The ultimate goal of having a website is to generate more business for your organization. This is true whether your objective is to generate more leads for off-line services, sell shippable products, sell memberships or sell downloadable products. Of course, one way to do this is to achieve a higher ranking with the search engines and to thus attract more traffic to your site. However, much more important than attracting more traffic is to increase the conversion rate of your website. After all, if you have a conversion rate of 1% and you raise it to 2%, you double the productivity of your website without having to pay for any new visitors.

In this article, we'll be looking at five simple things you can do today to increase the conversion rate of your website.

#1: Placing Your Offer “Above the Fold”

The term “above the fold” refers to the content of your website which is visible to the user without them having to scroll down on their browser. When people are surfing the Internet, they’re in a hurry to find what they want and so the less work you make them do in order to see your offer the more likely they are to respond to it. So if the sign-up form on your website or the advertisement for your products is not already located above the fold, moving it to a more visible spot will often increase your conversion rate. Marketing research shows that the upper right-hand corner is the most effective spot for an opt-in offer.

If your site uses a long-form sales letter that ends in an invitation for the customer to click a “buy now” button, make sure that your offer is clearly stated within the headline of your sales letter.

#2: Sell End Results, Not Products, and Services

Customers don't buy products and services, they buy the end results which those products and services will produce for them. If the sales copy on your website is talking about your products and services, your conversions are probably only going to be mediocre. Focus instead on the specific end result benefit which your customer is going to get from using your product or service, and communicate that to them directly in your sales copy. Make sure that this end result communicates an emotional benefit that your customer is going to get as a result of purchasing your product or service or opting into your e-mail list.

This tip alone can make a dramatic difference in the conversion rate of your website and help you to get a lot more value from the traffic which you're already attracting.

#3: Optimize Your Site’s Load Time


Optimizing the load time of your site can make a dramatic increase in the number of visitors who actually stay on your site long enough to see your offer. Using technology such as file compression, external CSS style sheets, external JavaScript files, page caching, and image file optimization, you can potentially cut the loading time of your web pages in half. Search engine experiments have revealed that even a half seconds difference in load time can make a 20% difference in the amount of traffic that stays on your site. Therefore, optimizing the file sizes of your website and speeding up the load time can have an almost instantaneous effect on your conversions.

#4: Have Visible Customer Testimonials

You probably already know how important customer testimonials are for increasing your conversions. However, are your customer testimonials featured above the fold of your website, or are they somewhere your customer has to look for them? If your testimonials aren't already in plain sight, you can probably increase your conversion rate simply by putting one of them in a place where your customers will see them as soon as they land on your website. For best results, choose a testimonial that includes a picture or even a video and which speaks specifically about the problem which your product or service helped the customer to solve.

#5: Add a Premium to Your Offer

If you already have an offer on your site for your customers to purchase a product or to fill in a lead form, you can usually increase your responses by adding an extra premium. For example, what can you give your customers for free simply because they decided to contact you by phone, fill in your lead form or purchase your product? Once you add this premium, you can use it to create urgency in your customer through a  ”limited time” or “limited supply” type offer. It’s human nature for people to put things off, even things that are in their best interest for them to take immediate action.

By adding an extra premium to your offer and requiring an immediate response in order for the customer to qualify for the premium, you greatly increase their probability of taking immediate action.

Why the User Experience Matters

The user experience: one of the top factors Google takes into consideration when ranking a website.

It’s a big deal. If Google features your site on page #1, they want people to find it useful. If people are clicking your link, visiting your page then bouncing off immediately, that’s not good for business.

Unfortunately, most online business owners and SEO’s are in the dark when it comes to the user experience. Sure, they know having high bounce rates is bad. They understand their site isn’t delivering as much value as it could be. But instead of working to fix these problems, they build more backlinks.

Like Penguin showed us, this isn’t a good strategy for long-term success.

Think about website landing pages for a minute. Too often, instead of capturing visitor’s attention, landing pages simply broadcast cliche statements that every other business in their niche is saying.

“Aloha Marketing: The Best Marketing Company on the Web!”

What does that even mean? 

So in today’s article, we’re going to talk about two fantastic ways to increase conversions and lower bounce rates: infographics and landing page videos.

Wall of Text Elimination

One of the quickest ways to get a sky-high bounce rate is to present your visitors with a massive wall of text.

In the internet age, we humans have short attention spans. We only want information that’s immediately relevant to us. If we’re searching something on Google and get a 4,000-word wall, that’s probably going to turn us off.

Now, there are always exceptions. We’ve talked before about writing longer, more detailed articles. It’s absolutely fantastic for the user experience – unless it’s the very first thing a potential customer sees. 

Long content is great once you’ve already captured your visitor’s interest. But what if you need to get a point across when a potential customer first visits? An infographic, that’s how!

Infographics take long, complicated explanations or facts and compile them into a fluid and gorgeous picture. This picture still presents the reader with the information you want them to see. But it captures their attention. It makes them interested to read more.

People enjoy reading infographics. 

Look through your analytics. Do you have a page with a lot of content that has a high bounce rate? If so, this page might be a prime candidate for an infographic.

Another great thing about infographics is their “sharability.” When people read an interesting infographic, they share it. They link to it.

Increase Conversions with Video

It’s no secret – video landing pages convert far better than text alone. By simply adding a video to your page, you can increase conversions by ~80%. 

Of course, it can’t be any video – it has to be relevant to the product or service you’re offering. For the same reason, people don’t like reading a wall of text, people will prefer a video over a sales page.

And text-only sales pages lack credibility. People have been burned too many times to fall for a “scam” again. Even if you’re offering an incredible product, if you don’t have a video that instantly explains the benefits and what’s in it for the customer, you’ll likely have low conversion rates.

A video page, on the other hand, captures attention immediately. Additionally, it gives you a creative and interesting way to sell your product or service. You can state statistics, have an animation that explains what your company does… the list goes on and on.

Sure, you can do that with text too. But will people read it? 

And there’s no reason you can’t offer both video and text. Put a video at the top of your page – make sure it’s the first thing your customers see when they hit your page. But give them a written text with more details underneath. This way, you appeal to all different types of customers and maximize conversions.

How to Make Conversions Happen

Even if you are able to do great search engine optimization for your site, surely you are aware that the most important thing is making conversions which will put cash in your bank account. Otherwise, you won’t have the time or the capital to run your business, and eventually, it will dry up. However, there is a lot of confusion about what the most important factor is in making conversions online. Some say that it is the strength of your offer, others claim that your sales copy is the factor that makes or breaks you and others claim that it’s all about having a specifically targeted audience. The following information will help you to understand the role that each of these plays and how you can use them to boost your online conversions…

The Three Legs of Marketing

To build a solid marketing plan, you have to have an equal balance between the three fundamental “legs” of marketing:

  • Audience
  • Offer
  • Sales Copy

These three must be working together in harmony if you want to have success in making conversions online.

Your Audience

Of the three fundamentals of marketing, the audience is the most important. You can have a terrific offer and the best sales copy and if you don’t get it in front of the right people, they aren’t even going to pay attention to it. The secret to getting your offer in front of the right people online is relevancy and specificity.  Here are a few ways to make sure that your target audience meets these two requirements:

1. If everyone is your customer, no one is your customer

The internet marketplace is so competitive that you have to be as specific as possible if you want to win. If you are too general in the selection of your audience, you’ll always be up against an army of competitors who are more specialized than you are. Be as specific as you can in regard to the age, sex, social class, and income level of your target market and you’ll have a lot more success in connecting with them and making sales.

2. Fulfill a Need, Don’t Try to Create One

Do not be afraid of competition when it comes to choosing your target market. If there is no competition, chances are that there is no need for the product or service. This leaves you with the impossible battle of trying to create a need instead of simply fulfilling one. However, competition means that there are already people in your target market buying products like yours, and that’s a good thing. This means you no longer have to sell them on your product or service because they are already buying from someone else. That’s where the strength of your offer comes in…

3. You’re Offer

Your offer is the second most important leg of your marketing strategy. If you have a great offer and get it in front of the right audience, you can get away with having only mediocre sales copy. However, many marketers confuse the offer with the product itself. The offer is what provides the incentive for the person to BUY the product and find out just how good it is. Without a great offer, even the best product will never get a chance to prove its worth.

There are four components to creating a great offer:

1. A Guarantee

People are a lot less likely to take a chance on purchasing a product that they have never tried if the sale is final. Adding a guarantee assures the customer that they have a way out if they are unhappy with your product, which makes them more likely to buy.

2. Urgency

No great offer is complete without added urgency. In other words, limited-time discounts limited supplies of the product, or added bonuses for buying right now. People procrastinate, they always have and they always will. If you want people to buy from you, then you have to give them a reason to do it right now.

3. Added Value

Free bonuses add value to your offer and create the impression that people are getting more than their money’s worth. When it comes to free bonuses, it’s hard to have too many, and giving away the additional products will always bring you enough conversions to make it worthwhile.

4.  Your Sales Copy

While your sales copy is the least important leg of your marketing strategy, it is certainly not something you want to take for granted. The difference between great sales copy and average sales copy can have zeros at the end. There are four basic components that your sales copy must have:

5. Connection to Audience

You must know who you are talking to and speak their language in regard to what their hopes and fears are. This will build reports and credibility and demonstrate to people that you understand them well enough to help them.

6. Emotion

With the exception of products that fulfill basic physical needs, people make buying decisions based on their emotions. Sales copy which engages people’s emotions is sales copy that will get people to buy from you.

8. Clarity

You might be able to get away with offending people with your marketing, but you will never be able to get away with confusing them. Sales copy that is not clear in getting the point across is going to confuse people, and consumers won’t waste time trying to understand you.

9. Strong Call to Action

If people don’t buy while they are reading your sales page, chances are that they never will. This means that no matter how good your sales copy is, the call to action will make you break your conversion rate. A good call to action needs to do three things: tell the customer what to do next, remind them why they are doing it (the benefit of your product) and tell them what is going to happen once they do it.

Conclusion

Build your marketing strategy around these three principles and work consistently towards understanding your audience, adding value to your refining your sales copy. With a little hard work and perseverance, you’ll be sure to succeed.

Additional Resources for Refining Your Marketing Strategy

http://www.warriorforum.com/forum

A community of internet marketers who discuss methods of marketing, testing, and search engine optimization.

http://www.conversationmarketing.com

A website with strategies about improving conversion rates and positive customer behaviors