I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times this year have I been asked “how do I turn more visitors into customers, more orders and more conversions..?”

Strange that in a world where there’s much more pressure than ever before to be more efficient and costs have been cut in all areas of the business that this isn’t happening online.

I know of one large corporate who, in an attempt to cut costs got rid of the evening office cleaners and instead issued staff with cleaning products – but to the very best of my knowledge didn’t try to be more efficient by turning more of their visitors into customers. I know which of these things would have likely had a better impact on the bottom line – not to mention office hygiene!

In the last couple of years we’ve all heard more than enough about “doing more with less”. Usually that’s meant fewer staff, less marketing budget, less time and overall – fewer resources. And this was often accompanied by depressing projections, budget cuts, staffing cuts or if you’re really (un)lucky, management demands for the undeliverable within impossible timeframes! (No, Forsyth is not talking about First Rate here – Ed.)

But it doesn’t always have to be that way. You probably have a pretty “good” website for your organisation – it’s been signed off by the agency, the marketing department, finance and the CEO’s wife – and everyone who gets a say in it is pretty happy with the site.

And many of you have then gone on to solve the first major hurdle, the “we’ve spent all this money on our site but no-one comes to it. The internet doesn’t work for us” – problem through intelligent SEO and/or PPC strategies. And some of you are even looking at bounce rates and exit rates to better understand “where” and more importantly “why” visitors are exiting your website.

From this point there are 3 options to get more revenue from the website:

1. Expand your SEO efforts
2. Improve your PPC programme
3. Or – Start turning more of this traffic into customers. Do Conversion Optimization.

So what is Conversion Optimisation?

So what does it mean? Without being flippant the short version is that it means you find ways to get more customers without spending more on advertising. Or put another way, increasing sales for the same budget spend, along with experimental learning that will benefit all areas of your website.

Essentially it’s about testing different versions of the same page to see which one converts more visitors into sales or newsletter sign-ups or enquiries or whatever the various goals of your website are.

It’s about something as simple as looking at your conversion rate – let’s say it’s 2% – and understanding that if you can increase it to 3% that’s the same net effect as adding 50% to your online marketing budget.

In fact, as your traffic is driven by all your offline activity too, you could argue that it’s the same as adding 50% to your total marketing budget. And you don’t need expensive software or complex tools to do this, the nice folk at Google have created Website Optimizer which is completely free. Obviously, you need to know how to maximise the benefits this tool brings, and how to implement and configure it correctly. We do – and we’d love to help (contact us to have a chat).

Why Should You be Doing Conversion Optimisation?

So you can test different versions of pages again and again and get detailed reporting on what’s working and what’s not. Do you think your website is so unbelievably good that it converts the most amount of traffic it possibly could?

If not, you should be doing conversion optimization. If you honestly think your website is that good, think again.

Unless you’ve been doing conversion optimisation on every page that’s part of every conversion point or funnel then it isn’t that good. I know that whoever built it and designed it probably told you it was, but chances are that it’s not I’m afraid.

To get an idea of how fickle conversion rates can be, take a look at this, one of my favourites for real-life testing examples. It’s amazing to see which variants get the best conversion rates and if you can guess the winner 100% of the time then let me know!

It’s easier to turn more traffic into visitors than to buy more traffic. It’s more efficient, it’s cheaper and frankly it’s just plain sensible.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether your marketing department like your website or not, and it doesn’t matter how clever your creative agency is, or how well the site design matches the CEO’s curtains. Instead it’s about ensuring that visitors get everything they need from your site – and that as many as possible convert to customers.

Conversion Design – How to Get Started

The staff in your call centre know what your customers want, your sales people and account managers do too – they talk to your customers and potential customers more than anyone. But were they involved in the website design?

Or let’s turn the question around: Did the people who designed your site ever go out and try to sell your product/service? If they didn’t, then how did they know what the potential customer objections are or indeed what your customers or prospects want?

Your customers are a particular group of people with a particular requirement, they’re not “everybody” and understanding them is an important step in getting more out of your website. This is one of the first steps in starting the conversion optimisation process.

Getting more customers without spending more on advertising is not an instant fix but it has the potential to make a huge difference to your business. If you want to find out more about this, drop me a line (forsyth @ firstrate.co.nz).

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