What is your conversion rate?

You built a website. You have a list of keywords. You wrote some catchy ads. Now what? Before you spend another dollar, take a look at your conversion rate because you can save a lot of money and win a lot more customers by improving this metric. This might sound like a difficult process, but the good news is that there are a number of free and easy to use tools you can use to improve your conversion rate today.

The conversion rate is the number of visitors that come to your website who actually become leads or customers. In other words, if nine visitors buy from your website every day and your website has 150 visits per day, then your conversion rate is 6%. This metric is important because it helps you understand how effective your website is at ‘converting’ visitors to customers. More importantly, it lets you know the opportunity cost of the current performance of your website. In the example above, 94% of visitors leave without buy or buying or becoming a lead. This represents a significant opportunity for growth.

The first step in improving your conversion rate is to track your website visitors, leads and sales. To do this, you can purchase a website analytics package or install Google Analytics for free. We recommend using Google Analytics if you do not have experience with website analytics. It offers a very easy way to get started without the need to make an extensive investment in time and money.

Once you have installed analytics, the data will start flowing in and you can evaluate the performance of your website and marketing campaigns. These analytical attributions provide you clues about the make-up of your customers and offers you an opportunity to better tailor your website to serve them. For example, if your physical business is in Arizona, you may currently focus your website content to people from Arizona. But what if you see that 80% of your website visitors are actually from Florida? The analytics package enables you to see this data very easily and to start thinking about how to address potential customers from Florida as well as Arizona.

Customer data in hand, start designing opportunities for your website visitors to interact with you. Using the example above, 94% of visitors are leaving without a trace and no way to contact them again. Leverage the learnings you have about your users via analytics to create programs to build relationships with users who do not purchase directly from the site. Collecting contact information via newsletter subscriptions, product updates, product demos, free whitepapers, free research or other means is a great way to build a relationship with your customer.

Lastly, do not forget that building the website and implementing analytics is just the start. The best part of a website is that it is a living entity that can be amended and improved on an ongoing basis. We highly recommend that any company spending money to drive people to their website use Website Optimizer – for free – to test out different messages and pages to increase conversion rate. Using statistically driven testing can lead to dramatic improvements in performance especially if implemented as an ongoing regimen and practice.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free consultation on your marketing efforts, please contact a Thrivepoint advisor.

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