As an online marketer, you should know full-well the importance of conversion rates and testing as they pertain to your bottom line. Without conversions, you won’t make very much money; and without testing you will never truly know if your marketing efforts are as effective as they could be. The following 2014 updates as they relate to conversion rates and testing will help you remain on the up-and-up so that you can break all of your previous sales records in the coming year.
Defining Terms
Conversion rates and testing are important terms to understand if you are going to be a successful online marketer. Conversion rates refers to the amount of individuals who complete a form, purchase one of your products or sign up for one of your newsletters. Testing is the process of playing around with various elements – colors, graphics, content, headlines and more – so that you can determine which elements your prospects and customers respond to best. To help you understand these concepts further, let’s delve into the process of improving conversion rates
Conversion Rates
The 2014 updates for conversions will see you giving much of your content away for free. This can’t be avoided, not with all the competition that you will likely be up against. Don’t think of all that content creation as doing a bunch of work for free. Think of it as an investment in time and resources that will pay dividends later on.
Widen the Top of Your Sales Funnel with Free Content
Too many marketers, in an effort to make a lot of money quickly, restrict the top of their sales funnels. That is, they turn to the paid model way too quickly. This will only succeed in scaring away valued customers who might otherwise make a purchase once they see the type of value you are providing. The solution is to provide tons of value early on and for free so that you can entice those would-be buyers into actually converting.
Conversion rates and testing are much easier when you provide tons of content up front and at no cost. A free trial can even work for this, but don’t ask for credit card information just yet. Make it extremely easy to become a free trial subscriber if you hope to stay in line with these 2014 updates.
The Importance of Analytics
The ideal way to improve conversion rates and testing is to pay attention to the cold-hard numbers. These are your traffic, landing page and bounce rate figures, which can be procured by using a platform like Google Analytics. Once you have widened your sales funnel and you have succeeded in providing your audience with a massive amount of valuable content for free, you should be able to determine where your conversion rates and testing figures need work.
Where to Place Your Offers
One of the biggest 2014 updates for conversion rates and testing has to do with where to place your paid offer. Your free content should entice visitors to land on your website and individual web pages and the analytics platform that you use should let you know where most of your visitors are landing. Find those pages with the most visitors and place your paid offers on those pages. You may have to test various offers and place them on various pages before you find that sweet spot, but that’s what improving conversion rates and testing is all about.
Shopping Cart Abandonment and Payment Options
The 2014 updates for conversion rates and testing can also be used to prevent shopping cart abandonment. Test your sign-up forms to ensure that they are concise and that they don’t ask for any more information than is needed to complete the process. The shorter the form, the better. Test the color of the page the form is on, the headlines you use and every other aspect to ensure that the sign-up process is optimized and as easy as possible for the potential subscriber.
You will also want to play around with various payment options. Enabling subscribers to use credit/debit cards, PayPal and a number of other options should help with conversions, but you will also want to test the frequency with which you bill customers. You may want to try monthly payments and yearly payments to see which method your audience prefers most. Once you find your customers’ comfort zones, your conversion rates should increase, as should your bottom line.
To recap these updates for conversion rates and testing, widen the top of your sales funnel by offering a majority of your content for free, at least up front. Make it easy to sign up for your service and test every variable you can get your hands on until your numbers begin to rise. Whether you are looking to improve the number of comments on your blog, subscribers to your newsletter or paid customers who are willing to shell out big bucks for your products and services, the proper effort and patience to allow the numbers to improve organically should yield the results you’re after. The rule to remember is, if you test and give your efforts time to blossom, your audience will surely convert. Take that advice to heart and see what these 2014 updates can do for you.
