101 steps to higher conversion rates -- part 1

One of the most important pieces of information for any marketer to know about their website is the customer conversion rate. This is the number of visitors that take the action you want them to. For most sites this means making a purchase, but it could mean joining your mailing list, signing up for your forum or telling a friend about your site.

Although the average website conversion rate is around 2%, there are lots of sites that enjoy double-digit conversion rates. Use these tips as a guide to improve your conversion rate:

1. The first step to creating a site that sells is deciding what role it will play in your overall business strategy. Whether it’s to generate sales, generate leads, provide customer support or build your brand, create your site around this task. This may sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many sites just don’t get it! Remember, you can’t be all things to all people, and neither can your site.

2. Build your site around prospects taking ONE action. Too many sites give visitors so many options that they get lost in the process of choosing and end up doing nothing. Decide what the most important task of your site is and then build your pages to support this. Be sure to remove all navigation that isn’t necessary to get them to take the ONE action you want them to take.

3. Make your site look professional. If you can't afford to hire a professional website designer, at least invest some money in a professionally designed template. Remember, customers will judge you based on their first impression of your site, so make sure it’s professional and in line with what they would expect to see from a company in your industry. For professional, affordable templates check out the iProfit Template Package.

4. Choose the colors for your site carefully. They set the tone and can communicate powerful messages to prospective customers. As a result recent studies show that color can have a major impact on conversion rates. Read more in the Clickz article “The Color of Money”

5. Make it easy for customers to find answers to the questions that are stopping them from buying. The most common questions are about prices, availability, shipping policies and guarantees. A good strategy is to both weave the answers to these questions on the appropriate pages of your site, as well as include them all on one FAQ page. Don’t make potential customers hunt for this important information!

6. Make your site navigation simple and straightforward. Studies show that when a customer cannot find what they’re looking for in less than 2 minutes, they leave and usually never come back. Make sure you don’t lose their attention by providing a consistent navigation system on every page. Also, remember that a link to your home page from every other page on the site is essential. That way, if the search engines bring a potential customer to a page other than your home page, they’ll be able to easily find their way around.

7. Remember the “three click” rule. At any point a visitor must be able to get to any part of your website with no more than 3 clicks of their mouse. Ideally the most important pages will be even fewer clicks away.

8. Make sure all pages load as fast as possible. One of the easiest ways to do this is to reduce the size of your graphics – or eliminate them all together if they’re not necessary. A good rule of thumb is to ensure individual images are less than 25KB and each page (with graphics included) is under 50KB. Are your images too big? Make them smaller without compromising quality using a compression tool such as PaintShop or the free online tool GIFBot.

9. Don’t go overboard with technology. Many webmasters make the mistake of adding lots of flashy elements that are unnecessary and distracting. Java or Shockwave applets, scrolling banners, audio and rotating images are all annoying to most visitors since they make the page load slowly and can even cause some browsers to crash. Even Javascript can sometimes be a problem since there are still browsers that don’t support it and many users choose to disable it. If you are using Javascript for a specific, useful feature, be sure it’s used in a way that your site still works without it. Another website blunder to avoid is flash introduction pages. A survey conducted by Marketing Sherpa found that “more than 80% of consumers hate Flash introduction pages and that they will leave sites that incorporate such useless features”.

10. Give people a reason to come back on a regular basis. This may include a regularly updated blog, news headlines, a forum, regularly published articles, on going contests, or any other element that will make your potential customers visit again and again. The more often they visit your site, the more likely they’ll be to eventually make a purchase.

Often the simplest changes can have the biggest impact on your conversion rate. Get started today and you’ll be surprised how quickly your profits begin to grow.