmark goals for your business. Then test and implement conversion optimizations systematically until you match and exceed your set targets over time.

FAQs About Conversion Rate Optimization

What is a good conversion rate?

There is no singular conversion rate deemed universally good or bad out of context. A good conversion rate is one matching or exceeding the benchmarks for your specific industry. Top companies convert at 2-3x higher than average benchmarks in their niche.

How do you increase conversion rate?

Refer to the suggestions in this guide for the many marketing, technical and sales workflow optimization best practices to increase your conversion rates. Most lifts come from improving website page design, speed and messaging. As well as sales process improvements like lead qualification.

How do you calculate conversion rate in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics makes conversion rate analysis easy. Under the Conversions section, setup your goals like email signup and purchase confirmation pages. Then view the goals overview report to see conversions rates by each goal, with averages, by time period comparisons and more automatically calculated.

What is a good landing page conversion rate?

Excellent landing page conversion rate varies greatly based on the offer and industry norms. According to Wordstream research, the average landing page conversion rate is around 2-3%. For lead generation offers this ranges from 5-15% conversion depending on value exchanged. High ticket offers convert around 1-3% on average.

Why are my Facebook Ad conversion rates so low?

Low Facebook ad conversion rate usually means either your targeting is too broad and hitting low quality leads, your messaging isn’t relevant or compelling enough to clickers, or your landing page user experience isn’t aligned to ad expectations. Refer back to the optimization tips in this guide to improve Facebook conversion rates specifically.

How do you calculate sales conversion rates?

To determine sales team conversion rates, define what counts as a sales qualified conversion clearly, whether that be won deals, expansion secured, or customer renewals. Track all inbound leads handed off to sales over a given timeframe. Then divide the number of sales conversions achieved by the total leads to get the sales conversion rate percentage.

Optimizing conversion rates takes deep analysis, testing and persistence – but pays off exponentially with each gain compounding over time. Use this guide as a starting point to assess and improve your business lead generation, marketing messaging and sales processes. Ultimately driving more profitable customers and abundant revenue growth.