Are you taking steps to improve the rate at which leads convert into sales inside your web marketing funnel? If there ever was a “silver bullet” to online marketing success, increasing your conversion rate would be the gunpowder.
People often come to me for advice on what “Google thinks”, how to setup a profitable Facebook fan page or learning the latest marketing strategy and that’s fine. But profiting from online marketing is not really ABOUT any of these things, in fact it is only about one thing – your conversion rate.
That may sound a bit blunt, but it’s true. From a marketing standpoint, what good are 10,000 fans on Twitter if none of them buy anything you are selling?
If you design an opt-in form, the blue “join here” button may look better with your site theme but a yellow “get instant access” button may perform better.
The truth is, you won’t know unless you measure your conversion rate by testing.
If you are marketing online, the golden metric that you should be constantly looking to improve is the rate at which customers purchase a given product. If 10,000 people visit a sales page and 300 of them by something you have a 3% conversion rate. In this example, if you could increase the campaign’s conversion rate 1% it would result in a 33% increase in your sales.
So how do you increase your conversion rates?
It’s all about testing. But it begins with the quality of your traffic. Do you remember a few years ago when all the Adwords Gurus were selling the solution to the “Google Slap”? The basic pitch was that if you could avoid being “slapped” by Google you could get tons of traffic from PPC.
Traffic from Google can be better than traffic from Facebook if they are people that are in the mindset to buy something. For example, people interested in weight loss may search google for “how to lose weight” then complain on Facebook that they feel overweight.
From a conversion rate standpoint advertising to them on Google will likely yield greater profit. Folks typing those words in the search engine are actively looking for a solution in the form of a product or service, and by the time they begin complaining on Facebook they’re not in the “buyer’s mindset” anymore.
So traffic is the first part, but if you don’t have the right kind of traffic and also a profitable strategy to sell them something what’s the point in spending your money on PPC?
Many people are looking for “something for nothing” online. Don’t pay for that traffic!
I wrote an article a few years back that still gets 100′s of visitors to my blog every day from organic search, but only 1 in 1,000 buy something. Why? Well, it’s an informational article containing details about how to solve a technical website problem. Most folks read it, copy the code snippits and go on their way. The conversion rate stinks, but that’s fine by me!
Since most of these people come through Google using search terms such as “how to …” and “… code example” instead of “buy …” or “… for sale” they are not in the buyers mindset. Furthermore, the page is not optimized to sell them anything. The result is a very low conversion rate when measuring sales volume generated from that page.
But I don’t mind because I actually wrote the article was to share information and build a connection with a particular visitor, and in that respect it was a success. From a marketing standpoint I’d rather have 10 loyal customers than 100 folks who never buy anything from me. It’s ultimately about the numbers and quality content increases visitor response in the long run (as well as helping with SEO).
The truth is, Google makes hundreds if not thousands of changes to their algorithms every year and Facebook seems hell bent on closing out mom and pop from marketing on their social platform. Technology will constantly change and there will always be some new fad to worry about or ebook to buy.
I suggest folks learn some basics about generating quality traffic and focus on techniques like split testing and using proven strategies that help you improve the result from your online campaigns. My Web Profits 101 video teaches the most effective online training and lead system I personally use, Check it out here and you’ll learn how to dramatically increase conversion rates for YOUR web campaigns. Happy marketing!
