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How
To Quickly and Effectively Maximize Online
Conversion Rates
By Philippe Suchet, CEO,
Kefta, Inc.
Imagine
a world in which each customer that visits your website to browse or shop
is a blank slate and that each one will choose to stay and make a purchase.
Not only that, they become repeat customers or, better still, website
evangelists, extolling the virtues of your site to their friends, family,
and strangers they meet on the street.
Of
course, the actual environment in today’s market couldn’t be further than
the imaginary world. In fact, trying to guess which browsers will become
buyers, which buyers will become repeat customers, and which customers
will become evangelists is tantamount to a coin toss, only the odds are
not as good. So what’s a direct marketer to do?
Getting
a clearer understanding of your conversion rates is a good starting point.
Prospect conversion begins with the knowledge of your customers’ needs
and, if you have the right tools on your site, their thought process as
they maneuver around your site. Remember, your customers come to your
site in the hopes of filling some need. Each step in the conversion process
involves attempts to keep them on your site. Many will leave, for reasons
that are beyond your control, but many more will stay if you can convey
an understanding of their needs.
That’s
where it gets tricky. How do you keep your customers happily cruising
around your site until they make that much needed purchase? How do you
maximize online conversion rates?
First,
make it a priority and take advantage of large, untapped business opportunities:
your website visitors who aren’t converting into customers. The math is
simple. Regardless of the industry, average online conversion rates are
below 2%: less than 2 out of 100 online visitors are being converted into
customers. Assuming that you can successfully convert 1% of those abandoners,
you will have increased your sales by more than 50%.
So
how do website visitors become customers? Studies show that more than
50% of the visitors leaving a website before completing a purchase/application
intended to make a purchase at some point. And abandoners are struggling
with two types of issues:
- Structural
problems (e.g. website problems)
-
Quickly addressable issues (e.g. pricing or timing issues)
Given
this, direct marketers must ask what they need to do to convince website
visitors to become customers.
Five
things are critical in order to be successful:
1.
Differentiate various stages of the prospect website experience.
For instance, a visitor dropping at the homepage versus a visitor abandoning
on a page where shipping costs are displayed for the first time will
have varying (a) expectations, (b) willingness to enter into a dialog
with you and (c) needs.
2.
Understand the issues that your customers are facing at each
stage of their experience. Make sure to extensively survey
customers at the different stages and to offer something valuable or
compelling in exchange for their feedback.
3.
Collect the data that you need in order to efficiently re-connect
to your customer. Automatically record the pages that they
looked at, save the valuable information that they have entered thus
far, and proactively ask for missing information (e.g. email address)
at point of departure.
4.
Personalize the communication. Act upon the collected
feedback data to respond to your visitors, using the appropriate message
and communication medium. Follow-up in a timely manner with the visitor
who is unable to make a purchase because of either missing information
or unwillingness to purchase on the spot. Provide incentives for your
price-sensitive prospects as they leave the site. Have a sales rep contact
your visitors who are struggling with their online experience. Do this
within minutes of them dropping, and make sure to arm your reps with
relevant knowledge related to each of these prospects.
5.
Test and refine your conversion tactics. Constantly
try different kinds of real-time and pre-determined reengagement tactics
with: pop-ups, feedback messages, timing and title of follow-up emails,
as well as incentives. Get real–time reporting on all the relevant metrics
and have the flexibility to change the tactics on the fly. Expect to
improve your initial results by 2-3 times owing to your change management
capabilities.
Market
leaders using similar methods have reported interesting results:
-
25% increase in online conversion rates by an online retailer
-
45% increase in online account origination by an internet trading company
- 30%
increase of online sales by a leading direct-to-consumer financial institution
-
20% increase of online sales by a telecommunications company
About the Author
Philippe Suchet is the CEO of Kefta, Inc. (http://www.kefta.com),
a leader in online conversion optimization programs. Kefta provides both
marketing expertise as well as technology in order to enable online marketers
to: increase sales within a few weeks of implementing their solutions,
boost revenues by at least 10%, and limit reliance on in-house IT resources
to less than a day of IT work.
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