Conversion Optimization

Website Conversions: Just Click the Submit Button and Make Me Happy!

March 8th, 2012 by KellyK   |   No Comments

Does your submit button equal website conversions? Seems like a simple enough idea, doesn’t it? There are many things you can do to improve your website so it drives the results you are looking to achieve. Whether you want to build a relevant email list or generate leads, the submit button can effect your website in a major way.

Just Click Submit and Make Me Happy!

My Website Is Just An Online Brochure…

WRONG! Before you think about the submit button, you need to think about your website strategy, as websites are expected to be much more than online brochures. Clients and prospects are in search of resources they feel are valuable and help provide solutions to their problems or bring new ideas to their attention. If your website isn’t showing up in search results when your target audience is searching for those answers and solutions, then your website strategy should be reconsidered.

Just Click The Submit Button…

Whether clients or prospects are searching through their social media networks or use search engines like Google, your company must be present. But just being present isn’t enough. After someone arrives at your site, the logic for website conversion is often as follows: “I have a contact page on my website. Website visitors fill it out and just click the submit button.”

If only it were that easy. Of course visitors clicking the submit button would make you happy! The reality is getting website visitors to that point is not such an easy task and a path to conversion is often overlooked.

What Does It Take To Drive Website Conversions With Your Submit Button?

Driving website conversions is one of the most exciting pieces that goes into the strategy of a website. It’s a mix of psychology, writing, sales, technical, design and social skills! This is where you put yourself in your clients and prospects shoes and think through “What Would They Do” in a 360-degree view. You have to figure out potential reactions, usability paths, the offer, the content and more.

Your Website Will Drive A Response, It May Just Not Be The One You Want

If only it were as easy as, “If you build it, they will come” and included “and they will convert.” It takes a lot more than just putting up a website and a ‘set it and forget it’ strategy. As with any type of sales, it requires a continuous process of nurturing your target audience, getting your brand name in front of them, telling your story through your website, and convincing visitors why they should take the next step with your business. Your website has to offer a total package that includes coordinated components and a path that leads to website conversions.

3 Steps to Help Drive Website Conversions

Step 1: Analyze existing website traffic

Before making changes, analyze the existing patterns of your website traffic. What are people doing (or NOT doing) on your website? Dig deep into the website analytics to gain an understanding of what your website visitors are currently doing while on your website. Where are they spending time? Where are they leaving?

Step 2: Develop the right resources, tools and information to keep them coming back for more!

Fully understanding your target audience and providing the right resources, tools and information for them through your website on a regular basis will definitely keep them coming back to your website for more! You want to build your company’s online presence to position your brand as the “go to” person/website/company that can either help solve their problems or give them good advice or even offer a referral, moving them in the right direction.

Step 3: Your Website is Your Online Sales Team; Convince Visitors to Convert

While your website acts as your online sales team, convincing website visitors to move on to the next step is the goal. There are many next steps that can be taken and specific strategies that must be developed for each of those steps. In the end, it’s well worth the effort. Its far easier to convert someone searching for your specific expertise, product or service rather than cold calling. If your website is just an online brochure, you get what you give. If you’re not giving value, don’t expect to receive much value in return.

Leave a comment and let us know: What challenges are you running into when it comes to converting website visitors into leads or actual sales?

Crank up Your Holiday Sales with Heat Maps

October 26th, 2011 by RyanDraving   |   No Comments

You’re running a bit behind your e-commerce goals this year, and everything depends on the upcoming holiday season. In the pit of your stomach, you feel a sense of dread. If your conversion rate doesn’t increase significantly by the time holiday traffic starts hitting your site, you might get a bundle of coal in your stocking instead of a big fat bonus.

Everything you’ve tried so far has flopped. You have a beautiful (in your own humble opinion) website that follows all the latest UI trends and marketing theories. You’ve spent hours poring over what keywords are being  Googled to find your site, your most popular web pages, the volume of visitors you’re receiving, and what links they’re clicking on. You’ve been getting a huge amount of visitor traffic to your website, but your conversion rates are, quite frankly… pathetic. Somehow your website is attracting visitors who refuse to pull the trigger. It might not be that the visitors aren’t interested in your offerings. It could simply be that something’s fundamentally wrong with the design of your website. But how do you acquire the data to figure out how your site is failing to direct the visitors to actually buy your goods and services?

Why Eye Tracking Is Not the Answer

Eye tracking might seem like the answer, but it can be quite expensive and tends to draw conclusions based on a statistically small group of people. It’s essential to pair eye tracking with a strong analytics program. Think of eye tracking as dessert, and a robust analytics program with extensive analysis as the main course. Similar to focus groups, a company has to pay for a group of people to be organized and placed in a controlled environment for testing every single time new user experience data is needed. Additionally, eye tracking is incompatible with people with poor vision, the elderly, and most people of Asian descent. While the data can provide valuable insights, it can be expensive and statistically insignificant.

Why Heat Maps Are So Cool

We prefer a handy little technology called heat map software. Heat map software provides similar results to eye tracking, but it gathers that data in a very different way. Heat map software monitors visitor mouse movements, and then combines data from all visits to create a color-coded map displaying the web page’s levels of activity. Unlike eye tracking, heat map technology runs on a bit of code installed on your website and gathers data based on actual visitors to your website without requiring any human intervention. We recommend heat maps as a sidekick to your primary analytics package. Some companies even use it as their only analytics tool (bad idea, but certainly possible). Since heat map solutions often integrate into your website with a simple bit of JavaScript code, there is no need to organize groups of people for eye tracking every time your company wants to measure user reaction to a design change.

Tips for Success

  1. One of the biggest complaints about heat maps is that the JavaScript code increases page load time. To avoid this problem, simply ask your programmers to insert the code just before the </body> tag in your web code HTML, and it will load after the page contents have already rendered. Using this trick, heat map data tracking will not affect visitor experience. In fact, the anonymous data monitoring process will be completely invisible to visitors.
  2. Be aware of these downsides before you buy:
    1. Heat maps are not a good fit for every website.  Websites with dynamic web content will not be able to gather reliable data.
    2. Additionally, in some programs the admin panel that displays data reports can be painfully slow. In some cases it can take up to a hour to load a single page. This doesn’t affect the live webpage for the end user, but it could give your analytics team a good excuse to whip out their iPads for a round of Angry Birds.

If you’re ready to give your standard analytics a strong sidekick or you need a simple tool to communicate user experience to your boss (or client), consider heat maps. You’ll gain a constant stream of real-world data in a simple, visual format to get your whole team behind web design improvements.

Let us know how you use heat maps for your website. How did heat maps affect your conversion rate?

Conversion Optimization: The grand-slam of website design

July 10th, 2011 by RyanDraving   |   1 Comment

Every single element on a webpage impacts what visitors ultimately do, from the wording to the fonts to the color and position of all elements, as well as how easy it is to complete a form or transaction.  To maximize conversion rates, companies need to combine creativity with a holistic, results-based analytical approach.

Landing page optimization, results-tracking, testing of new ideas, user-friendly forms, and learning from experience are all part of good website design, and all contribute to higher conversion rates. However, all the website traffic in the world doesn’t mean much for e-Commerce companies unless those website visitors are actually buying.  Awareness that your company exists is nice, since you won’t sell anything if people don’t know you’re out there.  Traffic is important , but even a well-trafficked website of a well-known company can fail if the design doesn’t convert visitors into buyers and generate sales. Companies who neglect any of these will lose visitors, and therefore, revenue, to those who dedicate resources to conversion optimization.

What Conversion Rate Should You Expect?

The average online conversion rate for e-Commerce stores across all industries is 2%– yes, that’s right, an AVERAGE of just 2% of website visitors to e-Commerce stores actually purchase.  Doesn’t sound like much, does it?  An industry-specific breakdown of average conversion rates tells a little more of the story:

Type of site

Conversion rate
Catalog

5.8%
Software

3.9%
Fashion & Apparel

2.3%
Specialty

1.7%
Electronics

0.50%
Outdoor and Sports

0.40%

Catalog sites have a clear advantage, with a 5.8% conversion rate, because most visitors come to their sites to shop.  But even though their visitors are more likely to have the intent to buy, only 5 or 6 of every hundred visitors actually do.  It may not seem like much, but when you consider that websites can generate tens or even hundreds of thousands of visits per month, and even more if you’re a very big player, it all adds up.  If landing page optimization didn’t make a difference, no one would be doing it.

Steps to Improve e-Commerce Website Conversion Rates

Track

The first step is to gather information on the results you are getting from your website – you can’t fix problems you don’t know exist, and you can’t judge improvement if you don’t know where you’re starting from.  There are many tools now available to track how people find your website, how many visitors you have, how long they spend on each page, and where they go as they navigate from one page to another.  Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are free and easy for any webmaster to set up, and will give you the basic information you need to know about who’s visiting your site and what they’re doing once they’re there.

Test

Once you have benchmarked the data on what’s currently happening on your site, you can start making small changes and testing the impact those changes have on visitor behavior.  Google Website Optimizer enables you to create multiple versions of the same page, each with one or more elements slightly different, and to compare the differences in visitor behavior generated by each page.  For best results, follow Google’s guidelines to effective A/B split or multivariate testing, so you’re not misattributing changes in results to an elemental change that didn’t actually cause the difference.

Tweak

As you see improvements in visitor behavior and conversion rates on your site through testing, implement those changes that increase your conversion rates, and then choose the next element you’re going to test.  Never change more than one element at a time so you can appropriately assign responsibility (or hopefully, credit) for improvements.  Monitor the response over time because there are many factors that influence  conversion rate, including the calendar, sentiment and payroll cycles, and you don’t want to overemphasize the impact of any one factor.  Each change will improve upon the previous version of your site, and will bring you one step closer to maximizing your conversion rate.

Repeat

The process of testing and then tweaking your site in response to your results should be an always-ongoing process, because visitor behavior is always evolving.  The effectiveness of some elements decreases as people become accustomed to them– banner ads, for example, were once a major advertising draw, but are now far less effective because many consumers have developed “banner blindness” and no longer “see” banner ads.

There is both an art and a science to landing page optimization and e-Commerce website design, and when all the elements come together the right way, magic happens and conversion rates can far exceed industry averages.