Attract and Keep Customers.
Improve your Conversion.

Boost Sales Conversion
Attracting a crowd of web surfers to your site may not help your business at all. The real task -- the important task -- is converting those browsers into buyers.

The percentage of visitors you convert into spenders, that all-important sales conversion rate, is what powers your bottom line profits. Selling online is a numbers game: the total number of your visitors divided by your conversion rate equals the number of purchases at your site.

A good conversion rate can compensate lower traffic volume: a site with 50,000 visitors and a two percent conversion rate makes as many sales as a site with 100,000 visitors and a one percent conversion rate.

The point is that time and money spent improving conversion rate is one of the most effective uses of an e-tailer's resources. "Even a modest conversion rate improvement offers a huge upside potential," noted Jeff Seacrist, director of marketing for Web analytics firm WebTrends. "Small improvements can mean big profits."

The Core Ingredients
Distill all the rhetoric and you arrive at two basic truths:

First, the task of improving your site's conversion rate is never done. It's like mowing the grass: No matter how good it looks this month, you'll need to tweak it again next month because technology -- and customer tastes -- are always in flux. Experts agree that if you're not constantly looking for ways to bump up conversion, you're losing ground to your competitors.

Second, improving conversion means experimenting. Though there are industry standard techniques for improving conversion, each individual site will need to tinker and tweak, noting the results of each change as they go.

For example, divide your mailing list into two categories, and send a different offer to each. Which results in a higher conversion rate? This strategy of "A/B" testing, done on a consistent basis, provides a gold mine of knowledge about your specific customers and the offers to which they respond.

"Not a lot of customers are taking advantage of Web data to improve their overall results," Seacrist said.

While you're at it, it helps to know not just your own conversion rate, but also the industry standard. In e-commerce overall, the average conversion rate is 2.3 percent, according to a report in December from Web analytics firm FireClick.

Suffering a particularly low rate are e-tailers in the electronics category, at 1.1%. Doing better are the fashion, home furnishing and travel sectors, somewhere between 2% and 2.2%.

The real stars of e-commerce conversion are online merchants who integrate their web site with a printed catalog -- they enjoy a whopping 6.1% conversion rate. (It's this high because their buyers "are coming from a catalog and know what they want and just order online," said Bryan Eisenberg, co-founder of e-commerce consultancy FutureNow.)

There is no one single action an e-tailer can take to fully optimize sales conversion. Rather, it is a comprehensive list of activities, with each capable of contributing incrementally to your efforts.

Consider the Following:
Search me! Get the user to the product or service they are interested in as efficiently as possible. Your site's own internal search tool is arguably the best method you have for presenting customers with what they want. "Making sure your search works is huge," said David Berkowitz, an editor with research firm eMarketer. "The better the search is, the better the customer experience and the more likely those customers are to buy."

Your search engine needs to offer highly specific results to be most effective. If a customer enters "blue, men's, wool, sweater" they need to see results that are exactly that. "If that comes up right away, it's a heck of a lot more likely the customer will go through with the sale," Berkowitz said.

But building a highly specific search tool is easier said than done. There are so many possible ways a customer may think about your product, it takes a mind reader -- or plenty of close monitoring -- to know how they use your search tool. To see an industry leader, look at the search tool at Land's End - -It returns specific results, but moreover, each result comes up with a mini-sales pitch and a high-quality photo.

by James Maguire

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