Converting more visitors to customers is the art of page optimisation. The article covers what to think about to achieve maximum conversion rates. The industry standard rates are quoted for comparison.
Page Optimisation: Convert visitors to customers
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f you've read through the other
articles on this site you should be in a position
where you web site has enough content, driven at
the right keywords to generate traffic. The next
step is to convert visitors into people who
purchase your product or service.
There are two main goals of somebody visiting your business site.
Either you want them to buy your product now (typical of an affordable, shippable
product), or you want them to register for a follow up call (typical for a high end
product or expensive information)
it is essential to use an e-commerce
solution for selling your products. Giving the option to purchase via
credit card or debit card will allow full tracking of your ROI.
A registration form where an employee needs to
call the prospect back has the advantage that you will be able to build up your
prospect list much quicker as the visitor doesn't have to pay anything to make contact.
"most conversion rates hover between 1% and 3% of visitors"
If this is the first article on conversion rates that you've read, it may be surprising to learn that most conversion rates for sales hover between 1% and 3% of visitors. It really is that low!
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For registrations only, the target is 20% of all visitors. The average is 5%. 20% is not easy to achieve but as with selling, the landing page (the first page they arive at) must be really specific to the search, using the search term they used, and grabbing their attention that this product is very relevant in the pages headline.
Here are my findings from reading many articles on conversion rates:-
Newsletters with pictorial links (if html) performed best, standard links 2nd. Newsletters should be sent out regularly. If nothing else it keeps your company name on your subscribers minds.
Advertising can be extremely effective, as long as it doesn't look like a regular ad! Text-tower ad placements are currently ok as are these rich content adverts apparently (the ones that invade your screen), although I can't stand them. A front-page placement also pulls in top sales conversion rates.
Plain text Links from product listings, articles, product reviews and sample chapters again yield high conversion rates. It is worth thinking carefully about your content and strategic link placement as a marketing strategy. A periodic look at your log files should reveal all.
