Increasing Your Conversion Ratio

Your conversion ratio (CR) is the percentage of visitors who become customers, calculated as follows:

Say you sell one gizmo for every 115 visitors to your site. You Conversion Ratio (CR) is 100 divided by 115 (to get a percentage value). That would be 0.87 in this case. That means you're turning 0.87% of visitors into customers.

On the Net the average conversion ratio is about 1% (or one sale for every 100 visitors). Not very encouraging, is it?

There are of course many factors impacting your conversion ratio.

The biggest one is the type of site you have. If you have a content site offering free articles with a book for sale in case anyone is interested, your conversion ratio will probably be far below 1%. If your site consists of a massive list of products and you are attracting targeted, ready-to-buy visitors, your conversion ratio will probably be above 2%.

No matter what kind of web site you have or what you sell, your conversion ratio can probably be improved.

But there are companies on the Net with conversion ratios of more than 10%. By studying their web sites carefully, we can learn a lot.

Here are 7 techniques we have used to increase our conversion ratio:

Stress the benefits of your product first. This is important. Give them your mission statement on the opening page and they'll leave.
Don't just use your offline sales copy for your web site. It does not work. Look at: http://pandecta.com/copy.html
Don't mention price until right at the end. You have to convince them of the value of your product first.
Give them something for free. A free e-book, newsletter subscription etc. so that you live on in the memory of those that don't buy. You can really boost your conversion ratio by simply becoming a familiar (trusted) voice. They'll buy from you sooner or later.
Give them choices. Different product packages & different payment options. This seems obvious but few people do it. Don't hurt your conversion ratio by not being flexible.
Don't mix technical specifications into your sales effort. People buy with their hearts (benefits) and afterwards justify it with common sense (specifications). Sell to their emotions and link to technical specs.
Encourage feedback. Make it easy for them to ask questions. A "Frequently Asked Questions" section is not enough. Place an e-mail link on every page. Make it personal - something like mary@pandecta.com - it's a lot more effective than techsupp01@pandecta.com. Add a picture of Mary and you've got a winner.

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