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Website Conversion -
How to Avoid Losing 94% of Sales!
Attracting visitors to your site is only half the battle!Let’s face it – it doesn’t matter whether you get 50 or 50,000 people browsing your webpages, if they don’t buy anything from you, you’re not gonna make any money. It is that simple. OK, there are exceptions… your website might be all about giving some information and hoping the prospect clicks through on one of the AdSense links. The site may be purely about brand awareness and not actually sell anything directly off the page. It might even be a simple landing page that gently encourages the reader to click through to an affiliate page. But if you don’t have a carefully orchestrated strategy for following up on these visitors, they will
Virtually every marketing expert I know, whether online or offline, will tell you that repeated exposure is absolutely imperative in winning new sales, why leave it to chance that these surfers may see another link or advert for your site and make a return visit. Surely it makes much more sense to capture some form of contact information, which can then be used to keep your offer in front of them, drilling the benefits into their minds until the point when they are ready to make the purchase.
Converting new website visitors from prospect to buyer, straight off the bat, is notoriously difficult. Even good copywriters with many years of direct marketing experience can struggle to win the hearts and wallets of the casual surfer. Statistically, less than 6% of the people who will eventually buy the product will do so on their first exposure to it. That means if there is no follow-up process with your site visitors, you will lose 94% of the sales you could otherwise achieve. To add further to these figures, it has been calculated that over 70% of the sales generated as a result of email follow-ups happen in response to the 3rd and 4th email in the series.
So what is the generally accepted ideal strategy?
The ‘best-practice’ is to focus on getting the first-time visitor to give you their email address. If you can get them to give more details such as name and a phone number or physical address as well, so much the better. But you’ll need to be careful. The more information someone is asked to give out, the more you’ll scare some people off. The flip side is – the more information someone gives, the more chance they want the product or services you offer. You’ll need to test, but at the very least you should aim to capture their email. And to do that, you must really focus the first webpage they’ll see on that task and that task alone. Don’t give them loads of other links to other pages on your site or ask them to make decisions about your product, company or special promotions. Concentrate on being able to make the follow-up.
To do this you’ll most likely need to give them something. Some information or sample that is relevant to their needs. This technique is called using the natural law of reciprocity – if I give you something, you’ll feel more obliged to return the favour and give me something when I ask for it. In this case, you are going to give them some ‘extra’ information and they will give you their email address when asked for it!
In practice, that means this first webpage needs to focus on ‘selling’ the benefits of getting this ‘extra’ information. There must be strong compelling reasons to give you their email address in order that they can receive this ‘exclusive, additional knowledge’. And of course, the process must be quick, easy and ‘painless’.
Having now got a way to gently drip-feed them with your sales message via a series of emails, you can begin the process of turning your website visitor into a buyer. Remember, less than 6% will bite on the first hook and only another 9% on the second reading of your sales message. It’s the 3rd and 4th email that will most likely generate the greatest responses with about 35% each. Also keep in mind that these ‘sales’ messages need to be delivered after all the free information has first been sent. If this ‘extra’ information was in the form of a 5-part e-course, for instance, delivered every other day – you’ll need to hold off sending any ‘sales’ messages until at least a fortnight after they first requested the e-course.
The power of creating this kind of strategy, however, is that the visitor has been ‘warmed up’ to you and your business. They feel they know, like and can trust you – three vital elements in the psyche of buying. The result is your sales messages don’t need super ad-copy to be effective and your ultimate conversion rate of prospect to buyer is both higher and easier!
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Article written by Rudi Ashdown and first posted at
http://www.whywebsiteswork.com.
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©Rudi Ashdown. copyright2005. All rights reserved.
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