Notes

ow Do I Improve My SITE Conversion Rate? Part 1
Question 1.

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

What you're talking about here are two various ways to measure your website. "Read More Here" is what I would call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I call such 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" might get a worse click-through rate than "Click here to find out how to win a month's way to obtain vintage wine." So by improving this click on through, you get the individual browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. Using this method, you enhance your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get you to definitely register or sign up to win a month's supply of vintage wine. Micro conversions can 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 need them to do. In my own example, it would be registering to win wine, but it could be sign up to a newsletter, download an audio file, purchase a product, sell a service or whatever, nonetheless it should reflect what your website's business objective is.

Question 2.

What strategies can you suggest when there is no "online" conversion possible? I need them to call me for more info rmation, to learn more and to eventually provide them with a proposal.

There is absolutely no such thing as "no online conversion". You are considering leads who'll eventually phone you however the visitor may be the one with the power. If you don't give your visitors a reason to let you continue steadily to have a dialog with them, they won't. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for instance, you require a name, email and telephone number from your visitor so that he can then get useful information from you in the form of a free report or audio file, you do a couple of things. First, you qualify visitors as a person who is thinking about your services, and second, you obtain permission to contact him/her again. It is advisable to build into your site a powerful reason behind your visitors to provide you with permission to email or talk to them instead of expect someone to pick up the phone. Available for you, you say they have to ring you to learn more. Put what they have to learn into some form that they can opt directly into get, for instance 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 by giving you their email address or phone number in order to know more about your offering. People visit a website to obtain information, so give them the means to get it.

Question 3.

What if the product you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How do you get a person who is browsing the Internet 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 competition, then you get noticed. Why is you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your own competition? A USP makes a massive difference to conversions. get more info improved subscriptions by 11% monthly for six months by differentiating ourselves. The next point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. The thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are looking for information. So give these potential customers what they want by means of education. If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your own website, they will remember you over your rivals.

Question 4.

How do you obtain the address, phone number and name of who owns any company that you're trying to get touching to see should they would be thinking about what you sell?

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

Question 5.

What should one look for in the web logs to determine conversions?

Web log files are a problem since 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 must filter from log files the info that isn't relevant to visitors. Then you're looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. After you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate amount of visitors coming to your website, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as you browser, but it's as close as you can get with log files. You then divide the quantity of people who complete the conversion action by the full 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 makes your job easier.

Question 6.

What factors have the biggest effect on conversions on my site?

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

Differentiation is the first step in the process. You need to discover a way to stick out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue during 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 will need to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that audience.

Relevance is hugely important, too. If you're owning 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 and your link appears, on clicking through they must be taken up to the page on your site talking all about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn't land at the house page of one's website that includes a small connect to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other styles of wine on the market.

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 yourself a good measurement system, learn what it's about, and test thoroughly your changes.

Finally and most importantly trust. You can't sell anything if your audience doesn't trust you. It is possible to help them to trust you by prominently displaying your online 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 previously 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 website with articles and 'how to sections' or newsletters and instill trust as time passes. In short, your prospect must trust one to part with his / her money.

What's next?

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

Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. You can get a free of charge copy of his e-book delivered to you upon subscription to the Chronicles web site
Here's my website: http://tupalo.com/en/users/4157855