There are a lot of metrics that matter to a business owner. Ultimately, profit is what most people look at, but how much it matters depends on where you want your profit margin. A high profit margin always sounds great, but pumping up your margins often means you get fewer sales and less overall revenue. Going the other way, a lower profit margin might generate more sales and even greater revenue . . . but can also require a lot more work!
Clearly, the path to business success isn’t always as easy as increasing profits. But one thing that you want no matter what is to increase your conversions. Or more precisely, your conversion rates.
Many think of conversions as a sale, but in reality, a conversion is any action you want your visitors to take. For most ecommerce sites, a conversion is the purchase of a product. But for many other sites, a conversion can be a phone call, the download of an ebook, a lead through the contact form, etc. In fact, many sites have multiple conversions. The trick is to understand the value for each conversion.
Someone downloading a document doesn’t hold quite the same value as someone calling to request information on your services. Not by a long shot. But that’s not to say the download is valueless. Maybe you convert one in ten people who contact you into becoming a customer. However, one in one thousand ebook downloads might turn into a genuine lead.
With that math, you’ll get one conversion for every ten thousand downloads. You now know what that download is worth and how much energy you want to put into those efforts. Download conversions are easier to get than genuine leads, so you then have to weight the cost of promoting the download conversion point with the cost of promoting the services that generate leads.
It’s all a numbers game. You just need to be looking at the right numbers. Conversion numbers matter a great deal. That means a significant chunk of your online marketing efforts need to focus on the conversion process.
Once you know the value of each conversion and the efforts that need to go into them, improving the conversion process not only improves your conversion rates, but in turn improves the total number of conversions. Each new conversion is a value part of your business success.
Too many businesses focus on other factors such as driving traffic, building conversion points and converting leads, but far too often the conversion process is neglected. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]More times than not, a little investment in the conversion process leads to significantly improved conversion rates.[/inlinetweet] It’s like free money just waiting to be taken!