Increasing Conversion Rates One Step at a Time
PART ONE: THINKING ABOUT CONVERSION
by Bryan Eisenberg
Throughout history, people have employed every communication medium available as a sales tool, so it's no surprise we would turn our attention to selling online. The problem that presents itself to e-commerce is this: all previous vehicles for sales allowed for significant degrees of human interaction. Successful selling is human-centered - people meet the needs of people based on a series of steps all participants implicitly understand. The traditional experience includes lots of face-to-face contact, where all the non-verbal elements that comprise 93 percent of normal communication can play their roles. However, Web sites don't allow any of those elements to operate, and typically replace the human-centered sales process with lots of non-human-friendly technology.
The Internet does not change people - they still want to be sold (in a positive way). Buying is fundamentally an emotional process, and to be successful, the practice of sales must stay in touch with its human-centered roots regardless of the medium. This 4-part series of articles, presented in Klixxx by Future Now, Inc. (www.futurenowinc.com), is designed to help you increase your online conversion rates. Part I focuses on some of the critical ideas that should form the basis of your online enterprise.
The Importance of the Sale
You step up to the counter of your favorite store. The cashier smiles at you warmly and asks politely, "Will that be cash or charge today?"
In sales parlance, that's called an alternate-choice close. Whichever alternative you choose, you complete the purchase, and the merchant accomplishes GTC -- a well-established sales axiom and your imperative: Get The Cash.
In the dot-com world, the meaning of GTC can be expanded. You can still think of it as get the cash, or you can think of it as get the customer, or you can think of it as get the click. Regardless of whether you conduct your business online or off, the fundamental principles of sales are exactly the same.
Conversion = Persuasion = Sales
The world of e-commerce revolves around the simple five-letter word, "sales." Yet, when people hear the word, they think of it as a "dirty" word and imagine a slick, pushy, fast-talking used car salesman. But the concept of sales encompasses many things. It can be:
1. The exchange of currency for product or services
2. Exchanging personal information for entry into a sweepstakes
3. Subscribing to a newsletter
4. Opting in to an e-mail campaign
5. Registering yourself
6. Agreeing to provide a referral... or even
7. Convincing a child she should clean her room
8. A child convincing a parent to allow him to stay up 15 minutes longer
In short, sales is persuading someone else to take the action you want them to take.
Conversion is the process by which a visitor to your site becomes (is "converted" into) a customer, subscriber, contest entrant, etc. Persuasion is "a transactional process resulting in a change in beliefs, attitudes and/or behaviors" - it is the mechanism by which you create conversions. If conversion equals persuasion, then persuasion equals selling, where selling is both the art and science of practicing professional persuasion, using time-tested and proven methods and systems.
What does this all mean for you? Quite simply, whatever you do on your site, wherever you are trying to get your visitors to take any action, wherever there is an exchange of value, you are engaged in selling. More importantly, you are asking your visitors to engage in the process of conversion.
Marketing is Not Sales
Before your potential customers arrive at your Web site, they are exposed to numerous external messages. Mentally, they compare those messages to their internal desires and values. This is where marketing plays an important role in creating the inclination to visit your site and the propensity to buy what you are selling.
But do not confuse marketing with sales - they are not the same! Marketing paves the way for sales. However, it's only where sales and marketing overlap that buying happens. Think of it as one of those Venn diagrams you probably remember from school:
Now, imagine pulling these circles apart, so Sales moves farther and farther away from Marketing. How much buying do you have left? Now imagine pushing these circles together, so Sales and Marketing increasingly overlap. What you're now seeing is how much your buying actually will increase if you apply professional selling principles and processes to your Web site! Without this, your site is just "brochureware;" it may give your prospects information, but it will never persuade them to take action to the degree a professional salesperson would in the real world.
An interested visitor arrives on your site, but still needs to be "sold." Propensity to buy is not buying. As soon as your visitor begins to interact with your "digital store," all the marketing in the world isn't going to save you if your site doesn't know how to convert your visitors into buyers.
Building a Solid Structure
There are three fundamental ways to increase your revenues. As you read these, keep in mind the distinctions we have made between Marketing and Sales.
1. Increase Traffic. Using this technique, you drive more visitors to your site, on the theory that more visitors will correlate to more buyers. Tactics for increasing traffic, most of which are marketing methods that require you to spend more money, can include advertising, positioning in search engines, public relations campaigns, viral marketing, and encouraging customers to return.
2. Merchandise. Encouraging your paying customers to spend more money per visit is another way to increase your revenues. You can accomplish this in many ways: cross-selling, up-selling, evaluating your most effective price points and margins, providing extra services at discount, bundling products or services into "packages," and stressing benefits rather than features. Even something as basic as improving the quality of your copy can have a dramatic impact on your results.
3. Increase Your Conversion Rate. If you concentrate on improving your Web site's conversion ratio (the number of unique visitors who actually buy, divided by the total number of unique visitors), you will get much-improved results without having to spend more money to drive more traffic. There are literally thousands of adjustments, many of which cost practically nothing, that will increase your results dramatically. For example: remove unnecessary steps in the checkout process, clarify your Unique Selling Proposition, re-design your navigation scheme or prominently display your privacy assurances and guarantees. All the adjustments take into account the interrelationship between consumer buying behavior (consumer psychology) and the professional sales process.
In order to build a stable and profitable online business, you must focus on all these areas. If you neglect any, then you build a structure without a foundation. The only way to build a successful long-term business is to understand the inter-relationships of all the parts.
To build a solid structure, you must first build a site that focuses on maximizing Conversion, then improve its Merchandising, and only then undertake to drive more Traffic. It is the only sane and logical order - the way you can build a business to last like the Great Pyramids of Egypt, rather than one that crumbles under the weight of its own inefficient "design."
What's the bottom line? To be successful online, you must make conversion your first priority. Only when you have a successful, efficient "machine" that gets the most from your existing traffic do you have an enterprise in which it makes any sense to invest further marketing capital.
In Part II, we will examine the 5-step professional selling process that has been the foundation of successful sales for centuries, and relate it to the online conversion process.
About the Author:
Bryan Eisenberg - One of the principals and CIO of Future Now, Inc. (www.futurenowinc.com), Bryan is an expert at bridging the gap between technology and the real world. He has been helping companies realize that to maximize results it is essential to incorporate expert persuasion techniques into Web site design, development and implementation. He is the co-inventor of Future Now's proprietary Digital Salespeople process, is the author of Future Now's award-winning newsletter GrokDotCom (www.grokdotcom.com>, is the author of the weekly ClickZ column "Converting Web Site Traffic" (clickz.com, has been a featured speaker at numerous e-business events both in the United States and overseas. The application of his vision and processes has helped Future Now clients increase their conversion rates, not just by percents, but by multiples.
In addition to his background in both e-commerce and in technology, Bryan also has proven expertise in e-commerce customer service and support solutions, as well as consumer psychology, education and motivation. His eclectic background includes thought leadership in the critical area of Web site branding and positioning, and membership in the Usability Professionals' Association. A successful entrepreneur in his own right, he has also consulted to, and run seminars for, numerous corporations, large and small, both on-line and in the real world. He holds a B.A. from Brooklyn College, CUNY, and did graduate work at The Wurzweiler School. Bryan is also a graduate of Roy William's Wizard Academy.
|
Printer
Friendly Version