Posts in ‘Conversion101’

In the previous articles in this Conversion101 series, we’ve seen how good foundations, good site design and good optimisation practices can help to grow your business over time. What we need to think about now is: what else is getting in the way?

Imagine that you’ve identified an issue with your site: your product category pages are losing lots of customers. You now need to decide on what to do and get it done. How will this happen in your organisation? Think about all of the stakeholders and decision makers in the process. Do you need to involve your web agency, your SEO company, get agreement from marketing, the board, your boss?

Web analytics tools are good at giving you a big picture view of where people are bailing out from your website, but they can’t really tell you why. To find this out you need to test your website with real users. User testing allows you to look at your site through the customer’s eyes. It involves sitting down with a typical customer and seeing how they use the website and why it’s not working for them.

But you can’t just sit your cat down in front of your computer and expect amazing results. There are a number of attributes that make up a successful user testing process.

So, let’s assume that you’ve researched your customers, you’ve designed a website based on that knowledge, and you’ve implemented various strategies to get prospects to your site, what then? You now need to tune your site to turn it into a high performance sales machine.

The best way to think of your site is as a conversion funnel.

OK, so you now have an amazing website that does a pretty good job of giving customers what they need and is converting reasonably well. What’s next? You need to drive as many prospects to your site as possible.

Notice I used the term ‘prospect’, not ‘visitor’. Online advertisers love to tell you about the number of ‘eyeballs’ on their site and the amount of visitor traffic they can drive your way. But what you really want more than visitors is visitors who are potential customers.

Imagine Harry on a school visit to the zoo. On the way to the zoo, Harry’s pal George tells Harry how much monkeys love sandwiches. At the zoo Harry makes a beeline to the monkey cage and offers the monkey a sandwich from his lunch box. The monkey ignores Harry’s sandwich. Why? The monkey hates sandwiches. What the monkey would die for is a nice fresh banana.

The key point here is that the customer (the monkey) is being offered something they simply don’t want. Getting to know your online customer is critical. Harry’s friend George could be your sales manager, who has told the design team exactly what his customers are like and what they need. But more often than not, the online customer is quite different from the people we know about in the physical world. Take retailers, for instance: the people who buy in-store are very different from those that buy online — they have different needs and different characteristics.