Ethan Denney

Grow Your Agency’s Revenue with Conversion Marketing Services

See how to upgrade your services in a way that could potentially double or triple the ROI you get for your agency and your clients.

Let’s face it; most websites are struggling. While they usually don’t get enough traffic, some sites get lots of traffic, but still don’t generate any significant revenue for their owners. 

Whether they attract hundreds, or just a few visitors a day, most websites suffer from embarrassingly low conversion rates. 

If you've worked in the online marketing space for long, chances are, you know this issue all too well.

Depending on the kind of services your agency offers, you may have personally experienced the problems low conversion rates can cause. 

It’s also possible you’re thinking, “Conversion rates have nothing to do with the services I offer, so it's not my problem to fix.” 

Or is it? 

If you believe that low website conversions on your clients’ websites are not your problem, pay close attention to what I’m about to say.

Based on what we’ve seen after working with hundreds of consultants and agencies at ConvertFlow, if you offer any of the services shown below, poor conversion rates can be as much a problem for you as they are for your clients:

  • Website design & development
  • Content marketing
  • SEO
  • Inbound marketing
  • Paid advertising
  • Marketing automation
  • Social media marketing
  • Conversion rate optimization
  • Funnel creation

So why would you need to fix the low conversion rates on your client’s website?

Well, if you’re still in denial or unaware of this reality, what I’m about to say may shock you. So get ready. I’m not going to sugar coat it for you.

The clients who pay for your marketing services are always making the decision to continue paying you or to fire you depending on how much revenue your services generate for them on a consistent basis.

Successful business owners and executives invest in marketing to generate more qualified leads that convert into customers, so they can increase online sales and revenue. 

They don’t pay you because they love your beautiful web design or your copywriting wizardry. Ultimately, it all comes down to results and profits.

In other words, if the services you provide can't be attributed directly to an increase in revenue or profits, your clients will eventually see your services as a "nice-to-have," rather than a “must-have.”

Your client’s business has a few slow months, or the economy starts to slow down, and guess what's going to get cut? 

That's right. Your nice-to-have service may be the next expense on the chopping block.

Or what if another project is proposed by a team member or agency that competes for the same budget that’s been allocated to your service?

If that's the case, you better be ready to fight the dreaded "Proving your ROI" battle.

And just a heads up, combating this situation with weak, lofty benefits will probably be a losing proposition. Your clients want to see clear numbers and graphs showing that your service is moving their performance up and to the right.

The smart freelancer, consultant, or agency knows conversion rate defines the return on investment (ROI) of campaigns. And being able to clearly show an upward movement here to potential clients will ultimately win their budget.

Conversion Marketing For Agencies

Regardless of what your marketing expertise may be or which online channels your services are focused on, if your client doesn't already have an effective conversion process in place, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle when it comes to proving measurable results and ROI.

And that's why in this post, we're going to show you how to upgrade your services in a way that could potentially double or triple the ROI you get for your business and your clients. 

Keep reading, because we’re about to show you how your agency can benefit and grow by offering Conversion Marketing services to clients.

What is Conversion Marketing?

Conversion Marketing, in simple terms, is marketing with the intention of increasing conversions of site visitors into paying customers.

In a few minutes, you're going to learn how to use conversion marketing to enhance your existing services so you can show clients more ROI. You’ll also see how to grow client value through improved retention and upsells.

While browsing the web, you probably interact with numerous campaigns that are launched on websites by companies using conversion marketing.

For example, every time you visit a dedicated landing page for a campaign,  see a popup promoting a discount, see a website form asking for your email, or engage with quizzes and surveys on a company’s website, you're engaging with that particular brand's conversion marketing campaigns.

If you're familiar with this process, you may be wondering how Conversion Marketing differs from conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Although it may not look different on the surface, we see conversion rate optimization (the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action) as a part of a larger, more encompassing process known as Conversion Marketing.

While CRO is commonly seen as the continual improvement of the conversion rates of individual steps that already exist in a funnel through split-testing, we see Conversion Marketing as the overall process of launching, personalizing and optimizing campaigns on an ongoing basis in a way that increases conversions at each stage of the funnel. This process can also include split-testing calls-to-action, marketing collateral, and pages that promote specific campaigns.

As experienced marketers know, there’s only so much micro-optimization you can do through split-testing before you realize that to start moving the needle again, you have to zoom out and make a macro optimization. 

This macro optimization could be launching a new campaign, or you may decide to engage the audience more often using evergreen campaigns, content, or promotions that reach prospects at various points in their customer journey.

How does Conversion Marketing work?

Most marketers are familiar with the concept of building a funnel that moves prospects from one step to the next until they eventually become paying customers, repeat buyers, and, hopefully, brand advocates who refer new business to a company for many years to come.

For each stage of the funnel, companies using Conversion Marketing develop multiple types of campaigns targeting various visitor segments, hoping to increase conversions from one step of the funnel to the next.

We like to think of this process distilled into three primary steps:

  1. Segment website visitors
  2. Capture leads with personalized offers
  3. Convert leads into paying customers by personalizing the marketing and sales funnel for each person.

Here are a few examples, so you can see how this process works:

  • To generate leads from a site, a company may use different types of lead magnets across their website to convert different visitor segments into leads. They may also use a survey to segment website visitors into different groups, so that they can show people the right lead magnets.

  • To convert more email subscribers into paying customers, a company may target returning email contacts with a campaign promoting the next step in their funnel. For example, if your company sells services, that could be a CTA that drives email contacts visiting your site to schedule a meeting or a demo. If your company is an eCommerce site, that may be a CTA driving returning email subscribers to a relevant product page or a product category page where you’re running a targeted offer.

  • To increase sales, a company might use conversion marketing to target potential buyers by the pages they've visited on the site or by how they're segmented. They can do this with special-offer campaigns or campaigns recommending relevant products.

The Conversion Marketing Flywheel

By following the Conversion Marketing steps shown below, you can create a flywheel effect that helps accelerate growth for your business and your clients, while amplifying the results your services are generating.

Let's break down these five steps:

1. Invest in traffic

To get people to a website, there needs to be an initial investment of effort and money to drive traffic to the site. This is usually achieved by doing paid advertising, search engine optimization, sponsoring podcasts, social media marketing, co-marketing with channel partners, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and more. The list of possible channels goes on and on.

2. Drive visitors

Ideally, your traffic generation strategies would drive visitors to specific pages so the intent of the visitors is clear and you can easily nudge them to take the next step. However, this approach doesn't always apply. For example, in some cases, you could be running brand awareness or retargeting ads that drive people back to your home page.

3. Segment the audience

When people arrive on the desired page or website, you can use surveys, quizzes, and forms to segment the audience based on data that allows you to personalize the rest of the funnel and your marketing for them.

A SaaS or B2B company may segment visitors by persona, industry, size, or use case. Then they may use that segmentation data to determine which pages they drive visitors to, which offers and content they show, and whether they move people through a self-service or a high-touch sales funnel.

A B2C or eCommerce brand may segment visitors by interest, goal, gender, or use case, so they can recommend the right products, special offers, and personalize follow-up email and ad campaigns that retarget visitors.

4. Capture leads

Once visitors are segmented, you can display personalized lead magnets, content, and offers to capture leads, instead of forcing all your visitors down the same path.

If you're already getting traffic to your website, combining visitor segmentation with personalized lead capture offers is the number one conversion strategy you can use to increase lead capture rates.

5. Convert customers

Once visitors become leads in your email service provider, you can start personalizing your funnel, follow-up emails, marketing campaigns, and advertising campaigns that convert each contact segment into customers.

What's great about personalizing your marketing by contact segment, is you can create highly-targeted content and campaigns, which improve the effectiveness of all your marketing efforts. 

You can also get a better understanding of the buying patterns of each segment, along with their sales cycles, and conversion rates. This approach gives you better visibility when it comes to your marketing, and clarity on where you should double down.

Finally, as your flywheel helps to win more customers, you'll be able to invest more resources into marketing and driving traffic to your site.

Not only can this conversion marketing flywheel help fund growth by investing more in attracting more visitors to your site, but it can also help to prioritize the campaigns you launch, which content you create, which ads you run, which emails you send, to which audiences, and more.

Profitable services you can offer around The Conversion Marketing Flywheel

The conversion marketing flywheel has multiple steps that contain service opportunities with the potential to improve the overall performance of the flywheel.

Here's an illustration of how the Conversion Marketing Flywheel works and the service opportunities it spins off:


Core Service Opportunity 1: Optimizing the client’s conversion funnel

Client types: High-traffic SMBs to Enterprise (Examples: eCommerce sites, SaaS, B2C brands, marketplaces, publishers, etc.)

What agencies typically charge per month: $,$$$ – $$,$$$

To help optimize a company’s conversion funnel, agencies can provide conversion marketing services focusing on the three primary steps of the flywheel:

1.  Segmenting the audience
2. Capturing leads
3. Converting customers

This means improving the funnel designed to take people from new website visitors, all the way through to initial sale and buying additional products.

What's involved in achieving that goal may differ for different types of companies. For example, B2C and eCommerce brands usually have a shorter sales cycle, and visitors can move through the entire funnel and make a purchase in just one visit.

On the other hand, B2B businesses selling high-ticket items or SaaS solutions often have longer sales cycles. In these cases, a visitor will usually need to visit a company’s website multiple times, while being nurtured into becoming a paying customer.

You may want to consider this when packaging your agency's services. If you’re going to offer conversion marketing services, without getting into optimizing email and ad campaigns, then you may want to narrow your client focus to serving B2C and eCommerce brands whose businesses are built primarily on paid advertising and short sales cycles.

However, if you plan to incorporate email marketing and advertising services into your agency's packages, you could potentially generate excellent results for both B2C and B2B clients, because you'll be optimizing the full marketing funnel.

Examples of service providers that have scaled this type of service:

Core Service Opportunity 2: Filling the client’s funnel

Client types: SMB to Enterprise

What agencies usually charge per month: $,$$$ – $$,$$$

Filling the funnel focuses on steps 1 and 2 of the conversion marketing flywheel.

If you’re going to help the client fill their funnel, your services would provide the outcome of generating traffic to the company’s websites.

Agencies helping clients fill the funnel commonly help their clients with paid advertising, SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing.

Based on the strengths and channel expertise of the agency's team, most agencies helping clients generate traffic focus their offering on providing either PPC services, which may include paid social, or SEO services. Some agencies choose to offer both paid and organic traffic generation services.

Agencies providing conversion marketing services can benefit by helping their clients fill the funnel. Once they've built a well-optimized conversion funnel for a client, the agency can increase client value and retention by filling, as well as optimizing, the funnel through the use of retargeting ads, paid advertising, as well as SEO services.

To prove ROI, agencies offering paid advertising services usually take it upon themselves to build the landing pages their ad campaigns drive visitors to. This way, they can attribute the leads and sales being generated by their ad campaigns. 

Whether they set out to offer conversion services or not, most PPC agencies find themselves optimizing their conversion efforts along with the landing pages they create through split-testing, new offer creation, etc.

Sooner or later, many SEO agencies also find themselves offering conversion services in addition to their regular services. This happens because clients measure the ROI of hiring an agency based on how much additional revenue they help generate and providing conversion services is one of the ways SEO agencies can attribute leads and sales back to their search engine optimization efforts.

Examples of service providers that have scaled this type of service:

  • Klientboost – Average client value is $3,750+/month
    (Based on 2018 client and revenue numbers)
  • Disruptive Advertising

Core Service Opportunity 3: Optimizing the full funnel

Client types: SMB to Enterprise

What agencies usually charge per month: $,$$$ – $$,$$$

By optimizing the entire funnel, agencies can create optimal conditions to achieve the best results for their clients.

Instead of limiting an agency's results by the client's existing website traffic or an ineffective follow-up process to get potential buyers back on the site, the agency seeks to control how much traffic is driven to the site, the conversion funnel performance, and the remarketing/follow-up process.

This full-funnel approach allows the agency to have the most significant impact on its client's marketing results. It also helps to forge longer-lasting relationships with clients in which the agency becomes an integral part of a company’s marketing workflow. It can also help the agency generate substantially more revenue from each client.

Another benefit of providing services to optimize the full funnel is an agency can serve a wider variety of clients, from growing SMBs to significantly larger organizations.

This full-funnel approach may allow agencies that started off providing conversion or traffic generation services and are struggling to scale beyond their niche market, to service adjacent or larger segments of the market.

Here’s an example of services that might be offered by an agency that optimizes the full funnel:

  • Top-of-funnel traffic generation services (advertising, content marketing, etc.)
  • Full-funnel conversion marketing services
  • Full-funnel remarketing services to re-engage visitors who drop off (retargeting ads and email)

Expansion Service Opportunities:

When you provide conversion marketing and traffic generation services to clients, you may discover natural opportunities to offer additional services that increase lifetime value of a client, along with the value of each project.

Here are some services you can offer through upsells and cross-sells:

Some successful agencies have positioned themselves as authorities in their space and differentiated what they do from the sea of marketing agencies out there by combining conversion marketing with other services like the examples shown above. Doing this enables them to provide a unique bundle of services clients can't easily source elsewhere.

How to start offering conversion marketing services to your clients

By creating a ConvertFlow account, you can start setting up conversion campaigns for your clients to help them generate more leads and sales. 

Using our platform, you can easily create the perfect CTA for the next marketing project you work on with your clients. This includes CTAs like landing pages, popups, forms, embedded content, quizzes, sticky bars and surveys.

We're always working on ways to make this process faster, more streamlined, and easier for marketers and agencies to implement. 

For example, by customizing one of our professionally-designed templates, creating your own templates or using our workflow features to duplicate your previous work, you can make the process of launching future campaigns for clients much easier.

Time-saving features like these, help agencies, consultants and freelancers onboard their clients faster and deliver services more effectively.

That said, tools and templates can only help so much. If you want to accelerate your success when helping businesses with conversion marketing, then check out ConvertFlow’s Partner Program.

We’re working closely with partners to help them successfully onboard their clients, and grow their agencies faster.

About the author
Ethan Denney
Co-Founder & CEO, ConvertFlow
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Ethan is the Co-Founder & CEO of ConvertFlow. He loves reading about and sharing anything that helps marketers convert more website visitors.