PlusOne – Marketing Musings

Internet marketing is a numbers game – and most website owners/managers hold up visitor numbers as the Holy Grail of measurement. But are they right?

Its it a very easy measurement to assess on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Driving traffic forms a significant part of any e-marketer’s role and a steady increase in visitors keeps the boss of your back.

But is this the most important metric?

For any online e-business site that makes sales of goods or services visitors are great, but the business will only survive with cash flow and cash flow does not happen without sales.

Which is why conversion rates are all important. Now I’m no conversion rate expert – I wish I was….. but I do know that conversion rates, not content, is king.

One reason why conversion rate improvement is such a slippery beast is because knowing how to improve it is so hard to accurately determine.

Overall average conversion rates for websites peaked at 3.2% in 2002 according to Forrester Research. Is this a glass ceiling for the average e-commerce web site? For a lot of websites conversions sit at around 2-3%, but there are many, many more that have conversion rates of less than 1%.

While web site statistics can look at where people go on your web site, following what paths they follow, but what they cannot do is get inside people’s heads and show WHY they do what they do.

Perhaps the best converting websites do things to make a customer’s experience simple and enjoyable. This is a concept and implementation challenge we all need to wrestle with.

Maybe this graph will provide some clues as to what these site do that is so much different. What is proflowers.com doing so much better than everyone else?

Spend some time browsing these sites.

Just looking at proflowers.com, one aspect is instantly evident to me – they provide visitors with the options to buy based on their own needs.

The drop down menus provide a rich but not overwhelming selection so that a person looking for flowers is just as well catered for as a person looking by, price, flower type or flower colour.

Try progressing a dummy order and you will see some other subtleties in the checkout process that indicate that the buying process is not just a, well, buying process. It is a continued interaction that delves into aspects that work towards making sure that what is delivered is just right and that al, the details have been attended to.

Of course providing customers with a great experience is one aspect, another is getting the right people to your site. There are visitors and there are visitors. Are you getting the right ones?

If anyone feels they have a great conversion rate on their site and would like to share, please do so via comments.

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