By Corte Swearingen
Every business owner with a website has some particular goal for visitors. It can be as simple as signing up for a newsletter or as complicated as completing a large purchase.
Whatever the conversion goal is for your website, there are three basic strategies you should follow.
Strategy #1: Find Out What Your Visitors Want
As a business owner, it can be easy to convince yourself you know what your customer wants. But that assumption can prove false many times over.
The only way to really find out your customers wants and needs is to simply ask them. If you already have an electronic newsletter, then send out a link to an external survey in your next issue. Ask questions that will help uncover the need for your product or service idea, and be sure to offer an incentive for your customers and prospects to complete the survey.
If you don't have the ability to create online surveys within your website, than try a 3rd party service like Survey Monkey.
Another great way to uncover potential demand for a product or service is to see how many people are searching for that particular topic. This involves investing in a good keyword research tool. Yes, there are free keyword tools out there, but if you own a business and are serious about utilizing Internet marketing, than you really must subscribe to a good keyword research tool. I recommend wither Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or Wordze.
Researching keywords will allow you to identify high demand keywords with low competition, giving you the ability to rank high for these keywords in the major search engines. Without knowing the best keywords to target, you will have to rely on luck to carry the day. And you may have already heard, luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it!
Strategy #2: Create a Compelling Landing Page
Your product can be a hard good, a service or a downloadable report. Whatever it is, you need to find a way to convey the benefits of this item in a direct and simple way. I recommend you create a focused landing page for each of your products or services.
An effective landing page:
- Concentrates on a single compelling message
- Has a clear call-to-action
- Captures contact information
- Avoids distractions
- Contains bonus offers
- Contains testimonials
Today, it is quite common to see landing pages existing by themselves with no real content-based website wrapped around them. This strategy forces you to rely heavily on pay-per-click to drive traffic to the landing page. I recommend you leverage your own free organic traffic and only use pay-per-click as a supplement, if at all
Strategy #3: Test Your Landing Page
How do you determine the best price for your product? How do you decide the best photos and images to use in order to increase conversion rates? What's the best headline to grab your visitor's attention?
The answer is - I have no idea. But there's one way to find out - test, test and test again!
The easiest way to test multiple parameters within your landing page is to use the Google Website Optimizer. This free service allows you to perform A/B split testing. An A/B split test allows you to test one page parameter against another in order to determine which yields a higher conversion rate.
For example, suppose you're unsure about how to price your product. One way to zero in on a price that yields the greatest profits is to test. To test three different pricing levels, you would simply upload three versions of your landing page. Each page would contain a price you wish to test. The Google Website Optimizer would then randomly serve up one of the three landing pages to each unique visitor on your site. These pages would be served evenly and conversion measurements calculated for each one. At the end of the testing session, you would get a summary of conversion results to determine which pricing structure brought in the highest profits.
The Google Website Optimizer is free and one of the most powerful tools you can have in your marketing arsenal. Use it to test headlines, pictures, captions, bonus offers and anything else that affects conversions.
Taken together, these three tips will help maximize your website landing page conversion rates.
Corte Swearingen is the creator of the Integral Marketing System and CEO of SmallBiz Marketing Tips. For additional information on landing page strategies, visit Website Marketing Campaign Tips.
