Thinking from the customer’s point of view is important to prompt them to buy a product or service. Initiating the process begins with a meticulous understanding of what and how you’re selling. In this context, conversion optimization plays a significant role. It’s a process considered absolutely vital for an emerging or even established business.

For an E-Commerce venture keen to take its Web-based operations to higher levels of efficiency and reach, this is an important step ahead. It essentially makes a seemingly ubiquitous website look unique, thus enhancing its effectiveness and productivity. In fact, boosting your site’s conversion rate holds the key to stay ahead of your competitors in today’s highly challenging online space.

As the crowded online marketplace becomes more competitive, the need to maximize every click has turned very vital.

The roots of conversion optimization

To understand the historical context of the process of conversion optimization, we shall need to wind back to the early 2000, when the world of Internet started becoming competitive. A host of online businesses and Internet marketers had to turn more measurable with their respective marketing tactics. This gave rise to experimentation in the areas of site design and content variations to grasp which layouts, structures, copy text formats and type of images would enhance conversion rate.

Conversion optimization, as we know it today, is an outcome of the quest for lead generation on part of the Internet marketers. It hinges on two critical factors – firstly, to analyze the collaborative impact of your existing marketing strategy and then optimizing them to turn your visitors into customers. From this perspective, it is important to keep on optimizing your webpages.

Key areas of optimization

• First and foremost, it is essential to determine the ‘real’ visitors’ response as well as click paths of to the site, which lets an insight into the behavior of the target audience to the site. Website stats point to the in-depth visitor behavior. A detailed analysis suggests the common clickpaths in the website.
• It is necessary to decide as where to focus optimization in order to draw visitors to a particular page. Split testing incorporates creating a hypothesis and then testing it. The tests can be more advanced with the increasing number of options. Multivariate testing is slightly more advanced.
• A conversion process starting from the first click to actual landing on the ultimate goal page can be attained through a series of steps, each having its own drop-off in clicks. The primary goal is to cut down this drop-off by page redesigns as well as usability improvements. Changes are effected incrementally on a website. A whole gamut of techniques is used for improving conversion rates significantly.

Conversion optimization continues to pay rich dividends long after the process has been undertaken. However, it demands a wide range of skills and practical knowledge to enhance the conversion on your site that we shall consider in the next post.