Happy New Year!

This month IÂ?m going to focus on the very best way I know of to increase what you get from your marketing investment. That is to turn more of your website visitors into interested prospects and customers.

If you think about, this just makes sense. You already have these people coming to your website. Although some of them undoubtedly got there by mistake, many of them are actually potential customers. Why then are these people so often ignored? Why do marketers continue to spend money driving traffic to a website without worrying about what happens once visitors reach the site?

LetÂ?s put a stop to that and get you more new business from your existing investment.

I'll tell you about some experiments we've run that could easily improve your conversion efficiency, how to set up those experiments using Google Website Optimizer and Â? in this article Â? how to get started.

Next month IÂ?ll shift the focus to pay-per-click advertising. If you donÂ?t want to wait till then, you can join us over at the Clicks 'n Conversions blog where weÂ?ll be looking at PPC this month.

But donÂ?t abandon this conversion discussion. Yes, you need a minimum amount of traffic before you can fine-tune your conversion process; but spending resources to drive website visitors into an efficient or broken system just doesnÂ?t make sense. Stick with us here and youÂ?ll find out how to make your marketing dollars go much farther.

IÂ?ve never seen a software website that couldnÂ?t bring in more business and money for its owners.

Establishing a baseline.

When youÂ?re getting started in Conversion Optimization it helps to know where you are now. By that I mean how efficiently are you are handling your current website traffic.

For the answer, we turn to website analytics and your own sales funnel.

You can look at your conversion efficiency on several different levels Â? macro and micro if you will. At the macro level you want to know what percentage of website visitors eventually become paying customers or Â? depending on your sales model Â? sales ready leads. At the micro level youÂ?ll look at what percentage of visitors who take the interim action(s) you want them to take.

LetÂ?s use an unnamed web application as an example. This particular application is sold online and we want to know what percentage of visitors become paying customers. To get this conversion rate, we just divide the average number of monthly visitors to the site by the average monthly number of new paying customers.

If youÂ?re selling a more complex product requiring sales team intervention you could use the average number of salesÂ?ready leads coming from the website instead of the number of new customers.

Back to our web application example. ItÂ?s likely that the conversion process Â? whether planned or not Â? looks something like this:

Visit site ---- take product tour ---- sign up for free trial or free version --- buy.

Each one of these steps can be tweaked to get more people to take it, so Â? moving backwards from the sale - we want to know:

1. What percentage of free trial users eventually buy the product?
   
   
2. What percentage of visitors become free trial users?
   
   
3. What percentage of visitors take a product tour?
   
   
4. What percentage of visitors actually stay on the site and do something?
   

These are all important metrics that youÂ?re probably measuring anyway, and turning them into a percentage is quite simple.

Once you have the numbers you can begin to see how improving your efficiency in any of these steps increases your sales (or sales opportunities) without increasing your marketing costs.

What if you doubled the number of visitors who became free trial users? What if you could increase the number of free trial users 4x? What if you got 50% more people to stick on your site?

The great news is that you can!

ItÂ?s all a part of conversion optimization, and thatÂ?s what weÂ?re going to be focusing on here this month.

IÂ?d like to encourage everyone reading this blog to download and read a copy of the free Clicks Â?n Conversions eBook called Â?How to increase profit from current website trafficÂ?. It just may change your mind about the way you view marketing.

If you have questions, suggestions or ideas, donÂ?t forget to leave them in the comments box.

Cheers,

Susan
http://www.clicksnconversions.com]Clicks 'n Conversions