Converting website traffic into sales

Posted by Steve on Dec 6, 2010

As the proprietor of an online training business it is important to understand and fine tune the design of your website and the way that website visitors interact with it. After studying several models for EzyLearn I opted for the freemium and money back guarantee model and it has worked exceptionally well for our online MYOB course. It is important to note that this model is important in the relatively new area of online education where website visitors are used to seeing lots of information for free so if they are going to pay for something, they want to make sure that it actually has value.

My goal with EzyLearn online computer training courses goes along these lines:

1. Encourage website visitors to interact (email us, blogging and blog responses, sample our product etc).
2. Act upon what they have experienced with you (upgrade or make the full purchase which is where you monetise)
3. Use the site to it’s fullest potential and as a resource (they keep coming back which is good for Google pagerank)
4. Recommend it to their friends and colleges (affiliate programs and social media is useful here)

This is an excellent article which reflects some of the best ways of converting your website visitors to customers and here are their main points:

1. Have a search box on every page of your site, especially the home page. Ideally, the search box should be in the same location across all of your pages so people know where it is when they need it.
2. Consider adding Autocomplete to your search box, which suggests possible terms when visitors start typing the first letters of a keyword.
3. Have clear and specific product and content titles in the search results. If titles are not accurate, visitors may not click on a result that is otherwise relevant, or they may click on it only to find that it doesn’t contain what they were looking for, which could lead them to abandon their search.
4. Incorporate images into search results. Showing images in results helps visitors find what they’re looking for faster and with fewer clicks.
5. Offer “add to cart/buy now” options directly from the site search results page. By allowing visitors to add products to shopping carts or to go to checkout directly from search results, they’re more likely to complete the purchase.
6. Show ratings and reviews in search results, and allow visitors to further refine or reorder their search results based on ratings.
7. Rely on user behaviour to improve the relevance of search results. Based on the data, you can move more popular products to the top of search results, making the results more relevant.