conversions

can some people list the important factors in coverting your traffic into buyers, and in general ho many vistors do you need to make a sale?

Professional looking website
User friendly navigation
A site that portrays credibility

You can have all the hits your site can handle and be at the top of all your keywords, but
it won't mean a thing, if your site can't close the sale.

I think the average for Visitor to Buyer ratio is around 3%

converting a visitor to a buyer is much more involved than having a great looking website and differs for each market or product. You may be a doctor looking to convert a visitor into a patient. Maybe you are a gift shop looking to sell someone a birthday gift basket. The mindset of each one of those visitors is different and what is considered a "conversion" is different for each as well. The doctor may consider a "conversion" to be someone who fills out a contact form on their website or maybe someone that calls their office to take advantage of a special offer on the website. For the gift site owner, they may only consider a conversion to be the sale of a gift basket.

I think you would be better off surveying your customers (and giving them incentive to do so) rather than asking people on this forum what will make your customers "convert".

PS. I love these forums and think there is a lot to learn from them. I just think in your situation you should focus your questions to the people that matter...the people coming to your site.

Conversions vary depending upon your market -- what you're selling. For actual hard goods it will probably vary from 1% to 5%. This will also vary depending upon the time of year, ie holiday season, fathers day, mother day, etc.

STUDY the book... Don't Make Me Think by Krug... don't read it - study it. Then apply what you have learned. Your conversions will go up. No book or website has influenced me more in how to design my site and my landing pages.

Also, start testing testing testing testing... don't stop... keep the best result... test something new. You can not improve without changing things and keeping data on the results.

I am always running tests.

EGOL - That is exactly the book I live my life by. Buy it from his site - http://www.dontmakemethink.com/

I agree that in terms of usability and e-commerce stats, nothing will be more beneficial. Some great free resources do exist online, however:

Web Credibility Guidelines - http://www.webcredibility.org/guidelines/
Test and Refine Site Speed - http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Usability Results from Tests (very worthwhile) - http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/
Nielsen's Alertbox (read 'em all and come out an expert) - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
How to Design a Usable Web Site - http://www.usability.gov/methods/index.html

Basically, there are four things you can do to boost your conversion rate:

1. Visitors - Improve the number of visitors to your site or the percentage of visitors who are seeking what you sell (refining keywords, ads, etc)
2. Improve Usability/Speed - Make your website easier to use, surf and buy from
3. Improve Credibility - Make your site more professional and credible so users don't have to think - do I trust these guys?
4. Provide More Product Options, Choices, etc - Get a larger and more varied inventory, carry the stuff others don't have

There is one other, which is to improve customer service and relationships to build in a higher recitivism rate (more return buyers), but it's less in the website and more in the company.

Thanks good links and tips, tread has had some good info thanks all

Whoa, Great stuff randfish... I know what I will be reading sometime soon.

Thanks!

I just posted this in the affiliate forum, so sorry for cross posting, but it fits so well in this thread.

I am an affiliate management consultant so spend a lot of time advising merchants and affiliates on how to increase conversions, so thought I would share a couple great resources with you all. This is some of the most powerful stuff I have read on increasing conversion rates and also persuasive copywriting for the web. Check the archives, sign up for current newsletter and learn to convert more Clicks to Sales!!!

Intro from their site:

Would You Like To Convert More of Your Traffic?

Wouldn't it be great to get more sales without spending more money to drive more visitors to your site? You can. There are hundreds of ways to improve your Customer Conversion Rate, many of which can be done very quickly and some of which cost absolutely nothing to implement!

GrokDotCom is the Award-winning, plain spoken, practical, and refreshingly irreverent FREE newsletter that shows you how from the authors of Persuasive Online Copywriting. Twice a month, The Grok delivers solid ideas you can use right away to increase your sales, subscriptions, opt-ins, registrations, sweepstakes entries, phone inquiries, or whatever visitor action is your goal, without having to increase your traffic!

http://www.grokdotcom.com/

The guys behind the scenes are Jeff and Bryan Eisenberg owners of www.futurenowinc.com. They are AWESOME at consulting for companies who want to improve ROI.

Go to their site for lots of FREE tools for measuring ROI and conversion rates.

Enjoy this resource - it's one of my favorites!

Linda AKA Catalyst

actually a friend was just telling me about that site as well. Unfortunately, the site is down right now.

futurenoinc.com is up, you just have to remove the period from the end of the url

guess the weekend was a little longer than I remembered. Thanks.

Sorry about that. Just edited and fixed that link. It's such good info, I would hate to have anyone miss it.

This thread has been a welcomed slap in the face. Thank You All!

Thanks for the tip on the book. It is a great read, and is rapidly withering away from frequent handling.

As far as commerce sites....so many things can convert customers into sales.

Few that come to mind:

- navigation
- layout
- usability
- descriptions
- ease of process
- ease of finding what you want, about what you want (if that makes sense)
- price
- shipping
- availbility
- security
- post sale
- branding (site, name, product)
- warranties
- audience target

That is high level....from there with sales, and stats much can be learned increasing the bottom line on a continious basis.

-Dwight
_____________________________________________
Trademark Productions, Inc.