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Without_Conversion_Rates_You_Dont_Know_If_Youre_Mickey_Mouse_Or_Mickey_Mantle
| Without Conversion Rates You Dont Know If Youre Mickey Mouse Or Mickey Mantle
I couldn’t agree more with the headline of this article and it’s
one I’m afraid I can’t take credit for. I found this line in
Paco Underhill’s book, Why We Buy – The Science Of Shopping, and
found myself comparing many of the things he has measured in the
retail world to the tests I’ve done with online, visitor-based
activity. The conversion rate on a website is easy to measure.
Unfortunately, businesses too busy concentrating on their bottom
line most often overlook it. The point of this article is to
define what a conversion rate is and show you how you can begin
to start improving your own website’s conversion rate and
therefore your bottom line. At the same time, I will relate my
observations to Paco’s on offline retailing.
In Cyberspace No-One Can Hear You Shop
According to Paco, the main problem with websites is that, owing
to media attention and the love of technology, retailers went
online without knowing why. It’s true that in the late 90’s
businesses were going online because their competition had, or
because they feared that they would be left behind by not
embracing the new technology. Not great reasons to spend time,
money and resources on a website. The painful thing is that,
since going online, most of these websites have not changed much
for the better. Yes, they look nicer now, but the number of
glorified poster sites I still see never ceases to amaze me. In
order to combat this lack of purpose, I propose you look at four
goals and adapt them to your own business requirements. One of
these goals should be the primary focus of your entire website
design.
1) Prospect Acquisition To deliver qualified leads and prospects
through the website.
2) Sales/E-commerce To sell products and services online
directly through an e-store.
3) In-House Cost Saving To cut costs, usually resources such as
printed material or time, by automating in-house processes
online such as timekeeping systems and human resource
procedures.
4) Customer Service To improve customer service by providing
answers to queries and complaints online automatically where
possible.
With the goal clearly defined, it is easier to measure the
effectiveness of your site because you know what to look for.
Conversion is defined in relation to the goal you’ve chosen.
So measure prospect acquisition as the percentage of visitors
who give you their details out of the total number of visitors
to your website. Measure conversion on sales as the percentage
of people buying a product against the total number of website
visitors. Conversion on in-house cost saving is simply the
number of people using the system as a percentage of the number
of people supposed to be using the system. A good internal
policy here will mean this is a 100% conversion rate. The number
of people using the resources and systems you have put in place
as a percentage of total visitors to the support web pages can
give you your customer service conversion.
So why measure conversion? Because it allows you to accurately
measure the impact of changes you make by measuring the
performance of your website before and after the change. With
that valuable information in hand, you can make adjustments
accordingly.
The Butt Brush Factor
In many instances in his book, Paco refers to ‘The Butt Brush
Factor’ — the way people, women in particular, don’t like
enclosed spaces where other people constantly bump into them
from behind. It usually led to the prospective shopper feeling
frustrated or feeling uncomfortable and leaving the store or
going somewhere else. You might be thinking, “well how does that
relate to an online experience?” It is true that no-one usually
bumps into you from behind while you’re sitting in front of a
computer, but how many times are you made to feel irritated,
uncomfortable or just downright frustrated by a website? How
often do you leave one and look at another because the first one
doesn’t have what you’re looking for? This ‘Butt Brush Factor’
is incredibly relevant to websites, more so I think than even in
ordinary retail. Here are some examples of common online ‘Butt
Brush Factors’ that you will see in many business websites.
1) Latest News. The landing page has the latest news about the
company links. What exactly is the point of having a bunch of
latest news links on your landing page? What good is that to a
browser arriving at your landing page knowing and caring little
about your company? A browser wants to know what you can do for
him right there and then, not how your company stock is doing.
An ‘About Us’ section is a much more reasonable place to put
these links.
2) Awards. A landing page with awards screams, look at us, look
at what we’ve achieved, aren’t we clever? It also completely
wastes space on the most important page of your website. It can
be compared to what Paco said when he talked about going into a
car showroom and seeing manufacturer awards. That is unlikely to
make much of an impression on the average shopper.
3) Poor Headlines. ‘Welcome to Company Name’ is the most common
waste of a headline I ever see. Probably the company is unknown
to the visitor so you’re wasting his or her time. A headline,
which communicates the need of the target audience and how you
can solve that need, improves reading and click through by up to
35% in recent tests we made.
4) Submit Buttons. Why tell the visitor to ‘submit?’ Submit
actually means “To yield or surrender (oneself) to the will or
authority of another” according to dictionary.com, so why ask
innocent web browsers to do that in order to read your monthly
newsletter? Subscribe to our newsletter is much more friendly, I
would say.
5) Bad Use Of Flash. This is a common problem with media
companies in particular. I understand why they do these all
singing all dancing interactive flash websites, which often are
works of art and showcase their ability. However ‘skip intro’ is
a common link on the majority of these websites. That is because
some people find them a waste of time. Why have an intro at all?
Why not just have a showcase of what you can do on a normal
fast, efficient website which tells me what I need to know
quickly? If I decide I have the time to look at flash animations
I will.
6) Poor Use Of Imagery. I’m guilty of this myself. We used to
have a picture of a squirrel flying through the air with ‘what’s
your objective’ on our landing page. It might have worked had we
been selling nuts or seed, but a company improving website
conversion? Not really relevant! It was more a result of my ego,
pride and photographic luck in capturing said squirrel with my
digital camera, and then thinking of a way I could use the
picture, than thinking of a good picture which was relevant to
what we were trying to say and using that. This kind of thing is
repeated on many websites — people with briefcases, bridges,
animals and other general graphics, which can be turned with
words into anything you want the image to say. But on first
glance, they don’t really show any relevance. All communication
should be relevant and, ideally, persuade the user to do
something.
Again, conversion is an important measurement here. It can be
applied to all of the changes you make to your site as you
eliminate these ‘Butt Brush Factors’. Later in this article,
I’ll explain how.
Attention All Shoppers…
“For the next fifteen minutes, in the frozen food section, free
passion fruit sorbet for everyone” is a perfect way to instill
urgency in shoppers to go to that section of the store and get
the freebie. They know they only have 15 minutes, and they know
that after that time they won’t get the lovely sorbet. This was
Paco’s way of showing how stores could be more imaginative. The
store knows that that section of the store is going to be jammed
with people for that 15 minutes and can capitalize on impulse
sales. That’s how it works in the retailing world, but what
about online? Instilling urgency online is a major factor
overlooked by many business websites. Some examples of how you
might want to start employing this technique online are listed
below.
1) Time Expiry Offer. Just as in the above example, you could
let your readers know they will miss out if they haven’t
subscribed or bought your product by a certain time.
2) The First Number. Your website could offer the first 50
subscribers a free e-book or could advertise that the first 50
items sold will be at a 30% discount. This could be combined
with a counter showing the number of places/items left, so that
the browser thinks “I have to subscribe before those places are
taken up”.
3) The Nth Number Competition. The website states that if you
are subscriber number 1000, you get a free website makeover,
again combined with a visible counter of the current number of
subscriptions. This could be tied into a referral deal so that
if the subscriber is not the lucky number and does not get the
deal, at least he could be offered something for making the
referral while his friend might still end up being the lucky
number and win the prize.
So how does conversion relate to all these changes? The
conversion rate should and can be measured in every instance.
The Science Of Online Marketing
There are two incredibly significant lines in Why We Buy:
“Science is by and large the study of very small differences”
and “When you change one thing, everything changes”.
The first ‘very small difference’ and ‘changing one thing’
situation I came across in my online marketing career was a
complete mistake. I was working for a large press organization
and one day I had to change some HTML code on a sales form. By
mistake, I removed a voucher entry field from the form. As a
result, people could no longer enter their voucher number to get
a cheaper deal. Conversion improved by three times. I told our
editor who was amazed but instructed me to put the voucher field
back on the form while they figured out what to do. There was a
good reason for the voucher; in fact, it was the entire reason
the page was there. However, putting the voucher entry field
back resulted in a drop in conversion to almost the identical
sales that we had been getting before my mistake. The voucher
idea was eventually scrapped on that page and sales sky rocketed
again. The reason, we ascertained, was that visitors figured
that they could get a cheaper deal with a voucher. The voucher
could only be gotten by physically buying a newspaper and that
limited us to around 10% of the audience. Nine out of ten people
visiting the website did so from a place where they couldn’t buy
the newspaper at that time, so it was obvious that the voucher
idea could only be good for the local readers. This experience
was a catalyst for me personally, and from then on, I began to
understand the importance of measurement online. In particular,
the measurement of conversion.
So in order to turn the online changes you make into a science,
follow three simple rules.
1) Measure Conversion. Conversion is a percentage, a calculation
of the number of people who take the action you desire as a
percentage of the total number of visitors to the page. Using
percentages makes the actual number of people arriving at a page
irrelevant. It becomes possible to compare a busy week with a
quiet week.
2) Change one thing at a time. An average page has lots of
variables: graphics, headlines, paragraphs, sentences, links,
testimonials and probably a lot more. By only changing one thing
and always measuring for the same period of time (30 days is
good), you will get a fair result. So for instance, if you
change a headline, look at the page click-through and if
possible the length of time an average visitor stayed on the
page for 30 days before the change. Make the change and measure
the results for the next 30 days. Then if conversion is higher
(more people reading or more people clicking through), keep the
change. If it’s lower, revert to what you had before.
3) Experiment. Don’t limit yourself to headlines. Copy, content,
graphics, adding competitions, etc. — try them all. But remember
the rule: change only one variable at any one time.
Summary
I’ve desperately been trying to keep this article short; I think
I could have written an epic on this subject. If I were in the
same room as Paco Underhill, we would have an awful lot to talk
about. However what I’m trying to say is that businesses should
start waking up to the fact that online marketing is as much a
science as Paco demonstrates in the retailing world. Measuring
conversion rates online is the beginning of making it
scientific.
About the author:
Steve Jackson is Editor of The Conversion Chronicles, a
respected writer and author of the e-book Learn Before You Spend
- 6 Ways to measure web traffic costing $30. You can get a free
copy by subscribing to http://www.conversionchronicles.com
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