What is a conversion rate?

So lets start out at the beginning.. Surprisingly, you ask five people at the same company and you get five different answers.  Here is a quick diagram on perhaps what the conversion rate may be:

Sometimes a conversion rate starts at the beginning of the sales funnel. For example, you may have a form on your website that collects an email address or some interest information, but they aren’t quite yet ready to purchase. Others calculate conversion rate based on a sale that occurs. At the end of the day, you need to have your team in alignment to understand:

1. What the conversion rate is
2. How its calculated
3. How its measured
4. What the goals and targets are

Why do you need to increase it?

So now that you have a conversion rate you are monitoring and analyzing, why do you need to increase it?  And better yet can you? Absolutely!

1. Theres always room for improvement. Yes your mom was right! Even the best at their game, don’t stop and with technology rapidly evolving, you can’t either.
2. Traffic is expensive. You can’t afford not to convert it.
3. There are effective tools to help monitor and manage it.

There is no one right answer and landing page or website optimization really is still more art than science (sorry robots). But the reality, is very simple changes can dramatically impact your conversions and it grows exponentially.

If you were able to take your current 5% conversion rate, and turn it to a whopping 10%, you can no afford to:

1. Pay up to twice as much more per customer than before
2. Advertise on other venues on or offline
3. Pay your affiliates more money

All of this leads to more sales. And it isn’t necessarily just your landing page or website that needs help on conversions. You can double your conversions by increasing the conversion rate of your:

• ads by 19%
• landing page by 19%
• product sales page by 19%
• subscribers by 19%

(* note that each improvement compounds so its 19% not 25%)

So stop talking about it, and lets start increasing conversions. Create the conversion rate goals and share them with your internal and external teams.
John Ayers is one of the contributing writers at John Ayers Consulting and can be seen on Google +