The Truth about Conversion Rates

Does curiosity actually help or hurt your conversion rates?

To answer that question, let’s back up and look at the big picture. Curiosity and marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly. In fact, piquing your audience’s interest may be the most important part of inbound marketing. After all, you need to get readers interested enough to open your email, or click on a link, or check out your product. But some organizations and writers go too far in arousing their audience’s curiosity in order to gain more digital interaction. That’s how we get “clickbait”: content that has the sole purpose of attracting mass attention and encouraging visitors to click a link. Clickbait is widely regarded as annoying and generally does not provide value to the audience. 

So, when it comes to actively marketing for a business, it’s important to walk a fine line between engaging with prospective customers and going overboard in order to gain more attention. You want to pique visitors’ interest in order to convince them that your products, services or content are worth looking at, but you don’t want to make them feel like your marketing efforts are a bait and switch. Furthermore, you want to ensure that you are targeting the right people with your marketing techniques. Going viral and receiving a lot of attention may feel good, but meaningless if it does not result in more sales and increased revenue.

You can get a better idea of where you stand with this by examining your organization’s marketing metrics. Content that may be too sensational will likely result in a large number of clicks or opens, but people will quickly leave the page, resulting in high bounce rates and low conversion rates. If you’re both piquing readers’ interest and satisfying it, you’ll benefit from higher engagement and conversion rates. That’s assuming that your content is relevant to your audience, of course. 

So, here’s the short answer:

Curiosity helps your conversion rates only if your marketing efforts are targeted at the right audience, and your content provides value. Piquing someone’s curiosity for the sole purpose of gaining more clicks or attention will have no effect on your conversion rates, and may even harm conversion rates by eroding trust.

Looking for ways to increase both engagement and conversion rates? We can help. Contact us today!