Conversion101, Part 1: Getting the website foundations right

Before get into talking about increasing conversions, let’s start by clarifying what a conversion is. Simply put, a conversion is getting a website visitor to take a specific action that you want them to take: usually completing an online purchase or making an enquiry.

For any business using the web as a ‘channel’ for new business, conversion rates are the benchmark of how well your site is performing. Across all industries, the average conversion rate is around 2%, meaning that out of every hundred people who visit your site, only two people successfully buy a product or make an enquiry: but this can vary quite widely. For specialty products, you would expect a much higher conversion rate. For mass market ‘me too’ products, you may have difficulty in getting to 2%.

If you think of your website as a funnel, with visitors going in at the top end and customers dripping out of the bottom, the two main factors are in building a successful business website are pretty clear:

1. the volume and quality of traffic; and
2. the effectiveness of the website

While it’s relatively easy to increase the number of good prospects to your site, getting a highly tuned website that converts them into customers is rather trickier.

For any online channel to succeed, you need to have a website that has solid foundations you can build on. And I’m not talking techy here: I don’t mean built on a solid code platform. What I mean is that the design, structure, features and content of the site all need to be based on sound business strategy and a solid understanding of who your online customer is.

Most business websites are designed and built with an ‘internalised’ view of what they site should be and they often fail to deliver. In the next part of this series, we look at how to know what your customers really want.

Conversion 101

• Part 1: Getting the website foundations right
• Part 2: Know who you’re selling to
• Part 3: Drive prospective customers to your site
• Part 4: Optimise your site to increase conversions
• Part 5: Test your site with real prospects
• Part 6: Identify and remove barriers to growth