There’s nothing worse than creating a well-planned marketing campaign only to see it fall far short of its conversion-rate goals. No matter how stellar your campaign is, conversion rates can end up down in the dumps if a few essential basics aren’t taken care of first. Let’s take a closer look.

What is a conversion rate?

If you recently launched a marketing campaign aimed at prompting a specific action in your audience, you can measure the success of your campaign using conversion rate. Conversion rate is the percentage of your audience that took the desired action.

If your conversion rate was strikingly low, it can be difficult to know why. Luckily, we’ve got you covered. In this blog, we’ve put together 10 critical points that could be inhibiting your marketing campaign’s conversion rate.

By identifying and addressing these potential roadblocks, you’ll be better equipped to optimize your strategies and achieve better results.

1. Complex, Confusing, or Unappealing Websites

Impressions matter online and in real life. Your website is like your calling card to the world, and if your website is not up to scratch, your audience might have a less-than-stellar impression of your company. This can result in low conversions.

Unfortunately, it only takes a few easily overlooked aspects to dampen your website’s appeal. Luckily, knowing what they are means knowing what to improve.

Let’s start with the basics: the website’s design. Your website needs to have an aesthetically appealing look, have a simple layout, and be easy to navigate. In an article for Bootcamp, Tony Hou writes: “Attractive design can lead users to believe that a product is more user-friendly and enjoyable to use.”

The result is a pleasant user experience and a positive impression of your company.

Try not to clutter your website with obtrusive ads, hard-to-read fonts, or low-quality images. Even if all you have is a landing page, make sure it looks good.

Next, make sure that your site is easy to navigate. If your audience needs to move from one page to another to move down your sales funnel, make sure the links are visually clear and the navigation easy to follow. The last thing you want is to frustrate a visitor to your website by making it hard for them to find what they are looking for.

In that regard, there’s nothing as frustrating as a slow-loading website. Waiting for a website to load can put visitors off faster than you can say dial-up, costing your company before the customer has even seen what you have to offer.

And that’s if they’ve managed to find your website in the first place. Search engines like Google will penalize slow-loading websites by putting them way down on the search engine results page (SERP), meaning there’s a low likelihood anyone will be able to find your site.

For a compelling position on the SERP, your site must have good SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Optimizing your site for search engines means ticking all the boxes that make a site easy to find and your visitors more likely to spend time on your site, so it’s worthwhile exploring how to increase your site’s SEO.

Another important SEO tip is to make sure your site is mobile-friendly, as a large number of users navigate the web on their phones and expect a seamless user experience. (Take a look at this article on how a writing agency can help to improve your website.) Aspects like decreasing loading time, simple navigation, appealing design, and mobile friendliness can all affect your SEO.

2. Lack of Clear Value Proposition

Don’t take it for granted that it’s clear to customers why they should choose you. It’s easy to overlook the importance of a clear value proposition, especially because, being intimately familiar with your product or company, you inherently understand its advantages over competitors. However, your customers don’t necessarily have this knowledge, which is why it’s so important to communicate it to them.

What makes your offering unique? What is it about your company or product that sets it apart from your competitors? Make it explicit why your offering is valuable. Don’t lie, but don’t be humble either. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and communicate in a way that is simple, straightforward, and easy to understand.

3. Poor Customer Service

Customer service is an important part of most if not all businesses. It can be the difference between a conversion made or lost. If you have a great marketing campaign but your customer service is not up to scratch, you might see the result in a low conversion rate.

Modern customers expect brands to be available to answer questions and provide clarification. Social media and website chat features make this possible in real-time.

However, when potential customers encounter unhelpful, slow, or rude service, their perception of a brand can be tarnished, leading to a loss of trust and a reluctance to engage further.

A negative brand experience, at best, results in a lack of conversion. At worst, it can snowball into bad online reviews and public posts, further amplifying the adverse impact on a brand’s reputation.

The best course of action is to have an effective customer service team that is motivated to help make conversions and grow goodwill towards the brand. If you’ve had a negative review, learn from it and take it as an opportunity to grow. (We go further into this in number 7.)

4. Complicated Conversion Funnel

If the success of your campaign depends on conversions, make it as simple as possible for your audience to go down the funnel. It might seem superfluous, but a long, confusing, or cumbersome conversion funnel can easily be the reason you’re not seeing conversions.

The process should be lean, with few if any alternate options that can sidetrack or overwhelm your customers. Focusing your funnel could be as easy as strengthening your call-to-action or positioning it visually at the most prominent position possible.

By simplifying the process, customers know which steps to take to get your offering and thereby convert. 

5. Hidden Costs

There’s nothing worse than being surprised by a hidden cost right at the end of a conversion. No one likes nasty surprises, and although you might think you’re making your offer seem more attractive by not showing all the costs upfront, the result is a customer who feels unable to trust the brand and disinclined to interact with it further.

Be upfront about costs. Tell your customers exactly what they’re in for. Be clear and honest, and they will be more likely to trust what you tell them and trust your offering.

6. Lack of Trust Signals

Including trust signals such as customer reviews, testimonials, security badges, and money-back policies on your website make it easy for your customer to take the final step to accepting your offer and converting.

When it comes to customer reviews and testimonials, don’t be afraid to ask existing customers or clients to provide you with them. Most people don’t mind taking a few seconds to tell you about their experience, and even just a few short words can go a long way to helping new customers take the final step.

In addition, remember that where payments are made on your website, you can expect your customer to have some hesitation.

After all, web-based payment systems aren’t always secure or trustworthy, and your customer might be hesitant to provide sensitive information over the net.

Assuage your customer’s fears and let them know that your system is secure.

Lastly, a money-back policy will always help convince customers that there is nothing to lose when they take the final plunge.

7. Inconsistent Branding

For many people, branding simply means the company logo, but it goes much further than that. Simply put, branding translates to what your customers can expect from you, known as the brand promise.

As William Arruda writes in this article for Forbes: “Brands are built through the consistent delivery of the brand promise through all stakeholder touch points. […] Branding is the key to differentiating yourself from the competition, but if you don’t build your brand promise around reality or consistently live up to it, your branding efforts are pointless.”

Consistent branding means that throughout the sales funnel, your customer gets the same experience of your company.

On the superficial level, however, consistent branding can be as simple as using the same typeface throughout your funnel. This lends your brand a trustworthiness that is easy to underestimate.

Another element that relates to branding is the tone of voice your company uses. Whether it is on social media or the company website, make sure to be consistent in the style of your communication. Using a different tone of voice across your platforms can confuse customers and leave them with an unwelcome impression of the brand.

8. Not Engaging on Social Media

In this day and age, not having a social media presence is akin to not having a telephone number. Being on social channels is an easy way to connect with your audience and build a relationship. It helps establish your brand and your offering.

A social media page lets you connect with your audience in an environment where they are likely to engage. It helps entrench the recognizability of your brand, establishing it as a trustworthy entity that is on the same level with its audience.

Moreover, having a social media presence means being able to tap into brand sentiment in real-time. It means listening in on potential negative conversations around your brand, which allows the opportunity to make amends and grow.

By not having a social media presence, brands miss out on these benefits, and audiences are more likely to be mistrustful.

9. Ignoring Feedback

As mentioned in the previous section, it is extremely important to take criticism as an opportunity to grow and improve. If you find yourself at the receiving end of negative feedback, the worst thing to do is to ignore it.

Audiences have historically not taken lightly to companies posing a deaf ear to criticism, especially online. The best thing to do is to see it as an opportunity to improve.

After all, many companies pay large sums to be able to understand what their audience thinks— getting that insight for free, even if it’s negative, is always a win.

10. Poor Targeting

Sometimes, the simplest reason why a stellar campaign isn’t reaching its conversion goals, when everything else is up to standard, is that it is reaching the wrong ears.

In other words, the issue isn’t necessarily that your campaign needs tweaking but that the audience you’re showing it to does. It is critical that you identify the right audience.

Alternatively, the problem might be that you don’t know your current audience well enough. Tom Davenport, an independent senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics, writes in this article for the Wall Street Journal that “no amount of analytics will make customers want something that doesn’t suit their needs.” Figure out your customer’s problem that your offering can help solve.

You need to have an in-depth understanding of your customer and the nature of their problem. Take a deep dive into your analytics and try to learn as much as you can about your audience. Remember: Your marketing campaign should be about your customers, not you.

Final Thoughts

It can be overwhelming to create a marketing campaign that hits all the different goals you have for it. Sometimes, it can be easier to outsource this aspect of business to companies that have years of experience creating compelling campaigns.

Hiring a professional writing company can be the difference between a campaign that succeeds and one that flounders.

Whether or not you choose to outsource or do it yourself, make sure that all your basics are covered before you send off your campaign. Often, getting the little things right can make a world of difference.