The Image Group UK are a company based in Manchester who specialises in producing banner stands for their customers. They have been doing this for some time, and when the internet revolution came, like most far sighted companys they built a website. However, that website they first built on the 8th June 2002 (like most early websites) was a simple one page advert for themselves. By modern standards it really wasn’t up to much - you can have a look at what it used to look like here at the wayback when machine. Go to the machine, and type in the web address.

The Image Group have not only come in leaps and bounds since then ,they have also clearly taken on board all the things that poeple like ourselves have been saying for years about how to make you website convert. Lets take as an example page, their product page selling roller banners. Have a look at this, what a great selling page. Easy to navigate, nice clear picture at the top of three attractive ladies with the product that they are offering. As you scroll down the items are clearly marked. No need to look around for the price or wonder if you can afford them. This level of upfront costing makes them seem instantly trust worthy - it is the dodgy sites that try to conceal their prices till the last minute. Then note that each and every banner has the option to buy the banner there and then within the same box, making it easy to click to buy as soon as you are considering it.

The page is completely clear about what it is selling, laid out well, has clear conversion goals… there really is very little I can fault with this. If you are interested, have a look around the rest of their site - their pvc banners page is equally well done.

I am going to continue to once every few months find a site that I really like a review here. Until then - look at your own site and think about what you’ve just seen. What could you change to improve your conversion rate? You may find that adding an image could suddenly make you alot more money…

The first thing you need to do is consider what visitors would consider a value exchange.  Would it be a report on something related to the subject area of your site?  Would it be an e-book or workbook on a similar theme?  How about a list of resources that people interested in your site subject area would find useful?  Maybe an audio podcast they can download and listen to that will either educate or entertain them and be based on the subject area of your site? Or perhaps you could send them some cosmetic surgery or marks and spensers vouchers? Whatever you choose, it should be a quality product and easy to transfer automatically so that the visitor can be enticed with a “download immediately upon subscribing to our site” comment.

Creating these products doesn’t have to be expensive.  You can either produce them yourself, or outsource via a number of sites such as rentacoder.Com or elance.Com.  Make sure that you are very clear about what the product should be before you post the project however, and be very clear that you want original material and all rights to the product once it’s complete.  What you pay for the product will depend on your budget (which in turn is dependent upon what the conversion from visitor to subscriber is worth to you), and the kind of quality you can expect.   Extremely low budgets can expect products that require additional “fixing” to improve the standard of the product before it’s used as a conversion incentive.

Once you have your product, take the time to create a welcome page that promotes what the product will do for the visitor if they download it.  What can they expect to learn from it?  Educate them on how much they will get out of the product. How much they will save using their vouchers, how much more beautiful they'll look after the face lift, how much they will enjoy listening to the free music tracks.  Use language that enforces this and gets them to act now (chances are if they decide to do it later, they’ll forget)  so that they can immediately access the download of this product. 

Conversion incentive products are a great way of bringing new people onto your subscriber base but make sure that your product is of high quality, and that you are able to market it effectively.  If you don’t see an upsurge in your conversion rates once you offer the product, it’s probably the page that markets the product that’s at fault, so you need to consider if the page is saying what the visitor needs to read in order to get excited enough about the product to sign up as a subscriber.

The way to do this is by using active headlines – some kind of “call to action” so that the visitor is interested or intrigued enough to be knocked temporarily out of his passive surfing zone.  Have the words free laser hair removal with a live link like this nice and big. Or perhaps if you sell corporate events london, have a flash sequence with images of the event in order to catch peoples attanetion. You don’t want to hold him up, just slow him down long enough to provide you with an email address - so make sure there is 'join our mailing list' box linked in to some kind of email marketing software package that processes it for you automatically. Once you have this, then that part of the conversion process is complete – your accidental surfer is now a subscriber and the next part of your conversion system will pick him up.

So what kind of headlines will call this surfer to action?  Well you could offer a free report – something directly related to your subject area (it’s the subject area that will have brought the surfer there initially).  Perhaps it could be a headline “Click here to receive your FREE report on the Best 10 Tips on Catching the Biggest Trout this Season” or “Subscribe here and receive a free guide on choosing the best tent for your next adventure vacation” – depending on what your subject area is.  The reports don’t have to be long – they could be anything from a report of 2-3 pages (which should also give more information about your site and giving teasers about what they will find there), to an ebook of 50-200 pages.  You could produce these yourself, employ someone else to do them for you at a relatively low cost, or see if there is some kind of PLR content available (often a very low fee) that allows you to put your own information on the content and use it as a conversion tool.

Remember, although the report or ebook you’re offering should give good quality information, the main thing is to get the visitor to be interested enough to hand over their email information so bullet point what they will learn from the item you’re going to send them, make the process of signing up simple, and use active language that will move them to action. 

Happy Converting!

John was building the female hair loss page at the time he found it, and I really believe that it had effected the way that he has built and altered the page. The navigation of the site is good already, and as you can see that has been in place for some time, but recently he’s been getting more and more adventurous and creative with the way he deigns the page. This time, he’s just gone back to basics and kept it simple. I think that the page looks good and will do well.
If you want to see the rapper, you’ll have to click on this link… (more…)

Look at your product or service.  No matter what you are trying to sell, whether it's laser hair removal or a london corporate event, you have to know your customer. Analyze any sales report information you have on similar products or services. Who is the main buying sector?  Are they young professionals?  Are they parents?  Are they busy top executives, homemakers, or students?   Where do they live?   What other things interest this demographic?  Are they hip and trendy, or more traditional in their outlook?  Are they wanting the “in” thing at any price, or tried and tested at a cost effective price? 

Once you know who your target buyer is, you will have a far better chance of being able to create marketing copy for your website that will appeal to what they want.  For example, if your target buyer is a 20-something single businessman, he’s probably more interested in what looks good and will attract positive attention than what the item costs.  He will be attracted by marketing campaigns that state “Stand Out From the Crowd” and “Lead the Pack” than he will by ones which just list features that can be found on other similar items online and elsewhere.  On the other hand, if your target buyer is busy mom on a tight financial budget then using marketing copy that has headlines such as “Need to Find Extra Time in Your Day?”  or “Increase your Time for Less Expense” (if these are appropriate to your product/service) are going to have them clicking to convert through to the next stage in your process.

Having identified your target demographic, you’ll not only be able to use this to increase your conversion rate, but you’ll also find that you are able to run a more effective advertising campaign where you put ads for your website in websites and other media where this demographic is likely to hang out – this is where the analysis of what interests this particular demographic has its main power.

It may seem like a lot of hard work to identify your target demographic, but you’ll find that it will increase not only your conversion rate, but your profit margins and so in the long term, the time spent will pay off.

What is it about your product or service that will benefit a visitor to your site?  What do you think the average visitor has in mind when they enter your website?  What are they looking for?  These are questions you need to answer so that you know how to use language in your web copy that speaks to the visitor and shows that you have what they want.

Webpage stats are a great way of getting this information.  Depending on the statistical tool you have available you might be able to tell not just which pages they entered and left, but also how they got there.  By analyzing how they found you, you can identify what it is they’re looking for.  For example, if you know that they are clicking through from a specific search keyword, then this keyword is something you need to highlight more on your site.   If you know that they are clicking through from another website, take a look at that website and see what it offers because this is obviously something your visitor was also interested in. For example, if the visitor has made a search for breast reduction birmingham, and they then land on a webpage that talks about breast reduction with reference to clinics in birmingham, that person is likely to convert.

Use the information you have to focus your advertising towards the majority of visitors.  If you find that most of them are based in the US for example, target your marketing towards testimonials that are US-based.  Use US current terminology and spelling.  On the other hand, if you find that your client base is mainly Australian, then you should adapt your marketing to “speak” to them.  Learn what the culture of the visitor profile is likely to be attracted to – is a free offer if they subscribe onto your database going to be more persuasive then a percentage rebate for members for example?  A word of warning however, don’t use your website stats analysis change too many things at once.  Introduce one new idea at your website – such as a heading suggesting benefit to the visitor - and monitor how it impacts your conversion rate.  Changing too many things at once means that you won’t be able to tell which change was the one that really made the difference and therefore should be expanded upon!

Limit your options.
If you have a website with millions of people coming through it on a daily bias, you can experiment with every single page element to find the perfect combination. If your website doesn’t have that kind of traffic you may find if you never reach any useful conclusions or you go bust waiting for the results.
Ideally you would want to have about 1000 people through a page to get a accurate conversion rate, but you would usually find by 500 people that there is a clear winner.
Based on this I suggest that you always stick to simple A/B experiments and this way you can predict how long the experiment will go on based on your how much traffic you have. So if you have 2 variations and your page is getting 100 visitors a day, you can estimate the experiment will take about 10 days, simple!

Make your pages very different!
With small amounts of traffic you are really looking for drastic increases. To do this make the landing pages as different as possible. If you are just vary something small you will see a very small difference in conversion plus it would take very little to make the whole experiment pointless, if the difference between the pages are low a couple of really keen buyer going through one page can completely throw the experiment.

Follow up experiments
If you have finished the first experiment you have two choice of follow up experiments:

1.If you find there is less than 5% difference, you need to another completely different page to compare it to. In low traffic experiments you are looking for big improvements, if the page is worth doing version testing for you really something noticeable.
2.If the conversion rate was over 15% you are on the right track. So you can either try another completely different page or you could take one element of the winning page and start altering that, so for example you could just try two completely different headers and see which one of those have the best conversion rate. The theory is the same take one element and try two drastically different versions.