Is Your Own Mind Holding You Back From Improving Your Conversion Rates?
February 8th, 2010
When often faced with a choice, any choice most people choose to do nothing. Our brains are hard wired through evolution to protect us. Our deep-rooted caveman brain sees change as unsafe and keeps us from doing anything different that what we have already done in the past. When we need more online results we do what we have always done, buy more traffic.
Wasn’t it Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and expecting different results?
This is what most marketers do every day. They buy more traffic, through different means of acquisition and expect different results. More traffic means more potential sales right? The part of our brains that protect us is afraid to do anything different. Marketing acquisition is what we have always done, and more traffic is fundamentally good right?. It has become a natural reflex for most marketers at this point. Your marketing budget has been allocated to traffic building and you’re probably doing a lot of other tactical stuff on the SEO traffic driving side, so why stop? More traffic will always be a part of Internet marketing, without traffic there are no sales.
What our caveman brains are not letting us see is that there is a better way. There is a way to work smarter not harder and increase sales without increasing traffic. That answer if you haven’t guessed it by now is conversion rate optimization. The art and science of improving and testing your website to deliver higher returns and more profit by increasing your conversion rate not your traffic numbers.
Let’s take an honest look and peel back some layers of fear, uncertainty and doubt and try to reason with the caveman brain.
Let’s say your website converts visitors at a rate of 2% any you’re currently bringing in 5,000 unique visitors through paid traffic with an average of $100 revenue per conversion.

At a 2% conversion rate you’d have 100 conversions that would generate $10,000 in total sales. Now let’s say you increased the amount of paid traffic to your site by an additional 1,000 unique visitors, with all other things being equal. A 2% conversion rate would give you 120 total conversions with $12,000 in total sales. Not too shabby, but remember the extra 1,000 unique visitors came at a cost, and that cost is a recurring cost if you want to keep those sales figures up each, week.
Now let’s look at an alternative to spending more and more money on traffic.

What if you increased your conversion rate but kept the same amount of traffic? If you just increased your conversion rate by a half of a percent 0.5% with the same amount of unique visitors as before 5,000 and an average of $100 in revenue per conversion, that small lift in conversion rate of 0.5% would generate a total of 125 conversions (5 conversions more than getting 1,000 more people to your site) and a total of $12,500 in total sales. Even if you paid twice as much than you did on bringing in more traffic to improve your conversion rate by a mere half a percent, you would sustain that higher conversion rate over time. Giving you more conversions and more sales over and over, month after month without the cost of continuously feeding more and more traffic, over and over again. But imagine what your total sales would look like once you added more traffic to a site that was converting sales at a higher percentage than you’re converting now.
I’m not going to lie to you, it’s bad enough that our brains are hard wired to keep us in the dark and resist change. Not all change is good and jumping into conversion rate optimization with your eyes closed is no way to expand your mind or your conversion rate. You deserve to know the full story. There is a dark side to conversion that very few people talk about. Again let’s peel back another layer and take a look at some hard truth.
Truth #1 - Conversion rate optimization is not a quick fix. It is not as simple as turning up traffic. Conversion rate optimization deals with the mind of your visitors. Conversion does not happen on web sites, it happens in the mind of your prospect. It is critical to understand your prospect and the psychological triggers of the buying process to get it right quickly.
Truth #2 - Conversion rate optimization may take time. If you jump in blind without knowing what to improve or how to properly conduct a valid test that will tell you with at least a 95% confidence level that the improved version of your web page will consistently perform at that higher level then you may be increasing your conversion rates temporarily. It is vitally important to understand how to conduct a proper conversion test.
Truth #3 – It may sometimes take one step back to take three steps forward. You may not always get it right the first time, no matter how well you think you know your customer. There are a lot of factors involved in conversion rate improvement, including usability, design, motivation, etc. with so many moving parts you are not the best judge of success before something is tested. The final outcome is in the hands of your visitors, it is up to them to decide. However, with every test you learn something that can help you improve the next time.
Truth #4 – Conversion rate optimization requires consistency and dedication. To truly implement a conversion rate optimization strategy takes a commitment to testing and continuous improvement. Improvement and testing is not a one time fix. Each website is different and how high you improve your conversion rates is up to how much time and dedication you are willing to put into testing and improvement.
It is now up to you. Will you continue to settle for the same conversion rates you currently have? Will you overcome the part of your brain that wants to keep the status quo and continue to do what you have always done, bring in more traffic and hope for the best? Or cay you resist your own brain and gain improvements you never thought possible? The choice is yours, but I vote for conversion rate optimization.
Why should someone buy from you? That is one of the top three vital questions every website needs to answer within the first five seconds of a visitors arrival on your site.
Even if people are not fully aware of it, they think about things based on what surrounds them, like a picture in a grand elegant gold frame. Suddenly that picture becomes more elegant and takes on the characteristics of the frame around it. If this works for pictures would it work for other things?
Do you remember what it was that got you to purchase the last item you bought online? It was probably one of only several reasons and you probably weren’t even fully aware of your reasons why. If it’s this difficult to know why you yourself buy, imagine how difficult it is to understand why someone else would buy from you. You may think you know why someone is buying from your website but are you really sure? There is a process that customers unconsciously go through in their mind before, during and after they purchase. If you understood this process and knew the reasons why people buy from you, it should be easy to sell more right?
In the book 
Which do customers find more attractive, 40% OFF or $5.00 OFF? A study conducted in the July 2007 issue of Journal of Marketing research asks that exact question.


