9 Tips to Increase Lead and Sales Conversion Rates

Are Your Strategies Bringing More Traffic to Your Pages? That’s Great!

But despite this, have you noticed your conversion rate is low?

It’s a challenge to turn visitors into leads, let alone into customers. It takes a big effort in all conversion opportunities to consistently achieve better results.

With that in mind, we’ve gathered 9 essential tips you can apply right now to increase your sales and lead conversion rate.

Shall we get started? But first, let’s understand what a good conversion rate is.

Check it out 👇

What Is a Good Conversion Rate?

To know whether your conversion rate is good or not, you need to analyze the numbers for your segment.

For example, if the conversion rate from visitors to leads in the B2B segment is 5% (hypothetical number), but yours is 2%, it’s time to invest in new strategies.

A good resource for this analysis is the Webshoppers Magazine from NielsenIQ, which provides semiannual analyses of sales conversion across various e-commerce sectors.

And for lead conversion, we’ve already published a detailed study showing the breakdown by several segments.

When you analyze the conversion rate, you can measure the performance of your marketing actions.

In general, a good conversion rate is one that is always growing.

It’s also worth remembering that we should always differentiate between lead conversion rates and sales conversion rates, as the numbers are not the same.

Let’s understand more below:

What Is the Ideal Sales Conversion Rate?

As I mentioned earlier, not all conversion rates are the same.

Above, we talked about the process of converting a visitor into a lead; now we are addressing sales conversion.

To help us discover the ideal sales conversion rate, let’s look at some data from the U.S. company Compass.

In its survey, the company found that the average e-commerce sales conversion rate is 1.33%, while the best performers are around 3.6%.

Now, focusing on the Brazilian market, the numbers change a bit.

According to research by Experian Hitwise the average sales conversion rate is 1.65%.

Yes, these are low numbers, and therefore challenging. Let’s now understand the main reasons your conversion might be low.

Why Is Your Conversion Low?

There are some factors that can contribute to low sales conversion on your website.

We’ve selected the main ones, along with solutions to increase the conversion rate of your pages.

You’re Not Taking the Customer Journey into Account

The marketing and sales funnel is a strategic tool that guides your efforts all the way to closing a sale or contract.

If you don’t consider the stage the visitor is at in this funnel, it will be much harder to get the verbal and visual communication right — the key to capturing the user’s attention — and your chances of conversion will be lower.

If this is one of the reasons behind your low conversion rates, seek to better understand your audience’s needs and interests.

Remember that the sales funnel is a framework, but your customer can enter it at any stage. They may arrive at the top, identifying their needs, or they may already be looking for a quote.

Here’s a crucial tip to boost conversions: replace static forms with more interactive tools, such as marketing and sales chatbots.

Analyze the content, offer, and presentation of these elements on your website, always keeping the sales funnel in mind!

🔎 You might also be interested in: Is Your Marketing Funnel “Clogged”? Discover the Most Common Problems

The Website Is Not Optimized for Mobile

As identified in the Lead Generation Panorama developed by Leadster, mobile already represents the majority of visits to Brazilian websites, with 64.45% of traffic — compared to 35.55% from desktop.

However, when we analyze the conversion rates for this type of device, we find they are, on average, lower than desktop conversion rates.

This happens because many companies still don’t optimize their websites for mobile, losing opportunities by not offering the best experience for users arriving via mobile devices.

The Value Proposition Is Not Highlighted

A good value proposition should be a clear statement that offers relevance, benefit, and differentiation.

This ensures your brand has a strong market position and creates engagement with the audiences you want to reach.

It’s based on the perceived value proposition that the consumer decides whether or not to take the next step — the proposed conversion.

If the value proposition is not clear on your website or conversion pages, the benefits and differentiators of the product or service are lost, along with the visitor’s interest and conversion.

The CTA Doesn’t Convince the User to Take Action

Testing and improving CTAs is another way to increase your website’s conversion rate.

A Call to Action is an invitation to take action. If your goal is for your reader or visitor to take a specific action after engaging with your company’s material, you need to make that clear to them, right?

Using a CTA makes this action a priority by highlighting it, and it also encourages the visitor to keep engaging with your brand — whether by clicking a link to different content, providing an email address, or trying a free version of your product.

There are many options to keep the visitor’s attention on your pages or guide them to the next stage of the conversion funnel.

A good CTA should take into account the persona, the stage of the sales funnel, the level of knowledge about the conversion, and have a clear goal.

The Copy Is Not Persuasive

Copywriting is a writing technique focused on persuasion and conversion.

By applying persuasive text, the target audience is encouraged to make a decision — in this case, to convert as desired.

More than just creating persuasive text, the copy needs to be clear, objective, creative, and able to communicate with the persona at the stage they’re in on the buying journey.

There Are Too Many Barriers to Conversion

Every element on a page is part of the structure that either drives or hinders conversion.

If these elements hinder navigation and the visitor’s experience more than they help, they become barriers to the desired goal.

For example, a form with too many questions can be a barrier that prevents conversion.

According to HubSpot, forms with more than three questions tend to have lower conversion rates.

How to Optimize Your Website’s Conversion

If you’re looking to increase your website’s conversion rate, you should invest in improvements in areas such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

It’s also necessary to adapt content to personas and sales funnel stages, as well as review page design to improve user experience, copywriting, and site structure — removing barriers and encouraging conversions.

Below, you’ll find 9 practical tips to boost your conversion rates.

Practical Tips to Increase Sales and Lead Conversion Rates

1. Organize Your Data

Optimization can only be done if you have data to guide decision-making.

You might know your website or landing page conversion rates — and maybe you’re here because they’re unsatisfactory — but are you really analyzing the full picture?

Some key data points to watch:

Where do your website visitors come from? (Google Ads, organic search, Facebook Ads, etc.)
Which of these channels generate more or fewer conversions?
Which specific paid media campaigns generate the most traffic and conversions?
Which of your pages have the best and worst conversion rates?
What are the differences between them?
At which stages of the sales funnel do the biggest conversion gaps occur?
How many of your leads have been impacted by a nurturing strategy?

You can access this data through platforms that already offer a simplified dashboard or by tracking campaign performance with cookies, UTM codes, and pixels.

2. Improve Website Speed

The technical side matters too. Few users are patient enough to convert on a slow website.

In fact, the first five seconds of page loading have the greatest impact on conversion rates.

After that, each extra second causes conversions to drop by an average of 4.42% (Source: Portent, 2019).

Loading speed is also one of the main factors for ranking well on Google.

You can check your site speed — and get tips for improvement — using Google PageSpeed Insights.

Basic changes, like compressing site images, can be done easily, but you might need a developer for more advanced improvements.

🔎 Read more: 5 Reasons to Improve Your Website Speed Right Now

3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Beyond speed, adaptability for different screens is crucial for conversion rates.

Websites and landing pages that aren’t responsive lose users who access them via mobile devices — and they now represent the majority of visits.

In the U.S. alone, 79% of smartphone users have made at least one online purchase via their device in the past six months.

4. Run (Lots of!) Tests

To optimize your conversion rates, you should also run tests — not only on your pages but also on the materials leading to them, like ads, emails, and referrals.

A/B testing should be explored to present two versions of the same material with small changes in text or visuals.

Both versions are shown to the audience during a test period, and the one with the best performance becomes the permanent one.

This strategy helps you understand what resonates best with your audience, allowing you to invest in the option that delivers more satisfying results.

5. Personalize Your CTAs

A Call-to-Action (CTA) is a prompt for the user to take a specific action.

It’s present on different types of pages and materials, guiding visitors toward the action your company wants them to take.

Personalizing the CTA based on the user’s profile and their stage in the buyer’s journey increases conversion rates because attention is captured in a more tailored way, and the motivation to act is also customized.

Example from a legal consulting website:

According to HubSpot, the world’s leading marketing automation platform, personalized CTAs perform up to 202% better than generic ones.

6. Capture Visitor Attention Faster

You have just 3 seconds to grab your visitor’s attention. How are you using that short time?

Your conversion page — whether it’s a landing page or your main site — must align with visitor expectations and contain textual and visual elements that match their stage in the journey.

Besides optimizing your website speed, make sure your value proposition (the benefit your product or service delivers) is immediately visible when someone lands on the page.

Example:

A highlighted statement such as “Increase Customer Satisfaction” could be the reason the visitor came, while the actual service offered (e.g., “Contact Center”) appears secondarily — keeping the visitor engaged and aligned with their expectations.

7. Add Social Proof to Conversion Pages

Social proof is a persuasion tool that helps convince a potential customer to make a purchase or hire your services.

When a testimonial or endorsement comes from someone who already knows your brand and has benefited from your solution, credibility increases, and decision-making is boosted.

According to Statista, 30% of consumers agree that social proof has a significant impact on their trust perception of a product or brand when making a purchase decision.

8. Reduce the Information Requested in Forms

People will only fill out forms and wait for a response if they are convinced that the benefit (a video, e-book, demo, etc.) is truly worth it.

If you’ve used static forms for lead conversion, you know it can be hard to reach good conversion rates when asking for specific visitor information.

From a visitor’s perspective, long forms are a turn-off.

Tip: After defining your qualification criteria, remove any fields that aren’t essential at first — especially for top-of-funnel forms.

Ask yourself: “Would I give my CPF and phone number just for a simple e-book and be open to commercial contact after converting?”

If the answer is “no,” it’s time to simplify the form.

9. Replace Forms with a Chatbot

Virtual assistants or chatbots are the best alternative to static forms, offering better conversion rates and a more interactive, dynamic experience for the user.

They approach each visitor personally, based on their browsing context, which increases engagement.

According to research by Twillio, 90% of consumers want to communicate with companies via messaging.

Chatbots can naturally gather more information about a lead, speeding up qualification and increasing conversions.

What CRO Is and How to Use It on Your Website

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is the set of strategies used to optimize a website’s conversion rate.

Improving your conversion rates can bring several positive results, such as:

Increasing the number of qualified leads;
Boosting revenue;
Reducing lead acquisition costs;
Gaining more value from existing clients and leads;
Closing more sales;
And more.

If you want to improve your brand’s performance, you should pay attention to CRO, which focuses on enhancing and adjusting your website’s existing structure to boost conversion rates and improve results.

Where to Implement CRO?

If you want more conversions and can use CRO to optimize your existing pages, which ones should you prioritize?

You have three options:

Pages that are already performing well but could improve;
Pages that don’t deliver strong results but are easy to optimize;
Pages that are harder to optimize but will certainly bring results after adjustments.

To decide, use the P.I.E framework.

Also, always apply CRO to critical conversion pages, such as:

Website homepage;
Category pages;
Product pages;
Pricing or plans page;
Blog;
Landing pages.

Good CRO Strategies

Some CRO best practices you should start applying immediately:

Create custom CTAs for all blog posts;
Develop nurture flows fueled by your content;
Test your lead capture pages;
Help leads become qualified leads through free trials and content downloads;
Create automated workflows to support your team;
Add messages on high-conversion pages;
Optimize high-performing blog posts;
Use retargeting to re-engage site visitors.

How to Use the R.E.A.D.Y Framework to Increase Your Conversion Rate

The R.E.A.D.Y framework lists the five main dimensions that impact a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) strategy:

(R) Relevant – Relevance
(E) Engaging – Engagement
(A) Authoritative – Authority
(D) Directional – Direction
(Y) Yield Optimal – Optimal Performance

Although it’s not the only structure available for executing a CRO strategy, the R.E.A.D.Y framework offers an interesting perspective on aspects that impact websites and landing pages, whether in the B2B or B2C market.

For each of the five dimensions, the framework breaks down into five additional factors that help structure optimization work.

Relevance

A relevant website is one that meets the visitor’s expectations. To optimize for relevance, your site should:

Fulfill the promises made to the visitor at the moment of the click or conversion;
Maintain context, following a consistent thought process from the ad to the landing page;
Be visually coherent, with ads and page layouts that align;
Create identification and empathy with the audience by speaking their language;
Be timely and always up to date.

Engagement

This CRO dimension refers to how well your message resonates with your target audience. To achieve it, you should:

Offer a value proposition aligned with visitor expectations;
Generate emotional appeal through storytelling, design, color theory, etc.;
Present logical and rational arguments to persuade the visitor;
Use affective design, combining aesthetics and functionality;
Be authentic, creative, and differentiated.

Authority

Authority is one of the most important psychological triggers when it comes to online conversions. The best websites should:

Offer guarantees and credibility signals;
Be precise and convincing through details, images, demonstrations, etc.;
Adopt and comply with privacy policies and terms of use;
Add customer testimonials as social proof;
Maintain consistent branding.

Direction

Conversion is essentially a direction — a path we want the visitor to take. To optimize this aspect, you should:

Have a clear and visible CTA on the page;
Facilitate decision-making by providing the right amount of information;
Reduce distractions that can pull the visitor away from the conversion goal;
Offer incentives, such as strong storytelling or mental triggers, to guide navigation;
Create a natural progression on the page, encouraging the visitor to complete micro-conversions.

Performance

Lastly — but no less important — comes the most technical dimension of conversion optimization. To improve your results, make sure to:

Formulate relevant hypotheses to test conversion elements;
Perform A/B testing frequently and maintain a culture of experimentation;
Closely monitor metrics and results;
Work on an SEO strategy, including keywords, link building, etc.;
Regularly review the framework for new optimization opportunities.

How to Use SEO to Increase Your Conversions

With SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, you will be optimizing the content of websites, blogs, and pages.

But, unlike CRO, you will take into account factors relevant to search engines like Google.

Through this strategy, you will compete for the best ranking in search results, thereby driving more organic traffic to the site.

Let’s explore which SEO techniques you can apply to increase your conversion rate:

Keyword Research for Product and Category Pages

Yes — even the words you use in your article matter 🤓.

You will need to perform thorough keyword research to discover what and how users are searching for terms related to your industry and niche.

This way, you can create content for your site, product descriptions, category pages, and other areas according to what people are actually searching for on search engines.

To help in this process, invest in SEO tools like SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, and Ubersuggest.

We discuss this further in our complete article on keyword research.

Content Marketing with a Long-Tail Focus

Content marketing is responsible for planning and creating content for your website — usually for blogs and product pages.

When used alongside SEO, it can increase your conversions. For this, you’ll need to invest in long-tail keywords — those that are longer and, therefore, more specific.

Example: Many people search for the terms mattress, mattress store, single mattress, double mattress — and you can be sure there are hundreds of results for these searches, making it hard to stand out.

That’s where long-tail keywords come in.

You should focus on keywords that aren’t as competitive but will appear in the user’s navigation at some point. Instead of creating content about “mattress,” try:

Best-priced mattresses;
Mattress for back pain;
Best mattresses on the market;
Mattress store in São Paulo.

Differences Between On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO

Working on SEO means paying equal attention to what happens on your page and outside of it.

To make it easier to understand, here’s the difference between on-page SEO and off-page SEO:

On-Page SEO – This includes all practices carried out within the company’s website or blog. These are changes made exclusively on these channels and involve how search engine algorithms read and interpret the page structure. Examples: titles, subtitles, meta descriptions, and URLs.
Off-Page SEO – This includes practices carried out externally — outside of the website. These actions mainly aim to expand the recognition and authority of your site’s address. Examples: partnerships, content production, comments, backlinks, and social media activity.

Frequently Asked Questions About Conversion Rate

What is Conversion Rate?

The conversion rate is the percentage between the number of visitors to your conversion pages and the number of people who actually complete the conversion.

By conversion, we mean the measurable action you expect from your visitor.

It could be filling out a form, starting a conversation in your online chat, signing up to receive a discount coupon, completing a purchase, starting a free trial, upgrading a plan, among other actions.

The conversion rate can also be calculated between other stages of the funnel — for example, the conversion rate between qualified leads and sales, between visitors and SQLs, etc.

How to Calculate Your Website’s Conversion Rate?

To calculate the conversion rates of your pages, you need to have some numbers on hand, such as: total visitors/leads/opportunities/sales.

The conversion rate will always be the relationship between two stages of the user’s journey in the sales funnel.

Thus, the conversion rate can be calculated as follows:

For example, let’s say you want to know the conversion rate of a Landing Page in the last month.

In this case, the calculation would be:

Why Optimize Website Conversion?

The conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for anyone investing in digital marketing.

That’s because it shows the success of campaigns and whether the invested amounts are delivering the desired results.

Think about your campaigns: they have a goal, which is to get the user to take an action — whether that’s signing up, downloading a resource, or purchasing a product.

So, the conversion rate is the metric that shows whether that action was completed — in other words, it’s directly related to the success achieved by the campaign, material, or page.

🔎 Read also: How to Generate Leads with Chatbots – 10 Ideas to Increase Conversion

What Is the Relationship Between Conversion Rate and ROI?

ROI stands for “Return on Investment.”

ROI is mainly monitored when talking about marketing investments related to the costs and results of campaigns, actions, and new marketing strategies implemented.

ROI calculates how much money the company earns or loses with its investments.

And the conversion rate measures the success of campaigns, actions, and materials.

Therefore, the two are related, since the better the conversion rate, generally, the better the ROI as well.

Discover How Leadster Can Triple Your Website’s Conversion

With personalized service — even for simple questions and interactions — a lead is more likely to convert after resolving their doubts and establishing a dialogue with the brand.

Conversational Marketing is one of the most dynamic and modern ways to generate qualified leads for your company. Here at Leadster, we have developed our own methodology, combining five years of learning in building chatbots with the best practices in online conversion optimization.

This methodology allows us to confidently say that you will triple your lead generation on your website.

Our tool optimizes website conversion rates by enabling personalization, implementation of tests, quick visitor attention capture, and replacing static forms.

Want to bring this type of strategy to your brand?

Learn more about our tool by exploring a personalized demonstration tailored to your needs right now!