More often than not a successful site is one that converts visitors into sales, leads or enquiries. Even a small increase in conversion rates can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Here’s some example data:

How to increase your website conversions – where to start?

Understand: this means you
Conversions don’t just apply to e-commerce stores with shopping baskets. Most websites need to get a user to do something:

• Make an enquiry
• Register or sign-up
• Phone or visit a store
• Order online

Measure-up: accurate website statistics software
Start with some accurate website measuring software. If you can’t measure your existing conversion rate, how can you improve it?

Modern statistics packages are low cost and extremely powerful, and the more insight you have into your site the more easily you’ll be able to improve it. You should be able to see the headline figures in an instant – number of visitors, number of conversions, £ value of the sales, ROI from different traffic sources.

Goals: keep them relevant
Bits, bytes and gigabytes are fascinating but irrelevant at a board-room level. Your measurements should relate to your business:

• £ sales per week
• Number of visitors
• Number of enquiries/leads

Start with a quick audit and identify the bottlenecks
With a good stats package in place you should be able to identify the bottlenecks:

• Are 50% of customers dropping out at the credit card payment page? If so, why?
• Do only 10% of people who reach your ‘get a quote’ or ‘contact us’ form actually complete it?
• 40 phone calls a day saying: “I’m on your site but it doesn’t say how much the postage will be?” Think about the other 400 people who didn’t bother phoning and went elsewhere.

It could be that by simply adding a big note saying: “All credit card details are encrypted and are 100% secure” on your payment page is all it takes for the drop-out rate to go from 50% to 20% overnight – or to put it another way 1.6 times more sales.

Get serious
Conversions are all about the final 10 yards. You’ve already done the hard (and expensive) work: driven people to the site and got them interested in your product or service. Now comes the easy part: converting them into a customer.

In most instances, this won’t require a new website or a complete design overhaul, but it will benefit from an expert, fresh, independent eye looking at the site. For most of our clients our conversion consultancy work has paid for itself within the first three weeks – and in some instances within the first day.