Website Conversion – It’s all about CTA’s and Email Marketing!

Why do many website owners ignore the opportunity to start a long term relationship with their website visitors, often to the detriment of their online business?

When do visitors to your website ‘convert’, i.e. when do they become new customers of your business? What percentage of new visitors to your website convert to new customers?

Research has shown that a new sale from your website can take up to 5 visits from your prospect. If you don’t capture email details the first time a user visits your website, chances are you’ll become a distant memory in the eyes of the prospect.

This problem can be sorted very quickly by setting up a very compelling ‘Call To Action’ on your website, somewhere very prominent on every page.

So, what is a ‘Call To Action’ or CTA. Very simply it’s a reason for the visitors to your website to give you something, an email address is the easiest to get. The challenge for your business is giving your visitors something in return for their email address. Just before we go on, a CTA can be a lot more, it may involve getting a visitor to buy something from your website, or you may have multiple CTA’s for different products/services.

Let’s look at a typical funnel for a website in terms of conversion behaviours, i.e. analysis of how many visitors take the CTA and eventually become customers of your business;

Your website gets many visitors at the top, a certain percentage opt-in through your CTA, another percentage will actually engage and want to know more and then finally a small percentage will convert to a new customer.

The main points here, do you know the percentages for your website? Do you test, on an ongoing basis, different CTA’s to see if you can improve your sales figures, and are you aware of what software is available to track this for you? When a new opt-in signs up, are you communicating with them using automated email?

If you don’t know your sales conversion figures and were wondering what’s typical for the web, well, if you had a 5% conversion rate, i.e. you were turning 5% of the visitors to your website into new customers, that would be  a very good conversion rate. Look at the number of unique visitors who visited your website last month. If it was 500, then at 5% conversion you’d expect 25 new customers.

So what happens once a new visitor opts in from your website. What happens next? You now have their email and their permission to start communicating with them through email. Or do you? If you have a business in the US, you have to get a opt-in verified using a double opt-in. This is to prevent people getting unsolicited emails, i.e. if someone else opt-ed a user in without their knowledge or permission. In Europe, a single opt-in is enough, i.e. you don’t have to verify the email address. There are naturally pros and cons, double opt can be used in Europe to increase quality, but may also impact on numbers who verify their email address.

Communicating through email

Once a new visitor gives you their email address, they are giving you permission to start educating them about your business. If after the first email they want to stop receiving communication from your business, they can easily opt-out. Remember, you must include an opt-out link on every email you send.

So you have a new opt-in, what happens next? You should have an auto-responder set-up to automatically send the opt-in a welcome message. Thereafter you can send emails on a regular basis, not too often though, you r emails may be regarded as SPAM if they’re too frequent and contain little of value in terms of relevant content. Don’t make all your emails just sales letters, take time to add valuable content relevant to your industry.

All of this is common sense right? You have a CTA on our website and a auto-responder set-up to start sending quality email message to your list. If you don’t you should get to work on this immediately.

What Email Software should I use?

This is obviously quite subjective, but two that I have found to be quite good are Aweber and MailChimp . I have used Aweber quite a lot, and have only recently started using MailChimp. I’d suggest you visit both sites and take a look.

Both are very good in terms of setting up auto-responders and setting up campaigns and tracking them, but I believe MailChimp may have the edge when it comes to A/B testing your email campaigns. Below is a screen shot of what you see in terms of reports for a A/B email campaign;

When you configure an A/B email marketing campaign in MailChimp, it’ll send two different emails to 10% of your list, so 5% to Group A and 5% to Group B. 24 hours later, which ever email has the highest open rate, the remaining 80% of the list is sent that email – thus giving you the best opportunity of success.

How is a winner chosen? It’s up to you, you can choose open rate or  click through rate and you can test different ‘from’ emails and different subject lines.

Getting into the habit of fine tuning your email marketing campaigns can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.

So remember, test different CTA’s and measure which ones are getting the best traction, set-up an auto-responder to start sending emails and employ A/B on all your marketing campaigns.

Another useful tool for A/B testing is Google Optimiser, this tests your web pages again each other. For PPC campaigns this can be a invaluable tool and further increases your chances of improving your conversion rate.

What about you? What tools do you use for your conversion analysis and email marketing campaigns?

What’s the conversion rate on your site? Do you think 5% is good, or poor?

Please share your thoughts.

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