Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

“The best thing is to do the right thing. The next best thing is to do the wrong thing. The worst is to do nothing.”

I have no idea who originally said that. I once had a boss who used it frequently. And boy is it true with conversion optimization.

Since our recent release of an e-book on How to Increase Profits from Current Website Traffic, we’ve received a lot of enthusiastic response – much of which can be summarized in the words of one software company owner:

“This sounds awesome! Where do I start?”

Here’s how we how we approach this question at Clicks ‘n Conversions. I’ll use a recent new client as an example. I hope this will help you get your own efforts going.

Shawn’s company has a specialized web application for a certain type of small business. He sells his application online. He came to us for help in getting more customers.

The first thing we noticed was that Shawn wasn’t using a web analytics program and we showed him how to put Google Analytics on his site. Website conversion optimization without analytics support is not impossible, but analytics makes it much easier to find and fix problems areas — especially as you get into more detailed tweaks.

Next we looked at Shawn’s marketing process, which – as is typical for web applications that don’t require a sales person – looked like this:

1. Send people to the website
2. Get them to sign up for a free 30 day trial
3. Convert them to a paying customer.

Each of these steps offers opportunities for improvement and to decide where to start we needed to answer two questions:

1. What percentage of Shawn’s trial users become paying customers?
2. What percentage of his website visitors take a free trial?

In Shawn’s company’s case, 5%  of trial users actually ended up as paying customers while less than 1% of website visitors were signing up for the trial. This information led us to focus first on getting more website visitors to try the application.

In reality, we could have chosen either place to start. The question is often which is more efficient. By doubling the visitor-to-trial ratio from 1% to 2%, we could double the number of new customers each month. To accomplish that same thing we would have to double the trial-to-customer ratio from 5% to 10%. Shawn had enough traffic to make the 1st option a better starting place.

But the bottom line really is that it’s impossible to start at the wrong place. Just by taking action and improving something, you will improve your sales – assuming of course that all else remains the same.