How To Get A Pay Raise From Your Web SiteWritten by Lisa Packer
How many of visitors to your web site take action you want them to take? Whether you want them to buy something from you, sign up for your newsletter, enter your sweepstakes, or give you contact information to follow up on, you want them to do something. The percentage of visitors who actually do that something is called your “conversion rate.”Many web site owners are great marketers. They know how to drive a ton of traffic to their site. When results are less than what they had hoped for, they think answer is to spend more time and money generating even greater traffic. What they really need to be doing is improving their conversion rate. Picture this: If you currently get one sale (or subscription, etc) for every 100 visitors to your site, you have a conversion rate of 1%. But what if I told you that by making a few changes to your site you could increase that to two sales per 100, and double your income without increasing your traffic? The best part is that most often simple changes are all that are needed. Once you make those changes, you can forever “convert” a greater number of visitors without doing anything else different. So, without further ado, here are three changes you can make that will have greatest likely impact on your conversion rate:
| | What To Do When You've Blown ItWritten by Lisa Packer
It’s bound to happen sooner or later – yes, even to you and your business. Sometime or other, you will make a blunder that upsets a customer. It may be an employee mistake (honest or intentional), it could be a defective product, it could even be an unreasonable expectation on part of your customer. The cause really isn’t important.What is important is that you have an angry customer on your hands. What, you ask, does this have to do with marketing advice? Everything. Because it costs you eight times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an old one. Because your angry customer isn’t going to stop at avoiding your business – she’s going to tell everyone she knows just how sorry you are. Because if you have been getting a steady stream of new customers (at eight times cost, remember) but your overall numbers aren’t growing as fast, you are losing money. Bigtime. Here’s an example: Jane is a regular customer of Joe’s Bargain Dry Cleaning. Once a week she brings her entire business wardrobe in for cleaning. Since her entire business wardrobe isn’t that big, she spends about fifty bucks every time. This week, a stain on her favorite blouse isn’t removed, and Jane calls in to complain when she gets home. The employee Jane speaks to claims to be sorry (though she doesn’t sound like it) and says that not all stains can be removed by dry cleaning process. She will, however, give Jane a coupon for a free one-item dry clean. Well, Jane wanted to wear her favorite blouse tonight for her big date with Jim. Now she can’t. Since she lives right around corner, she asks if she can bring blouse back now and have stain treated. She is told that Joe’s does not accept same-day orders after 10 a.m. Jane hangs up totally disappointed. Forced to wear a less-flattering blouse on her date, she is somewhat lacking in self-confidence (it’s hard to feel good about yourself when you think you look bad) and her date does not go well. She vows never to darken door of Joe’s again. And she doesn’t.
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