…And more importantly, do you want to be more profitable?

Discover how to get more customers without spending more on your marketing — the smart marketer’s way

How?

By increasing the conversion rate of your landing pages to make them better at selling. We’ve used our techniques to help produce results like this…

By tweaking this landing page from this to this…

…We helped to nearly treble the business of this website to $9.1 million within one year.

The sales literally went off the chart, as you can almost see in the picture below…

So, what exactly are your conversion rate and landing page?

(If you already understand these terms and I’m teaching you to suck eggs — grotesque phrase, I know — then you can skip to the next section!)

Your landing page:

This is the page on your website that you direct visitors to from your marketing. For example, your advert describes your product with a link to a landing page to buy that product.

Your conversion rate:

This is the percentage of visitors to your landing page who complete the task you want them to. Using the example above, this would be the number of visitors who actually go on to buy your product. (But this task could be anything, like filling out a contact form, requesting more information, signing up for a newsletter, ringing a number etc. etc.)

And their relationship is that when you make your landing page more persuasive, you increase your conversion rate and get more customers.

It’s a simple but very powerful concept. Here’s why…

Why increasing your conversion rate is the smart marketer’s way to become more profitable

What the typical marketer does to increase profits

If you’re like the majority of websites, when you want to increase your profits you look to see which of your advertising is already working and then you spend more on advertising, or you look for new (and so untested) places to advertise.

This tactic can work, but it does have its limitations, including…

• You need to find more money to pay for the new advertising up front

• Untested advertising might bomb and lose you profits

• There will come a point where you run out of places to profitably advertise

In a bad economy, when every penny counts, you need to find a more effective, long term and successful way to increase your profits.

What the smart marketer does to increase profits

(And this is the category I hope to find you in!)

If you’re a smart marketer, instead of increasing your spend on advertising to just drive more people to your website, you look at your existing marketing performance and work on improving that first…

…you make sure your landing pages are doing their best job at selling to convert as many of those visitors you’re already paying for.

And I think you’ll be surprised by the affect this will have on your profits, when compare to just increasing your advertising spend.

Let’s see how this works with a theoretical example using Pay Per Click advertising:

A The traditional solution of increasing your advertising spend

As you can see, the more you increase your advertising spend the more profit you make.

Happy days, you think.

But they could be even happier days…

Let’s see what happens if instead of increasing your advertising spend, you focus on increasing your conversion rate:

B The more effective solution of increasing your conversion rate

See what happened this time. Pretty cool…

…by increasing the number of customers you get from your existing marketing, you end up making more profit because you have significantly reduced the cost of acquiring each new customer.

And this leaves more profit in the bank for you.

Oh Happy Day!

But wait; for now I will reveal to you the real power of conversion rates.

C What happens when you combine conversion rate increase followed by increasing your spend on advertising

Remember, increasing your spend on advertising that is profitable is still a sound tactic, but see what happens when you do if after you’ve increased your conversion rates.

If this doesn’t get you excited then you should consult a mortician, because I think your pulse might have stopped.

Drum roll please…

Da da!

See what a massive increase in profits you get compared to the original example A where you just reinvested in advertising.

And this is a nutshell (albeit a nutshell made of charts and figures) is why as a smart marketer, you need to be investing in increasing your landing page conversion rates if you want to realise the potential profits you could, nay, should be earning.

And it doesn’t stop there…

How to leverage your new profits even further

As you’ve seen on the charts above, by increasing your conversion rate you pay less to acquire each new customer. This means your profit per customer increases.

When you start making more profit per customer, it allows you to start advertising in media that might previously have been too expensive to be profitable.

This leap to a bigger advertising medium exposes your message to a much wider audience than you previously could reach, and you start to gain massive market share.

At the same time your competition are left chasing the same old advertising, and their same fixed profit per customer, wondering how in the hell they’re going to afford to catch you up.

Put simply, an increase in conversion rates is key to dominating your industry.

And that is why it is the choice of the clever marketer. Makes sense, doesn’t it!

So how do you actually increase conversion rates?

So far you’ve hopefully seen the power of increasing conversion rates has on your profits. And you know that it connected with making your landing pages better at selling.

But what should you do to your landing pages to make them better at selling?

In theory everything about your landing page could either be having a positive or negative affect on your conversion rate. That is, it’s either encouraging or putting people off whatever it is you want them to do on your landing page.

This can range from your prices down to something seemingly innocent like the font you use, and everything in between.

But the reality is that some factors on your landing page will be having a very large effect, while other factors will have very little or no noticeable effect.

What factors most affect the conversion rate on your landing page?

This is by no means a complete list, but typically we find tackling some or all of these following factors has the biggest affect on conversion rates…

a) Offer — what your customer gets and what it costs

b) Visitor intent — knowing at what stage in the buying process customers are

c) Speed of interest — how quickly you can catch the interest of the visitor to read the rest of your landing page

d) Positioning — where your product fits into the market

e) Appeal — finding the real reason why customers choose you

f) Clarity — the ease of understanding your product, both its benefits and how it works

g) Design — when used to highlight important features, make information easier to follow or highlight the path to ordering

h) Ease of ordering — is it clear and quick to complete the task?

i) Call to action —when and how to tell people to take action

j) Risk reversal — taking the risk out of trying your product

k) Psychological triggers — using techniques like social proof, exclusivity or scarcity

l) Removal of distractions — keeping everything relevant to the task

m) Trust — do customers believe and trust you, your claims and your products?

And, what do you change about these factors to increase conversion rates?

To discover what you should change you use three main sources:

1. Your customers

Fundamental to making a conversion is to match your product and how you present it as closely to the needs of your customers as possible.

You to ask your customers fundamental things like:

• What problem they’re trying to solve by searching for your product

• What they like about your product so you know which benefits to lead with

• What they don’t like about your product so you can improve

• How they talk about your product so you describe it in a way they understand

Often you find that what you think your customers want or like about your product, and what they actually want or like about your product are very different.

Get it right and your conversion rates will rise.

2. Your competition

You need to be aware of what your competition offers, what their strengths and weaknesses are and how you can position yourself to stand out.

3. Best practices

Conversion rate testing, studies in human research and copywriting techniques have been around for years.

There are many techniques that have been proven to constantly increase conversion rates. By borrowing and adapting these tried and tested techniques with the research you find on your own customers, you can get a short-cut to increased conversion rates which might have taken you years to discover with trial and error.

What skills do you need to increase conversion rates?

1. Analytics/research

The basis of successful conversion rate increases is understanding your customers and your website. Good research and analytical reporting on your landing page and customers will show you what’s wrong and how to change it.

2. Copywriting

Copywriting basically refers to the copy used to promote, explain and sell your products. You need to know what and how to write to persuade people to take the action you want them to.

It has been termed “salesmanship in print”.

3. Graphic design and layout

When used to support and enhance copywriting, great graphic design and layout are really important in helping the conversion. Good graphics can be used to make complex information easy to understand, make important information eye-catching and make the copywriting clear and easy to follow.

4. An open mind

The chances are you’re quite protective of your website and products, and also have certain ingrained beliefs about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to selling your products.

But often to get an increase in conversion rates, it means changing something you firmly believe in, or trying something you either don’t like or aren’t convinced will work.

And the truth is, the only people who are qualified to tell you if something works or not are your website visitors. They’ll either convert or they won’t. End of story.

When trying to increase your conversion rate you need to be able to keep an open mind and test things that may go against your beliefs.

What are downsides of conversion rate testing?

Blimey, you must be thinking. Conversion rates are exciting aren’t they! It’s like finding free money hiding in your website.

You’ve seen the chart where we nearly trebled the size of a website to $9.1 million.

You’ve seen charts show how effective it is at creating profits compared to just increasing your spending on advertising.

But you’re a smart marketer.

You know nothing is 100% easy when it comes to making profits. And I have to admit, increasing conversion rates is not an exception.

1. You need to know what to do

I’ve already highlighted some of the biggest factors that affect conversion rates above, and the skills you need to plan and make the changes.

If you carry out the project in the correct stages, and have the skills needed, then increasing your conversion rates will be a straightforward project.

But if you don’t know, then you’ll need to take the time to learn everything yourself, and be hard to know where to start.

Of course, the best short cut you can take to start earning this extra profit as soon as possible is to hire an expert to guide you (oh, that’s what we do by the way, in case you were wondering…)

2. It can take time

The backbone of conversion rate increasing is measuring and verifying that the results achieved are correct and not just a fluke. The more results you can collect, the more certain you can be that the increase in conversion rate achieved from the changes you made are correct.

If you have a very high number of visitors, or the changes you make have a very drastic effect, then you will get the results of your changes relatively quickly (I’ve seen noticeable increases in order overnight).

But if you have a lower volume of traffic, or the changes made are subtler, then you will need to be patient for the results.

3. Things may get worse before they get better

The only people who can tell you what converts better or worse is your customers. They either convert or they don’t. Every website is different and a best practice that works for 99% of other websites is still not guaranteed to work on yours.

Your conversion rate could go down during testing.

This is all part of the project. It is not a failure if you learn from it and adapt.

And it is never permanent. You can always switch your page back to the old version at any time.

4. Results are not guaranteed

Again, because every website is different, their potential for conversion rate increases are different too.

A website that has major problems can realise massive increases in conversion rate once they’re solved. A website that is basically sound which might only have the potential for a smaller increase.

However, it is rare to non-existent that a website has got everything 100% first time round, and there is room for improvement in all websites.

5. It requires everyone to be on board

Testing the conversion rate on your website can disruption for your entire company, depending on the size and nature of the changes you make.

For example, it could mean changes to your pricing, or even your product itself, which has an affect on the operational side of your business.

To have the freedom to test different ideas, it helps to keep everyone involved and have their support.

But, despite these drawbacks…

…the techniques you have available to increase profits, conversion rate increasing is by far the easiest, most effective and biggest return on your investment.

What you should do now to start increasing your conversion rates…