How to Increase Conversion Rates
How do you increase conversion rates for your online business? A conversion rate is the rate of visitors that are converted into buyers and if you're not tracking these numbers now, you need to. There are definitely some things you can do to track your conversion rates and then increase them so that you make more sales.Tracking and Improving Your Conversion Rates
Plenty of software programs exist that will analyze your website data to tell you things like:
How many visitors you've have
How those visitors got to your site
What they did when they arrived
You can measure how many people made a purchase and that will tell you how many visitors you've converted into buyers.
Using your raw websites statistics data to your advantage is easy. It will tell you what keywords people are using to land on your website. You should use that information to check their entry page and see if the page answered their keyword search. If they asked a question, did it provide an answer to their direct question? Did that person leave the site without buying? If they left, did they subscribe to your RSS feeds or sign up for your newsletter first? If they didn't do anything you'd have liked them to do, it's time to improve the text on those pages.
Improving Your Website
If you're getting a lot of visitors but have a low conversion rate, maybe your web copy isn't strong enough. It's possible that you're doing all the right things to get people to your site but not doing enough to convince them that they should buy from you. Maybe you've left out some critical answers that could've removed the customer's objection to buying. Maybe some more interactive marketing could've guided that visitor through your pages more seamlessly, like a sales rep would have. Hand holding for some customers is a great way to convince them to buy.
After you've captured a sale from a visitor, you'll want to work to become a regular supplier for them. There are a lot of ways to do this. If possible, get permission on their checkout page to contact them in the future. It's a good idea to get this permission whether you do or don't make a sale but many websites make the mistake of only trying to capture permission to contact a customer if they're trying to leave without buying. Be sure you also try to turn a new customer into a repeat customer. A good way to do this is to redirect them to another page after you've accepted their sale on your site. That page could lead to future sales by getting the new customer to agree that you can contact them in the future.
If your existing methods aren't working, it's time to try new things. Split testing, interactive marketing techniques, and data mining to create new strategies will help you figure out how to increase conversion rates. It could happen significantly overnight or could happen through slow and steady progressive results.
Increasing your conversion rates is something every business, whether they're new or established, should do. Avoiding complacency in business is what will help you stay on the cutting edge of technology, marketing techniques, and your own niche so that you prevent your own obsolescence.