Using Calls-to-Action to Improve Your Website Conversion Ratio
- May 19th, 2009 by Steven Leung
There are many metrics that businesses use to measure the success of their websites. As we discussed in our last post, almost all standard web analytics deployments will have more than enough reports to keep any busy marketer, business owner, or executive from their day jobs.
But if the purpose of your website is to generate more business, then your most important metric is your conversion ratio. The first step to getting your conversion ratio is to define your goal: what are you trying to get your visitors to do?
The visitors who succeed in doing so are called conversions. And your conversion ratio is the percentage of your visitors who convert. The reason why I used the word “succeed” above is because you might have visitors who wanted — and, in fact, tried their best — to convert, but didn’t or couldn’t.
There are the websites that literally dare you to buy something by requiring you to fill out a sign-up form before putting an item in your shopping cart. There are the websites where the contact form is temporarily broken and there isn’t a phone number as backup. I’ve even seen business websites without contact information.
Most sites have a more subtle issue: they don’t clearly communicate a mutually beneficial offer to their visitors. This offer is the call-to-action, and it encourages visitors to convert. Your call-to-action should be easy to measure and appropriate for a person surfing the web. If your website isn’t generating as much business as you’d hoped, you may want to understand common reasons why some calls-to-action don’t work.
The easiest way to understand how your visitors see your call-to-action today is to work backwards. Start from what you consider success, whether it’s filling out a contact form, making a purchase, entering a promotional code, etc. Then map how a visitor might be instructed to get there and trace how a visitor might have seen those instructions. Many site owners find it’s not as easy to convert as they’d envisioned.
Conversions don’t have to happen on the web. Many times, you want to get a phone call. The main issue with getting calls is that they aren’t as easily tracked as web conversions. After all, most people put their main business phone number on their site. How can you tell where your caller got your number?
As part of any good integrated marketing campaign, it’s a best practice to have a separate phone number for whatever initiatives you run. The best part is that you can bypass the phone company altogether and get a forwarding phone number for a nominal cost.
It’s easy to see how the Internet has become more ingrained into business. Over the next few articles, we’ll discuss integrated marketing techniques that combine the immediacy and measureability of the Internet with social and traditional media. Our next blog post talks about how to create websites that already have communication mechanisms with Google and other websites built-in.
Tags: Goal Setting, Prospect Conversion, Websites
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