Micro conversions for your business success

With micro conversion, you measure the individual sub-steps a prospect takes on your website to convert into a customer. The main goal of these many small steps is the macro conversion – a user action that you define yourself individually. In e-commerce, this is usually the purchase of a product.

By capturing and highlighting your micro conversion, you get an accurate view of the touchpoints within the customer journey that your prospects go through, giving you insights that help you increase conversion rate. In this article, we took a closer look at micro conversion. We’ll give you four tips to increase your micro conversions and get closer to your business goals.

What belongs to Micro Conversion?

All interactions that a visitor does on your page and that ultimately lead to the actual conversion goal ( macro conversion) are assigned to micro conversion. In general, the so-called process milestones and secondary actions are distinguished here.

The process milestones, as the name suggests, are all the steps that bring the prospect one step closer to macro conversion. Examples of process milestones include going to a product page, adding an product to the shopping cart, or initiating checkout.

Secondary actions are any steps that do not lead directly to the goal, but are still related to it and have the potential to trigger a macro conversion. They are primarily there to generate interest and curiosity, as well as to create trust. In that case, the micro conversion touchpoints can be outside the website.

In general, the following interactions are assigned to micro conversion:

• open product pages
• use search function
• subscribe to the newsletter
• create customer account
• like / share / follow via social media
• add products to shopping cart
• leave a comment
• watch a video
• initiate checkout
• select a payment method
• enter data / fill out a form
• download an e-book or whitepaper
• register for a course
• subscribe to RSS feed
• click on an advertising banner
• interact with a popup

Why should you consider micro conversions?

Tracking and analyzing micro conversion brings several benefits at once. By looking at the individual sub-steps visitors take on your website, you can see at which touchpoints there is a weak spot. Micro conversion thus indicates where potential customers are abandoning and possibly dissatisfaction arises. Optimizing such a subsection will in turn help you increase the overall conversion rate.

If you focus solely on the macro conversion, you will get important data on how the conversion in your online shop is basically doing. However, this does not provide you with any insights into where optimization is needed. You gain this with measurement of micro conversion. This provides you with the opportunity to precisely identify each element in the sales funnel where it is worth investing in an improvement.

Micro conversion is just as useful for gaining a better understanding of your customers and their behavior. The insights you gain from this can also be used in the next step for later marketing actions. This makes campaigns much more efficient from the beginning.

You can track the micro conversion with analysis tools such as Google Analytics. Here you can choose between the “Events” or “Goals” functions.

4 tips to optimize your micro conversion

When it comes to micro conversion, it is important to define in advance precise goals that you want the substep to achieve. On this basis, you measure the micro conversions of the individual touchpoints over a longer period of time and identify critical areas. In turn, you take these as the basis for creating a strategic plan for optimization. For this purpose, we provide you with four tips below.

1. Make sure your email opt-in is compelling

To get prospects or customers to sign up for a newsletter as soon as they leave a page, for example, make the sign-up so irresistible that they can’t help but sign up. Sending a newsletter is one of your most important marketing tools. You can reach your target audience directly, send offers, announce new products, even remind them to add to their shopping cart.

How to optimize your email opt-in:

– Offer incentives like vouchers and FOMO
– Increase micro conversion with interesting content
– Use tools like smart newsletter popups

With uptain’s newsletter popups, you can quickly, easily and unobtrusively attract more subscribers to your newsletter. The unobtrusive slide-ins popping up at exactly the right moment and offer a personalized added value to the users by an intelligent software analyzing the user behavior in the background. The newsletter popup works on both desktop and mobile devices. In the long-term, you achieve a higher micro conversion, gain new newsletter subscribers, increase customer loyalty, reduce abandonment rates and increase your overall conversion rate.

2. Make it easy for shoppers to add products to the cart

Before a customer buys products, they must first add it to their cart, which marks the first step on the checkout journey. The simpler, less complicated, and more user-friendly you make each of the checkout micro conversions, the more likely you are to convert your prospect into a customer in the end.

The micro conversions of the checkout are among the most critical ones, where the abandonment rate is the highest. Reasons include high shipping costs, inappropriate payment methods, or complicated forms. You can use the micro conversion to measure the part of your checkout where things go wrong.

We explain in detail how to optimize your checkout in our article Shopping Cart Optimisation in Online Shops.

3. Keep your forms simple and intuitive

Entering data into a form is related to micro conversion. Asking for data is sensitive and a real balancing act between too much and too little. The principle here is: ask as little as possible, but as much as necessary.

You need the complete contact data for dispatch. Consider whether you really need a phone number or whether the e-mail address is already enough. In the end, you can always ask for more data at a later stage. Keep the checkout filling process as streamlined and intuitive as possible and include an auto-fill guide.

How to increase micro conversion of your forms:

• keep the fields manageable
• make sure the form displays correctly on mobile devices as well
• use automatic filling assistance
• let customers decide how much data they want to reveal (optional asterisk fields)

4. Get your customers to browse more pages

The longer a customer spends on your site, the higher the likelihood of closing a sale. By increasing micro conversion in terms of them page views, you ensure that prospects take a journey through your online shop. By looking at the micro conversion of individual pages, you can target and optimize those where users only stay for a short time or even bounce.

This is important on a page:

– provide useful information on your page, such as in product descriptions
– make sure the navigation is useful
– make sure that the structure in your online shop is clear and user-friendly
– create a target group oriented design
– ensure quick access to personal support

Micro Conversion: Many steps lead to the goal

Of course, you should always keep an eye on your macro conversion to know how well your online shop is received by customers and how successful it really is. By measuring your micro conversion, you work out the actual optimization potential and thus have the opportunity to specifically increase the macro conversion. Always measure both values continuously and thus lay the foundation so that you can always act proactively. This ensures maximum competitive advantages for you, because you are always one (micro) step ahead of your competitors.