Many people make the mistake of trying to increase their sales by trying to get more and more people to come to their website. That might work, to an extent, but it’s a rather wasteful way of increasing your sales. There are only so many people out there that are interested in your product, and if you focus on just increasing your traffic then you will eventually reach the stage where the people that are coming to your site are not people that care about your product. Why not focus on addressing the reasons that your current visitors aren’t buying?
The Secret to Improving Your Conversion Rate
You might find this hard to believe, but there’s one simple change that you could make to how you run your website that will make a huge difference to your conversion rate. That change is the key to everything that conversion rate experts do when they help online business owners improve their sales. What’s the secret? Assume nothing, and test everything.
You might think that you’re losing visitors because your sales copy isn’t convincing enough, or because your prices are too high – but have you actually looked at your analytics recently? Do you use analytics at all? If not, the first thing any conversion rates experts would tell you is to start logging everything, right now! You might find that you’re losing people on page two of the checkout process – which means that they are willing to buy, but something is putting them off. Perhaps the page doesn’t work properly. Perhaps some text on the page leaves them concerned about the security of the site, or perhaps the checkout process takes too long. Once you’ve figured out where you’re losing your customers, you can start thinking about why.
Knowing where to look
The above one simple rule is only simple if you know where to look, and what questions to ask. Fortunately, that’s what conversion rate experts are there for. You can achieve a lot by scouring your own stats file and looking at the pages that lose the most people, but if you hit a brick wall, there are experts out there that can help you out.
Avoiding the Scammers
Conversion rate optimization is not an exact science. You can guess what people will do based on previous experience and common usage patterns, but at the end of the day, people are still people, with their own desires and motivations. Before you hire a company to optimize your website, ask to see examples of what they’ve done for other sites, and ask them for thoughts on what they can do for yours. Avoid companies that make excessive sounding, or “too good to be true” claims. What you’re looking for is a balanced analysis backed up with a proven track record, and honest, open techniques. If the company is secretive, or promises amazing instant results, they could be using black hat techniques that might damage your businesses reputation in the long term.
Author: Written by Amy Fowler of Boom Online Marketing; conversion rate experts who also specialise in SEO, PPC and social media marketing.
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Amy – excellent article. You have to learn what your users are up to. To your #1 trick I would add: observer real users in the real world. Sure – looking at the stats, analytics, log files are all important, but it’s not enough. Watching real people can take all that data into the realm of actual user behavior. See: http://youtu.be/kIWtOCFkSss