Notes

ow Do I Improve My INTERNET 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 " read more here" or actually selling something or service?

What you're discussing here are two various ways to measure your website. "Read More Here" is what I would call a variable inside your conversion rate. I call these types of variables "Micro Conversions" because they're all small (microscopic even) steps toward a full conversion. A micro conversion is something that you should ensure that you measure. "Read More Here" might get a worse click-through rate than "Just click here to find out how exactly to win a month's way to obtain 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 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 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 would like them to do. In my own example, it might be registering to win wine, but it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, purchase a product, sell something or whatever, nonetheless it should reflect what your website's business objective is.

Question 2.

What strategies would you suggest when there is no "online" conversion possible? I want them to call me for more information, to learn more and 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 but the visitor may be the one with the energy. Unless you give your visitors grounds to let you continue steadily to have a dialog using 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 own visitor so that he is able to then get useful information from you by means of a free report or audio file, you do two things. First, you qualify visitors as someone who is interested in your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. You must build into your website 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 find out more. Put what they have to learn into some form that they can opt in to get, for instance a white paper, report or audio file. Then you have a conversion rate that is the percentage of people who give you permission to continue the dialog with them giving you their email or phone number so that they can find out more on your offering. People go to a website to get information, so provide them with the means to obtain it.

Question 3.

What if the product you sell can be sold by several others on other websites? How would you get somebody who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want 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 be seen. Why is you different (definitely not better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes an enormous difference to conversions. get more info improved subscriptions by 11% monthly for six months 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 when they browse they are searching for information. So give these potential customers what they want in the form of education. If your potential prospects become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your own website, they will remember you over your competition.

Question 4.

How do you obtain the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company you are trying to get touching to see should they would be thinking about what you sell?

You have to get permission from visitors to get that information. It can not be finished with any tracking tools available. There exists a very good reason for this and it's really called privacy. In the event that you or I went online and may have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine in the event that you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on christmas in a faraway land for another few weeks as well as your personal information could possibly be gathered. The person 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 one hope it stays that way.

Question 5.

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

Web log files certainly are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your site's pages from search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you should filter from log files the info that isn't highly 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% due to proxy servers recording multiple visitors as one browser, but it's as close as you can get with log files. You then divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That's your conversion rate. If you can get software it 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 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 rung on the ladder in the process. You need to discover a way to stick out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue throughout your entire website's strategy.

Then in your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your market between the eyes. You should find out just what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of this audience.

Relevance is hugely important, too. If you are owning a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those keywords and finding your site. 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 house page of your website which has a small connect to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine on the market.

Measuring and experimenting is then your 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 your changes.

Finally & 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 privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the point that you utilize SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that a huge selection of satisfied customers have previously bought from your store, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address and also support via email. You can educate via your site with articles and 'how to sections' or newsletters and instill trust over time. In a nutshell, your prospect must trust you to part with their 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 conversions, why it can help to track visitor activity utilizing the software that is available, and what you ought to 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 internet site
Here's my website: https://www.folkd.com/submit/kirkendalleffect.com/what-to-anticipate-in-an-online-backup-services//