Conversion below 1%? You could improve your conversion rate by as much as 200% within a year. Here is the proof! Does your website suffer from very low conversion rate below 1%? Have you tried ‘everything’ but still making the same money each month? Firstly, the good news is, you can very likely increase your conversion rate by over 200% within a year, as you can see on the screenshot below which compares October 2012 sales vs. October 2011 sales. As well as focusing on conversion rate which is up by 253%, also have a look at the revenue, which went up from $32,000 to $108,000, an 235% increase.

Now, have a look at the traffic level in the screenshot below. Compare to previous October 2011, the traffic this October 2012 is down by 14%, or by 3,470 visits to be exact, however the revenue is still up by 235%.

Now the question is why your site isn’t doing as well, as for example this one shown above? Based on my experience working with clients I observed several patterns that helped them improve their conversion.

The clients that improve their conversion rate have this in common:

1. They use Google Analytics and have the ecommerce conversion tracking setup, i.e. they know what their site conversion rate and revenue is, plus some basic goals.

This might sound strange to you, but over 80% of websites I come across, don’t have ecommerce tracking setup and therefore don’t know their site conversion and revenue. Also, I notice no goals setup. In all these cases, they have Google Analytics installed, but it allows only tracking of visits and the basic stuff.

2. They are educating themselves

My best clients are always those who already have an understanding of what conversion optimization is, understand its possibilities and many times educate themselves by going to webinars focused on conversion optimization. Simply put, these clients are spending their time learning how to improve site conversion and they believe in it!

3. They act fast

Once they realize, that the only way to improve site revenue is to hire a conversion optimization agency, due to the lack of in-house knowledge they go about it fast and start the engagement almost immediately.

4. They are usually business owners

Again, from my observation, once a business owner personally takes things into his hands, everything is much smoother and faster.  I remember working with one very smart marketing director in Germany who I was approached by on behalf of their business. He understood the potential of conversion optimization, however his boss wasn’t excited about the amount of changes required and the cost of doing it (design, development, testing software), so the process stopped before it even started and very likely went back to doing what they did for years and are still wondering why they can’t improve their sale. Generally speaking, large businesses are very slow because of the all processes and annual budgeting policies.

5. They listen

This is very important. If a conversion rate professional suggests testing something based on his experience where it worked really well and that an incentive is a must, or that that Magento Ajax checkout they use should be changed, then by listening they can gain between 20-100% improvement. For example, I recently spoke to a client who uses Ajax checkout and I suggested him to change it immediately as we already increased the conversion on another client website by over 40% by changing it. He still hasn’t done it, because of the cost even though he was making several ten thousands dollars each month from his website. By the way, he could make extra $300,000 a year, but I still wasn’t able to get him to do it. Honestly.

Is your site conversion below 1%, or you feel your business isn’t making as much money as it could and your marketing needs to be improved? Contact me at jan@proimpact7.com to request your FREE site conversion optimization consultation of your site, or call (+352) 6618-82070 to find out more about our conversion improvement guarantee.