June 23, 2008
I find internet marketing to be one of the most fascinating subjects and I can always discover new things I never thought of. I once had a friend of mine from Israel point out a terrific anecdote which if taken to heart can be much more than an anecdote and make you quite a lot of money. He focused his point on the ever small conversion rates most websites tend to suffer from. At the time he was working for an online diamond retailer which had a 0.1% conversion rate. This is quite small even compared to the low 2% average. But it was his way of looking at it that really got me. Basically 0.1% means you are selling to just 1 out of 1,000 people visiting your site. One purchase, 999 lost sales. Each of the 999 may have a different reason for not purchasing but if you can focus on just one reason that gets one out of 1,000 people to not buy from your site and improve it – you doubled your sales.
Another interesting point about how to deal with the grossly low conversion rates recently appeared in Danny Demichele’s internet marketing consulting blog. If you are not familiar with Danny Demichele, you are probably not a big SEM player as he is a name that has been in the biz for over a decade and has been providing Internet Marketing Consultant Services since day one. In his blog, Danny discusses the point of focusing on a lead rather than a sale (actual transaction). As it turns out, by gathering information for a lead you can tap up to four times more visitors who would otherwise abandon the sale. You can read more of Danny’s posts and learn about his services as an Internet Marketing Consultant at dannydemichele.com.
