Jay LeonardHave you ever listened to marketers talk about their websites? The misguided talk about their traffic. The savvy ones talk about what happens to their traffic.
In reality, traffic is only the beginning. It’s the easy part. The hard part—and the real leverage in your marketing model—is the rate at which you convert traffic to qualified leads or sales. Improving your site conversion is the single most important lever you can pull to increase your customers.
Below are six tips to enhance your website conversion.
- Speed up your site. Slow page load times are the number one reason for poor conversion rates. Optimize your images, get on a different hosting server or do whatever you need to do to make the pages pop. Page load time is the silent killer of visitor interest.
- Make the landing pages relevant to the visitor. If you brought the visitor in through search marketing, make the headline relate to the keyword. If visitors came from a direct mail piece, mirror the offer you mailed. Relevancy tells visitors they’re on the right page and should read more.
- Use your landing pages to move the prospect to the next stage. Explain benefits clearly. Make an offer to act now. Write copy that shows they’ll miss out if they leave. In other words…sell.
- If you have an ecommerce site, use offers and upsells throughout the shopping cart. Act as if your pages are an end-cap display and show them the “new” price or the free shipping.
- Give the user multiple ways to respond—form, phone, chat, email. If they don’t convert, give them extra value and a reason to at least join your mailing list for future offers or information.
- Measure and test. Test and measure. The only way you’ll know how many fields to put on your form is to test them. Testing is easy and cheap and can easily get you 20 to 100 percent more conversions.
Every visitor to your site wants something. Satisfy that and you’ll convert more. And the more you convert, the more you make!
Author: Ken Robbins is president and founder of Response Mine Interactive (RMI), an award-winning digital agency that helps companies acquire more customers using direct response interactive marketing. Since 2001, RMI has generated billions of dollars in revenue for leading brands in the retail, healthcare, travel, home services and business channels.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
Learn how to publish your content on B2C
Join our Telegram channel to stay up to date on breaking news coverage
Add B2C to your Google News Feed
I agree highly with point 6. Get you funnel in a visual way and start optimizing using a/b or multivariate and measure the results in you funnel.
You can do it with free tools like Google Web Optimizer but I recommend http://www.reedge.com (its free – and yes I work there).
Testing all you changes can indeed bring 100% more conversion over a period less then 6 months. So its 30 minutes per week and super results.