Your website may be getting a lot of traffic, but if your conversion rates are low you may need to test/change a few things to improve your website’s conversion rate. Even if you feel the conversion rate it ok, you can test to see if it improves.
Before I say any further let me give you an example of why improving your conversion rate is important.
Suppose your website gets 100 hits a day and your conversion rate is 1%. Let’s also suppose you make a profit of $50 per sale. So for every 100 visitors you make $50. One day a friend of yours saw your website and advised you to change a few things that he thought would help improve conversions. You did. The next month you noticed your conversion rate doubled to 2%. Since you are now making 2 sales per 100 visitors – you are actually making a profit of $100 per 100 visitors to your site. Got the picture?
You did some changes and wow, you ended up making more than you previously did. Note that your advertising cost and/or maintenance cost remains the same still you make more. Your actual profits go way up.
Coming back to the topic – how to improve conversion rate? Honestly the answer is not easy. The only answer is to know it by testing.
It’s important to know what you want to test on your website to improve conversions. Some ways to know what to test is this:
1. Ask some of your friends or colleagues to do an unbiased review of your site. Note down on a piece of paper what they say. If there is something common most of them are saying – this is something you need to test.
2. Study your log files. These sometimes contains goldmine hidden in them. The long tail keywords are the ones that will give you an idea of what exactly people are looking for in your site.
3. Run a feedback campaign for your visitors. You won’t believe what they have to say about your site. If they are saying you are asking too much for the product it means price needs to be tested. Similarly you will get some more ideas on things to test.
3. Go through website of your competitors. See their design, layout, product pricing, headlines, content etc. Compare with your site to get more ideas on things to test.
4. Read forums and blogs on your niche. You will get a lot of help.
If you don’t have time for all these – there are some common things that most of the webmasters test. You can try some of them. These are:
a) Headline – this is the most important thing to test. Visitors first read the headline of your site. If they don’t like they are off.
b) Sub-Headline – actually a combination of headline and sub-headline should be tested.
c) Price – sometimes selling at a higher price produces better results, and sometimes vice-versa. You need to test to know what works best for your site.
d) Content – Content is the king. In that case testing content makes sense.
e) Testimonials – you can test to see if testimonials present produces better results or no testimonials.
f) Length of the copy – this is a matter of debate among test marketers. It is widely believed that short copy works better than long copy. However have you noticed how many sites do we come across everyday with long copy, in fact very long copy? Test it.
Remember that testing to improve conversion rate is costly as it involves lot of thought, time and money. It’s also important to know what you want to test and why? A wrong decision and you end up testing what you shouldn’t have in the first place. The problem is you will realize only after the test phase is over. So be sure of everything before you start testing.
Important Advice: Keep a backup of all your files. In case your conversion rates drop, you can get back to the original site.
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