One of the most important – and most neglected topics in Internet Marketing is “Conversion Rate Optimization” or “CRO.”
“Conversion Rate” is the percentage of visitors that take action – contact you by phone, email, text, chat, fax (if you still have one), sign-up for something on your website, walk into your store or office, or complete a purchase on your website.
This is where the rubber meets the road. This is why you have a website. The is the payback for all the work done to create the website and develop traffic to it.
The first thing to realize is that this is a subject all in itself. It’s one thing to design and build a website that looks good and works right. Those are necessary if your website is going to convert. But it does not, in any way, guarantee any conversions whatsoever.
A good place to start is measurement. With good metrics to measure conversions and to measure the steps towards conversion, you can start to analyze how your site is doing and how you can do better. Typical conversion rates for your industry are almost certainly easily available online.
Of course not all possible methods of conversion will apply, but you better make sure you have adequate tracking in place for measuring your CR (Conversion Rate). A classic problem is tracking phone call leads. Usually this has to be done manually or a with service that uses special phone numbers so if someone calls from your website you can tell.
There are clearly distinguishable “sub-products“, the smaller steps that add up to a conversion. And there will be a sensible metric to measure those (though not always easy to get the numbers)
The first step is to get visitors to stick on the website. “Bounce rate” measures the percentage of visitors who take no action such as going to a second page on the site or spending some time on the page.
If a very high percentage of visitors are bouncing off your site, either you are attracting the wrong people, or the page they are arriving on is not doing its job.
The next thing is to get them to spend more time or visit more pages on the site. The longer a visitor stays on your site or the more pages they visit, the more likely they are to convert.
But that still doesn’t guarantee the conversion. Well written sales copy and an effective Call to Action (CTA) make the difference.
People are often quite timid and the more you are asking them to do, the better your copy and CTA have to be.
