How Does Your Business Stack Up?

Was your last marketing campaign a hit or did it totally miss the mark? While it might be easy enough to track conversion rates using the typical open rates and click-through rates on email marketing, tracking conversions on landing pages hasn’t always been as easy.

Unbounce recently released their landing page conversion report and some of the stats coming through are really quite interesting. But before we delve too far into figures and statistics, let’s go back to what makes a good conversion rate. What numbers do you need to be hitting to get what is considered a good conversion rate?

In general, a conversion is really just an action that you want people visiting your website to take. That might mean buying a product, subscribing to your email, downloading a free report, getting a new lead and so on. Different businesses and different industries will have varying ideas on what a good conversion rate is, and generally, it is based around the type of campaign you are running and your overall goals.

When talking about conversion numbers, Unbounce points out that “how you stack up against companies in your industry is more actionable than overall numbers.” They note that performance standards vary quite drastically between industries – buying children’s clothes online isn’t the same as buying a new car or buying gym equipment isn’t the same as ordering dinner online. This is why it’s really important to know where your industry stands as a whole and where you stand when compared to other businesses in your industry.

We mentioned above that some of the stats coming through from the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report were quite interesting. They found that the median conversion rate for all pages they analysed was 3.2%, but the really top performers were seeing conversion rates of up to 25%. They also found that click-through landing pages offer the best conversion rate for many industries, however, lead generation pages (or forms) are more common with just over 62% of pages using these forms.

What Makes a High Converting Landing Page?

Marketing agencies often have different ideas on what makes a high converting landing page, and it’s not surprising really. Many agencies work with a whole range of businesses, and they tend to use a one-size-fits-all approach. But, through experience, we know that approach doesn’t work. What works for the local mechanics won’t work for a nationwide finance company; they have completely different audiences with completely different needs, and therefore they need different ways to draw potential customers in.

Landing pages do tend to have a few things in common – strong images and videos, a focused call to action, and offer value and benefits. Your audience needs to have a compelling reason or be offered something that benefits them to leave their details. But after that, it all comes down to catering towards your intended audience.

Why Doesn’t a One-Size-Fits-All Approach Work?

The Unbounce Conversion Report delves into a range of industries, looking at what call to actions work best, what language is better received and even the word count that is more likely to convert. Let’s take a look at why landing pages need to be customised to individual industries using just two examples.

The real estate industry is known for using descriptive words to sell properties and the whole industry works on leads. Real estate landing pages convert at 2.2%, below the median of all industries (3.2%). Commercial real estate pages convert higher at 2.6% while generic websites lower at 2.1%. Here’s where it gets interesting for an industry where descriptions play a major role.

Unbounce discovered that words associated with joy and positivity often resulted in lower conversion rates. Likewise with pages that use a lot of trust-based words. Testimonials and reviews, however, do a lot better towards building trust; but those testimonials and reviews have to be real, specific and authentic. Photos and videos build a stronger connection than words alone.

Other interesting information for real estate landing pages include:

• Real estate landing pages are more challenging to read. Easier reading levels correlate with higher conversions
• Forms often lead to lower conversion rates
• Landing pages for investment properties tend to be long and use more words. Shorter copy often leads to a higher conversion rate

So what’s a good conversion rate for the real estate industry? If you’re hitting 2.2%, you’re keeping up with others in your industry. Exceeding that 2.2% mark? You’re doing pretty well compared to other similar businesses.

Let’s compare the real estate industry to business services. Overall conversion rate is slightly higher in business services (2.6%), but there is a huge difference once that industry is broken down – business consultants sit quite low at 2% whereas landing pages for franchise and investment services sit up at 4.7%.

Unlike in the real estate industry, ease of reading and the word count don’t lead to lower conversion rates in the business services industries. Unbounce found that “landing pages for lead-gen consulting and services appear to benefit from using more advanced vocabulary and sentence structure.” In other words, you should be aiming your language towards a more tertiary educated reader. HR, on the other hand, tends to get more conversions the easier the page is to read. Emotive language plays a role in HR landing pages, while consultants may not see results from using typical fear-based language. Click-throughs tend to get more leads than forms.

From just those two examples, you can see where there are some similarities, but there are also plenty of differences. Landing pages are a great way to build leads and to introduce new customers to your brand. But they need to be customised to your industry, and more specifically, to your niche within the overall industry.

A good marketing agency will work with you to find out more about your industry and your potential audience before working on your landing page.