In the face of rising advertising costs—especially when it comes to well-planned digital marketing campaigns—it’s critical that home improvement companies get the best return on their investment. A key measurement of that ROI are conversion rates from leads to sales.
Once a homeowner clicks on your ad, the goal is to convert them on the landing page. This happens when they take the desired action. An example would be a homeowner filling out a form and submitting their contact info to you. That’s the point when they “convert” into a lead. The percentage of customers that perform the action is called the conversion rate.
In this article, I highlight five surefire ways to boost your conversion rates:
- Know your audience. Understand that homeowners use search engines to find answers to their questions. It’s your job to provide those answers. Write your digital ads with the homeowner’s questions in mind. For example, a homeowner might search “hardwood floor estimates.” Your ad should repeat these exact words along with other relevant information about how to get an estimate. Use the ad to tell them you have what they are looking for.
- Focus on the homeowner’s experience. First and foremost, consider where the homeowners are in their buying journey. When it comes to collecting homeowners’ information on your site, put yourself in their shoes. They might not want to fill out a form if it asks too many questions. Yes, your sales team wants to know as much as they can. However, requiring that customers share too much too fast can be stressful. At the very least, make sure everything is easy to understand on your site. Note: Use a different design for mobile and desktop users. Research shows more than 60% of homeowners search for contractors using their phones.
- Optimize your landing page. If a homeowner clicks on your ad, you now have their attention. They expect the landing page to give them what your ad promised. Therefore, your landing page needs to be consistent with your ads. If a visitor clicked your ad about hardwood floor refinishing, the landing page should provide refinishing-specific information. If the answer isn’t clearly displayed, they won’t stay on your site. You will fail to capture them as a lead, and your advertising spend will be wasted. When your ads and landing pages have the same language, search engines reward you with a higher “quality score,” improving your page placement and raising your credibility with the homeowner.
- Make more landing pages. Create specific landing pages for each ad. Imagine you have two different ads that target two different homeowners. One says, “vinyl flooring install sale.” The other says “epoxy floor coating quote.” You do not want to bring both homeowners to the same generic landing page because each homeowner is interested in different things. Instead, make two different landing pages: one with highly relevant information about how to get a quote for an epoxy floor coating; the other with relevant offers about vinyl flooring installation.
- Test often. Do A/B tests, where you show two or more variants of your landing page to random users. Think of all possible alternatives for design, wording and layout and test to see which results in more conversions. Next, review the analytics to see which version performed better. This helps you find which ones have the best click-through-rate. Also, measure how quickly homeowners are leaving your site, often called the “bounce rate.” By doing this, you can base your marketing decisions on data rather than intuition.
Gregg Hicks is new business leader for Modernize Home Services, a company that connects homeowners with professionals who provide home improvement projects and services. He has 20 years of experience encompassing web analytics, SEO, social, SEM and affiliate marketing.
