Whether you are planning on having a website built for your business or you are looking for ways to increase the sales being generated (if any) from an existing website the following information will be of enormous benefit to you.
How To Measure Your Success
The success of any website marketing or sales strategy can be measured in terms of how many prospects exposed to the marketing/sales strategy actually convert to sales. This benchmark is commonly referred to as the conversion rate. The current industry standard Conversion rate for a business website is 1.8% or roughly 1 new sale or lead for every 100 website visitors.
Amazingly enough research shows that the majority of business related websites fall below this benchmark. This fact becomes an even bigger issue when you consider that the standard conversion rate of traditional brick and mortar businesses is a whopping 48%!
The Elusive Profitable Website
There are however scores of business websites that consistently achieve conversion rates of 10-20% and higher. Even an increase from 1% to just 3% for an existing website would translate into an incredible increase in sales.
The methods of achieving these kinds of conversion rates from your business website are Shockingly simple and well documented, they are just not commonly applied here's why?
Why Most Business Websites Fail Miserably
Website marketing & development even at this stage is still a relatively new industry. The methods that create higher website conversion rates are slow to be adopted because traditionally website development has been approached from a technological standpoint and not from a marketing and sales standpoint which is the key to understanding these conversion boosting methods.
Designers and programmers, however talented and dedicated, simply do not know enough about professional selling. It's not where their talent lies. Yet building and promoting a website that doesn't "know" how to sell is like building a beautiful brick-and-mortar store with a confusing layout, stocking it with great stuff, but then not hiring any salespeople.
The Bottom Line
Ultimately, it's about the conversion rate: the percentage of visitors your site can turn into buyers. Lots of dot-coms have turned into dot-bombs because even though they spent tons of money on "sexy" designs and tons more driving traffic to their sites, they overlooked the tiny fact that they needed to sell to visitors once they arrived at the site. The sad thing is, many of those visitors would have bought happily and could have left delighted.
Charles Preston is President of Click Response a website design company that specializes in Business Website Design.