Win Sales on YouTube with these Conversion Hacks

Wondering why your YouTube views aren’t turning into sales? Our effective optimizations can help you convert them! In our video, we’ll guide you through the process and provide tips to grow your business. Don’t waste those views – watch now!

Video Transcript

With over 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube is a crazy powerful platform businesses can use to reach potential customers and grow their business. But getting views often isn’t enough to make the efforts worthwhile. Those views need to turn into sales and many times that is the major struggle businesses face when it comes to leveraging YouTube or any social platform for that matter. I am going to walk you through the entire process of turning those views into sales and provide with some of the most effective optimization tips that will help you get more sales.

Now the journey for a video viewer to turn into a new customer can look a lot different for each person and company, but a general outline of a customer journey starting from YouTube looks something like this:

Someone sees your video in their feed. We call that an impression. They watch your video. Then they go to your website. They subscribe to your email list. They open one of the emails you send them and click a link taking them back to your website where they finally make a purchase.

To see better conversions, we are simply improving the % of people who move from one action to the next for every point in the journey.

We do this by establishing a baseline of what our current rate is for each step. Then we make changes to the right levers, and then measure the results of the change to see if we have improved at all from our baseline and then we repeat the process.

This can have a profound impact on the number of new customers you receive. As an example:

If you get 100,000 impressions > that turns into 10,000 views > which turns into 1,000 site visits > which turns into 100 subscribers > which becomes 10 return visits from email > and then you make 5 sales. Let’s say you make $100 per order. So that is $500 in sales.

If you improve each part by just 10% then it looks like this

100,000 impressions > 11,000 views > 1,210 site visits > 133.1 subscribers > 14.6 return visits > 8 sales or $800. Giving you a 60% increase in sales.

So how do you optimize each step of this journey?

Let’s start off with the first step: Impressions to Video Views.

You would look at your videos Click-Through-Rate (CTR). Let’s say it’s at 5% currently, so that is your baseline, and you want to increase it to 7%. To do that, you would change the thumbnail and the video title. Once you have changed those, you monitor the CTR to see if if it has improved and you can repeat that cycle until that step in the customer journey is performing optimally.

This process serves as a template for every other step in the customer journey. We set up a baseline, we pull certain levers to create a change, we measure the difference with a KPI or Key Performance Indicator, and we repeat the process.

Now what is fascinating about this, is often times when you make changes like this it also drives more impressions (since your video stats get better) which in turn, just drives even more views and sales.

With this basic concept established, I want to dive into some more of these to points in the journey to give you a better understanding of what to do, but before I do, if you don’t know who I am, my name is Steven Records, I am the founder of contentthunder.com, where we help business and full-time content creators get the most out of their content by helping them with their content strategy, optimization, and website. Now let’s talk about the next step in the journey of turning video videos into traffic on your website.

To establish a baseline, we would look at how much referral traffic that video has generated vs the number of views the video has received. Let’s say it’s 2% and you want to get it to 3%. A few ways you can improve this are:

– Add links to relevant web pages in the video description

– Change your messaging in the description to give a compelling reason to go to your website

– Use Info cards, previously called annotation links, when you mention something relevant although to use this feature, you need to join the YouTube Partner Program. Which requires 1000 subscribers and at least 4,000 watch hours over the past 12 months or 10 million views on shorts within 90 days.

To track this, you can view the number of sessions coming from that YouTube video url in Google Analytics and then divide that by the total amount of views you got on your video in that same timeframe. So if you received 300 sessions (or visits) to your website from that video, and the video got 10,000 views, your video view to website visit rate is 3%. There are other tracking methods you could use to do this such as link shorteners or using URL parameters in your links, but setting up a Google Analytics report is the most straightforward way of doing it.

Next turning website visits to subscribers. I think a lot of people totally miss this one. They get so focused on building their audience on YouTube that they forget that it’s still YouTube’s audience, until they have a way to communicate directly to them outside of YouTube’s platform. Email is probably one of the most overlooked things that are essential to converting views into sales and creating a consistent and reliable stream of income for your business.

I have actually helped people more than double their opt-ins by making just a few small changes.

– **Ensure at least 70% of your visits see an opt-in:** putting it higher on the page, using a popup, or adding a sticky button for it.

– **A/B test the messaging or offer with your opt-in:** Discounts do well, as do content enhancements like an e-book, or engaging content like a quiz

– **Don’t make it annoying:** There is a fine line of where optimizing for this starts to damage the user experience to the extent that it lowers your ranking in search engines and just turns people off in general from wanting to come back to your website. So the key is making it visible without overdoing it.

Checking this is pretty straightforward, as long as you are not trying to get too granular with your reporting. You can set up a conversion goal for subscribing in Google Analytics and see the total number of site visits vs the total number of subscribers. So let’s say you got 100 subscribers out of 2,000 site visits, then the opt-in rate is 5%.

Now obviously you can’t expect sales just because you have a person’s email. You have to actually email them. I think the most important part is to view your marketing emails through the lens of a relationship. Give them things they want and find valuable over time and with some regularity, but don’t over-communicate to where they want to get off your email list as fast as possible.

It’s funny how much optimization is about finding the right balance because you can over-optimize to the point where it hurts you in the long run.

For the emails themselves, clarity trumps mystery. So don’t be clever, be clear and to the point and ensure you have easy-to-find links to your relevant web pages in your email. There is a lot you can do to improve email optimization, these are just some of the basics to get you started.

To track this, most email platforms let you see the % of opens and clicks so the metrics are pretty straightforward for this step.

The last step in the journey we will talk about is converting return visits into sales. Now I’m going to get on my soapbox here for a second. Content marketing for business isn’t just about producing great content, it is about creating a complete content system designed to attract, capture, nurture, and convert your audience into sales. Your website is an essential part of that, so spend the time and money to make your website perform at its best. I could equally talk about your positioning, produces/services, and offer here, but we will stick with the website a few things you can easily improve to convert better:

– **Improve your messaging** – Make it clear what you do and what you offer

– **Make decision-making easy** – Have easy-to-read and digest descriptions with plenty of detail to make it easy for users to know what they need and what to do next

– **Improve usability and performance** – A one-second website speed improvement can increase conversions for mobile users by up to 27% and fixing usability issues through better usability and site organization are even more impactful on your conversions.

– **Pay attention to design** – 93% of consumers consider visual appearance to be the key deciding factor in a purchasing decision and Forbes reported that good web design and UX can increase conversions by up to 400%. Just like your body language and tone communicates 90% of what you are saying. Your website’s organization, design, photography, and user experience says far more than the words you have written, so don’t neglect it.

To track sales, it depends on what you are selling and how you are selling it. For instance, you may have to record conversions as just leads if you only sell services. But for e-commerce stores and course creators, your would be tracking your product or course sales by having a conversion goal for purchases in Google Analytics and compare the total number of sales vs the total number of sessions on your website. There are a lot of ways you can look at this one to optimize and improve your site conversion, but I think comparing total sales to total website visits or by the original referral source is the most straightforward option.

That’s it for this one, but if you found this video helpful then you definitely will want to check out this one too. And if you want to see more content from me in your feed, be sure to like and subscribe to channel. I’ll see you in the next one.