What if there was a way to make more money with less effort? To really impact the bottom line without worrying about more traffic, buying more advertising or just generally needing “more”?
The good news – there is a way to do all that, and more, by focusing on increasing conversions.
First, a short definition and then we will focus in on the two types of conversions that matter most for many of us.
Your basic definition.
A conversion happens when a person takes the action you want them to take.
There are many places where conversions can be measured. Here are a few, along with their most commonly used names.
- Buying a product you recommend. (Sales conversion)
- Clicking a link in a selling email. (Click through rate)
- “Liking” your Facebook page. (Social conversion)
- Joining your mailing list. (Subscription conversion)
For this discussion, let’s focus on the two that matter most to many of us.
- Sales conversion (someone buying your product)
- Subscription conversion (someone joining your list)
Three ways to increase conversions
If you want to increase these two types of conversions, there are three simple steps to take.
Step 1 – Know where you stand now
It is vital to start by knowing where your conversions stand now.
I often hear people say “I have no idea how to get this number”, so let’s start with that.
If 100 people visit a sales page where you are making an offer and 1 person buys you have a 1% sales conversion.
If you can increase that to 3 out of 100 you will triple your conversion to a 3% sales conversion.
You will also beat most online marketers at only 3%!
But that’s for another post. 🙂
The best way to get your starting numbers is by beginning to use a click tracker of some sort. I use, and recommend, Pretty Link. They offer both a free and paid version.
If you don’t know your current conversion numbers, don’t sweat it. Just start measuring now and put time on your side.
For a more in depth article about what to measure, and how, use this link.
Step 2 – Sharpen your offer
Once you have a baseline of what your conversion numbers are now, it’s time to look at your offer.
Whether you are asking people to join a list, asking them to buy your product or asking them to buy someone else’s product, there is an offer being made.
Knowing how that offer is performing matters most of all.
Once you know how the offer is performing now (by measuring how many people are buying out of every 100 visitors) you can begin to improve the offer.
There are three ways to improve most offers.
- Strongly justify the price.
- Focus on benefits and not features.
- Remove all risk with a strong guarantee.
There are other steps you can take to sharpen an offer (such as adding bonuses) but starting with these three generally works very well.
Step 3 – Adjust your copy
Every product sold is sold with some form of “copy”. Copy simply means the message you use to convince people to buy now. That might be a long-form sales letter, a video sales letter, a webinar or something else.
No matter what method you use, here are three ways to adjust, and hopefully improve, your copy immediately.
- Improve the headline.
- Test shorter copy. (Or a shorter video or webinar)
- Use sub-headlines to tell the entire story.
Almost everyone I’ve ever met wants higher conversions for their offers, be that a sales letter, an email signup form, a squeeze page or their social media engagement.
Getting there is a methodical step-by-step process that can be a lot of fun (when you start seeing improvement) and one that most people overlook.
If you want to do more with less, focus on increasing conversions from your existing traffic, and then add more traffic once the increase kicks in.
If you do, you will worry less about getting more traffic, spend less money, and see better results than ever.
And those are beautiful things indeed!
