What is your conversion goal? If it’s only when a visitor becomes a paying customer, then you’re doing it wrong.
While that moment should be the primary goal of your funnel, the fact is, there’re are lots of moments leading to that.
Get those small moments wrong, and you won’t have many people buying your product. But when you take care of those little moments, you’ll be able to convert lots of prospects.
These small moments that are often ignored by digital marketers are called micro conversions.
What is a Micro Conversion?
A micro conversion is an action that brings prospects closer to your main conversion goal (or macro conversion).
If your main conversion goal is to sell your product or service, a micro conversion would be any action leading up to that. That could be when a prospect signs up for your email list, shared your blog post on social media, or even commented on your blog post.
For example, Amazon is the biggest ecommerce store in the world. Searching for “DSLR cameras” is a micro conversion. It’s a small step towards Amazon’s primary conversion goal.
Searching for products I’m interested in buying is a good sign. It’s better than doing nothing on the site. My searches take me closer to buying.
Micro conversions are important. They tell you that, at least, you’re getting some things right.
Daniel Ndukwu, CoFounder of UsefulPDF explains “many brands try to go for the big win immediately but that’s not how people usually buy. They take it step-by-step. They click on your links, sign up for your mailing list, read a resource, and then finally buy. Each one of those steps is a micro conversion so when you optimize for them as well, you increase your chance of getting a macro conversion.”
What about macro conversion?
It’s your primary conversion goal. That could be when a prospect becomes a customer. For Geekdom, a coworking space in San Antonio, the primary goal is to get a prospect to book a tour of their facility.
Turning a prospect into a customer sounds great. However, you should focus on micro conversions first because that’s how you can get to a macro conversion.
After reading this article, you’ll become an expert in getting lots of micro conversions. And you’ll be able to turn all those micro conversions into macro conversions.
Why You Need Micro Conversions and How to Get Them
The reason why many businesses don’t get enough sales online to justify their investments is that they neglect micro conversions. If you can improve your micro conversions by a lot of percentages, you’ll increase sales.
Digital marketing is all about reaching, entertaining, educating, and engaging with real people who need your products and services. Get that right, and you’ll win lots of customers.
People rarely buy the first time they learn about a brand or visit its website. It takes time and effort to convert prospects. There are lots of small activities before someone decides to buy.
For example, Airbnb shares pictures of beautiful places daily on Instagram.
If you follow Airbnb on Instagram and travel a lot, you’re closer to using their service than people who don’t follow the brand on the image-sharing site.
That means, viewing Airbnb’s Instagram feed is a micro conversion for them.
Instagram likes and comments are micro conversions. If their Instagram updates are receiving a lot of likes and comments, and views, it’s a sign that they are doing Instagram marketing right.
So, how can you increase your micro conversions?
Here are the key things you should do:
- Understand your customers’ behaviors
- Recognize vital conversion areas
- Increase and nurture your leads
- Evaluate the performance of each marketing channel
- Build the right conversion funnels
Let’s delve deeper into each one.
1. Understand your customers’ behaviors
Selling online is a relationship business. You need to know your customers’ behaviors to build strong relationships with them.
Learn customers’ behaviors on your website and social channels.
If customers aren’t Retweeting or liking a Twitter update you shared a few hours ago, it could be that the topic doesn’t interest them. You may want to stop writing about the topic.
It’s true that a topic won’t interest everyone who follows your business on social media. But if many of them are interested, it’s a sign that it’s a winning topic.
The goal is to get the majority of your customers’ excited. So, micro conversions like social media shares and likes are another way you can learn what customers admire.
I used Airbnb Instagram account as an example earlier. Airbnb may realize that their Instagram followers like images of places that have water and mountains. If their followers are liking and commenting on those kinds of places, it means it’s what they want to see.
That’s a micro conversion that tells Airbnb about their users’ behaviors. So, how do they use this information?
They may put an image of a place with mountains on their home page. Since they know their followers love this kind of image, it can help them convert more site’s visitors into users. And that’s exactly what they did on their site.
(Note: The above screenshot of Airbnb.com was taken at the time of writing).
For me, social media is the best place to learn customers’ behaviors quickly. Most social platforms allow you to engage with your audience and vice versa.
Email, your website and chatbot, and live chat are other channels that are great too. But social media is my favorite.
Micro conversions occur on all these channels.
In email marketing, micro conversions are opens, and link clicks. If an email campaign gets a lot of opens and link clicks, it’s a sign that your subscribers like the message. You may use this information to improve your conversions.
You can use heatmap tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg on your site to see what visitors are clicking.
And you’ll learn more from analyzing customers’ chats on chatbots and live chat software.
You can learn from every small action on any marketing channel.
2. Recognize vital conversion areas
Depending on how big your business is and how many products and services you sell, your micro conversions could be over 100. That would be too much.
You shouldn’t focus on every micro conversion, of course. That would be impossible. And to be honest, it wouldn’t make business sense.
Let’s use a big e-commerce site like Amazon as an example again. They probably have hundreds to a thousand micro conversions they can track. But they don’t focus on every micro conversion. Instead, they invest their resources into micro conversions that are vital to their business.
For e-commerce stores, these few could be their vital micro conversions:
- New customer reviews
- Products searches
- Easy site’s navigation
- Easy checkout process
- Customers clicking on related products
- Customers adding new products to carts from the related product section
For an e-commerce store like Nike, the essential micro conversion is a popup that collects visitors’ details on the home page.
Nike asks for the visitor’s email address, date of birth, and gender. For Nike, if a visitor completes this form, it’s a micro conversion win that leads to the primary conversion.
The marketing team knows that if they can get lots of visitors to complete this popup form, they can increase Nike’s overall sales.
Popups are a powerful tool for micro conversions. Increasing your sign-ups numbers through popups should be a vital goal for your business. You can use OmniKick to create high converting popups.
So, recognize the most critical micro conversions that can boost sales and focus on them.
3. Increase and nurture your leads
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with potential buyers across every stage of your sales funnel.
It’s the essential part of a digital marketing campaign. When you nurture your leads, you automatically increase your micro conversions.
How do you increase and nurture your leads?
Invest heavily in content.
I mean invest in quality content for your blog, social channels, email – every channel your business has a presence.
If lead nurturing is the door to getting more micro conversions, content marketing is the key to that door.
What do you see on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, and search engines?
It’s content, of course. Content is everything. Without content, it’s impossible to increase and nurture your leads.
Let me give you an example.
David Heinemeier Hansson (commonly known as DHH) is the creator of Ruby on Rails, and founder and CTO of Basecamp. DHH shares amazing content on Twitter and Signal v. Noise, the main blog of Basecamp.
He invests heavily in content on these channels. While he isn’t on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, he ensures that the content he shares are high-quality enough to spread to those social channels.
Right now, DHH has over 300k followers on Twitter, and he engages a lot with his followers on the platform.
Following DHH on Twitter convinced me to become a Basecamp customer.
Twitter isn’t the only place to share content. Don’t forget email. Email remains one of the best channels to nurture leads.
The busiest people in the world use emails. According to a study by McKinsey, the average worker spends 28% of their workweek on email. That’s more than 11 hours per week!
Email is nearly 50 years old, and it remains an effective channel for developing strong relationships with prospects.
The more you invest in email, the more you get out of it.
Ensure that each content you publish on any channel is high quality. Do that, and you’ll continue to keep people interested in your products and services.
4. Evaluate the performance of each marketing channel
There are different marketing channels today. Each one has its unique purposes and expectations.
Facebook is where people connect with their friends and family.
Twitter is where people get trending topics in their fields and the world. It’s where people follow and connect with thought leaders in their industries.
Instagram is completely different from those two. It’s a place where people share photos and videos from their lives.
When you track micro conversions, you’ll realize that some channels aren’t effective for your target audience.
Spend more time on channels that give you the most micro conversions and leads.
Facebook may be the biggest social media platform in the world, but if your audience isn’t engaging with your content there, you shouldn’t maintain a presence on Facebook.
Your time could be better spent on LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Instagram.
That’s why you need to track micro conversions. They tell you when to get off a social media platform.
For example, String Nguyen is a video marketing consultant with over 30,000 followers on LinkedIn. A lot of people engage with her posts on LinkedIn.
Nguyen also maintains a presence on Twitter, but she barely receives any engagement there.
When you compare the micro conversions she receives on LinkedIn with Twitter, it’s clear that the latter isn’t worth it. LinkedIn is more important for her business than Twitter.
If your audience is big on Instagram and you rarely post there, you’re losing valuable customers. It’s time to focus your effort on platforms you get likes, shares, and comments.
For example, CIRCA Jewels is a place where you can sell jewelry for the right price without issues. The company maintains presence on top platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. All these platforms are great places to create awareness, but CIRCA Jewels get more engagement on Instagram than other social platforms.
5. Build the right conversion funnels
Everything you’ve read so far is about micro conversions.
Yes, micro conversions are important. Getting them consistently is a sign that you have the right marketing strategy.
Out of all the five actions I outlined, this final action is the most important. So, continue reading carefully.
As I noted earlier, micro conversions are those little actions that lead to macro conversions (sales). However, not all micro conversions lead to macro conversions.
After doing number one to four, you should now focus on those little small steps that only lead to macro conversions.
List out 5 – 7 micro conversions (or steps) that lead to a sale.
For some SaaS businesses, their most critical micro conversions could appear in this order:
- A prospect visits your website
- The prospect reads a blog post
- The prospect signs up for your email list
- The prospect reads 3 – 4 emails from you
- The prospect signs up for a free trial of your service
- The prospect continues to use your service
- The free trial period ends, and the prospect becomes a customer
Those micro conversions are what make up their conversion funnels.
I recommend Google Analytics for tracking how prospects move along in a conversion funnel like this.
Also, pay attention to your email marketing metrics. Your email marketing software should tell you how many subscribers open your email message.
The more people are reading your emails, the better it is for your conversion funnel.
Conclusion
And that’s it!
Instead of worrying about making sales, you should focus on improving your micro conversions across the board. Track everything and see which metrics are improving.
For me, the crucial micro conversion is when a visitor gives me their email address. When you have the email address of a visitor, you can reach them any time in their inbox.
OmniKick is a powerful tool for creating popups that collect emails. Make sure you sign up today. You have 14 days to try out the tool for free.
Thanks for reading. And please share this article with your friends on social media.
