Notes

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

What do you mean by conversion? Can you mean getting you to definitely 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 different ways to measure your site. "Read More Here" is what I'd call a variable inside your conversion rate. I call such variables "Micro Conversions" because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a complete 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 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 improve your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get someone to register or sign up to win a month's supply of 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 own example, it might 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, but 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 need them to call me for more information, to learn more and to eventually give them a proposal.

There is absolutely 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. If you don't give your visitors grounds to let you continue to have a dialog with them, they won't. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for example, you ask for a name, email 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 a couple of things. First, you qualify visitors as a person who is thinking about your services, and second, you get permission to get hold of him/her again. You need to build into your website a powerful reason behind your visitors to give you permission to email or speak to them instead of expect someone to grab the phone. In your case, 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. You then have a conversion rate that is the percentage of individuals who give you permission to continue the dialog using them by giving you their email or phone number in order to find out more on your offering. Online Backup Service for a website to obtain information, so give them the means to get it.

Question 3.

What if the product you sell can be sold by several others on other websites? How will you get somebody who is browsing the Internet to notice your website and want to order from you?

In offline marketing, an effective tactic is differentiation. It's no different online. If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. Why is you different (definitely not better, just different) from your own competition? A USP makes an enormous difference to conversion rates. We improved subscriptions by 11% monthly for half a year by differentiating ourselves. The second point is your site should be useful to your visitor. The one thing that people online have as a common factor is that whenever they browse they're 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'll remember you over your competition.

Question 4.

How do you obtain the address, phone number and name of the owner of any company that you're trying to get touching to see if they would be interested in what you sell?

You should get permission from the visitor to get that information. It can not be done with any tracking tools available. There exists a very good reason for this and it's called privacy. If you or I went online and may have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it may be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on christmas in a faraway land for the next few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. The person who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you as long as 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 search for in the web logs to determine conversions?

Web log files certainly are a problem since 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 it is advisable to filter out from log files the info that isn't relevant to visitors. Then you're looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate amount of visitors coming to your website, 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 is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesn't use logs like IRIS Metrics or log software that works out the filtering like Web Trends, it creates your job much easier.

Question 6.

What factors have the biggest effect 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.

Differentiation is the first rung on the ladder in the process. You need to find 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 need to smack your market between the eyes. You must find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that 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 and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken up to the page on your site talking about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn't land at the house page of one's website which has 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 conversions. 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 & 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 truth that you utilize SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that a huge selection of satisfied customers have already bought from your own store, that you make it very easy to get contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your site with articles and 'how to sections' or newsletters and instill trust as time passes. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.

What's next?

In part two of the series, we'll be looking at measurement software tools, the professionals and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversions, why it helps to track visitor activity using the software which 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 may get a free copy of his e-book delivered to you upon subscription to the Chronicles internet site
Here's my website: https://kirkendalleffect.com/what-to-anticipate-in-an-online-backup-services/