Conversions
11th June 2010 at 3:56 pm with no responses
Summary: Too many websites focus on driving traffic to their site, ignoring what happens to their visitors once they get there. Conversions = sales – it’s time to stop focusing soley on traffic.
The word is conversions – you need to convert your visitor, which means getting them to carry out whatever action you’re aiming for. A sign up to a mailing list .. an email enquiry .. an order .. a sale .. whatever a conversion means for you.
What can you do to improve conversions on your site?
- Get familiar with Conversion Rate Optimisation. This is the process of testing which combination of elements (text, images, etc) and offers on your pages convert best. The positioning of elements (for example, a product image) should also be tested as this may affect your visitors’ behaviour.
- Segment your visitors. Make sure you only segment them where the differences between them are relevant. So for example if, when purchasing your product, what’s important to people in Lincoln is the same as what’s important to people in Derby, there’s no need to segment Derby and Lincoln. If, however, different factors influence girls and boys in their choice to buy your product, you do need to segment girls and boys.
- Segment new and returning visitors – you’d expect them to act differently on your site and you should examine the behaviour of each differently.
- Set up funnels using Google analytics (these help you identify where people are exiting your site). Set up different profiles on analytics to represent the segments you’ve identified. You can then look at the funnels for each segment.
- Look at different conversion goals – for example, ‘add to basket’ is a different conversion goal to clicking ‘checkout’ and different still from making the payment. Tracking where people get to can help you identify problems.
What other factors can influence your conversion rates? Consider the following:
- Providing the ability to zoom in on a product (if appropriate)
- Providing company and product reviews
- Using attractive buy now/add to bag buttons
- Ensuring you have sufficient calls to action (‘order now!’ ‘buy now’ ’sign up now’) but not too many
- Using cross selling and upsells, bundled pricing (see Amazon for good examples – “Frequently bought together …. price for all three: £24.98)
- Providing delivery info – next to the product (for example, take a leaf out of Amazon’s book: “Want guaranteed delivery by Saturday, June 12? Order it in the next 4 hours and 57 minutes, and choose Express delivery at checkout”).
- Offering free postage and packing
- Giving lists of features and related benefits
- Offering a number of product images
- Competitive pricing
- Offering good product descriptions with specifications
- Showing stock availability
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