Ow Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate Part 1

Question 1.

What can you mean by conversion? Do you mean getting you to definitely answer the simplest call to action such as "read more here" or actually selling a product or service?

What you're discussing here are two various ways to measure your website. "Read More Here" is what I'd call a variable inside your conversion rate. I call this type of variables "Micro Conversions" because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a full conversion. A micro conversion is a thing that you should test and measure. "Read More Here" could easily get a worse click-through rate than "Click here to find out how exactly to win a month's supply of vintage wine." So by improving this click on through, you get the person browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. By doing this, you enhance your overall conversion rate, which in cases like this is to get someone to register or subscribe to win a month's way to obtain vintage wine. Micro conversions could be tracked by measuring the click on through of links, or the read time for content, or the bounce rate for headlines and copy. Full conversion is persuading these potential customers to do what you want them to do. In my example, it would be registering to win wine, but it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, purchase a product, sell something or whatever, but it should reflect what your website's business objective is.

Question 2.

What strategies can you suggest if you find no "online" conversion possible? I need them to call me for more info, to learn more also to eventually provide them with a proposal.

There is no such thing as "no online conversion". You are considering leads who will eventually phone you however the visitor is the one with the power. If you don't give your visitors grounds to let you continue steadily to have a dialog with them, they won't. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for example, you ask for a name, email address and telephone number from your visitor so that he can then get useful information from you by means of a free of charge report or audio file, you do two things. First, you qualify visitors as someone who is thinking about your services, and second, you get permission to get hold of him/her again. You should build into your site a powerful reason for your visitors to provide you with permission to email or speak to them rather than expect someone to grab the phone. Available for you, you say they need to ring you to find out more. Put what they have to learn into some form they can opt in to get, like a white paper, report or audio file. Then you have a conversion rate this is the percentage of individuals who offer you permission to continue the dialog using them giving you their email or phone number so that they can find out more on your offering. People visit a website to obtain information, so give them the means to obtain it.

Question 3.

What if the merchandise you sell can be sold by several others on other websites? How does one get somebody who is browsing the web to notice your website and desire to order from you?

In offline marketing, an effective tactic is differentiation. It's no different online. In the event that you stand out from your own competition, then you be seen. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes a massive difference to conversions. We improved subscriptions by 11% monthly for half a year by differentiating ourselves. The second point is your site should be of use to your visitor. The one thing that all people online have as a common factor is that whenever they browse they're searching for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of education. If your potential prospects become educated about your offer and eliminate something useful from your own website, they'll remember you over your rivals.

Question 4.

How do you get the address, telephone number and name of who owns any company that you're trying to get in touch with to see if they would be interested in what you sell?

It is advisable to get permission from visitors to obtain that information. It can't be done with any tracking tools available. There is a very good reason for this and it's really called privacy. In the event that you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and telephone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on christmas in a faraway land for another few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. The one who sees that information then knows when to visit your address and rob you as long as you're away. It's OK to track browser behavior because no personal stats are ever tracked. I for just one hope it stays this way.

Question 5.

What should one search for in the net logs to determine conversion rates?

Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your site's pages from internet search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you should filter from log files the info that isn't relevant to visitors. Then you're looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. When you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate amount of visitors coming to your site, still not near 100% due to proxy servers recording multiple visitors as you browser, but it's as close since you can get with log files. Then you divide the amount of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That's your conversion rate. When you can get software that doesn't use logs like IRIS Metrics or log software that computes the filtering like Web Trends, it creates your job easier.

Question 6.

What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my internet site?

The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site's relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, and most importantly trust.

Online Backup Service is the first step in the process. You need to discover a way to stick out from the competition. It should focus on the domain name, and continue throughout your entire website's strategy.

Then in your articles, your copy as well as your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes. You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of this audience.

Relevance is hugely important, too. If you're running a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at the right place after typing those keywords and finding your website. So if the audience types "Red Vintage Wine" into Overture as well as your link appears, on clicking through they must be taken to the page on your own site talking about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn't land at the home page of your website that includes a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other styles of wine for sale.

Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You can't improve conversion without measurement unless you're making educated guesses or you're just plain lucky. So get a good measurement system, learn what it's all about, and test thoroughly your changes.

Finally and most importantly trust. You can't sell anything if your audience doesn't trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the fact that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your own site, that a huge selection of satisfied customers have already bought from your store, that you ensure it is very easy to find contact information like a name and address in addition to support via email. You can educate via your site with articles and 'how to sections' or newsletters and instill trust as time passes. In a nutshell, your prospect must trust you to part with their money.

What's get more info ?

In part two of the series, we'll be looking at measurement software tools, the professionals and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversion rates, why it can help to track visitor activity utilizing the software that is available, and what you ought to test and tweak to improve conversion rates.

Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. You can get a free copy of his e-book delivered to you upon subscription to the Chronicles site