You may think increasing the conversion rate of your site is difficult, but in fact it’s not, you can achieve it in less than five minutes by doing one of these three things:
- Start a sale / drop your prices. I bet that if your cut your prices in half more people will buy your products / services but you have reduced your margins so you’ll need to sale much more to compensate (and depending on your cost structure you may even start losing money!)
- Reduce the traffic. Each traffic source (adwords, facebook ads, banners,…) have a different conversion rate so you can just drop those that do not convert so well and you’ll see a leap in your conversion rate. Still, if the customer acquisition cost of the marketing channels you just dropped was positive you’ll end the month with less money on your pocket.
- Oversell your product. One little lie here and there and you’ll manage to awe your visitors with the amazing features your product is offering. They will start buying in masses, making your conversion rate skyrocket. The “only” problem is that refund requests will start piling up as well, as soon as customers realize of your exaggerated marketing claims.
In all three scenarios, we easily pump up the conversion rate but end up with a drop on our benefits. Yes, I bet you’re now thinking these are clearly stupid strategies and that you’re not so dumb to do any of this stuff yourself. Well, think again. Are you really so sure? Companies using the conversion rate as the business goal to improve tend to fall sooner or later in one of these marketing traps (or many other similar ones that improve local aspects of your marketing funnel but damage the global business performance). And usually, they can even fool themselves to justify those actions (reduce stock, save marketing dollars, …).
When starting your next marketing campaing, make sure your primary goal is to increase your profit every month and not simply your conversion rate per se. Every company should do an extensive use of A/B testing and other conversion optimization strategies to improve conversion rates IF AND ONLY IF higher rates translate into better profits. Stop aiming to satisfy your inner marketing ego and do what’s right for your business! As we’ve said before, optimization techniques are a must-have in any marketing strategy but by themselves they don’t do magic. You still need to do the thinking 🙂
Featured image is a partial view of the well-known Ascending and Descending litograph by M. C. Escher
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