Micro conversions: Smaller steps for the great leap forward

Macro vs Micro Conversions

People rarely buy the first time they find out about a new brand, product or service. It takes a lot of effort to cater to the smaller moments of truth to keep delighting and building trust with your prospective customers. So to get a complete picture of your marketing efforts, you need to analyze conversions from both micro and macro perspectives. Let’s start by defining both:

Macro Conversions: Final conversion event performed by the customer that directly contributes to the revenue. For example, a user purchasing one of the products on your eCommerce store.

Micro Conversions: The smaller steps that your customers take that may not have an immediate effect on revenue but ultimately leads to the final conversion. For example, a user subscribing to your email newsletter.

In simple terms, micro conversions are low-hanging fruits – events that guide your users to the end goal, the macro conversions. The primary goal of any business is to generate revenue by increasing sales, so all marketers out there measure final conversion metrics. However, many marketers ignore the fact that the final conversion is rarely a standalone event but rather the result of a series of actions that are equally important. An unattended micro-conversion or a break in the funnel is surely going to drag your end conversions and revenue.  

Micro Conversions in eCommerce

For an eCommerce business, the ultimate macro conversion is ordering a product. However a user taking the typical linear journey from [home page > category page > product page > add to cart > checkout > product purchase] is rarely the case. Most times, prospective customers undertake several nonlinear steps before coming back to the linear buying funnel. These nonlinear steps are essentially micro-conversions that are crucial events that need to be measured. Given below is a basic flowchart list of micro conversions for an eCommerce user journey:

HOME PAGE

• User registration
• Allowing a push notification
• Newsletter signup

CATEGORY PAGE

• Repeat visits 
• Clicking a personalized banner
• Apply filters

PRODUCT PAGE

• Compare products
• Shortlisting  products
• Add to cart 

CART PAGE

• Read reviews
• Click a customized web push with an offer code
• Checkout

CHECKOUT PAGE

• Apply Coupon
• Check shipping conditions
• Click product recommendations 

A Typical Micro to Macro Conversion Funnel

We have already seen a list of micro conversions in eCommerce. The infographic below explains how a typical micro to macro conversion funnel works with a practical journey flow.

1.HOME > User receives a web push request and enables it

2. CATEGORY > Clicks a personalized promotional banner

3. PRODUCT> Compares one product vs other brands, selects one product but abandons the browser session

4. CART > The user gets a personalized trigger push with last visited product at a time he is more likely to click

5. CHECKOUT > User applies the coupon code to complete the purchase

How Do You Leverage Micro Conversions?

We’ve already seen how micro conversions work with real-life examples. We can summarize the micro-journey tracking activities into 5 basic steps:

1. Understand the customer behavior in smaller steps
2. Identify roadblocks and micro conversion opportunities
3. Create a micro-conversion funnel
4. Execute & optimize micro conversions
5. Measure the macro impact of micro conversions

As a marketer, you can follow the above steps to make sure you have a robust micro-conversion tracking for your business. These steps are industry agnostic, therefore any marketer irrespective of their domain can micro track to achieve better conversions. All you need is the right platform or tool to easily and speedily go live with micro event setups. 

How Micro Conversions Contribute to Revenue & ROI 

Now that we have seen how effective micro conversions lead into macro conversions, it’s also important to analyze their direct impact on revenue. The micro focus definitely makes you invest more effort on nudging users to next micro actions and guiding them throughout their purchase journey. Most of these micro steps require little or no investment other than a platform which helps you leverage  ready-to-use shopping triggers and purchase-inducing templates. Segmenting = users based on their likelihood to purchase or churn, lifecycle stages, lifetime values or interest clusters further enhances the overall user experience and in turn, your revenue. 

Micro conversions indirectly boost your ROI as well. Just focusing on final conversions vs. costs can be the wrong way to go, if you have a major segment of users stuck in the funnel as you did not nudge them enough. Many of these customers are not yet lost but need additional micro-pushes. You can easily tap into this massive opportunity to increase sales with micro pushes with no additional customer acquisition cost. 

Before You Go

Micro conversions are often the most overlooked KPIs in marketing. Analyzing micro conversions helps you test and optimize marketing efforts, so you can keep converting prospects.. Measuring and optimizing your funnel for micro conversions helps you generate additional revenue with the same marketing budget and improves customer experience. All you need is a well-defined micro conversion funnel along with a platform to implement it effectively using action-oriented triggers and ready-to-use micro-conversion templates. 

Insiders’ Growth Management Platform is the perfect platform to improve your micro conversion capabilities with AI-powered conversion templates. Request your personalized  demo today. 

Is there a last-ditch strategy to retain such users? Exit-intent overlay is a trusted strategy you can fall back on. In essence, an exit-intent overlay works by identifying users who are likely to leave your website and engaging them with a relevant and personalized message, providing an incentive to stay back and complete their journey.