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How To Improve Web Site Conversion Rates
Do you know your conversion rates? Conversion rate is the
number of visitors to your site that take the desired action
against the total number of visitors in a particular period
or time. Research has shown that 60% of websites do not know
their conversion rates. Then how do you improve your site's
performance if you do not know your conversion rates? What
do you take into consideration when making changes to your
site's design? What do you do when you have plenty of
visitors yet very few of them take the desired action? What
do you want your visitors to do? How are they going to do
it? What is the next step for your visitor after taking the
desired action? These and other questions can easily be
answered if some efforts are made towards tracking and
calculating websites' conversion rates.
Converting your visitor is the ultimate aim of any website.
Making the visitor to take the desired action is the
fulfillment of a process that started from wherever the
visitor clicked to come to your site. The desired action
could be;
1. Sales
2. Subscribing to your newsletter or book-marking a page.
3. Taking a survey.
4. Downloading a software or ebook
5. Clicking on a link.
6. Going through the process
(that is, clicking from page to page ) before clicking on the order button.
7. Etc
Most of the time we think conversion starts when the visitor
lands on our Site. But conversion actually starts from
wherever the visitor first locates our site. How the site
was located. What description the visitor sees before
clicking to your site or what recommendation or word of
mouth brought the visitor to your site. This pre-conversion
state is what to a large extent, can determine whether
conversion actually takes place or not. This is what I call
the keyword-title-description-landing page formula. This
formula is explained in my free ebook "Google Adwords Made
Easy". You can download this free ebook at home base
business ideas site.
What enables conversion to take place.
A visitor landing at your site should immediately feel
comfortable with your site. First impression as they say
matters a lot. For conversion to take place you must hold
the visitor's attention once he lands on your site. Some of
the points to note that make for easy conversion are:
1. Your website should load fast.
The next site is a click away. If your site loads slowly
your visitor clicks away and
you have lost a potential customer. Usually, graphics,
animations, are the cause of slow loading pages. Your can
use some software, available free on the internet, to reduce
the size of your graphics so that they load fast.
2. Your site should have a professional look about it.
It should at first glance portray a quality site. This adds a
little bit of credibility to the site. The site is then seen
as a serious site.
3. State your case quickly.
Let your visitor know what your site is about in a few words.
Don't go rambling about your achievements. That can come later.
Give the visitor what he
is looking for.
4. Arrange your content in an easy to understand way.
Whether you are using Tables or CSS for site design, make sure your
content is arranged in such a way that the visitor moves from
one section of the site to another without confusion or
frustration. If you are catering to different kinds of visitors,
demarcate your site or page clearly showing these different
sections for visitors.
5. Include your Privacy Policy, Phone Numbers, About Us information on every page of your site.
This builds some element of trust. Visitors may not click to these pages
but the fact that they are there builds some credibility.
6. Do not irritate your visitors with bad grammar or typos.
Check and crosscheck your content. Ask somebody to read
through your content and point out grammatical errors and
typos. These kinds of errors portray a site as unserious and
therefore suspect.
7. If you must use banners use them sparingly.
Do not allow your banners to distract your
visitors from the desired action to be taken. Banners are
been clicked on less and less these days.
Having taken care of all of the above, your site is set to
present your visitors with your carefully packaged offer.
You begin by getting to know your present conversion rates.
It is only logical that before any action is taken to
improve conversion rates, the present conversion rates are
known.
What is your website's conversion rates.
There are many actions a site may desire a visitor to take
once he lands at the site. It is the conversion rates of
these desired actions that you want to calculate. Lets look
at some the typical conversion rates that need to be
calculated and what can be done to improve them.
1. THE SALES CONVERSION RATE.
This gives you an idea of
how many visitors are buying your product out of the total
number of visitors that visit you site.
The sales conversion rate = number who bought / total number
of visitors x 100
So if you have about 10000 visitors in the month and out of
that , 350 bought your product, your conversion rate is
350 / 10000 x 100 = 3.5%
This means that for every 200 visitor that land at your site
7 will buy your product.
How to improve the sales conversion rate.
(a) Make navigation through your site to your order page so
simple a ten year old can find it.
(b) Make bold call to action. Example, BUY NOW, or ORDER
HERE. Put it near the top, at the middle and near the bottom
of you sales page.
(c) If you offer free shipping indicate this at your home
page and prominently on your sales page. Research has
shown that free shipping is the second most important
consideration for buyers apart from price.
(d) Your web page should load fast. Imagine a potential
customer clicking to your order page with the intention to
buy only to be frustrated by a slow loading page. The
importance of fast loading pages cannot be over-emphasized.
Some of the ways to reduce loading time are:
i. Reduce the number of graphics on your page. Apart from the number, you
can also reduce the size of the graphics. There are a number
of software you can use to reduce the size of your graphics.
ii. Always specify the dimensions of your
graphics in your html coding. In your IMG tag be sure to
specify the width and height of your graphics. This makes it
easy for the web browser to load the page because it doesn't
have to figure out the dimensions of the graphics.
(e) Experiment with different colors on your pages. Measure
and track the result of any little change you make. It has
been reported that change in the color of a page layout
increased conversion rate.
(f) Do not use Pop-ups for displaying your vital
information. For example, your shipping rates. Though
Pop-ups can be effective in drawing attention to vital
information, it is not worth taking the chance. With all the
free Popup blockers offered by most toolbars and software
companies it will be counter productive to display your
vital information in a Popup only to have it blocked.
Displaying information in Pop-ups could seriously reduce
your conversion rate. Instead use banners that will display
a strong call to action.
(g) Include a progress indicator on each page to your order
page so that your customer knows at what stage he is. You
can number the pages or steps and clearly describe each step
so that the customer can easily move back and forth through
your pages.
(h) Make it automatic so that when the shipping info is same
as the billing info, the customer doesn't have to fill the
same information twice.
(i) Because of credit card concerns, not all customers will
want to order using credit cards. Offer other forms of
payment, check, fax, phone etc
(j) Display critical information at the check out page.
Information like warranties, guarantees, shipping costs,
testimonials, return policies, after sales service, support
service etc
(k) Develop a system whereby if a visitor abandons the
checkout process for whatever reason after providing an
email address, your system immediately emails the visitor
offering an incentive to tell why the process was not
completed. This happened to me. I abandoned purchase when
the order page could not load due to my unsteady internet
connection. I promptly received an email from the company. I
later went back to the site to purchase the item.
(l) If you are selling tangible product use high quality
pictures. Since the visitor cannot touch or smell the
product, it is essential to provide a top quality picture
that will look like the physical product.
(j) Include the number of days the customer will have to
wait for the order. If possible provide tracking of the
order. All these help to make the customer comfortable and
close the sale.
2. THE SUBSCRIPTION CONVERSION RATE.
This is simply calculated by dividing the number of subscriptions
(subscribers) by the total number of visitors for that
period and multiplying by 100. This gives the percentage of
visitors that subscribed.
Example, if the total number of visitors in the month is
9000 and 300 visitors subscribed. Your conversion rate would
be 300 / 9000 x 100 = 3.3 %
Getting visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or ezine
depends on where the visitor had seen the offer to
subscribe. If you are promoting a subscription page, then
your description must be enticing enough to lure surfers to
visit your page. That is, if they are coming from search
engines,ads etc. Most times people will only give their
email address when they are sure they will get some quality
stuff from your newsletter. If they are already at your site
and it is a quality site then you may require little
persuasion to get them to subscribe.
How to improve the subscription conversion rate.
(a) Make sure your privacy policy is clearly stated.
(b) Highlight the benefits of your newsletter to the
subscriber. State plainly the high points of your
newsletter. Direct your visitor to a good issue in your
archives.
(c) Provide a valuable free gift. Example a free ebook or report.
(d) If you are providing a free ebook or report, tell the
visitor what is special about your own because there are a
thousand and one free ebooks and reports on the internet so
why should yours be different. For me I usually get a high
conversion rate from surfers seeing the articles I post at
various article sites on the internet. They become
interested when they see the quality of the articles.
(e) Change the position of your subscription form. From
upper left to upper right. Then recalculate the conversion
rate. Compare the result of the two positions. Try other
positions until you get the position where conversion is highest.
3. DOWNLOAD CONVERSION RATE.
This rate shows you how many of your visitors (in percentage) are downloading your
software or ebook or whatever you have presented for
download. It is obtained by dividing the number of downloads
by the number of visitors to your download page. Example ,
you had 4000 visitors to your download page for the month
and 300 downloaded your software your conversion rate is
300 / 4000 x 100 = 7.5%
you will need to install a script at your site to monitor
the download. You can get a free download monitor script at
http://www.Focalmedia.net
How to improve your download conversion rate
1. Write a compelling copy emphasizing the benefits to your
visitors of whatever you are offering for download. Then
make a bold call to action .example, Download Now or Start Download.
2. Download should start with the first or second
click. That is do not make the download page more than two
clicks away from the introductory page.
3. Make it clear to the visitor that it is a free, trial or demo
download. You could list the features and benefits of the
download in a Popup window. That is the popup is activated
when a link is clicked and not by itself.
4. Put your download button at the top of your page with the
main menu. Alternatively, you can put it at the left hand side navigation links
5. If it is a free report in PDF make the download start when the
download link is clicked. It is some times frustrating when
PDF download opens up in the browser.
4. CONVERSION RATE FOR CLICKING ON A LINK.
Sometimes a web page is written where the main aim is for visitors to click
on a particular link. The link could be an affiliate link.,
or a link to another page or even an email link. You have to
install a script to monitor these clicks. There are many
click trackers on the internet . You can get a free click
tracker script at http://ww.focalmedia.net . The conversion
rate is the number of clicks on the link divided by the
number of visitors to the page. Example, if the total number
of visitors are 6000 and the number of clicks 1500. Then the
conversion rate will be
1500 / 6000 x 100 = 25%
How to improve this conversion rate.
1. One effective way to improve conversion rate for clicking
on a link is to put the link in the content. This is called
in content link. The text link flows with your write up.
Visitors are more likely to click on such a link than one
that is not in content.
2. The text link should clearly indicate to the visitor what
to do or what to expect after clicking on the link. You are
sure to get a more favorable response this way.
3. If the link is an affiliate link do not use the long
affiliate links provided by affiliate merchants. They are
often long and too obvious get clicked less times. Get a
script that will shorten the affiliate link you can download
a script at home business ideas. Make your links bold.
CONVERSION RATE FOR AFFILIATE SITES.
Affiliate sites need two conversion rates to succeed. One on
the affiliate's site, the other on the merchant's site. The
first is within the affiliate's control while the second is
not. So to succeed in affiliate marketing the affiliate has
to choose a merchant with good conversion rates. The
merchant should show proof of conversion rates. Or you can
calculate how many visitors you sent to the merchant's site
and how many converted (that is, resulted into sales).
Conversion on affiliate sites largely depends on traffic. As
a matter of fact, you need a lot of traffic to succeed as an
affiliate. With little traffic your conversion will be
almost nonexistent and there will not be enough data to show
a consistent conversion rate. For example you might make a
sale after 10 visitors to your site and make the next sale
after 2000 visitors. This is not consistent. The first sale
after 10 visitors might have been a motivated buyer. Which
means you were lucky. You need more than luck to succeed in
affiliate business.
How to improve conversion rates on affiliate sites.
1. Build traffic to your site.
2. Effective pre-selling.
An affiliate tries to persuade a visitor to click on an
affiliate link. He has to pre-sell the product properly.
Emphasizing the benefits of the product to the visitor.
Building on the emotions of the visitor and leading him to
click. Research has shown that most buying decisions are
influenced by emotions.
3. Get your visitor to subscribe to
your newsletter. With the traffic you are generating you do
not want to miss out on the other visitors who do not buy.
Provide an opportunity for them to subscribe so that you can
still pre-sell again and again through your ezine or newsletter.
4. Provide very few choices for your visitor.
Do no clutter your page with all kinds of offers. This makes
the visitor to be undecided and may lead to frustration.
Promote one or two product per page. Write your best review
of the product.
5. Own the product you promote. This way
you are able to give real life experiences about the product
or service. It more believable when writing reviews from
experience and this increases conversion rates.
CONCLUSION:
Calculating your conversion rates would be
meaningless if you cannot determine whether you are
improving or not. Stick to a period of test and be
consistent. Example, one month, two weeks etc. Whichever is
suitable for you. Calculate for that period. Compare with
the previous period or the next period. Make changes to your
pages and test again. By testing you will know what works.
Also if there is any industry standard conversion rate
(especially for the sales conversion rate), compare your
rate to the industry standard. By comparing you will know
whether you are doing well or not. Or you can set objectives
for yourself. Set a reasonable conversion rate that you want
to attain within a certain period and go for it.
The Author, Salihu Ibrahim, has been earning his living
online since 2000. One of his sites at
http://www.autoresponders4all.com offers completely free
autoresponder service for webmasters to put their businesses
on autopilot. He can be reached at
mailto: contact@autoresponders4all.com
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