Conversion rate obsession
The majority of Internet retailers will hopefully identify with having somewhat of an obsession with Internet marketing. Whether it be pay per click, SEO, social networking or email marketing, the goal setting is often focused too much on traffic volumes. How many Internet merchants have said to themselves “If only I could rank number one on google for “said” search term I would be sorted’ ?
The fact of the matter is that traffic, brand awareness & advertising are all going to become very diluted if conversion rates are not looked at first. A quick glance around some business forums shows that conversion rates do vary considerably. Rates of less then 1% up to around 5% seem typical, not very high on the face of it. That means that for every 100 visitors you send to your site a tiny handful will convert into a paying sale. Sticking with the maths for a moment, what if you could double your conversion rate, or even triple it? That would mean your marketing budget and effort could go twice as far, maybe even three times.
If you are already marketing your website, have a good level of daily traffic and are paying for clicks and traffic then it’s time to begin looking into making better commercial use of that traffic. If for every 100 visits you gain one sale, why not try for two instead? The first thing that many internet merchants need to do is find out what their conversion rate is. This may seem shocking to many of you but I speak to plenty of merchants who simply don’t know! Google analytics is a great tool for anaylising traffic, it will also tell you what your conversion rates are and track them over time.
How do I get more conversions from the same number of visitors?
On our quest for better conversion rates we came across this conversion rate blog which is a brilliant source of information. The blog is run by The Conversion Rate Experts who will get involved with merchants with a view to improving their conversions. You don’t need to pay these guys any money to begin improving your conversion rates, many improvements can be made just by putting into action some of the methods they kindly publish on their blog and website.
After reading their blog we began going through our website with a fine tooth comb to try and tighten up weak spots, remove any nuke buttons and make life easier for our customers. The results so far? A 0.8% improvement in our conversion rate!
What did you do to actually improve the conversions?
The first thing we did was to set up a conversion ‘goal’ in our google analytics account. The goals tool is really useful and quite exciting if you are as interested in conversion rates as we are. It allows you to see how many visitors reach each stage of the checkout process, where they most commonly leave, and where they go afterwards. If you haven’t already set goals in your anayltics then do it, I guarantee you will find the results interesting.
We used this data to see common leakage points within our checkout system and to identify where people were ditching their shopping carts and going elsewhere. This allowed us to target any improvements to the weak areas. The end result was a slicker, easier and faster checkout system on our website which in turn brought in more sales.
The second thing we did was to remove all nuke buttons. Nuke buttons are mentioned in the conversion rate blog, they are buttons on your site that simply nuke a transaction before it’s had a chance to flourish into a full blown order. A common nuke button is ‘empty cart’ and amazingly is present on a great number of e-commerce websites. Another great example is ‘clear form’ one of those buttons that has been around for as long as you or I can remember but serves little purpose apart from making people go bananas when they hit it by accident. The general rule of thumb is that if a button isn’t there to help your visitor complete their purchase goal, then it shouldn’t be there in the first place.
There are hosts of other techniques that you can use to improve conversions on your website. Another thing we did was to introduce a colour coded checkout system whereby the customer needs to contine clicking the ‘green button’ in order to proceed. Graphically it works very well and gives our customer a clear picture of where they need to click next, even if they can’t be bothered to read the online instructions (we can all be guilty of this from time to time).
To conclude
So there you have it! If you hadn’t been thinking about conversion rates before you should be now. They are simply too important to overlook and if optimised correctly will reward your internet marketing work many times over. Good luck and happy selling!