Your website essentially exists for a single purpose – to convert visitors into customers. The act of converting a website visitor in such a manner is called conversion marketing. Why is conversion marketing so important, and how can you measure the effectiveness of your conversion marketing techniques?
Your Current Website
Are you happy with your current website? It could be that it is perfectly up-to-date, utilizes a clean, modern design, and your customers and employees are providing positive feedback. Yet do you know just exactly how many people visit your site without ever purchasing any of your products or services?
Conversion Marketing
Do you need a conversion marketing plan? Before you answer, consider the following example. Many online shoppers start to fill up their virtual shopping carts only to later abandon them. Whether or not they have the intention to later revisit their virtual shopping cart, a good conversion marketing plan will help persuade those potential customers into completing their online purchases. It is important to note that conversion marketing specifically refers to converting visitors who have already chosen to visit your site – it does not measure the effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns that are designed to draw visitors to your site.
What is a Conversion?
Recently we wrote about Calls-to-Action, which is an action that you want your visitor to complete. If a visitor completes an action, then the goal of the webpage was successfully converted. A call-to-action can be anything interactive, such as a click through to a relevant blog post, a whitepaper download, an ecommerce purchase, or a submitted “request a bid” form. So in other words, any successfully completed call-to-action is a single conversion.
Conversion Rate
Before you can develop a conversion marketing plan for your website, you must first measure your conversion rate. The formula for measuring a website’s conversion rate is simple: the total number of website visits measured within a specific period of time is divided by the number of successful conversions. If your conversion rate is low or not where you’d like it to be, then it will be beneficial to optimize your conversion marketing plan through a number of proven techniques and add-on technologies. Also remember that conversion rates can fluctuate by season – for instance, people typically spend more money during the November-December holiday season than during rest of the year, so it would be inaccurate to base your conversion rates of those months as your typical, annual rate.
Proceed with Caution
Depending on your industry or how your website and business is structured, conversion marketing may prove to be either completely unnecessary, ineffective, or too costly to accurately measure. If you do choose to utilize conversion marketing, be sure not to limit yourself by focusing on solely your conversion rate when measuring your website’s effectiveness. In order to truly measure how effective your website is, you must take three more things into account.
Amount, Intent, and Engagement
The first is to consider how many items and how much money a visitor spends each time an online purchase is made. The second is to consider that not every visitor to your site intends to make a purchase – perhaps they are there just to do research about your products or to find out what your business hours are. The last thing you must also take into account is how long an individual visitor stays on each page and what their overall engagement with your website is. By combining all four aspects – your conversion rate and the visitor’s amount, intent, and engagement – you will be able to properly monitor and maintain your conversion marketing plan.