Marketing » Conversion Strategies

So much energy is spent every day trying to "convince" Google or some  other party to "send" more and more traffic. Well that's fine, but what about spending some time working on the conversion of that traffic when it comes — wherever it's coming from? So ... what is conversion? If you ask most people, they will tell you that it's about money ... that is, how many sales you can make compared to how many people visit your website. Well, that's only mostly true. I say "mostly" instead of "partly" because ... let's face it. That's why the site is there in the first place. To earn revenue, right? While there is far more to "conversion" than just counting sales "converted," most conversion is measured in the context of finding more and better ways of getting those visitors to the receipt page. So let's explore that. If we have 10,000 unique visitors coming to our website in a month's time, but only 500 of those create accounts and of those 500 — 250 buy something, we would say that we "converted 5% of our traffic to accounts and 2.5% to sale. But wait a minute ... That sound pretty bleak doesn't it? Just 2.5 percent? Are you kidding? What happened to the other 97.5 percent? Do they hate our products, our brands? Our concepts? Why do they just pass us by? Some of these questions can be answered, and these numbers can be improved with a sound traffic conversion strategy. First of all, if 2.5 percent went to the trouble of creating an account, then these are serious prospects, who will probably buy if we give them enough reason to. But different people require different reasons to buy, so we must play 20 questions — and guess what those reasons are in carefully strategized presentations, which can be delivered via email. Okay, that's simple enough to wrap our minds around, but what about the other 95 percent? Well, a small portion of that traffic (let's say 10%) came to your website by accident and the rest — well, the rest needs more reasons to pause and learn more so that they too can create an account and/or buy something from you. This is where Papugai really shines. Our combination of confidence-building brand presentation (design) sound usability, superb application logic, and conversion strategy compels more visitors to act. How many more? Well, that varies, but in a recent, three month study, we learned that just adding a more professional home page design to an otherwise amateur-built Yahoo store with no decent usability, no tracking and no professional-level e-commerce strategy, we were able to roughly double the sales conversion rates over the same period compared to the preceding (fairly consistent) years. The key is to compel website visitors to do something ... anything! Make a purchase? Yes, that would be great, but what if they don't? Do we just give up there? If we can, with a compelling presentation, convince some of these visitors to create an account, or leave their contact information behind in exchange for "something," then we can always market to them later and start asking the questions that will lead us to the answer of what would convince these folks to buy. That "something" changes from audience to audience, but the principles remain the same for every website. We need to figure out what it takes to get people to act and then do it. Sometimes we can use our common sense and insight to make these judgments fairly quickly, and other times it takes a few tries to get it right — but every audience has a sweet spot and Papugai's marketing pros are the best qualified to find the right approach for every audience, every time. 333