In the most brutal sense of the word, a “conversion rate” is the simple measure of success or failure arrived at when you compare 2 things: how many people came to your website, versus how many of them actually bought something. It’s kind of like the prom- if you ask 10 girls to go to the prom, and they all turn you down, you’re probably doing something wrong.
The numbers, even for a moderately successful site, are pretty low- about 3 to 5 percent is good. So what does this mean? Are we all failures?
Does this mean that if you aren’t some greasy used car salesman, you can’t have an online business? Does this mean that artists who just want people to see their stuff can’t survive in a sharky world? Those are the first 2 images I saw in my head when I first learned about this from Harald Anderson, an internet marketing guru, as he was sitting across the table from me at the Sunset Grill in Nashville, TN, at 1 am a few years back.
But Harald led me into a very different way of thinking about it, because he introduced the element of real relationships into the equation. The implications are very simple, and powerful:
Good websites create relationships, which are cultivated over time. The same people will come back, if they are treated like friends, and they will share it with their friends. If it has something that is interesting to them, if they value it for any reason, the relationship will grow.
The girl I went to the prom with was a friend of mine, someone I had known for a while. When I asked her to go to the prom, she said yes immediately because we both really liked each other already. I didn’t just wander up to someone, nervous, excited, and ask them out, like it was some kind of favor to me. A lot of people miss this simple fact- whether it’s business, relationships, music, really just life in general, people ALWAYS choose their friends first.
Everything else follows from that simple principle. Brand awareness is simply a reputation, which is established by friends of friends. Differentiation, or positioning (Coke is #1, Pepsi is #2), is simply who wore that cool shirt, or discovered that new band FIRST, before everyone else knew about it. Ad impressions are simply how often you see somebody. If you see somebody enough times, you might go up to them and say “have I seen you somewhere before?” and a conversation can start, which can lead to a relationship.
It’s pretty simple. Conversion is mental, it’s not some number. And the reason for this is also simple: over the long term, you can never know how many non-customers who have visited your site will eventually buy something from you, maybe something you haven’t even created yet, because you don’t know what they think. Ask any small business owner who has half a brain if they would let someone who didn’t buy something on the spot use their bathroom. If they say no, chances are they have turned away potential future customers.
-Ernest
illuminati enterprises
http://teamilluminati.com
