One of the biggest things that is often overlooked is website conversion. Most businesses focus on getting more traffic to their website. They spend thousands and thousands of dollars getting that traffic to their website, yet they don’t seem to realize that if visitors are coming to your website and not taking an action, those efforts of getting the traffic to your website have gone to waste.
Before I go further, let’s talk about web conversion… what is a web conversion rate?
A website’s conversion rate is equal to the number of people who take a desired action on your website divided by the number of people who visit your website. I say desired action because leaving your website is also an action, but not desired! So a 3% conversion rate (slightly above average) means that out of every 100 people that come to your website, only 3 people take an action!
So with all those visitors who escape your clutches, what’s a poor website owner to do? Well enter the art of increasing your web conversion rate! There are few processes that will gradually allow you to increase your conversion rate, including things like split testing of various website elements. If you are really good, you can get your conversion rate to up to 8%, which is phenomenal!
The whole split testing thing can take some time and lots of effort and someone who knows what they are doing. If you are fortunate enough to understand how to do it yourself, and/or fortunate enough to find someone qualified enough and affordable enough for you, then you can expect to see an increase in your income. This is a longer term effort and will eventually reach a plateau in conversion rate.
I have recently become a fan of the Web Conversion for Dummies approach and have discovered a single method that far outweighs the combined methods of split testing. This method of website conversion is called Live Chat.
Live Chat is basically having a receptionist on your website meeting and greeting your website visitors, answering their questions, guiding them through the sales process and taking down their information for the sales staff to follow up with and close at a later date. Your website receptionist can also connect the web visitor with a staff member via the phone if someone wants to speak directly with a company representative.
According to Website Magazine, up to 40% of online shoppers engaging in live chat converted into a sale or became a lead. Also contained in that report was that e-tailers with live chat implemented on their sites experienced conversion rates up to 15 times higher. This is a significant increase.
Some other statistics from internetretailer.com have reported “Live chat produces a conversion rate of 15-20% at Backcountry, roughly 10 times the 1.7-2.0% buy rate for all customers, Bruni reports. It also produces higher orders. In one week this spring customers who chatted ordered $224 on average, versus $135 for the site overall.”
This shows that live chat not only increases conversion rates, but increases order values as well. The potential increase in business can be significant over the month.
What is required to implement live chat? There is software that is involved, and someone to staff the chatroom on a 24-7 basis if that is the kind of business you have. That can be quite costly if the business is trying to do it themselves. If they have to hire and train the staff and pay them at least $10/hr. Other solutions are to hire the chat service that already comes with the trained staff person and take advantage of the economies of scale of hiring a service, and you can be paying as little as $1.80 an hour, not including the savings of having to train someone, and purchase the software.
Live chat may be a powerful option for your business. If you want to know more, call me at 720-432-0621.
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