DMN3 Blog

Do you use a website or landing pages as part of your effort to generate leads or sales? Do you routinely make specific changes based on quantifiable data from visitor traffic? If not, you should be turning to someone like DMN3 to help with your online marketing efforts. Why?… because you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

I’ve spoken many times on how important it is to optimize your website for conversion. Conversion is getting your website visitor to take specific actions that you favor on the website. It could be buying a product, downloading a file, opting in to receive newsletters, registering, referring a friend, making a phone call, clicking to chat, etc.

The specific actions are tied to the specific website objectives and sales process you have found work best for the audience segment that is your market. When someone takes the action we want, we label this as a “conversion.” We report conversions as a percentage rate, i.e., the percentage of visitors who take the action we desire.

Conversion rates vary markedly by industry and visitor segment. Ecommerce sites where visitors generally go to buy a product can have conversion rates close to 30%. Other sites typically convert in the low single digits, with 2.5% often cited as an average “conversion rate.”

If you have read this blog, you know that I consider “So What?” traffic to their website unless the website has a systematic approach to conversion optimization. That means an ongoing process of using analytics and testing to increase conversion and return on investment (ROI).

You would be surprised to know how many organizations don’t even know their conversion rate? That tells you a lot about the organization’s online marketing prowess in of itself.

I’m still amazed at how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (paid and organic) are considered essential these days by businesses to increase traffic to their websites while website conversion optimization is still a stepchild for small and medium-size businesses.

Think about this. If your conversion rate currently is 1% and you wanted to increase your return on investment by 50%, you could do one of two things:

1. You could set about trying to increase qualified traffic to your website by 50%; or
2. You could set about trying to increase your conversion rate to 1.5%

Either could get you to your goal. However, depending on your current traffic and the channels from which you get it, it could take you a long time to increase traffic by 50% even with SEO consultants.

If you have not optimized your website for conversion, then chances are you can create 1/2 of 1% increase in conversions fairly quickly.

How quickly depends on two factors:

1. Did you use conversion “best practices” as part of your original design of the site, including getting input into the design from your customers and potential customers? If not, a redesign of the site using conversion best practices and customer input may increase conversions dramatically.
2. The volume of traffic to your site. Whether or not you use conversion best practices in your design or redesign, you will only know for sure what works best by doing online testing of specific hypothesis: Headline A versus Headline B, for example. This is an example of an A/B split test. More complex testing of multiple variables is called multivariate testing. The latter requires a lot of traffic to reach statistically valid conclusions. A/B testing requires fewer visitors to reach such valid conclusions and would be the testing choice for all by very large organizations with lots of traffic to their websites.

While we can “start” by employing what we know about the best approaches and elements to website design to increase conversion, only with valid data can we really know what works best. The only way to know what works best over time is a program of ongoing testing to evaluate website elements and copy. For example, we may learn that headline A works better than headline B for conversion. We shouldn’t stop there because headline C may work better than headline A.

You see where I’m going. Online testing to optimize conversions on a website or landing page should be an ongoing process. This approach is a marathon, not a sprint.

Now imagine if you did both of the options above to increase your ROI. What if you increased both your traffic and your conversion rate by 50%? Instead of a 50% gain in ROI, you would have increased the ROI by 125%!

I rest my case… I will have more to say about this topic in future posts. If you would like to see my other posts on "Conversion Optimization" follow this link.

In the meantime, be sure and ask “So What?” when people say you need more traffic. Ask them what they are going to do about increasing conversion rates first?

If they act like they don’t know, you may want to turn to someone else for your website SEO and conversion optimization efforts.