Why You Need to be Obsessed with Your Conversion Rate
Are you obsessed? Are you totally and utterly obsessed? With your website’s conversion rate, that is!
Your website’s conversion rate is the percentage of times that your website visitors take the actions you most highly value on your site. For a retailer, this is typically an online purchase. For a B2B firm, this may be lead generation. For an online publication, this could be a subscription or Page Views or Time-On-Site.
So, here are a few questions for you:
- How often do you analyze your website’s conversion data?
- How often do you make changes to your promotions to test the effects on your conversion rate?
- How often to do you test web page elements to enhance your conversion rate?
What if I were to tell you that you should be continuously taking these steps, exploring different ways to increase your conversion rate every month? What if I were to tell you that you should continuously obsess over your website’s conversion rate?
Why You Need to be Obsessed with Your Conversion Rate
Here are three important reasons to be deliriously obsessed with your conversion rate:
1. Cost-Effective Sales
Think about it. If your fixed costs remain somewhat consistent, then you will be much more profitable by selling more. In effect, the incremental sales are what can take your business to an entirely new level of profitability.
2. Tweaking Can Make All the Difference
If you are investing the energy to run promotions and build web pages anyway, then you’ve already done the hard part. Why not take the time to leverage your time, energy and investment by testing different variations? Certain tweaks can result in exponentially better returns. Even if a tweak results in only a 5% or 10% increase in conversions, well guess what — for little effort you just increased your business results and can leverage the learnings for your future marketing efforts as well.
3. It’s Winner Take All
Who won the Super Bowl earlier this year? The Steelers. After their victory, they had a parade, met the President and kicked off the new NFL season on prime-time TV. The Cardinals? They came within minutes of winning, but that didn’t matter. To the world, the Steelers are Super Bowl champions and no one is really talking about the Cardinals. In other words, the winner tends to take a disproportionate amount of rewards, regardless of how close a competitor may be in 2nd place. In the case of clients and customers, this can mean a disproportionate amount of mindshare. Simply by increasing your conversion rate just a bit beyond your competition can make a difference.
So, be sure to take the time to methodically work on increasing your website’s conversion rate (Get obsessed about it!), and see your business growth accelerate.
Special Announcement:
And to blast your way through the down economy by capitalizing on current marketing trends, check out the new, exclusive Marketing Trends Report: Blast through the Recession with Social Media, Mobile Marketing & More!, jointly produced by StartupNation and Website Marketing NOW. I think you’ll learn a lot from the report and encourage you to check it out.
September 23rd, 2009 at 10:21 am
Nice post, Tom.
I think every commercial website (which may be just every website) needs a clear conversion strategy. They need to apply that strategy and then monitor its effectiveness. Why do more people not get this?
September 25th, 2009 at 11:27 am
We are a B2C site which focuses on lead generation. I can testify myself that it is the most important variable to analyze when using Analytics or Adwords.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:40 am
[...] Why You Need to be Obsessed with Your Conversion Rate (Three important reasons why you need to be deliriously obsessed about your conversion rate in order to maximize your website results.) [...]
November 6th, 2009 at 2:56 am
If you are travelling to Australia for a holiday, business, gap year or visiting family and friends you will need a visa. Visas 4 Australia are an online Australia visa specialist offering fantastic customer service at extremely competitive rates. What ever visa you need for visiting Australia… look no further than Visas 4 Australia
September 20th, 2011 at 11:39 pm
Excellent blog! Do you have any helpful hints for aspiring writers? I’m hoping to start my own blog soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you suggest starting with a free platform like Wordpress or go for a paid option? There are so many options out there that I’m totally confused .. Any recommendations? Thank you!