Double the business your Website generates, without increasing the number of visitors to it.
Imagine you had a physical shop on the high street and sales were low. The shop is hard to get around, signage is poor and so customers cannot find what they want. The shop looks a little run down and the products are not displayed in an attractive way. People find it hard to get to the till as it is tucked away in a corner. When people have a question about a product, the information is not there. Most people walk out of the shop without buying as they have a poor experience. In order to get more sales, what should you do?
a) Undertake some marketing to get more people into the shop
or
b) improve the shopping experience so that more people who come into the shop buy something
In my view it is quite simple. What is the point of paying money to promote the shop in order to get more people in when they are not going to buy anything anyway? You would be far better to spend some money and time improving the shop in the first place. Marketing to get more shoppers coming in can take place later. This a much more cost effective approach.
The same is true for almost any type of business. Planned conversion work and digital marketing can make a huge difference to your Website
Focus on improving your Website rather than increasing visitors
Large retailers measure store performance on their conversion rates. They have electronic counters that count the number of people entering a store. These are then used to calculate a conversion rate by dividing the number of transactions, and the value of those transactions. Store managers often cannot influence the number of people coming into their store, but they can influence the conversion rates.
How does this apply to your Website?
Firstly you need to decide what constitutes a successful visit to your Website. This could be:
1. When someone completes a contact form
2. When someone looks at a specific page
3. When someone spends over 5 minutes on a site
4. When someone buys something
5. When someone looks at more than 5 pages
Once you have established this, you need to monitor how many of your Website visitors go on to meet any of your defined successes. You can do this using Goals in Google Analytics. This will then give you a conversion rate.
An example:
If you have 2,000 visitors to your Website and they generate 20 sales, orders or enquiries, or successful visits. This gives you a conversion rate of 1%. 2,000 visits divided by 20 successful visits = 1%. You can attribute a value of say £100 per successful visit. Therefore at the moment your Website is generating 20 x £100 = £2,000 of business per month.
If your aim was to double the amount of business that your Website generates, there are two appoaches:
a) Double the number of visitors to 4,000
or
b) Increase the conversion rate from 1% to 2%
Trust me, Option b is much more achievable and this should be your focus initially. By improving your Website, making things easy to navigate, intuitive and obvious, answering customer questions you can have an impact on your conversion rate quite quickly.
By making changes to your Website, even if you just made it fractionally more likely that a visit will be successful, increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 1.5%, that could lead to an increase in business of £1,000 per month. The best thing about this is that this improvement in conversion keeps on delivering month after month.
Even changing the colour of your Website buttons, or changing the wording, can improve conversion rates.
It doesn’t mean you should stop your marketing activities. Just that you need to make sure that your Website is performing before you do.
Use this information to influence your digital marketing activities
Once you have information on the conversion rate for your Website, you can use this information to your advantage. In Google Analytics, you can look at the Acquisition, Channels report (my first place to go when analysing a site!). This will give you a break down of where your Website traffic is coming from, be it social media, email marketing, search engines or referrals from other Websites. You will be shown a conversion rate for each source of traffic. As a point of interest, every single Website I have looked at that uses email marketing has email marketing outperforming every other form of marketing in terms of conversion. I looked at two sites last week and both had a conversion rate of around 0.1% for social media traffic and over 3% for email marketing.
You don’t have to be a genius to work out that you should be spending your time and money on the activities that are driving conversions….
So, how do we undertake conversion work for our clients?
We are known for working with clients who have had Websites developed elsewhere but they simply do not perform. We don’t mind who built the site in the first place, a large number of our monthly clients came to us asking for help with making their Website work for their business because their Web developer simply didn’t understand digital marketing and wasn’t interested in how the Website was performing for them.
We offer a conversion work service starting at £45 + VAT per month, usually as part of our Total Digital Marketing Package. Essentially this involves:
1. Identifying what constitutes a successful visit to a Website
2. Ensuring that successful visits can be tracked
3. Proposing Website improvements that can increase successful visits
4. Implementing changes
5. Monitoring and refining the approach
You can also do this yourself. Whilst there are many advanced tools that we use such as A/B testing as long as you can access Google Analytics and set up goals, you can make improvements to your site and then see how this has affected your Website performance.
In summary, stop the constant chase for more Website visitors and focus on converting the ones you have. It really does work!
I get a real buzz from analysing small business sites, making improvements and seeing the results. Just contact me on eddy@insynch.co.uk if you want to chat about how we could work together.
photo credit: Stop via photopin (license)