Someone has visited your website. How do you get them to make contact? If you are selling products or services online, then how do you encourage the visitor to make a purchase?
As in any walk of life, first impressions count. The average visitor takes only few seconds to decide if a website has anything of interest to them. There is also a limit to the amount of information that the visitor can absorb, so they should not have to scroll right down the page to confirm that the content if of relevance to them. If the visitor does want to find out more about the topic, then they should to be able to read more about it.
Making a Sale
A popular misconception about sales people is that their main objective is to “make the sale”. The best sales people know that every interaction with the customer leading up to the eventual sale has to be closed in a way that moves the customer closer to making a purchase. Equally, sports people know that the only way to win a tournament is to focus on winning each point.
Having attracted the right sort of visitor, the website has to retain and develop the visitor’s interest, and lead them through step by step towards making some form of contact. A website cannot control the path taken by a visitor, because, by their very nature, they provide visitors with random access to their content.
Ease of navigation and good presentation of the content are obviously essential. Your website should be easy to navigate, because your customers need to find what they are looking for quickly and easily, and without getting lost.
The layout of your website design is equally important. Your website visitors are looking for specific information about your goods and services. If this is not instantly available to them they will feel that they have come to the wrong company and you will lose them as a customer.
Beyond that, each page can only include signposts and inducements to encourage the visitor to make contact. We are very familiar with the techniques that are available, and we extensive experience in applying them. Even so, it is impossible to anticipate the optimum content at the outset, so it cannot be a one-off exercise as part of the website development.
Evolving Content
The only way of maximising the conversion rate of a website is for its content to evolve over time. Analytical tools can be used to measure the performance of a website, such the pages that the visitors’ viewed and the order in which they were viewed.
The development of a website to meets the specific needs of a business does not end when it goes live. It is only the starting point. Maximising the conversion rate requires a feedback based process of making steady improvements over time.
Measuring Performance
The value of a high conversion rate is highlighted most when the visitors arrive from pay-per-click advertising campaigns, because the cost of the each contact can be measured. Website conversion rates can range from as low as 1%, especially for websites selling high ticket items or non-essential services in lean times, to 15% for websites offering local services that are in high demand, such as for plumbing services in winter.
The average cost per click for many products and services is typically 50p. The average conversion rate quoted by Google for all types of product and service is 2%. This means that the advertiser must spend £25.00 with Google just to make one online sale. This might be a reasonable selling cost if you are selling an expensive service, but not if you are selling relatively low priced products.