Anybody with a business website will have objectives and goals. Ultimately you will want your visitors to either purchase, subscribe, register, refer, particpate, recall your brand, be loyal or something along those lines. You’ve got their attention as they’re already at your site but now you have to create the interest and desire to convert them into whatever you want them to be i.e. a customer or a sales lead for example.

Conversion is a complex, multi-faceted process whereby the design, content and structure of your website persuade prospects to take the action you want them to take. Your conversion rate is a measure of your ability to persuade your prospects to take that action. It is a measure of both your website’s effectiveness and the satisfaction of your customers.

Marketing plays an important role in attracting people to your website but it is important to remember that this is not sales, it may create the desire and pave the way to the sale but marketing alone will not close the sale for you. I’ve witnessed too many people see the solution to not achieving their goals as to simply spend more on their marketing and it is a complete waste of time and money. Instead they need to be addressing the conversion rate of the traffic they already get and improving on the sales process. So whilst it is important that your marketing and sales are in harmony it is also improtant to address them separately and not to confuse them as the same thing…

The average conversion rates for websites converting visitors into buyers is less than 2 percent and yet general statiistics claim that 70% of people shopping online are hoping to buy…doesn’t quite relate does it. So based on the conversion average if you have 100 visitors you will convert approximately 2 of them (this is on the basis that you did all of the necessary market, customer and competitve research at the start to ascertain whether you actually had a business in the first place) but imagine if you could better understand your visitor behaviour to make enhancements to your site that double that or maybe even treble it…what would that mean to your bottom line?

Whilst there are some standard practices and principles for increasing conversion rates it is also really important to understand the behaviour of your own very specific visitors as well. You might look to do this by beta testing your site or through onsite surveys and post sale questionaires, there are lots of ways but if you’re on a tighter budget a good web analytics tool (Google Analytics does it for me) can tell you an awful lot about where people are entering your site, what they are doing whilst there and at which point they are dropping off. Armed with this information you will often be able to see patterns forming that will point to navigation, content or userability issues that can be readily addressed often with minimal expense.

I can’t stress the importance of understanding the behavioural patterns of your exisitng users and to gain insight to what they are doing on your site rather than just looking to throw more money at your marketing and trying to increase your traffic as the reality is you will only just fail harder and be poorer in the process!

Once you gain a better understanding of your visitors behaviour you can look more closely at the relationship between that and the professional sales process. There are some proven standard steps in the professional online sales process that can be taken to help increase your conversion rate and I’ll touch on a few of these in my next post.

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