As you may know, conversion rate is the percentage of people who complete a certain action on your site like making a purchase or submitting a form. The conversion rate is one of the ways to accurately measure just how well your site is performing its job.
Improving conversion rate has a huge impact: raising the conversion rate from 1% to 2% would represent a 100% increase in goal completion. For an e-commerce site, that would mean double the revenue! When you increase your conversion rate, you get more sales from your existing traffic which saves on marketing expenses, customer acquisition cost goes down, and the customer retention rate goes up.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see why improving the conversion rate of a website is worth some effort, but the question of how to get more people to do what you want them to do is a sticky problem. Jack Aaronson recently wrote an article on this very subject called “Creating Value“.
We’re working with a client right now to help them increase conversion rates on their site. We’ve spent the last few weeks running A/B tests with about six different homepages, each leading to special micro-sites we’ve created. Each of these changes has increased conversions (we’re using the poorly converting homepage as a control). Some of the test homepages show a 100 percent increase, some up to a 300 percent increase.
The next article, ‘Continual Conversion Rate Improvement Part II’ will discuss a case study where efforts were made to improve a website’s conversion rate and the results of those efforts, so stay tuned!
