Boost Your Web Site’s Conversion Rates

Like so many facets of direct marketing, improving Web-site conversions depends as much on applying an appropriate focus, some common sense and thorough planning as it does on adopting the latest technological breakthrough.

Indeed, 43 percent of Web executives, marketers, developers and IT managers said conversion rates are the most important Web-site metrics they track, according to a survey from NetIQ. It’s astonishing, then, that 66 percent didn’t know their own conversion rates.

What’s needed? The logical first step toward improving conversion rates — and overall Web-site performance — is to apply some of the same knowledge you use in initiatives for your print catalog.

For example, you assort, design and mail catalogs using sophisticated plans and analysis. To blindly mail catalogs without an expectation of response rates (estimated from historical results and successful test roll-outs) undoubtedly would be unacceptable to you.

Yet, even as they’re busy planning fall/holiday 2003 and spring 2004, many catalogers continue to treat the online channel as something separate and largely different from their core direct marketing businesses. A casualty of shotgun thinking and follow-the-pack marketing mentality, conversion-rate increases under these circumstances are more likely to result from luck than design.

Employ Proven Practices

You can, however, end costly, blind experimentation. In its place, a confident review of proven offline practices and processes — with an eye toward online reinterpretation — may produce immediate and sustainable results.

For example, let’s assume your prospect list response rates double profitably with the addition of a free gift or introductory discount. You respond by mailing these lists a separate cover or catalog version. Mirror this experience online by recognizing new visitors as they enter the site, and serve them up the same kinds of incentives and content.

Or perhaps you’ve established list exchange or package insert relationships with non-competitive mailers. Mirror this experience online by establishing a strategic partnership whereby you send sponsored e-mail campaigns to your respective e-mail lists.

Successfully translating catalog know-how into interactive, multi-dimensional shopping and selling can take some outside-the-box thinking. Consider your catalog’s circulation plan and the amount of analysis, testing and forecasting involved in it. An entire season, if not an entire year, is planned in detail, and you consider many things, including segmentation-level performance, seasonality, trends, offers and testing.

Carefully dissect the elements of your circulation plan and look for areas where they can be imitated online. For instance, does your circulation and database analysis identify highly responsive customers with an affinity to purchase certain products or categories? If so, leverage this information when buying keywords on search engines, steering your keyword budget toward emphasis on a particular category or item.

If you learn that catalog requestors are most quickly converted if they get catalogs within 24 hours, immediately respond to new e-mail sign-ups with an online version of your catalog in addition to a thank-you e-mail assuring them their print catalogs are en route. Also test sending a thank-you e-mail with your strongest proven prospect offer.

Interpret Offline Successes

Arguably, the closest online equivalent to traditional direct mail is e-mail. Deploying e-mail from a viewpoint that borrows from both new media and your print catalog practically is guaranteed to improve conversion rates.

Why? Because planning techniques require a careful look at all the elements that drive conversion, such as segmentation and contact management, orchestrated drops based on historical results, and segment-sensitive marketing, merchandise and creative offers.

If you’re not yet segmenting, understand that cyclical gains in conversion rates come from better contact management, leveraging database attributes and eliminating poor-performing names.

For example, pay attention to e-mail bounce rates. Understand the mix of hard and soft bounces, both as they relate to each other and to your e-mail list in total. Pull the most current e-mail opt-ins just prior to each deployment. Suppress hard bounces immediately, and establish business rules around the number of mailings you undertake on a soft-bounce name before treating it as a permanent bounce.

Don’t let the absence of historical trends keep you from driving quick conversion-rate improvements. Remember, online tracking cycle times are several hundred percent faster than catalog mailing cycle times. By analyzing and testing, you’ll see improvements in days and weeks rather than months and seasons.

Targeting: More than Data Mining

Remember that segments in and of themselves do very little. The real opportunities begin when you interpret and apply successful marketing and merchandising tactics to what you’ve learned about these similar groups, just as you routinely do in the print channel.

For example, for e-mail campaigns, test and modify subject lines, and send separate creative, marketing and merchandise offers. Take different segments to different landing pages where they find offer modifications relevant to their segment characteristics.

While segmentation largely is an outbound effort in print catalog mailing, you’ll want to create target customer groups based on online visitors’ specific behaviors while on your site. Recognize these target customers when they return, and give them a uniquely appropriate, personalized experience, replete with targeted offers, merchandise, creative and more.

More Tactics to Try

Digital coupons. If you want to improve your chances at conversion on sessions that seem to be headed toward abandonment, try offering a spontaneous digital coupon to customers who’ve been on the site for a prescribed length of time and haven’t yet put merchandise in their baskets.

Cross-sells and discounts. Dynamically serve up a relevant cross-sell or discount to those who added, then later removed, items from their carts.

While improving your Web site’s conversions is not all about the technology, it is about leveraging that technology to its maximum potential.

Target customer groups. Create target customer groups based on previous purchases, and offer relevant content when they visit. Create similar groups based on lifetime value, and offer them free gift wrapping or shipping when they return at holiday time.

Use source codes. If you participate in affiliate or strategic-partner programs, always source code the link, and recognize the visitors from specific affiliates by customizing their experiences based on their referring sources.

Use “smart-sizers.” If you sell apparel online, use a “smart-sizer” that dynamically presents subsequent items in the size the visitor has identified.

Generate links. If you’re buying keywords or phrases on search engines, or supplying data feeds, generate links to specific product detail pages whenever possible.

Measure, measure, measure. Who wouldn’t love to sit with prospects and customers as they browse through paper catalogs? By such an exercise, you could learn how to more effectively paginate, promote and ultimately convert a catalog browser to buyer. With online browsing, you can. Pay attention to the analytics. Watch for consistent abandonment on specific pages. Losing them at shipping? Is it clarity or amount? Watch, analyze, learn and convert.

Order Entry and Customer Service

Online customers are making decisions about your company and products in more places than your Web site. When you’ve exhausted the online applications of offline marketing techniques, shift focus to order entry and customer service.

Online customers who call your contact centers asking questions want good service and accurate answers, and such service can support your company’s online-conversion rate.

Also monitor customer service e-mail responsiveness. Are you responding within 24 hours? How many more customers could be converted to buyers with rapid reply, live chat or both?

Look for call center and e-mail patterns. Numerous calls or e-mails from customers asking questions about specific items point to a potential content problem. How many customers were confused and didn’t call or buy?

Finally, talk to your customers. A simple survey allowing them to express their opinions about your merchandise, your Web site and your company may keep them involved. The greater the involvement, the greater the likelihood they’ll buy more frequently.

Begin with the End in Mind

Does all of this sound eerily familiar — a bit like the “old economy” business? It’s meant to. To boost conversion rates you need a combination of good merchandising, marketing, design, technology and business practices. Remember the basics such as the importance of planning and offline reinterpretation, and drive your way toward higher conversion rates, sales and profitability.

Judith Roberts is vice president of Internet strategy at e-commerce software and services provider Multimedia Live. She can be contacted at (707) 780-1623 or via e-mail at judith@mmlive.com.