Microconversions – What Are They, and Why Do You Need Them?
Microconversions are small tasks you get your prospect to commit to before a final sale. They usually get bigger the closer you get to the final conversion, or other end result.
Microconversions do the important job of priming your prospects, getting them used to the idea of handing over money or information in small doses so it feels more comfortable when they make a bigger commitment.
Here’s an example progression through microconversions to the big sale:
Read more > Click here > Enter your email > Download the PDF > Sign up for a free trial > Buy the course
What are microconversions?
In more detail, a microconversion is an task, or a set of task, which provides a strong indication that a user is progressing towards a more valuable task on your website. They’re little “checkmarks” or milestones your prospect hits that tell you they’re more likely to give you a sale.
For a membership site, a new user registration would count as a microconversion. Newsletter sign ups, clicking to read more, lead magnet downloads and entering free competitions are all microconversions, as well as:
- Adding products to a cart
- Clicking on an ad
- Visiting a product page
- Signing up for a demo
- Joining a webinar
Why are microconversions important?
Because no one forks over $1,382 after reading one cold pitch. No one.
Show me a person who did that, I’ll wait.
In the vast (vast) majority of cases, you’ll need to do a little pre-selling. You need to qualify your prospects, and whittle your audience down a sales funnel so that only the people most likely to buy end up at the bottom. Microconversions help you do it.
Microconversions typically fall into one of two categories: process milestones or secondary actions:
Process milestones are hit on a linear path towards a bigger conversion, such as adding a product to the shopping cart or attending a webinar which will pitch a direct sale.
Secondary actions do not work directly towards the bigger conversion, but are still indicators of commitments being offered. They’re indicators of potential sales in the future, such as mentioning your brand on social media, leaving a comment or signing up for a newsletter.
Both of these types of microconversions are significant to your bottom line because they build your audience, as well as your paying customers.
Microconversions and identifying with your product
There’s another reason microconversions are so important: they help people visualise themselves as having already bought your product.
When you ask for microconversions, you’re essentially selling tiny pieces of your offer. It doesn’t matter if the bigger commitment is still too expensive or far-off for them: once they make a microconversion, they’ve quite literally “bought in” to the benefits your product promises.
Designer clothing brands such as Gucci are a great example.
Only the biggest players can afford head-to-toe Gucci clothing, or the latest pieces. But Gucci also offers smaller, more affordable products such as makeup and accessories as “gateway” products: the purpose is not only to make a few extra bucks off the less-well-off segment of its audience, but also to get that audience self-identifying as “someone who wears authentic Gucci”. Once this happens, it’s a lot easier for them to justify a larger purchase, because they’ve already built a tangible history wearing Gucci.
And even if you can’t afford the cheapest Gucci item (Éclat De Beauté Effet Lumière gel face gloss, $18), you can still sign up to their newsletter. Follow their social media. Watch their videos. And perform other microcommitments that help you self-identify as “someone who loves Gucci” – and who, one day, will probably save up enough money for that bag (GG Marmont matelassé mini bag, $840).
Microconversions give you more data (and that’s good)
Microconversions are important for all websites, big or small. But if you’re just starting out of if you don’t have a lot of traffic yet, they’re even more helpful to sprinkle over your marketing as part of an overall conversion optimization strategy.
Why? Well, if your ecommerce website only gets one or two sales per day – or less – that won’t give you a lot of data to study. You’ll see how much money you’re making, but not a lot else.
But when you measure microcommitments over social media, your email newsletters, your blog, and everywhere else on the customer journey, you’ll be able to identify squeeze points. You’ll be able to see which microcommitment was one ask too many. You’ll be able to see which CTA’s performed better and why, and what kind of stuff your audience loves and wants more of.
For example, if microconversions are through the roof on your email newsletter but your blog only gets crickets, you might find better results if you delete your blog and focus on email from now on – even if none of those microcommitments were a sale.
What are the best microconversions to measure?
Don’t just go out there spraying CTA’s all over your page to see which ones stick – there’s many categories of microcommitments to try, and some are more effective than others. Here are some great ones to experiment with:
Downloading files
If you have a PDF lead magnet, a free MP3 or book chapter or a software trial, file downloading is a critical microconversion to measure. In an age of information security, it’s a big sign of trust to download a file from a person or brand you don’t know much about yet. Downloading a file means they really want it – and that’s why it’s a valuable microconversion to measure.
Signing up to a newsletter
Test your newsletter sign-ups with and without a lead magnet attached, and this will give you some vital information. Visitors who offer their email address to subscribe to your free newsletter might only want the PDF attached – in which case, make sure you also monitor downloads as above. If downloads are fewer than subscribers, your unsubscribe rate is healthy and low, or you don’t offer a lead magnet? That means visitors are 100% interested in what you’re putting out, and already pre-qualified as a potential customer.
Creating an account
Membership sites, forums or free courses can all measure microconversions through new account sign ups. Even if those people never go on to post, it means they’re interested enough in the subject matter and the forum itself to want to read further, and fork over their email address in order to do so.
Adding to cart
How many of us have bulging carts full of products we’d love to buy come payday, scattered all over the internet? Adding to cart is a microcommitment, as they’ve already clicked through the first stage of buying. Now all you need to do is get them to checkout. If you can, send them an email if a product remains in their cart for 12 hours without a checkout – if you offer a discount code or free gift, that could be enough to sway them into making a purchase.
Ask for feedback
When dealing with microconversions, it can be a little tricky to work out why they’re not doing as well as they ought. It’s never a bad idea to ask for some customer feedback in this scenario, at one or two stages of the customer journey (don’t bombard them with surveys, whatever you do).
Ask questions such as:
– What’s stopping you from checking out?
– What were you looking for?
– How can we make this newsletter better?
You might just glean some valuable feedback that helps you get more sales and make bigger conversions down the line.
