You need to spend a fair amount of time and energy working to improve conversion rates for your website or you’re going to have trouble making sales or getting leads online. When you’re taking conversions seriously, it is much easier to gain more profits from the same level of traffic. For this reason it’s important to try to increase website conversion rates.

Improving your website conversion rates could be an 'easy win'

If your website isn’t converting, then your profits aren’t living up to their potential. Here I’d like to discuss what you need to do in order to improve those important conversion rates without making unnecessary sacrifices along the way.

Be professional

First thing to remember is to be professional so that you can leave a lasting impression on your visitors and eventually turn them into sales or leads. This is why you should consider the language of your site and avoid typos and errors in spelling. Whether you agree or not, grammar does have a strong impact on the way your page converts. Typos or spelling mistakes can easily discourage your visitors, causing them to move back and leave your site. In such a scenario, it will be time consuming to convince them to go back to your site and take action. Knowing that your visitors are backing off after expressing their interest in your product or service is the last thing that you would want to happen.

Meet the demands of your customer base

Failing to meet the demands of your customer base can cause a drop off in revenue so make sure you have enough stock on hand. When you don’t have products in stock, your conversions are sure to drop. For this reason, it’s vital to let your visitors know whenever products are out of service and offer them a way to hear from you whenever new stocks have arrived.

Check your website’s checkout process

Your website’s checkout process can also be negatively impacting your conversion rate. Try to make the check out process short as the longer the process is, the lower will be the conversion rate. The size of your checkout does matter when it comes to converting prospects to customers. Focus on getting only information relevant to completing the purchase; you can always follow up with your customers for more details. Also consider offering checkout methods like Google Checkout and PayPal. They are good options because many customers like to pay through them.

In general, it becomes obvious that with the aim of increasing your website conversion rate, you should make any essential moves toward guaranteeing a smooth experience for your customers/leads. You have to bring them through the total process effortlessly in order for them to be able to take the action you would like for them to take without any dilemmas. Enhancing your website’s conversion rate should be one of your top priorities – because what’s the use of generating lots of visitors via your online marketing plan, but not converting them?

As highlighted in our OptimizePress review, you should be thinking of creating a page with just one call-to action – an email form field and a submit button. This is a squeeze page. It ‘squeezes’ your visitors towards one call-to-action.

OptimizePress WordPress Theme

You really want a squeeze page which produces a high conversion rate – and the way to do this is to use the individual elements it includes so that you can get the most out of the visitors to your site. Remember that if you want to grow your online business, the best way to do it is with a targeted email list, which is why a squeeze page is such a critical component of any marketing campaign online.

Your squeeze page copy should be relatively short

In the first place, make sure that the copy on your squeeze page isn’t long, as it should be quite concise. It’s senseless to post lengthy copy on your squeeze page. There is little need for extensive persuasion, because all you want is to get the emails of your audience. Your copy should be relatively short and you should also add an image of the free item you are giving away. Consider getting a cover designed by a graphic designer, if you are giving your subscribers a free report or ebook.

Even though this step might not look like it’s necessary, it can help in improving the conversions. You can also ask your visitors to subscribe through an embedded audio message on your squeeze page.

The main function of a squeeze page is to turn your visitors into subscribers

You should avoid any frills and keep your squeeze page as plain as you can. The main function of a squeeze page is to turn your visitors into subscribers. You don’t have to make your squeeze page fancy, but keep it basic and to the point. You can still be professional with a simple page. As soon as someone arrives on your page, they should be able to immediately understand what your message is. Don’t confuse your visitors by having heavy graphics, blaring music or a design that’s not pleasant. The design of your page should complement your copy in such a way that it not only helps your prospects, but also presents a professional image in front of them.

Privacy is a major issue for most people

Privacy is a major issue for most people and they aren’t too happy about giving away personal info to scammers. They are scared of being spammed, which is why most of them are so careful about it. For this reason you need to provide your visitors with the reassurance that their data is extremely safe in your hands. Ensure that they understand very clearly that their private details will not be sold, rented or handed out to third parties.

You could also insert a link to your privacy policy beneath the subscription form. There are many techniques and methods available to make your squeeze page more effective. Traffic is precious to come by, and that is why you have to do all you can to convert them. What you do to generate your traffic also plays a role. If you’re using ineffective traffic generation sources then obviously the performance of your page will be affected.

The best kind of visitors are the ones that you either get from the search engines or through pay per click advertising. You can obtain very high conversion rates when you take the time to test all you do on your squeeze page – we recommend OptimizePress to get the best possible conversion rates.

If you want to emulate the successful online businesses, then use your frontend product as (good) bait to bring people in for your back end marketing. This is something almost anyone can do, and it is not hard to put into practice, either. It’s all about getting your customers inside your sales funnel and selling them more of your products. The only purpose of the leading product is to entice people to buy and then they are in your marketing machine. The real money comes later when you unleash your up selling strategies – remember that you can automate all of this by using a clever autoresponder like AWeber.

Does your back end selling persuade customers to add more to their shopping cart?

Build relationships with your list

The thing to remember is that you must get your marketing messages out in front of your market. You do need to build a marketing list because that is the fundamental instrument for optimizing your entire sales funnel. You will build relationships with your list members, and when the time is right you show them your promotional offers. You will find that most people need more time to get to know you, etc. You always want to be working on your relationships and marketing your backend.

Pre-selling can be an essential art form

If you want your overall marketing efforts to pay off, make sure you balance your frontend offers with upselling, so that your customers don’t feel that they’re being exploited. Pre-selling can be an art form, and when you can do it very well you can sell hot coffee in the desert. You will need to understand the problems of your audience so you can send them appropriate offers. When you give them what they want in terms of a product, then they will be happy and continue to stick around.

Consider offering drop ship products

You can still engage in backend selling even if you have nothing else of your own to promote. Well, one quick and easy solution entails making offers for drop ship products. You just need to sell drop shipped items and do nothing else because other businesses take over from there.

You can sign up for one of these drop shipping companies and promote back end products that are related to your niche. For instance, if you’re selling an eBook about “dog training”, you can find products that are related to it and drop ship them to your customers through backend selling. Concentrate on marketing and making the sale, and all the rest will be taken care of for you.

You do need to do this because back-end selling can work like crazy when it is done right. This is truly powerful stuff here, and you can experience a solid business that continues to grow. There are three prongs: new leads, new customers, and marketing to current customers with your backend marketing. This is exactly what the hugely successful marketers have been doing for years.

I’d like to share with you how I increased my conversion rates by using a new WordPress theme called OptimizePress.

I was recently introduced to OptimizePress and I thought it presented me with a good opportunity to see if I could improve conversion rates on my existing opt-in pages.

OptimizePress WordPress Theme

What is OptimizePress?

OptimizePress is a specialist premium WordPress Theme with a build-in template system that claims to help you build web pages that convert extremely well, so I decided to test OptimizePress on one of my existing ‘squeeze pages’ which offers the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing eBook.

My OptimizePress experiment

The existing landing page didn’t do too badly – 24.1% of people who visited it decided to opt-in with their email address and download the 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing eBook.

Here’s what the original version of the landing page looked like:

The original 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing landing page

The new landing page included some of the same elements like the 13 Pillars eBook image and just an email address required to opt-in. It also used a slightly different design and added a more prominent heading.

Here’s what the new OptimizePress version of the page looked like:

The new OptimizePress version of the 13 Pillars landing page

This new version at the page converted at 37.6% – that is, 37.6% of unique visitors who visited this page entered their email address to receive a free copy of the 13 Pillars eBook.

What’s really impressive is that this difference (37.6% opt-in rate compared with the original 24.1%) represents a massive 56% improvement in conversion rates!

Here’s a screenshot of my Google Website Optimizer experiment…

Screenshot of the 13pillars.com Google Website Optimizer experiment in action

What I liked about OptimizePress

I loved the style. The way that it automatically created image based lettering out of headlines makes each page look so much classier than a regular opt-in page.

You can tell the design of each and every page has had a lot of testing time already spent on it, with everything aimed at increasing your overall conversion rates.

Are there any negatives about OptimizePress?

Sure, it isn’t perfect. Because OptimizePress is a WordPress Theme and not a WordPress Plugin it means that it won’t work as part of an existing Theme. You have to install it on another directory to make it work if you want it to function as part of a domain on which you already host a WordPress blog. Ideally it would be available as a plugin too.

Plus, what would make this Theme really rock would be to make it integrate with Google Website Optimizer. That way you’d be able to include a multi-variabel split-test as part of the OptimizePress pages.

However, I did speak to James Dyson, the creator of OptimizePress and he may well include these options in future upgrades.

To buy or not to buy?

At the time of writing OptimizePress is a STEAL at $97. I have no doubt that the price will go up in the near future, so my recommendation is to get it now!

The 33rd edition of our podcast brings you week #4 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video looks at website conversion rates.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.