The 5 Most Important Factors for Online Conversion

Converting online visitors into customers is the key to a successful profitable business. It doesn’t matter how much website traffic your getting to your site or how little traffic you may have, if your not doing a great job of converting that traffic into revenue for your business you won’t be in business very long.
You could focus on increasing your website traffic, hoping to convert more visitors, by bringing in more clicks, and you may see an increase in overall conversions this way. But, most businesses can’t afford to keep increasing their online traffic budget each and every month in the hopes of getting more visits to convert into buyers. Eventually you will reach a breaking point and as soon as you stop feeding the traffic monster, not only will your traffic go back down but so will your overall converted visitors.
Luckily there is a smarter option – and that’s to concentrate on optimizing your conversions. By focusing on boosting the amount of people that take action on your website you won’t be chasing money down the mouth of the traffic monster. You won’t have to worry about feeding a hungry beast and you you’ll be able to squeeze more value out of your existing marketing budget.

Increasing your online conversion rate will have the biggest impact of any marketing activity that you can do. A higher conversion rate means more customers for all traffic and any future traffic. Unlike throwing marketing money at traffic, money invested in conversion improvements will live forever. Once your conversion rate is improved you’ll reap the benefits of gaining more customers month after month and year after year. Unlike the short lived strategy of just buying more and more traffic.
All websites generally have at least one conversion goal and each conversion goal should be examined individually. The most common types of sites that translate easily and benefit the most from a conversion rate boost include:

• E-commerce Websites
• Subscription Websites
• Lead Generation Websites

These are the top 3 that are just naturals for a conversion improvement strategy, but almost all types of websites can benefit from a lift in conversions, even if your website is not selling anything. Conversion is not just about selling. It’s about getting your visitor to take an action that is valuable to your business. And it starts with the question, what are your business goals? What do you want visitors to your site to do that supports your business revenue model? Conversions can include signing up for your newsletter, taking a survey, downloading a pdf, watching a video, buying a product, requesting information, sharing some of your content with a friend or any action that ties back to your business goal.

There are many factors that go into increasing your online conversion rate and each business has it’s own unique challenges and issues that are exclusive to you or your specific market. You will need to approach those factors individually and optimize around each one if you want to increase your online conversion rate.

However, despite the differences in markets, products or customers the key to improving any site conversion rate can be clearly broken down to several factors. Here are the top 5 most important factors that affect your conversion success. All 5 of these critical conversion elements can be applied to any website or landing page.

The 5 Most Important Factors for Online Conversion
1. Analytics and Testing

2. Customer Insight

3. Usability

4. Momentum

5. Trust and credibility

Analytics and Testing
Analytics and testing is the single biggest factor to improvement. Without knowing where you are you can never get to where you want to be. It’s vital to measure your conversion rate across not only your site as a whole but also across each individual marketing channel.

Customer Insight

A deep understanding of your specific customers and market is essential to empathizing with your users. Being sympathetic to their needs and truly understanding where they are coming from during the buying process is vital for directing your overall conversion strategy.
Usability

If you just improve the usability of your site alone you can see a lift in overall conversion. Simply by removing roadblocks on your site and making it easier to use, you’re allowing visitors the ability to accomplish their tasks with less difficulty. Help your customers and you’ll help your conversion too.
Momentum

Once your visitor starts down a path they are moving through your site and further into your conversion funnel. Each click builds up a velocity that builds on itself. To increase your conversion you need to design for momentum through persuasive design. For both verbal persuasion and visual persuasion.

Trust & Credibility
Establishing trust and credibility at exactly the right points in the conversion process is essential to persuasion and conversion. If your visitor has no faith in you why should he or she buy from you?

By improving any one of these five factors you will have a better website, but when all of these factors are combined together and directed toward the goals of your site that are in harmony with the goals of the visitors your conversion rate can experience massive gains.

Happy Converting!