How to convert customers and prospects to engage and purchase - part 3

Are you a stats watcher?

Are you always having a sneaky look at the activity on your site?

Well it's very important and with the freely available information that you can glean in real time from Google analytics for example, you can draw some valuable and interesting conclusions.

But how can this type of information help with improving online engagement and purchases?

You need to consider 3 things:

1. Context - Have you done something recently to generate activity on your site? If so did you use a dedicated landing page? If you did then you can get a pretty good idea of the response rate to your whatever you did - and then see how many visits you converted. But don't get downhearted or confused if you generated 100 new visitors and only made 1 additional sale, because not every visitor is human. In a recent white paper Incapsula suggests that 56% of traffic was not human. Some of the non human activity was made by Good Bots but even so only 44% of visitors to your site could be real human beings.
   
2. Expectations - Do your expectations match with your visitors needs? You might want to sell a product or service, but some of your visitors might just want more information. Do you have easy to access information about what makes you special or how your product or service can make a difference. If you don't then a percentage of your visitors will leave empty handed.
   
3. Timing - You just don'y know were your visitors are in their buying cycle. You can add content and reply mechanisms that can help you to find out, but at the end of the day a percentage of visitors just want to know you exist and will come back to purchase when they are ready.

So yes I'm, a stats watcher, but I don't get tooooooooooooooooooo wound up if I get 20 hits on the site and not a call or request.  I figure 10 are probably human, 5 just want to check me out, and the other 5 have a need which means I might get a call tomorrow or next year.

To maximise the lasting effect when a visitor lands on your site try and cater for all needs. Include all of the following:

• Contact details on every page
• Clear physical address and land line contact no.
• An offer on the landing page that has NO risk and lots of Value
• Free information section - with or without sign up 
• Lots of testimonials from real named clients

Next blog will be about friction and how to reduce it - should be fun!