What is a conversion rate? How does it affect your marketing plan? Read on to learn more about the importance of increasing conversions, and how the ability to do so will make or break your business.
What is a Conversion?
In order to build an effective plan for boosting conversions, you have to first have a grip on what the term refers to and how conversions work.
Stripped down to the most basic definition, your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your sales page who follow through with action items. This can mean answering a call to action, making a purchase or even joining your mailing list. The number of people who do what you want them to do on any given page you run is your conversion rate, and it's vital to keep that rate high. Optimizing your conversion rate is one of the most vital parts of your business plan, right behind driving traffic you can turn into customers.
How is it Calculated?
Calculating your conversion rate gives you the opportunity to see how many people are visiting your sales pages, and how many of those visitors go on to make a purchase. Knowing the concrete figures helps you to better market your products, determine whether or not your sales copy is effective and see how people are responding to your marketing plan, so it's important to learn more about calculating your rates.
First, you'll need to determine just how many visitors you've had over a given period. This is where website analytics is vital. Once you've figured out how many visitors you had during a given time period, Now, divide the number of total visitors by the number of conversions. The resulting number is your conversion rate.
How Does Calculating Conversion Rates Help?
If you're not tracking your visitors and conversion rates, you really have no idea how many people are seeing your product, how many of those people will ultimately make a purchase or how your system is working. Sales figures alone aren't enough to give you an accurate picture of your business, or its growth.
For example, if you take the time to calculate your conversion rate and discover that it's very low, even if your sales figures themselves are high enough to generate revenue, you have a golden opportunity to start boosting sales. You can easily take your business to the next level if you turn those customers who leave without making a purchase into buyers, and you won't know that you need to court those prospective buyers if you haven't calculated a conversion rate. So, if you review the data available to you and discover your traffic is high but your conversion rates are low, you can start taking the necessary action to boost conversions. If you've got a thousand visitors per day and you're able to turn a 10% conversion rate into a 90% rate by altering sales copy or pricing, for instance, you've exponentially increased your sales by making small adjustments you would otherwise have neglected.
What Makes Conversions Better?
There are many reasons why you want to improve your conversion rates, but the most important one boils down to time and money. Why spend time, or money, to attract new visitors to your sales pages if those viewers aren't ultimately making a purchase? Better to focus your energy on turning existing viewers into buyers, first. So, let's look at ways you can make your conversion rates better.
- Make sure your sales button or call to action is easy to find, and easy to understand. Don't hide your purchase button in a sea of distracting images, for instance.
- Keep an eye on content. Your customers expect you to be a professional, and your copy must reflect that professionalism. Is everything spelled correctly? Is your message clear, concise and to the point?
- Emphasize safety. Identity theft and other online crimes related to financial information are always on the rise, and as such, people are becoming more savvy about protecting themselves. Make sure your sales pages reflect a sense of security and trustworthiness.
- Focus on SEO. Search engine optimization isn't just important for driving traffic; it's also important when it comes to conversions. You'll have a much higher bounce rate if your tags and keywords aren't quite relevant, even if your traffic is high. You don't want to attract visitors just for the sake of getting clicks when you're selling digital products, you want to actually sell your products. Misleading keywords might pull in viewers who are looking for other things, and those viewers will almost always leave immediately. This is known as your "bounce rate," and it directly impacts your conversion rates.
- Provide proof. Do you have particularly glowing reviews or strong testimonials from previous buyers? Make sure they're prominently displayed on your sales page. This encourages conversions by giving your product legitimacy, and boosts the sense of security that's so important to today's online buyer.
Assignment:
If your site is already up and running, take the time to calculate your conversion rate. Is it higher than you expected, or lower? If you're still in the planning stages, make a focus on conversion rates part of your overall business plan.