Conversion Marketing 101

Conversion marketing is a marketing strategy used to encourage potential customers to take specific action. In electronic commerce, the term is described as an act of converting site users into paying customers. An example is when the customer abandons his or her shopping cart, a merchant can market special offer such as discount or free shipping to convert potential customers browsing the website into the paying customer of your product or service. This type of marketing is measured by the conversion rate. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. When doing online marketing, this will involve sales pitch, website design and page layout, as well as good strategies and actions. For example a high rate of conversion may mean more sales, greater returns on the advertising investment, and fewer customers lost. By converting any potential customers who may have expressed at least some interest, no need of reaching as many new prospects for you to generate same volume of sales. Who employs this type of marketing? All sales people wants higher conversion rate, as it is to any business with an aim of doing its business online. Actually any type of online activity will affect the kinds of conversion strategies employed. Most websites sell products or services directly to customers; for them, the conversion is the matter of convincing this potential customers to make some purchases. Some other websites receive their revenues from advertising, such as print newspapers make a lot of money through selling the advertisements rather than selling the paper. Such websites, their conversion means getting visitors to click on different ads displayed on the website. Even if the website is advertising, or selling products or services, customers are required to take a specific action. It means that any commercial website online can apply this kind of marketing into its presentation. Customers browsing online through the web pages from the list of the search engine may come and go quickly. Averagely, it can take eight seconds for the person to make a decision whether to leave the page or stay on the page. Therefore the first step is to ensure that you get people to stick around. The tactics of this type of marketing does not target only one customer segment, but instead, it applies to all potential customers who visit the website of the company. Most of them will, through the search engine results. Visitors such as those ones are immediately high valued prospects, because they have interest in some aspect of the website content, and if not, a specific product or service that you provide. Some of the customers may arrive directly, if they already know about the website. These kinds of customers are also high value, since they have already established some relationship with the company or business. In all this scenarios, this kind of marketing does not have to make any try to invent prospects, and try to con any prospects into making the purchase. The only thing done is to make compelling case for those customers who already have the need. How the Conversion Marketing Campaign is Developed Before choosing the conversion tactics, business identify the type of buying processes their potential customers use. Electronic commerce websites sell goods and services online: other companies or businesses do not expect their customers to purchase online; what they simply do is to promote the image of the company or brand for business deals which will happen through the personal interaction. In cases like this, conversion involves getting potential customers to spend a lot of time on your website, finding more about the brand or company and its virtues. After identifying the way customers make purchases on the websites, the marketers will then begin to select some strategies that will help to increase the rate of conversion. Some strategies like having attractive pages and the website that is easy to navigate. Intuitive page navigation is more important for electronic websites that depend on the purchase of customers to survive. Designers must ensure that they create shopping carts on electronic websites from the consumer standpoint instead of doing it from engineering standpoint. Most of customers who have already put items in their carts are ready to stop any transaction, and can do so if checkout page presents them with surprises. So ensure that the page of the product has already informed customers about costs and shipping options, stock issues and taxes. For you to convert customers in a problem solving mode, the website’s search features are supposed to be refined in order to return relevant results on top of your page. For all customers, make subscription processes simple and painless. Conversion Optimization Expert •They improve the rates of sales conversion on the websites of the clients •These experts use statistical methods together with the software to gather data about conversion rates and click thru for online ads, and give the roadmap for improvement. •These specialists structure some tests for the home pages, product and category pages, shopping carts, download forms and landing pages. •Manage the relationship between them and with the clients, supporting them by providing domain expertise. Web Analyst •Provide the ongoing audits and reports of the website commerce •Analyze the traffic of the web both to and on the website of the client, including the flow of customers and conversion rates. •Troubleshoot analytical reports and test results, for an easy capture of accurate data •Analyze the online marketing campaigns and strategies, and then evaluate their effectiveness and weaknesses. Benefits of Conversion Marketing •Implement marketing programs easily and track campaign results in order to allocate budgets •Measure and give reports on offers and invitations •Nurture the prospects with proper branding, features and even benefits •Increase relevant visitors from the search referrals and convert them into new leads effectively •It is fast to setup and it has low costs Conclusion Conversion marketing is the technique that aims to transform the website visitor into an actual purchasing customer. Sometimes the marketing tactics are enlisted to help convince some potential customers to buy an item. It is measured by the rate of conversion, which is the actual number of websites users or visitors divided by the percentage of customers completed the transaction. Conversion marketing is therefore one of the marketing methods that you can use to attract traffic into your website.