Outdoor Events & Advance Ticket Sales

Are you converting your web site traffic?

One of the largest marketing mistakes web site owners commit is not having a plan to get visitors to take action upon arriving at their web site. Numerous companies look at their web statistics for the past month and are confused as to why so many people visited their site yet there is no appreciable change in revenue.  This is where the conversion factor comes into play.

A conversion is the process of your user taking some predetermined action or series of actions.  It is a measurable metric.  As an example, 10,000 people come to your web site in a month.  Of the 10,000 visitors, 100 of your visitors take a predetermined action.  In this case they make a purchase from your web site.  The end result is a 1% conversion rate.  100 purchases / 10,000 visitors = 1.0% Conversion rate.  In order to be successful online you need to concentrate on converting your web traffic.

Conversions don't always need to be in the form of a purchase.  Many people concentrate on building email lists to soft sell their product or service. Doing so increases the lifetime value of that perspective customer.  I know of one person over the last few years that amassed over 15,000 email addresses.  He delivered high quality content via his newsletters on a regular basis.  Imagine what you could do with 15,000 people dedicated people on your email list?

The cold hard truth is that most visitors come to your site and never return.  There are a plethora of reasons.  In some instances it takes several visits before a visitor will take any action.  You need to establish trust and credibility with your user.  A miniscule number of people will convert in their first visit.  You need to get people to come back to your site often enough to establish credibility.  In today's day of information privacy that can be a very daunting task.  After the trust is ultimately established it becomes much easier for you to convert users. Web sites that retain their traffic for subsequent visits are referred to as having a high degree of "stickiness."  Users are attracted to come back because of any number of onsite factors.

Here is a brief list of things you can do to establish trust and credibility:

• Deliver High Quality Content.
• Provide clear content, concise content, and relevant content.
• Respect the user's attention span.
• Present a professional looking web site.
• Balance your web site information with aesthetics.
• Update your web site often.
• Make your web site usable.

If you can establish the criteria above you should be in good shape.  Can you put a check mark next to each item listed above? If so, you should be well on your way to creating a trustworthy and credible web presence.