Online Marketing Articles by Web Profits

How To Dramatically Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rate

You may have heard the term before, but you might not be aware of what it means – especially what it means in terms of you and your business.

It will have the greatest impact on website conversions, yet it is the one thing that most website owners neglect when designing their website.

The ‘call to action’…

All good websites have at least one (usually several) calls to action, and they generally prosper because of them.

In short, a call to action is something that asks website visitors to do something. It’s your job as a website owner to make the process of ordering a product, requesting more information or signing up for a free report as easy as possible, and providing a call to action is the most important part of that process.

Let’s suppose, for example, that you have a weekly newsletter that you send out by email to your database. You want to get more subscribers to this list so you include a box on the home page of your website asking people to fill in their details and click ‘Subscribe’ to start receiving the newsletter.

At the bottom of this box there will probably be a big button bearing the word ‘Subscribe!’ in big letters, with an arrow pointing to it. It may sound like you are holding the hands of your website visitors and leading them to take a specific action, and in reality you are, but this call to action makes it clear what they need to do to receive some kind of benefit – in this case a free newsletter.

But there is more to the call to action than directing people to press a button or click their mouse. You can also make it more enticing and add a certain urgency to the task you are encouraging them to perform.

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Direct Marketing On The Internet

The companies that generate the most profits from online marketing, like any other forms of marketing, are those that use direct marketing principles in everything they do.

Direct marketing, unlike traditional marketing, is all about achieving a return on investment from your advertising spend and tracking the response from each individual campaign.

Direct marketing focuses on producing immediate profits or results. Traditional marketing is about ‘branding’.

The biggest difference between traditional marketing and direct marketing (apart from the immediate, identifiable profits) is that you can achieve all the benefits of traditional advertising with direct marketing, such as branding, but you can’t achieve all of the benefits of direct marketing from traditional marketing, such as immediate profits.

For example, let’s say you advertise in magazines, and you have ads in BRW, Forbes and Times, with each one costing you $8,000 for a full page. Traditional marketing would spend the advertising budget to advertise in each paper for the purpose of ‘branding’ with no real purpose except to let the public know about one of their products or, even worse, to let them know the company exists.

Direct marketing would spend the advertising budget in each paper but they would have a clear reason for advertising, would offer something of value and would provide clear instructions on how the reader can redeem that value, such as a free gift or a coupon. They would use different phone numbers in each of the advertisements so they could track how many sales were made from each ad, and what the ROI was for each ad. With this information, they can identify which ad produced profits and which ad produced a loss, then continue advertising in the profitable medium and stop advertising in the others.

Online marketing is the same. There are those companies which use traditional marketing methods (the vast majority) and there are those that use direct marketing methods (the successful minority).

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What is a Conversion Rate?

Whether you market on the Internet or your market offline, one of the most important numbers you must constantly try to improve is your conversion rate.

Simply put, a conversion rate is the results of a particular campaign expressed as a percentage. And there may be multiple conversion rates in one sales process.

Let’s take the example of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising on Google, where you want to drive sales to your business…

- If your PPC ad on Google is clicked 100 times from 2,000 views, your PPC conversion rate is 5%
- If, from those 100 visitors, you receive 20 phone call enquiries, your website conversion rate is 20%
- If, from those 20 phone call enquiries, you make 5 sales as a result, your sales conversion rate is 25%

So from this one campaign we’ve broken down each stage of the process and tabulated the conversion rate. By doing this we can test and track and continually improve each conversion rate over time.

By increasing any of these conversion rates you increase your sales, and profits, overall.

The reason a conversion rate is so important in search engine marketing is because of the cost of driving targeted internet traffic to a website.

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