As an entrepreneur, marketing a new startup can always seem like a tough mountain to climb. The marketing landscape is rife with competition among companies in a perpetual tug of war over market share. Not to mention that new entrants keep churning themselves every five minutes or so in a bid to disrupt the market. In fact, there are more than 63,703 startups in the U.S. alone.
If you, as an entrepreneur, are hoping for long-term success, then you should possess a strategy for growth. Fortunately, even in a market teeming with startups, you can make your mark and have a profitable business to carve a path to success. By employing a mix of traditional and creative solutions, you can build yourself a sizable customer base to help your startup off the ground.
Here, we will take a look at five such strategies that can help your startup improve its conversion rates and subsequently hack growth.
What is a Good Conversion Rate for a Startup?
On average, the acceptable conversion rate for startups is between 2% and 5%. However, the ideal conversion rate for all businesses is 10% or higher. To calculate your marketing campaign’s conversion rate, use this formula:
Conversion rates differ depending on the brand’s desired conversions, campaign, keyword level, and other factors. Some metrics you can consider include:
- New or returning visitors
- Interactions or value per visit
- Cost per conversion
- Bounce rate
- Exit pages
Remember that conversion rates also differ across industries. For instance, the median conversion rate in e-commerce is 1.84%, while finance businesses tend to perform at 5.01%.
How to Fuel Your Startup’s Conversion Rate
1. Market Your Startup Before Achieving Product-Market Fit
The product-market fit (PMF) is the state of existing within the perfect market for a particular service or product that solves a problem. While it doesn’t have to be the solution to every problem out there, it has to be a minimal viable product that fulfills a real need. Lack of market need can often be the doom for startups, as per a CBInsights survey which found that as many as 42% of startups failed because of it.
Finding your PMF is a process and tends to occur when you develop a product that satisfies a substantial part of the market. It involves communicating with your target audience while the product is in development to decide its direction. Although serendipity can play a huge role in finding the PMF, it emerges from rigorous market and buyer persona research. Identifying the ideal buyer persona is essential in finding the right PMF because it allows you to reach out to and establish relationships with potential buyers before you can target them.
There is value in marketing to these people before you even acquire the final PMF since the insight you gain from them will help you decide your product’s subsequent direction, so that it is marketable to a large group of people. By establishing relationships before even launching the product, you ensure that your product is not lost in a sea of novel innovations and also request clients to recommend their favorite features to friends and colleagues.
2. Invest in Live Chat Software for Real-Time Support
Did you know that most companies out there aren’t able to respond fast enough to capture the number of potential leads out there? According to a SuperOffice survey, an average company takes 12 hours and 10 minutes to respond to an email.
This is the primary reason why startups aren’t able to leverage the growth they need in their nascent stages to keep themselves buoyant. In fact, data shows that the odds of making contact with a potential lead decrease by 10x after you go by five minutes without responding to customer support queries.
However, it is mostly easier said than done for startups who lack the resources to service all customer queries satisfactorily to acquire the leads they need. Fortunately, customer support automation can help companies turn this setback into an opportunity.
Support automation tools like live chat software can encourage repeat purchases and increased conversions by providing superlative customer service throughout their buyer journey. It allows you to offer product support and knowledge in real-time to customers when they need it, thus enhancing their overall experience. You can also pair it with a chatbot to provide automated customer support. According to CrazyEgg, doing this can cause 38% of consumers to buy more from you and improve your conversions consequently.
3. Invest in Remarketing Strategies
Remarketing, or retargeting, is an online advertising form that targets users who have previously visited your site by showing personalized advertisements to them. It is one of the best options for startups since it allows them to reach out to potential users at a time when they are most likely to purchase.
According to a Forrester study, 96% of people leave a website without taking the action the marketer would have wanted them to take. Unlike conventional paid advertising campaigns that encourage all users to visit a website, remarketing lets you strategically target users who are looking for a product similar to yours or have already visited your app or website.
Based on simple technology, remarketing works by implanting a cookie in a prospect’s browser when they visit your website. This means that whenever they visit a website that runs advertising systems in the background, they will be shown your advertisement.
Myfix cycles used this to their benefit when they ran a retargeting strategy by setting up conversion tracking on their site and creating three different audience segments to target them with specialized ads. After their Facebook remarketing campaign, their revenue soared, with them generating a return on ad spend of 1529%!
4. Improve Page Loading Speed
The page loading speed of your website has a measurable influence on its conversion rates. According to a study, pages that take two seconds to load experience a bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load see their bounce rates jump to 38%.
This establishes an interdependence between the page loading speed of your website and its conversion rates. In other words, the slower a webpage loads, the more likely a user is to bounce from the page and not perform the intended action on it. Improving your startup’s website page load speed, thus, can hugely affect how much revenue it can generate. Take the example of Walmart, for instance. Just by improving their site’s page loading speed by 1 second, they were able to increase their overall conversion rate by 2% and grew incremental revenue by up to 1%.
If you have a WordPress website, speeding up your site is not so difficult. There are many tools and plugins that help you do it yourself.
Remember that your website hosting also affects your page speed significantly. If you are planning to scale your website, you can expect that shared hosting won’t handle user requests and visits that are growing beyond a certain limit. That is why when choosing website hosting services, make a wise choice by comparing the options and choosing the one that handles more user requests at a lower price.
5. Extend the Free Trial Duration
According to the Journal of Marketing Research, free trial users behave in a different manner than customers that pay for the product. The author of the study said that beginning a relationship with the help of a free trial “influences usage and retention behavior, responsiveness to marketing activities, and ultimately how long the consumer will remain with the service.”
Prospects that are on a free trial have a higher likelihood of converting to customers the more they use the service. Here is where you can capitalize on their need for your product and make them loyal to your product or service by extending their trial period. Allowing the free trial user more time not only makes a compelling case for yourself, but it also makes them rely on the product more and solidify their experience with it.
GetResponse is a perfect example of this. Wishing to increase the free trial run but doubtful over its sales impact, they A/B tested it first. By deploying a “free trial” button on their homepage, they were able to tap into customer sentiments, leading to a 158% increase in free trials without reducing purchases.
Fuel Your Conversion Rate with Spiralytics
Startups have a higher likelihood of driving growth by finding their ideal demographic, understanding user needs better, personalizing customer support, and customizing their ads to specific audiences.
The tips mentioned above are central to formulating a robust growth strategy and have proven instances of success. These strategies can help you deliver a much-needed boost to your marketing efforts to cut through the noise and set yourself apart from your competitors.
Spiralytics, a conversion rate optimization agency, can help increase your conversion rate with our proven expertise. Contact us today to learn more about our tailored digital marketing services!
