Remember the Crocodile Dundee series from the 80’s?
The opening scene from the second movie has Mick fishing in the harbor right outside of NY City. He quietly lights his hand rolled cigarette, looks around his dinghy and picks up a stick of dynamite.
Shortly thereafter, he starts hauling in the fish that were stunned on the surface of the water. Then the NYPD shows up in full force to see who this nut is using explosives just outside of the city. With a smirk on his face, Mick greets the Sergeant with a tip of his hat and gives the reason behind his unusual methods:
These are NY fish Serg! They weren’t taking bait!”
(Here is the link to the video clip if you want to take a trip down memory lane with me… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueR6_ipaw4g)
Mick Dundee had the right idea. If what you are working with now is not efficient, then it’s time to switch bait and giving something else a shot. Never keep fishing with something that is not closing the deal.
It May Not Be Your Pond, But Your Bait That’s The Problem.
The simple solution when looking at a revenue issue online is often to explore options for boosting your traffic. But often, it’s not a traffic problem at all, but instead is a conversion problem. You may have the right people visiting your site, but you may not have the right tools in place to convert them into sales.
When you begin to explore a sales problem on your website, the most logical place to explore first is going to be your conversion rate. Do you have a list of pages that are low preforming? Do you have a high exit rate on your checkout page? Does your home page have an astronomical bounce rate? There are dozens more questions that we could ask, but you are getting the picture.
The Right Bait Could Double Your Revenue While Lowering Your Marketing Costs
Conversion rate issues are the most critical element for doing business online. It can mean the difference between a $500,000 year and a $1,000,000 year when a few items on your site are just not “right”. If you want your visitors to purchase, you have to give them the right environment.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) remains the most effective way to boost ROI when selling items online. Through a series of tests and experimentation, you will expose your website’s weaknesses and boost your sales numbers.
Sounds too simple to be effective? Consider this:
If your current conversion rate with 1,000 visitors per month is 1.2% with an average sale total of $2,000, you will be generating a total of 12 sales per month to the tune of $24,000. What if through a series of testing and tweaking that within six months you are able to double that conversion rate to 2.4%? Not only that, but you were able to enhance the buyers’ experience and increase your average sale total from $2,000 to $2,500. You are not only doubling the number of sales but a 250% increase in overall revenue! And we did not even have to increase the number of visitors at all to achieve the revenue growth.
Small numbers mean big things when it comes to conversion rate optimization. You don’t have to obtain a 10% conversion rate on your website traffic to be successful online. You may only need to get your rate up to 2.0% to have more business than you can handle. So, before you become obsessed with traffic generation and social media followers, look into your conversion rate. An increase in a conversion rate will make a long term difference on your revenue & profits.
