Does your website get plenty of traffic but not very many conversions? You're not alone. In fact most websites have a 0% conversion rate. I can't tell you how often I hear business owners say, "our website is just there for our customers to look things up", or "we only have a website to prove that we're legit", "we don't rely on our website for marketing or getting us business". How about this one; "our customers don't use the Internet". Hello.... it's 2008! Your customers absolutely use the Internet and if you're not there, they're finding your competition.
OK, so let's assume that you're living in this Millennium and you realize that you need to be on the Internet and you need to attract visitors to your website in order to be successful. But out of every 100 visitors to your site; only 1 actually takes action - a phone call, an email, a download, a sign up, a purchase, a request for information; whatever the action you want them to take is. A 1% conversion rate is very common; in fact that is the average conversion rate for eCommerce websites. And those sites are supposed to sell. Websites that are designed as 'brochures' with the hope of providing the occasional lead usually have an even worse conversion rate.
Why are conversion rates so low? Because these websites are failing at effective communication with the audience they are attracting. They make it difficult to find information quickly and provide no compelling evidence why you should take action. More times than not websites don't even direct visitors to take action and if they do it's a link to open an email to send; not very intuitive and not very dynamic.
Imagine your website gets 1000 visitors per month at a 1% conversion rate; so 10 people are taking an action that you desire them to take. How can you get that number of conversions from 10 to 50 without paying more for traffic? It's actually quite simple. You improve the conversion architecture on your website. Imagine if you could enhance the design, perhaps add a landing page, throw in more calls to action, make the site a bit easier to navigate, add multiple conversion points so there are several actions visitors can actually take as opposed to just 'phone us or send a email', and perhaps even add some professionally written web copy that makes your company sound more professional and speaks more persuasively to your audience.
Now you have an effective Internet Marketing System: A) a website B) build traffic and C) convert more customers. Just do the math. If you can improve your website so that your conversion rate increases by just a few percent, you could end up with a 3, 4 or even 5% conversion rate.
So using the example above, that same 1000 visitors with an improved website could easily increase the number of conversions from 10 to 50 with a 5% conversion rate. And once you have improved your conversion rate, then you can invest into more traffic. Your conversion rate will usually remain consistent as long as you are driving qualified traffic to the site; ie. targeting the proper keyword phrases and the right geographic area.
Here's an example. James Snow Parkway Self Storage in Milton is a relatively new client. Their site went live May 28, 2008. Previously the client had a website that had no conversion architecture, no real marketing purpose and was basically just an online brochure. This month they got a 7.11% conversion rate. Out of 661 visitors for the month, they had 47 online conversions. In addition to this, we recently added a toll free number on their site which allows us to track the number of phone calls they get from the website and they are averaging over 2 phone calls per day (68 in October). When you factor phone calls in with the online conversions, their website is converting at a rate of 17%!
So what makes more sense to you; increasing your traffic by 17x or improving your websites conversion architecture?
