- March 31, 2008
- 1 comment
In our work helping retailers improve website conversion, we often recommend that sites with unusual or atypical layouts adopt more conventional design.
“Be unique in your merchandising and value proposition,” we say, “not on where (for example) you put your site search box and your add-to-cart button. Testing and usability labs show that conversion suffers when users can’t find site elements where they expect them to be.”
We’ve written before how folks don’t see things outside their zone of expectations, and here’s another fun video on the same theme.
Watch carefully. How many passes does the team in white make?
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I call it “The Great Web Traffic Debate: Creation vs. Conversion”. Over the last 10 years fellow Trafficology members and top web marketers have weighted in on what is more important… getting people to your site or turning the browsers on your site into buyers. It really is a “chick and the egg” conundrum. And for nearly a decade I’ve ruled there are just two-sides to the same coin… to be profitable, you can’t have one without the other.
But… one realization completely changed my POV: Conversion actually creates Traffic.
Yes, it’s hard to believe until you see it…but it’s true. The process of optimizing your conversion rate and lifetime customer value actually creates new sources of traffic many people have never even heard of.
In fact, if you own a highly optimized site with a proven conversion and monetization process, then the people in your niche who already have all the traffic will find you.
Now… obviously you need to have a little traffic at first in order to optimize your site. But that’s easily generated via Pay-Per-Click or SEO. And I’m not saying you should spend your whole life trying to build the ultimate conversion machine. But if you’re sitting there asking yourself, should I spend more time on driving more traffic to my site or on improving the conversion rate, then to me the answer is obvious…
Figure out how to get more visitors to opt-in, build a stronger bond with your list, get more people to buy front end products… and get current customers to buy again.