The average sales conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that actually buy on your e-commerce section. These customers complete the entire shopping cart process for either the new visitor or the return visitor sections (in case you have different process for existing customers).

 This is the first success metric of your website that should be improved as it helps you to boost returns from different web promotions that you may be managing. Improving these conversion rates can be tricky as there are many factors influencing conversions. From the outset you need to analyse your complete website, gauge its weaknesses and arrive at workable strategies for improving site conversion rates.

The basic steps that you need to take are:

- Correctly establish key customer needs and focus on fulfilling them quickly while minimising visitor pain points (navigation etc.).
- Know the strength of your products/services and leverage them through testimonials/success stories. Highlight their popular features prominently too.
- Establish greater credibility through such simple measures as fast loading content, easy to navigate web layouts, simple e-commerce procedures, evidence of real life (physical) presence and offering a money back guarantee too. Always use persuasive sales content and friendly website copy. Simplicity and well researched terms make it easy to win over the trust of your web visitors.
- View your website ‘holistically’ to ensure that there is all round professionalism in terms of its overall look and feel, accurately worded content with higher comfort levels (ease of navigation) for web site visitors.

Importance of landing pages

Landing pages are specially designed web pages to initiate specific action from web visitors. Usually visitors arrive at landing pages from focused marketing campaigns like e-mailers, PPC advertisement or banner advertisements. Successful landing pages quickly grab visitor attention as their design and copy easily maps to the overall look and feel used in the ‘lead-on’ promotional campaigns. Landing pages and customising your website experience based on the search performed by the Internet user is proven to significantly improve the your website sales or sales lead conversion rates.

Crisp content and a brief ‘call to action’ paragraph help reduce abandonment rates. Landing pages should focus readers’ attention to specific offers with the primary call-to-action content displayed prominently: upfront/ at the center to boost response rates. Marketers can also allow people who showed interest in their offer(s) to view other offers from the company by providing links to relevant web pages. It’s a smart tactic to add an incentive (freebie) to compel visitors to complete the desired action on the landing page (shopping etc). Restrict the data fields required to be filled by the visitors to the bare minimum as this adds to their convenience.

Scenario testing, ‘A/B testing’

Ensure your marketing efforts get better returns consistently by testing their effectiveness on your target users. Marketers need to test the effectiveness of their web initiatives under different scenarios i.e. e-mail campaigns, PPC advertisements, landing pages etc.  A/B testing - sometimes also called ‘A/B split’ - is the simplest means of testing email / web promotion elements. You need to divide your viewing-audience into two groups: one group sees the original (unchanged) version of whatever you want to test; the other group sees the alternative version (with one element changed). You can then track the results of both the webpages.

For example, suppose you want to develop the most suitable subject line for promotional emails. Simply write two separate emails with identical content but different subject lines. These e-mailers should then be sent to separate groups of people. By comparing the open rates of both the subject lines you can judge which is better. Repeat this exercise with other subject line options to arrive at the most appropriate subject line. Repeat the exercise 3-4 times and the most successful subject line becomes your benchmark.

This simple but important exercise can have a tremendous impact on success rates of your marketing campaigns and even content on your web-pages. It also means that marketers will not have to make potentially expensive campaign decisions purely based on risky gut reaction

Our experience shows the majority of websites do not invest in AB Testing as they do not have the time to invest in that level of granularity of website performance measurement. However, our experience also shows that investing in AB testing can quickly have 200-300% positive impact on your bottom line.

The website is a very dynamic medium and its quick and easy to test the best ideas. ROI.com.au can help your business quickly set up a robust process for testing the effectiveness of your search engine marketing.