Conversion101, Part 4: Optimise your site to increase conversions

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.

In the top are your site visitors, and dripping out the bottom are customers (or at least warm enquiries). Your internet marketing initiatives are hopefully making the top of the funnel as large as possible and filling it with good quality prospects. Now the aim is to open out the funnel at the various stages of conversion so that you get more sales and enquiries.

The first step in analysing how well your site is converting is by using analytics software such as Google Analytics. There are two key things that you need to do with this software. Firstly, you need to establish some specific KPIs that are relevant to your business. Example KPIs include sales conversion rate, bounce rate, newsletter sign-up rate. The second thing is to think about the on-site journeys that customers would need to take to reach their goals, and set up some paths in your analytics software to measure these paths and see where the bottlenecks are.

Once you know where the problems are you can then think about how you can improve things by redesigning pages, reworking content and improving overall ease of use.

Measurement, testing and redesign should be part of an ongoing regime that continues to make your site better and better. Measure-Test-Improve should be your mantra for growing your online channel. Lots of small measurements and changes are a good approach as you’re not risking much. A small change that doesn’t work can easily be rolled back. This is exactly what companies like TradeMe and Amazon do.

Next: Test your site with real prospects.

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