Conversion rate not where you want it to be?
May 1st, 2009 Posted in SEO
While Dickens got paid by the word – and let’s be honest Great Expectations fell short of expectations – no one is getting paid by the word anymore (Thank god).
Brevity is essential.
With the short attention span of most Googlers, you have only a short sentence to get them to click, and then you have about 30 seconds before they hit the back button.
“You have approximately 30 seconds until they press the back button.”
What every online marketer wants is to get the user to click from Google, and then buy their product or sign up. This is the conversion rate, the number of users that click to your site compared to the number of users that become customers. Needless to say you want to have a high conversion rate.
So, how do you boost your conversion rate?
Marketing is a verb
Adjectives in a book are great, but the truth is there is no room for personal interpretation in marketing your product. I mean, honestly, do you want your potential customers to receive your pitch and ponder your intent? I didn’t think so.
When marketing a product you want complete control over the message you are sending out. This is where adjectives fall short for marketing purposes.
While at first counter-intuitive, the excessive use of descriptive words leads to a very ambiguous message to a potential customer; for example, the adjective “big” is hard to define – one person’s idea of “big” could be another person’s idea of “small.”
To raise your conversion rate, you need to nix the adjectives and find ways to incorporate verbs. Verbs have energy and very little flexibility in their meanings.
Many well-known companies have tapped into this thinking:
- Snap into a Slim Jim
- Just Do It
- Taste the rainbow
The finality in these pitches alleviates any ambiguity and vagueness.
“Think about messages with action— ‘Taste the Rainbow.’”
Interaction is a Verb
What could possibly be more fun than clicking through Tide’s step by step stain solution feature?! I know! Nothing right?!
While this may raise your conversion rate, the idea behind it is interaction.
With the endless products marketed on the web, everybody wants a chance to give their feedback, enter sweepstakes, personalize their experience or play a game.
These are just a few of the many ways marketers work to incorporate interactive possibilities to their product websites, but the end result is more users becoming customers.
“Make the buying process easy on your customers.”
Lose the Red Tape
Lastly, and maybe the most important, is being user-friendly.
No one wants to have to disclose half of their personal information before they can checkout. Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to buy a product, but having to go through a maze of pages asking to know everything from your mothers maiden name to where you were last night a 10 o’clock.
That being said, if you want to raise your conversion rate, make this final step easy for the customer. This is, after all, the last step for a user to become a customer, you don’t want them to lose interest at this point!
So forget what your English teachers taught you, tell Shakespeare to shove it (you know you want to), and remember verbs, interaction, and accessibility raise your conversion rate indefinitely.
| Emily Dunn
Want content written for your Brand that shows up #1 on Search Engines and brings you new customers? Contact us. |
3 Responses to “Conversion rate not where you want it to be?”
By Tina on Jul 6, 2009
Slim Jims sell themselves, delicious
By Jenn on Jul 7, 2009
Be short, sweet, and to the point. People don’t have time these days to be putzing around…grab their attention right away.
By Shorty Fiercehem on Jul 7, 2009
The problem today is TMI: too much information. You really have to make your words count when people are sifting through millions of words and ideas per day.