There are two main ways to make more money from your website: driving more traffic to it and converting more of your visitors into customers.
If you’re trying to grow revenue, the approach most companies take is to try and attract more visitors to their site – after all more visitors should lead to more sales.
However it’s FAR cheaper to convert more of the visitors you’ve already got than it is to attract new ones – with study after study showing that for every £1 invested in work to improve conversion rates, businesses receive between £10 and £100 back.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation?
Your website is almost certainly built to do something – whether that’s deliver leads, persuade people to sign up to a newsletter, or buy a product – and your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that go on to complete your intended objective.
Conversion Rate Optimisation uses a range of techniques and tools to understand why people react the way they do on your website, and to increase the number of people that complete your goals.
It’s easy to assume that the solution to conversion problems is a rebuild of your website, however this can be counter-productive – simply carrying over the existing problems to a new site design.
Instead, quite often it’s cheap, simple changes that can have a fundamental impact on your website’s performance – if you know where to look.
Curious has developed a four step process to deliver improvement to customers websites:
1. Measure
Ensure that key performance measures for your business are agreed, defined and accurately measured – so we can be confident that we can really understand what’s happening on the website.
2. Identify
Using the data, find the main issues with the site where attention should be focussed. Use a range of tools to gain further insight into areas of particular concern to pinpoint issues.
3. Understand
Engage with your target market and seek to understand the causes of behaviour. Work with our clients to understand the buying process and find solutions
4. Change
Implement changes to the site based on our understanding and test their impact on conversion rates – ensuring that this is done in a controlled way so that we can be confident that there is a positive effect.
Impact your bottom line
Improving your conversion rate – the number of visitors to your site that reach your desired goal – can make a massive difference to your profitability. In fact, it’s likely to be the biggest lever you can pull to transform your business – mainly because your profit is surprisingly sensitive to changes in your conversion rate.
Check out this example to see why:
The graph on the left shows a business that has a reasonable proportion of fixed overheads. It also spends a healthy amount on marketing activity.
Because the majority of the company’s costs stay constant, by increasing it’s conversion rate from 6% to 12%, it sees a massive increase in profit. The existing marketing spend works harder, reducing the overall cost per sale and delivering a disproportionately large effect on the company’s bottom line.
Beat the competition
As more and more business focus their time on getting business from the Internet, competition for traffic is hotting up. If you can convert your traffic to profit-generating customers more effectively, not only does it increase your market share, but it reduces your cost of acquisition – the amount you have to spend on marketing to get each customer.
One of the wonders of Internet Marketing means that you only need to have a slight edge over your competition to gain an enormous competitive advantage – a concept called “winner takes most”,
Once you’re able to gain business more cheaply than your competitors, you can afford to attract more traffic as your profit margin is higher than your competitors’.
Long term and measureable return on investment
Because Conversion Rate Optimisation is based on measuring and improving performance, it’s incredibly simple to see that the work being done is having a positive effect.
Conversion rates, sales and revenue are tracked and evaluated consistently – meaning you can see what you’re paying for.
Even better, the learnings from Conversion Rate Optimisation stay with you. You’ll understand why customers behave in certain ways and how to encourage them to do what you want. This means increased revenues from your existing website, but the learnings from CRO can also be applied to future websites and technologies – even to other parts of your business
Please your customers and the Search Engines
Conversion Rate Optimisation isn’t some dark art. In the main it’s about creating a clear path for users and making sure they find what they’re looking for.
Focussing on making your website more effective means that your customers will find your website easier to use and are more likely to be satisfied with their user experience.
This has an added upside for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Whilst the details of search engines algorithms are kept sketchy, what’s clear is that they are all looking for signals of a positive customer experience – with engagement and bounce rates increasingly prominent factors for good search rankings.
Our overall bounce rate decreased by 9% in just one month
A Jones, Motoring Website
Trust Curious
Curious’ specialists have worked on some of the biggest websites in the country including Confused.com, Lloyds TSB, UpMyStreet.com and eHarmony.
We’re expert at optimising websites – often delivering multi-million pound increases in revenues as a result.
We’ve got years of experience in making sites work more effectively and a whole box to tricks to help us analyse your site’s performance, identify issues, and boost your results. In addition, we can work with you to help you to implement really effective tools such as multivariate testing and click tracking to help drive your results upward.
Our initial phases of work can show increases in conversion of anywhere between 25-150%, and can then continue to deliver increases in the profitability of your site.
We think that’s a pretty good track record. If you do too, call us on 0330 010 9000 or fill in this form and see how much your site can improve.