How to improve conversion rates online

Can you improve your conversion rates?

If you’re reading this, chances are you have a website (or even more of them) live somewhere and you’re selling something online. Whether it’s a service, be it local or global, products, digital or not, anything. It does not really matter. The point is, you’re selling something. And to make it happen, you have probably invested some time and money into it. So it’s only natural that you would like to get the most out of it, and this means you should pay attention to your conversion rates across the system. The higher they are, the better your ROI. Can you improve conversion rates? Of course. There’s no such thing as a perfect landing page. How to get the best conversions possible? Well, I’ve got THE thing for you.

What is a conversion rate?

In the simplest of terms: it’s a percentage of people visiting your page that actually do something while they are there. Whether they opt-in to your email list or buy your product, it’s the same. They’ve converted from visitor to buyer. This means that to improve conversion rates should be one of your main goals.

As an example, if your optin page gets 20 confirmed optins out of a 100 visitors, your conversion rate would be 20%. It’s not so bad, but believe you me, it can be improved. A standard target is something around 30%, and some pages even get much higher than that.

Why would you want to increase your conversion rates?

Again, very shortly.

You’ve done some work to get people visiting your page, right? Or you have paid for it, using Facebook advertising or similar paid traffic sources. In any case, each visitor you get to your page has costed you something. So, using this analogy, for 100 visitors, you may have paid 100$ to Facebook. Which means every visitor costed $1 to get.

If you stick with the 20% conversions rate, every person joining your email list (or buying something) will cost you $5. Now, if you can’t sell them something within the first 30 days using email marketing that brings you more than this, you’ve successfuly generated a loss. Repeating this practice will soon force you into stopping the work, right? You’re simply funding Facebook, and have nothing to show for it. Not what we want.

If you could only increase those conversions to be at 25%, the cost of a subscriber would fall down to $4. And you immediately have a better chance of making a sale during the email sequence, because you have more subscribers available.

Why would I do more work for $1?

Good question.

And there’s an even better answer. Let’s follow the same example from above.

While $1 less per subscriber does not seem much, you’ve actually only just scrathed the surface of running a business. What I mean is you will surely not stop after getting these 100 visitors. Rather than that, you will continue investing into traffic, becase more subscribers (or sales) is of course your main target. So you will probably repeat this at least 10x this month, counting up to your first 1,000 visitors. You see, we already have a difference of 50 subscribers (comparing the rates of 20% and 25%). And calculating the costs, you’ve just saved $100 obtaining them. You see where I’m going?

Under the line, effectively lowering the costs is extremely important for any business. It directly impacts your profits, and noone is running a business for hobby.

How to improve conversion rates

It can be done in many ways. You can always pay an agency to do it for you, assuming you have the funds, of course.

The main way of doing it would still be the same. Improving means nothing but making subtle changes that convert more visitors into buyers. And testing the numbers all the time during the process. It is a widely accepted way, and it even has a name – Split Testing.

Split Testing – Doing it manually

Yes, you can do it by hand. Go and publish an optin page, send some traffic to it, and observe what happens. After a week and a few hundred visitors, you should have a clear feeling of your conversion rate, because you’ll know how many visitors you had and you’ll see the number of subscribers inside your autoresponder.

Now, go and change a little something on the optin page. Change the wording of your title, for instance. Or, change the order in which the text and images are shown. Bring some visitors and calculate your conversion rate again. Is it higher? If it’s not, you’ve stepped in the wrong direction. Reverse your changes and change something else.

Repeat

and repeat again, until you have a decent conversion rate – or at least you’re satisfied with what you’ve achieved.

Assuming you’ve done it right, you must have brought in at least 1,000 visitors for 3-5 tests to be meaningful. For this, you’ve spent maybe $500 for the traffic on Facebook, Google or using solo ads. And, you’ve raised your conversion rate from the initial 20-22% all the way to 30%. Congratulations. But don’t forget – you’ve spent $500 and additionaly possibly a few weeks, during which you’ve spent at least 5-6 hours of checking numbers and making changes. So your investment is actually much higher than these $500, plus you could get into trouble with your wife because of all the time spent.

It can be done by hand, of course; I’m just not sure about why would you want to do it that way.

Automated Split Testing

Like already mentioned so many times, automation is the key to a success. You want to make more money, not spend more time making it, right? So you’ll want to automate every possible step of the process in order to save time, which means your time will be paid more in the end.

Among many split testing softwares out there, personally I still think Split Test Monkey is one of the best. By price, by simplicity, by effectiveness. While many page builders (like FunnelVio, Convertri and ClickFunnels) have split testing integrated, they cost a lot of money to begin with. And starting a business with a little budget just cuts them out.

So you can either do it by hand or look at solutions like Split Test Monkey. Sure, Split Test Monkey means a little bit more work has to be put in compared to using a full-fledged page builders, but for most cases, it is really minimal. It mostly goes to creating variations of the pages you want to test and including a line of code on each of them, as well as the thank-you page. Once you master the process, it’s actually a matter of minutes.

The best thing about Split Test Monkey is that it’s not limited to any single builder. It can easily be used on WordPress pages, as well as pure PHP scripted sites or anything in between – it can even be used with page builder pages from Convertri, for instance, should you want it. There’s no limits. The only thing you’ll need is access to the page design, because you have to include a little script into it. That’s it.

Split Test Monkey V3

Split Test Monkey has been around for some time now. It’s currently in version V3, and there’s a great new functionality that adds more value to it.

It’s called Campaigns.

A familiar term, isn’t it? In Split Test Monkey, it means that you can now chain split tests for a particular domain. Once your initial split test ends and the winner page is clear, Split Test Monkey will automatically continue with the next split test, using this winner as one of the contestants. And so on – there are no limits, you can chain as many tests as you like.

What this brings to you as an owner is a continuous process of split testing that assures you have the best possible conversion rates at all times. And it’s all done completely automatically after the initial setup. So you can set up a few tests and forget about the pages alltogether – Split Test Monkey will make sure your visitors always see the page that was the winner in the test and improve conversion rates to the max.

Here’s a short demo video of this new addition to Split Test Monkey V3.

The interface

I know, we’re all used to shiny graphical interfaces these days. If the app looks old, it’s old.

Don’t let the looks deceive you. Personally, I find the fact that the developers spent more time developing functionalities than the looks very promising. While the design of Split Test Monkey may look simple (even terrible to some), it’s all about effectiveness and simplicity of use. And I fould it to be very refreshing, because I can find what I need very simply, and do what I want very fast. So +1 from me for this.

And if you’re looking to build a business rather than using the shiniest of the apps out there, you’ll like it as well, I’m sure of that.

Who needs Split Test Monkey to improve conversion rates

I’ve talked about Split Test Monkey before, and you can see all about it HERE.

In short, if you’re doing any kind of business online, you need this functionality. Being able to effectively test your pages for conversion rates is essential for your business. It does not matter what you’re selling, each and every visitor will cost you something. And being able to convert as many as possible into buyers or subscribers can drastically improve your results and chances online.

My suggestion

I’m sure you’ve noticed that I like Split Test Monkey from what I’ve said about it so far. It saved me tons of time so far, and it will save more. And I’ve managed to improve conversion rates from as low as 12% all the way to 38% within a week, which took me probably less than an hour of work to create a few page variations. With Split Test Money V3, I will have even more automation available, because I will not have to create more variations after each test, but rather have Split Test Monkey do a chain test from the beginning.

So yes, I suggest you take a look at it. You’ll see the value easily.

You may also like

• Funnel Builders – Which funnel builder to use?
• How I messed up the entire launch as an affiliate
• Split testing – to do or not to do?