Is your Company Wasting Traffic with Poor Conversion? How to improve your conversion rate	Visited: 718 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Claire Elizabeth March 12, 2010

Have you ever listened to a group of marketers talk about their websites?

The misguided brag about traffic to the site. The savvy ones talk about what happens to their traffic.

The point being, generating traffic is only the begin­ning. It’s the easy part. The hard part—and the real leverage in your marketing model—is the rate at which you convert traffic to qualified leads or sales.

Improving your site conversion is the most impor­tant lever you can pull to increase customers. Almost every website “leaks” and fails to convert otherwise interested prospects. This lack of conver­sion suppresses your ability to reinvest profits from newfound customers in initiatives that generate more traffic and more conversions.

Here are some fundamental tactics that can help increase your conversion rates:

•   Understand the intent of your traffic. Site visi­tors at different stages of the sales cycle will need different content and landing pages with different offers and information.

•   For example, deep in the funnel, a qualified prospect with near-term closing potential may be looking for a quote or a demo. These types of “high-engagement” offers are appropriate at this stage because the prospects are willing to invest the time.

•   You’ll need a different process and different offers for less qualified prospects that are still in the research stages. B-to-B buyers, in particular, often require months of nurtur­ing. Sub-offers, “micro-conversion” tactics and voluntary forms are appropriate for these early-stage leads. In this case, think about content-types and offers that require lower levels of prospect engagement.

•   Align the source of the traffic with the destina­tion messaging. Make sure the source and desti­nation content mirror each other in their design and their key messages, especially the offer. For example, if the source shows an image of a free booklet the respondent will receive, show the same image on the landing page. And keep the alignment consistent for other materials pros­pects will receive later in the sales cycle.

•   Invest in well-designed landing pages. Create relevant incentives and premiums. Be wary of co-registration tactics that dilute your value proposition. If you are “drip marketing” to a list of existing prospects, consider using personal­ized landing pages with pre-populated form information.

•   Allow visitors to convert on their own terms—by calling or by using a registration form. Be sure you have a top-notch lead processing infrastruc­ture in place for each response channel.

•   Test. Test. Test.

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