Posts Tagged ‘conversion’
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www.rypmarketing.com/conversion-optimization.html
Posted on May 19th, 2012 by admin
We Can Help You Get More Leads & Sales From Your Existing Website Traffic
Results We Have Achieved:
Our conversion optimization services can help improve your website conversion rate by 300% or more! (Even if your site already has a “good” conversion rate!)
The perceived worth of the services you offer can be increased by making your company appear bigger. 1300 Number – Contact Us are the perfect way of taking your local business to the national stage.
Getting tons of traffic to your website is great, but getting tons of conversions and profits is way better! That is exactly what conversion optimization is all about – maximizing the number of your website visitors that convert to sales/leads. More leads and sales, of course, mean more profits.
Why your website needs conversion optimization:
More Leads/Sales – a higher conversion rate means that you get more sales and leads from your existing website traffic. Think about it…that means you can get more sales without spending one cent more on advertising!
Decreased Cost – raising your conversion rate means you spend less advertising money for each lead or sale you get.
More Profit – more leads or sales and decreased costs add up to more profits! Whether you have an ecommerce site, landing page for lead generation, or other type of website, improved conversions means increased profits.
5 Ways RYP Marketing Can Help Raise Your Website Conversion Rate:
Improve your website usability. If your ecommerce website is not easy to use, visitors will either be unable to purchase, may purchase less, or they may leave your website in frustration to buy from your competitor. We can help make your website intuitive and easy-to-use for your website visitors, resulting in more conversions and higher profits for you.
Improve your sales copy. If your website copy does not clearly and compellingly present the benefits of your company/products/services, then your site visitors will be unmotivated, unconvinced, and unlikely to convert. We can craft compelling sales copy for your website that will encourage and entice your site visitors to convert.
Tweak your conversion funnel. Every single step that your website visitors take, from when they enter your website to when they make a purchase or submit a lead form, is important. We can analyze your conversion funnel and make improvements to increase conversion rate.
Multi-variate testing. The most sure-fire way to increase conversion rates is to religiously test every important element in your conversion funnel – everything from headlines to buttons to page layout. RYP Marketing can setup and manage a multi-variate split-testing campaign for your website that will continually work to improve your website conversion rate.
Improve website design. RYP Marketing’s expert designers can work to improve your site design to better communicate your message to your site visitors.
How much does it cost?
Our conversion optimization packages (including analysis, strategy, copywriting, design, and split test implementation) start at $1,000 for individual landing pages and $2,000 for websites. Contact us using the form below for a custom quote.
Conversion Optimization Case Study:
www.taigoji.com
This weight loss ecommerce site had a 1.06% sale conversion rate before we started conversion optimization. We implemented improved page elements, alternate sales copy, and split tested headlines and other important page elements. The website currently boasts a 3.08% sale conversion rate and is much more profitable than it was when we started! This is what we call successful marketing – marketing that raises your profits!
Get started with conversion optimization and start increasing your profits. Call us at 888-293-5649 or fill out the quote request form below.
Request a quote
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Website Conversion Rate Optimization Services | Increase …
Posted on May 19th, 2012 by admin
We Can Help You Get More Leads & Sales From Your Existing Website Traffic
Results We Have Achieved:
Our conversion optimization services can help improve your website conversion rate by 300% or more! (Even if your site already has a “good” conversion rate!)
The perceived worth of the services you offer can be increased by making your company appear bigger. 1300 Number – Contact Us are the perfect way of taking your home company to the national stage.
Getting tons of traffic to your website is great, but getting tons of conversions and profits is way better! That is exactly what conversion optimization is all about – maximizing the number of your website visitors that convert to sales/leads. More leads and sales, of course, mean more profits.
Why your website needs conversion optimization:
More Leads/Sales – a higher conversion rate means that you get more sales and leads from your existing website traffic. Think about it…that means you can get more sales without spending one cent more on advertising!
Decreased Cost – raising your conversion rate means you spend less advertising money for each lead or sale you get.
More Profit – more leads or sales and decreased costs add up to more profits! Whether you have an ecommerce site, landing page for lead generation, or other type of website, improved conversions means increased profits.
5 Ways RYP Marketing Can Help Raise Your Website Conversion Rate:
Improve your website usability. If your ecommerce website is not easy to use, visitors will either be unable to purchase, may purchase less, or they may leave your website in frustration to buy from your competitor. We can help make your website intuitive and easy-to-use for your website visitors, resulting in more conversions and higher profits for you.
Improve your sales copy. If your website copy does not clearly and compellingly present the benefits of your company/products/services, then your site visitors will be unmotivated, unconvinced, and unlikely to convert. We can craft compelling sales copy for your website that will encourage and entice your site visitors to convert.
Tweak your conversion funnel. Every single step that your website visitors take, from when they enter your website to when they make a purchase or submit a lead form, is important. We can analyze your conversion funnel and make improvements to increase conversion rate.
Multi-variate testing. The most sure-fire way to increase conversion rates is to religiously test every important element in your conversion funnel – everything from headlines to buttons to page layout. RYP Marketing can setup and manage a multi-variate split-testing campaign for your website that will continually work to improve your website conversion rate.
Improve website design. RYP Marketing’s expert designers can work to improve your site design to better communicate your message to your site visitors.
How much does it cost?
Our conversion optimization packages (including analysis, strategy, copywriting, design, and split test implementation) start at $1,000 for individual landing pages and $2,000 for websites. Contact us using the form below for a custom quote.
Conversion Optimization Case Study:
www.taigoji.com
This weight loss ecommerce site had a 1.06% sale conversion rate before we started conversion optimization. We implemented improved page elements, alternate sales copy, and split tested headlines and other important page elements. The website currently boasts a 3.08% sale conversion rate and is much more profitable than it was when we started! This is what we call successful marketing – marketing that raises your profits!
Get started with conversion optimization and start increasing your profits. Call us at 888-293-5649 or fill out the quote request form below.
Request a quote
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Increase Sales of Your Online Business Traffic Generation and …
Posted on February 27th, 2012 by admin
website promotion
On Wall Street, financial investors speak of CEOs improving their companies top line by increasing sales volume or their bottom line by reducing their expenses to expand the margins from their current sales volume.
For online businesses a similar top line bottom line approach should be taken by business owners determining where to direct their improvement efforts.
Do you have an option for your clients to contact you for FREE using 1300 number and 1800 number signup? 1800 numbers are a toll free services inside Australia.
Defining Top-Line versus Bottom-Line
An online business improves its top line by increasing the number of unique visitors to its website or its bottom line by increasing its visitor-to-sale or visitor-to-lead conversion rates.
Let me illustrate.
After an online business establishes its performance metrics, it is able to predict with confidence the expected results from its visitor traffic. For example, an online businesss performance metrics may show that for every 1,000 visitors received, 15 sales are completed a sales conversion rate of 1.5 percent.
With this understanding, the business can increase its top line growth by driving more visitors to its website. For example, if the business invests money in traffic generation efforts to increase visitor traffic from 1,000 to 10,000, 150 sales will be achieved from the 1.5 percent sales conversion rate a ten times growth rate.
Top-Line Improvements Focuses on Traffic Generation
What are traffic generation efforts?
In brief, traffic generation efforts are ways an online business attracts visitors to its website. They may include online efforts such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click search engines, affiliate marketing, email campaigns, and media or offline ones such as direct mail, television, radio, and public relations.
On the other hand, the business may decide to spend its money on improving its bottom line by concentrating efforts on website conversion strategies.
For example, if the above online business invests money in website conversion strategies to increase its sales conversion rate from 1.5 percent to 2 percent, then for the same 1,000 visitors, sales will increase from 15 to 20 a 25 percent increase.
Bottom-Line Increases Focus on Website Conversion Strategies
So what are website conversion strategies?
Web site conversion strategies are website design changes that connect with your visitor’s wants and persuade them to take action to achieve your goals as well as theirs. There are endless strategies to increase your bottom line, although some have greater significance than others.
Depending on your type of online business, different strategies may achieve greater results for your website and offer greater relevancy for your visitors.
If you manage a consumer or business product website, then website conversion strategies that focus on reducing shopping cart abandonment may provide the greatest website conversion improvement. While a service businesss lead generation website will find improvement from website conversion strategies focused on contact us form completion.
On the next page, Kevin Gold provides details on how to implement website conversion strategies and how to decide whether focusing on traffic generation or website conversion strategies will increase your online business’s sales the most. Click to continue reading.
Previous
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Converting Website Visitors to Sales – Website Conversion …
Posted on February 20th, 2012 by admin
conversion rates
Increasing Traffic is Great, But It’s Not Everything
If you operate a website to market your home business, to conduct an online business to generate revenues from affiliates or ad programs like Google AdSense , to sell eBooks or to sell other merchandise through on online store, you’ve probably already discovered that there are search engine marketing techniques, such as SEO and pay per click advertising like Google AdWords as well as other website promotion techniques to drive traffic to your website.
Do you have the ability for your to contact you for FREE using 1300 number and 1800 number signup? 1800 numbers are a toll free services inside Australia.
But what happens once the traffic starts building and people come to your website? Are you converting them to paying customers? It’s one thing to get traffic coming into your site, but if no one wants to buy what you’re selling, your business isn’t going to get anywhere.
The Other Success Factor – Conversion Optimization
Conversion optimization is the process of maximizing the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action (this percentage is known as your conversion rate). If you’re not doing so already, you should be tracking your conversion rates. For pay per click advertisers, this is the percentage of people who clicked your ad and went to your website and then took an additional action – such as completed and submitted a contact form, an estimate request, or took some other action that you can measure to see if your ads are successful.
Calculating Your Conversion Rate
For pay per click ads, you can calculate your conversion rate as follows:
Where:
/ = Divided by
x = Multiplied by
[blockquote shade=N] Number of people taking the desired action / Number of people clicking your ad x 100 = Conversion Rate Pct.
For online store merchants, a simplified calculation for your conversion rate might be:
[blockquote shade=N]Number of orders / Number of visitors x 100 = Conversion Rate Pct.
The reason that improving your conversion rate is so important is that you can increase your sales with the same amount of traffic just by boosting your conversion rate. As you traffic grows – and it should grow naturally over time provided you manage your website properly – your earnings will multiply so that if you can double your conversion rate and double your traffic, your earnings should increase four-fold, all other things being equal.
9 Tips for Increasing Your Conversion Rates
Following are 9 tips you can use to start improving your conversion rates and converting Web site visitors to cash. This tips are ideal for online stores, but most will also be quite useful for other types of websites for improving conversions. Most are very inexpensive ideas, especially compared to the cost of driving additional traffic to your site or paying for advertising. Keep in mind, too, that increasing your conversion rate will result in a greater return on investment (ROI) for your website promotion expenses you use to increase your traffic.
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How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1
Posted on September 10th, 2011 by admin
How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1
by Steve Jackson
In a recent teleconference, I was asked a number of questions about specific problems people were having and what I would do if I were in their position. This is the first article in a three part series that we’ll publish over the next few weeks. It will answer specific queries from the teleconference, in the belief that the answers will also help you to solve some of your issues.
The perceived worth of the services you offer can be increased by chaging the perception of your company appear bigger. 1300 Number – Contact Us are the perfect way of taking your home company to the national stage.
Question 1. What do you mean by conversion? Do you mean getting someone to answer the simplest call to action such as “read more here” or actually selling a product or service?
What you’re talking about here are two different ways to measure your website. “Read More Here” is what I would call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I call these kinds of variables “Micro Conversions” because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a full conversion. A micro conversion is something that you should test and measure. “Read More Here” might get a worse click-through rate than “Click here to find out how to win a month’s supply of vintage wine.” So by improving this click through, you get the person browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. By doing this, you improve your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get someone to register or subscribe to win a month’s supply of vintage wine. Micro conversions can be tracked by measuring the click through of links, or the read time for content, or the bounce rate for headlines and copy. Full conversion is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do. In my example, it would be registering to win wine, but it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, buy a product, sell a service or whatever, but it should reflect what your website’s business objective is.
Question 2. What strategies would you suggest when there is no “online” conversion possible? I need them to call me for more info, to learn more and to eventually give them a proposal.
There is no such thing as “no online conversion”. You’re looking for leads who will eventually phone you but the visitor is the one with the power. If you don’t give your visitors a reason to let you continue to have a dialog with them, then they won’t. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for instance, you ask for a name, email address and telephone number from your visitor so that he can then get useful information from you in the form of a free report or audio file, you do two things. First, you qualify the visitor as someone who is interested in your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. You need to build into your website a powerful reason for your visitors to give you permission to email or talk to them rather than expect someone to pick up the phone. In your case, you say they need to ring you to learn more. Put what they need to learn into some form that they can opt in to get, such as a white paper, report or audio file. Then you have a conversion rate that is the percentage of people who give you permission to continue the dialog with them by giving you their email address or phone number so that they can learn more about your offering. People visit a website to get information, so give them the means to get it.
Question 3. What if the product you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How do you get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want to order from you?
In offline marketing, a successful tactic is differentiation. It’s no different online. If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes an enormous difference to conversion rates. We improved subscriptions by 11% per month for six months by differentiating ourselves. The second point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. The one thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are looking for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of education. If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your website, they will remember you over your competition.
Question 4. How do you get the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company that you’re trying to get in touch with to see if they would be interested in what you sell?
You need to get permission from the visitor to get that information. It can’t be done with any tracking tools available. There is a very good reason for this and it’s called privacy. If you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on holiday in a faraway land for the next few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. The person who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you while you’re away. It’s OK to track browser behavior because no personal details are ever tracked. I for one hope it stays that way.
Question 5. What should one look for in the web logs to determine conversion rates?
Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your site’s pages from search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you need to filter out from log files the information that isn’t relevant to visitors. Then you’re looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate number of visitors coming to your site, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as one browser, but it’s as close as you can get with log files. Then you divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesn’t use logs like IRIS METRICS or log software that works out the filtering like Web Trends, it makes your job much easier.
Question 6. What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my web site?
The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site’s relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, and most importantly trust.
Differentiation is the first step in the process. You must find a way to stand out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue throughout your entire website’s strategy.
Then in your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes. You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that audience.
Relevance is hugely important, too. If you’re running a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those keywords and finding your website. So if the audience types “Red Vintage Wine” into Overture and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to the page on your site talking all about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn’t land at the home page of your website which has a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine for sale. Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You can’t improve conversion without measurement unless you’re making educated guesses or you’re just plain lucky. So get a good measurement system, learn what it’s all about, and test your changes. Finally and most importantly trust. You can’t sell anything if your audience doesn’t trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the fact that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that hundreds of satisfied customers have already bought from your store, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your website with articles and ‘how to sections’ or newsletters and instill trust over time. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.
What’s next?
In part two of this series , we’ll be looking at measurement software tools, the pros and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversion rates, why it helps to track visitor activity using the software which is available, and what you should test and tweak to improve conversion rates.
Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. Visit his web site at http://www.conversionchronicles.com for more information.
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How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1
Posted on September 1st, 2011 by admin
How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1
by Steve Jackson
In a recent teleconference, I was asked a number of questions about specific problems people were having and what I would do if I were in their position. This is the first article in a three part series that we’ll publish over the next few weeks. It will answer specific queries from the teleconference, in the belief that the answers will also help you to solve some of your issues.
The perceived value of the services you offer can be increased by making your company appear bigger. 1300 Number – Contact Us are the perfect way of taking your home company to the international stage.
Question 1. What do you mean by conversion? Do you mean getting someone to answer the simplest call to action such as “read more here” or actually selling a product or service?
What you’re talking about here are two different ways to measure your website. “Read More Here” is what I would call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I call these kinds of variables “Micro Conversions” because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a full conversion. A micro conversion is something that you should test and measure. “Read More Here” might get a worse click-through rate than “Click here to find out how to win a month’s supply of vintage wine.” So by improving this click through, you get the person browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. By doing this, you improve your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get someone to register or subscribe to win a month’s supply of vintage wine. Micro conversions can be tracked by measuring the click through of links, or the read time for content, or the bounce rate for headlines and copy. Full conversion is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do. In my example, it would be registering to win wine, but it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, buy a product, sell a service or whatever, but it should reflect what your website’s business objective is.
Question 2. What strategies would you suggest when there is no “online” conversion possible? I need them to call me for more info, to learn more and to eventually give them a proposal.
There is no such thing as “no online conversion”. You’re looking for leads who will eventually phone you but the visitor is the one with the power. If you don’t give your visitors a reason to let you continue to have a dialog with them, then they won’t. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for instance, you ask for a name, email address and telephone number from your visitor so that he can then get useful information from you in the form of a free report or audio file, you do two things. First, you qualify the visitor as someone who is interested in your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. You need to build into your website a powerful reason for your visitors to give you permission to email or talk to them rather than expect someone to pick up the phone. In your case, you say they need to ring you to learn more. Put what they need to learn into some form that they can opt in to get, such as a white paper, report or audio file. Then you have a conversion rate that is the percentage of people who give you permission to continue the dialog with them by giving you their email address or phone number so that they can learn more about your offering. People visit a website to get information, so give them the means to get it.
Question 3. What if the product you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How do you get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want to order from you?
In offline marketing, a successful tactic is differentiation. It’s no different online. If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes an enormous difference to conversion rates. We improved subscriptions by 11% per month for six months by differentiating ourselves. The second point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. The one thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are looking for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of education. If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your website, they will remember you over your competition.
Question 4. How do you get the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company that you’re trying to get in touch with to see if they would be interested in what you sell?
You need to get permission from the visitor to get that information. It can’t be done with any tracking tools available. There is a very good reason for this and it’s called privacy. If you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on holiday in a faraway land for the next few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. The person who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you while you’re away. It’s OK to track browser behavior because no personal details are ever tracked. I for one hope it stays that way.
Question 5. What should one look for in the web logs to determine conversion rates?
Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your site’s pages from search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you need to filter out from log files the information that isn’t relevant to visitors. Then you’re looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate number of visitors coming to your site, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as one browser, but it’s as close as you can get with log files. Then you divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesn’t use logs like IRIS METRICS or log software that works out the filtering like Web Trends, it makes your job much easier.
Question 6. What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my web site?
The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site’s relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, and most importantly trust.
Differentiation is the first step in the process. You must find a way to stand out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue throughout your entire website’s strategy.
Then in your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes. You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that audience.
Relevance is hugely important, too. If you’re running a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those keywords and finding your website. So if the audience types “Red Vintage Wine” into Overture and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to the page on your site talking all about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn’t land at the home page of your website which has a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine for sale. Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You can’t improve conversion without measurement unless you’re making educated guesses or you’re just plain lucky. So get a good measurement system, learn what it’s all about, and test your changes. Finally and most importantly trust. You can’t sell anything if your audience doesn’t trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the fact that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that hundreds of satisfied customers have already bought from your store, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your website with articles and ‘how to sections’ or newsletters and instill trust over time. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.
What’s next?
In part two of this series , we’ll be looking at measurement software tools, the pros and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversion rates, why it helps to track visitor activity using the software which is available, and what you should test and tweak to improve conversion rates.
Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. Visit his web site at http://www.conversionchronicles.com for more information.
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How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1
Posted on August 17th, 2011 by admin
How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1
by Steve Jackson
In a recent teleconference, I was asked a number of questions about specific problems people were having and what I would do if I were in their position. This is the first article in a three part series that we’ll publish over the next few weeks. It will answer specific queries from the teleconference, in the belief that the answers will also help you to solve some of your issues.
The perceived worth of your company can be upgraded by making your company – make it appear bigger than it is. 1300 Number – Contact Us are the perfect way of taking your home business to the international stage.
Question 1. What do you mean by conversion? Do you mean getting someone to answer the simplest call to action such as “read more here” or actually selling a product or service?
What you’re talking about here are two different ways to measure your website. “Read More Here” is what I would call a variable affecting your conversion rate. I call these kinds of variables “Micro Conversions” because they are all small (microscopic even) steps toward a full conversion. A micro conversion is something that you should test and measure. “Read More Here” might get a worse click-through rate than “Click here to find out how to win a month’s supply of vintage wine.” So by improving this click through, you get the person browsing to take another small step toward your final website goal. By doing this, you improve your overall conversion rate, which in this case is to get someone to register or subscribe to win a month’s supply of vintage wine. Micro conversions can be tracked by measuring the click through of links, or the read time for content, or the bounce rate for headlines and copy. Full conversion is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do. In my example, it would be registering to win wine, but it could be subscribe to a newsletter, download an audio file, buy a product, sell a service or whatever, but it should reflect what your website’s business objective is.
Question 2. What strategies would you suggest when there is no “online” conversion possible? I need them to call me for more info, to learn more and to eventually give them a proposal.
There is no such thing as “no online conversion”. You’re looking for leads who will eventually phone you but the visitor is the one with the power. If you don’t give your visitors a reason to let you continue to have a dialog with them, then they won’t. Using opt-in is one answer. If, for instance, you ask for a name, email address and telephone number from your visitor so that he can then get useful information from you in the form of a free report or audio file, you do two things. First, you qualify the visitor as someone who is interested in your services, and second, you get permission to contact him/her again. You need to build into your website a powerful reason for your visitors to give you permission to email or talk to them rather than expect someone to pick up the phone. In your case, you say they need to ring you to learn more. Put what they need to learn into some form that they can opt in to get, such as a white paper, report or audio file. Then you have a conversion rate that is the percentage of people who give you permission to continue the dialog with them by giving you their email address or phone number so that they can learn more about your offering. People visit a website to get information, so give them the means to get it.
Question 3. What if the product you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How do you get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want to order from you?
In offline marketing, a successful tactic is differentiation. It’s no different online. If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes an enormous difference to conversion rates. We improved subscriptions by 11% per month for six months by differentiating ourselves. The second point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. The one thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are looking for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of education. If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your website, they will remember you over your competition.
Question 4. How do you get the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company that you’re trying to get in touch with to see if they would be interested in what you sell?
You need to get permission from the visitor to get that information. It can’t be done with any tracking tools available. There is a very good reason for this and it’s called privacy. If you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on holiday in a faraway land for the next few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. The person who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you while you’re away. It’s OK to track browser behavior because no personal details are ever tracked. I for one hope it stays that way.
Question 5. What should one look for in the web logs to determine conversion rates?
Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your site’s pages from search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you need to filter out from log files the information that isn’t relevant to visitors. Then you’re looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate number of visitors coming to your site, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as one browser, but it’s as close as you can get with log files. Then you divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesn’t use logs like IRIS METRICS or log software that works out the filtering like Web Trends, it makes your job much easier.
Question 6. What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my web site?
The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your site’s relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, and most importantly trust.
Differentiation is the first step in the process. You must find a way to stand out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue throughout your entire website’s strategy.
Then in your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes. You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that audience.
Relevance is hugely important, too. If you’re running a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those keywords and finding your website. So if the audience types “Red Vintage Wine” into Overture and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to the page on your site talking all about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldn’t land at the home page of your website which has a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine for sale. Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You can’t improve conversion without measurement unless you’re making educated guesses or you’re just plain lucky. So get a good measurement system, learn what it’s all about, and test your changes. Finally and most importantly trust. You can’t sell anything if your audience doesn’t trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the fact that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that hundreds of satisfied customers have already bought from your store, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your website with articles and ‘how to sections’ or newsletters and instill trust over time. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.
What’s next?
In part two of this series , we’ll be looking at measurement software tools, the pros and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversion rates, why it helps to track visitor activity using the software which is available, and what you should test and tweak to improve conversion rates.
Steve Jackson is CEO of Aboavista, editor of The Conversion Chronicles and a published writer. Visit his web site at http://www.conversionchronicles.com for more information.
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Writing a Strong Call to Action in Your Online Ads | How-to Guides …
Posted on May 26th, 2011 by admin
Home Guides Sales and Marketing Internet Marketing Writing a Strong Call to Action in Your Online Ads
Featured Listings
Guide to Writing a Strong Call to Action in Your Online Ads
Increase your conversion rate by including a compelling Call to Action in your online ads.
Build relationships with your clients by providing an easy method of contacting you using Click To Call Button.
By Eve Lopez , Associate Editor, Business.com
The most important thing to remember when thinking about Calls to Action is that online users want to be told what to do. They want to know exactly what you are offering on your website, and they want a direct command to do so. If you ever notice your conversions dropping off, or if you have a high CTR but low conversion rate, the first thing you want to ask yourself is: What is my conversion?
Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done
Define your conversion – it should match your call to action
Take a good look at your landing page. Is your conversion point prominently placed on the page?
Your Call to Action is a persuasive statement to compel a user to perform a conversion.
Do you want the user to:
Buy a product?
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Conversion Chronicles – How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion …
Posted on April 26th, 2011 by admin
Is it wrong to follow your gut feelings?
The perceived worth of the services you offer can be increased by making your company appear bigger. 1300 Number – Contact Us are the perfect way of taking your local business to the international stage.
the server. Server-based measurement programs measure activity based on the text files held on the web server (referred to as log files).
The way that browser-based measurement (or ASP measurement) works is that information from each browser that visits your website is recorded, usually in a database, and then the data is manipulated into reports you can read. Typically, these services ask you to paste some JavaScript code into your web pages. A cookie is used to determine which user is accessing the site. This is then tracked on a remote server and you log in to view the reports.
I recommend the use of ASP measurement because it only measures how people using a web browser use your website.
The log files record everything visiting your pages. They need a number of added filters to stop email harvesters, search engines and a variety of other software generated crawlers or bots from being counted as visitors; without them, you can get seriously skewed results. Server access is often required to get log file filtering right; otherwise, youre relying on your ISP to report your tracking correctly. The log files for one of our clients had 10 times as many page counts and visits recorded than shown by using an ASP. Thats a 1000% error!
Question 4.
What is an average conversion rate?
This is a very good question and is the topic of serious debate. In other marketing industries they dont guess. They have standards that everyone follows. Its whats needed in online marketing before any real answer can be given. Analytics companies, the big research companies, and digital media associations are going to have to come together to define these standards and then people are going to have to follow what is agreed before accurate numbers can be delivered consistently.
Currently, were in the process of trying to establish a worldwide benchmark with a number of other prominent people (The Web Analytics Association and the IAB to mention two) in the industry who also want to know the answer to this question. But meanwhile, here are some statistics weve gathered from different sources published both recently and over the last few years. I have figures for 3 types of websites: sales (e-commerce), lead generation, and subscription-based websites.
Generally, sales sites seem to range between a 0.5% and 8% with the average rate being 2.3% according to FireClick statistics published this year and figures published in 2003 by e-consultancy.com. In 2000, the average figure for sales conversion as published by shop.org was 1.8%. The high-end figures, I hasten to add, are the top e-tailers according to all sources. My own experience shows sites hitting between .5% and 5.3% so this seems to correlate with the published figures. Of course since there is no defined standard, these numbers have to be taken as a rule of thumb.
The only source we have for lead generation sites is e-consultancy.com. They quote 2-3% of users completing an optional or free registration process, with 5% being best in class. Our own experience again falls within the same ballpa rk.
Subscriptions to sale conversion is typically between 1 and 7% again the source is e-consultancy.com
We dont have figures for visitor to subscription conversion, but our own experience with clients has been between 1 and 8%. Our own site has consistently hit 15% for 6 months though the traffic is pretty well targeted and our methods very well tested.
Question 5.
How do you go about consistently improving conversion?
This is the million dollar question. What it really boils down to is treating web marketing as a science. We do it by consistently measuring how people use a website. Over time you will learn what works and what doesnt and stop wasting your time on the things that dont work.
First we look at the technical aspect of the website. Its amazing how many people overlook and ignore thousands of people who dont use Windows XP with Internet Explorer at a screen resolution of 1024×768. First make sure that you develop something that works for everyone.
One of the next areas we look at is where the traffic comes from. It allows you to concentrate your efforts on your best chance of generating converting traffic. Then we get into reducing the average website bounce rate. The lower the average bounce, the higher the number of people surfing your website and seeing the value of your offer. The higher the number who see your offer, the better the chance of a sale. Checking bounce rates also usually brings up some juicy problems to be solved.
Then look at testing and improving copy and graphical content, running split tests and measuring bounce rates on copy or simply testing the click-through on links. We do much more, but the basic premise is this: test and measure, follow up with experimentation, and then with more testing and more measuring. Sounds like science class doesnt it?
Summary
In part three of this series of articles well be looking at where traffic arrives from and how that effects conversion, specific search engine queries, PPC issues and other general topics. To summarize, I am suggesting that if you begin to scientifically measure and improve your websites based on facts and findings, not guesswork and theory, you will begin to improve your conversion rates.
More from this months issue | Archived chronicles | More from this author
Author: Steve Jackson, Editor – Conversion Chronicles
Steve Jackson is the Editor of the Conversion Chronicles, a website conversion rate marketing newsletter dedicated to improving website conversion rates. In 2003 he co-founded Aboavista the first web analytics consultancy in Finland and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Satama Interactive . Satama Analytics unit is a web conversion and web analytics consultancy based in Finland with offices across northern europe. You can get a free copy of his e-book sent to you upon subscription to the Conversion Chronicles web site.
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Conversion Chronicles – How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion …
Posted on April 23rd, 2011 by admin
can learn more about your offering. People visit a website to get information, so give them the means to get it.
The perceived value of the services you offer can be upgraded by chaging the perception of your company appear bigger. 1300 Number – Contact Us are the perfect way of taking your home business to the national stage.
Question 3.
What if the product you sell is also sold by several others on other websites? How do you get someone who is browsing the Internet to notice your site and want to order from you?
In offline marketing, a successful tactic is differentiation . Its no different online. If you stand out from your competition, then you get noticed. What makes you different (not necessarily better, just different) from your competition? A USP makes an enormous difference to conversion rates. We improved subscriptions by 11% per month for six months by differentiating ourselves. The second point is that your site should be of use to your visitor. The one thing that all people online have in common is that when they browse they are looking for information. So give your visitors what they want in the form of education. If your potential customers become educated about your offer and take away something useful from your website, they will remember you over your competition.
Question 4.
How do you get the address, telephone number and name of the owner of any company that you’re trying to get in touch with to see if they would be interested in what you sell?
You need to get permission from the visitor to get that information. It cant be done with any tracking tools available. There is a very good reason for this and its called privacy. If you or I went online and could have our names, addresses and phone numbers tracked by software, it could be potentially dangerous. Imagine if you were online and were talking in a chat room about going on holiday in a faraway land for the next few weeks and your personal information could be gathered. The person who sees that information then knows when to go to your address and rob you while youre away. Its OK to track browser behavior because no personal details are ever tracked. I for one hope it stays that way.
Question 5.
What should one look for in the web logs to determine conversion rates?
Web log files are a problem because they record everything. Web logs record every request to your sites pages from search engine indexes, to email harvester software, link harvesters and visitors. So first you need to filter out from log files the information that isnt relevant to visitors. Then youre looking for unique visitors (not visits) or unique sites. Once you have that filtered figure, you have the approximate number of visitors coming to your site, still not close to 100% because of proxy servers recording multiple visitors as one browser, but its as close as you can get with log files. Then you divide the number of people who complete the conversion action by the total visitors. That is your conversion rate. If you can get software that doesnt use logs like IRIS Metrics or log software that works out the filtering like Web Trends, it makes your job much easier.
Question 6.
What factors have the biggest impact on conversions on my web site?
The short answer is differentiation, target marketing, your sites relevance to your desired audience, measurement, experimentation, and most importantly trust .
Differentiation is the first step in the process. You must find a way to stand out from the competition. It should start with the domain name, and continue throughout your entire websites strategy.
Then in your content, your copy and your design, you must smack your target audience between the eyes. You have to find out exactly what it is they want and answer the wants and needs of that audience.
Relevance is hugely important, too. If youre running a campaign on Overture or Google with certain keywords, your audience should land at exactly the right place after typing those keywords and finding your website. So if the audience types Red Vintage Wine into Overture and your link appears, on clicking through they should be taken to the page on your site talking all about and selling red vintage wine. They shouldnt land at the home page of your website which has a small link to the red vintage wine section and 5 or 6 other types of wine for sale.
Measuring and experimenting is then the key to improving conversion rates. You cant improve conversion without measurement unless youre making educated guesses or youre just plain lucky. So get a good measurement system, learn what its all about, and test your changes.
Finally and most importantly trust. You cant sell anything if your audience doesnt trust you. You can help them to trust you by prominently displaying your privacy policy, your shipping procedure, the fact that you use SSL encrypted protection for the forms on your site, that hundreds of satisfied customers have already bought from your store, that you make it very easy to find contact information such as a name and address as well as support via email. You could educate via your website with articles and how to sections or newsletters and instill trust over time. In short, your prospect must trust you to part with his or her money.
Whats next?
In part two of this series , well be looking at measurement software tools, the pros and cons of logs versus ASP vendors, average conversion rates, why it helps to track visitor activity using the software which is available, and what you should test and tweak to improve conversion rates.
More from this months issue | Archived chronicles | More from this author
Author: Steve Jackson, Editor – Conversion Chronicles
Steve Jackson is the Editor of the Conversion Chronicles, a website conversion rate marketing newsletter dedicated to improving website conversion rates. In 2003 he co-founded Aboavista the first web analytics consultancy in Finland and now a wholly owned subsidiary of Satama Interactive . Satama Analytics unit is a web conversion and web analytics consultancy based in Finland with offices across northern europe. You can get a free copy of his e-book sent to you upon subscription to the Conversion Chronicles web site.