Do you know how many visitors your website needs before you start you start generating business? This article will address this. It is for people who have a website offering a service or a products. (As opposed to website where people are trying to generate money through advertising on the site through Google Adsense or Clickbank.)

What we need to know is the conversion rate, the percentage of visitors that go on to buy or make an enquiry. The short answer, from my own experience is this: for a service that you offer where you require a potential customer / client to contact you before they get a price the answer is about 3% for a typical website. So 100 visitors would mean 3 enquiries. For a site that sells products and facilitates the ability to buy online that jumps up to 10%. So 10 out of every 100 visitors would buy.

Now for the longer more detailed answer. There are many things that affect this conversion rate. The two main things for a website are: how well targeted is the traffic / where is it coming from and how well is the site optimised for converting it’s traffic.

Where Is The Traffic Coming From

Traffic from a search engine is the best. The reason for this is because the person using the search engine is actively searching for your products or service. This is a two-fold effect. (1) First of all it means they are a potential client in a position to buy. (2) The other thing which people often under estimate the value of is that as well as being in a position to buy they are actively looking for someone to buy from. This is very valuable and should not be underestimated.

You could advertise on other related websites. For example if you sell widgets then you could advertise on a site called widget-fans.com. This seems to make sense as the first of the two benefits above (1) will be matched to a degree. However they are on widget fan site for a specific purpose like to read an interesting looking article. They are busy at the moment and were not expecting to be pulling out their credit cards and buying widgets online. So the second benefit mentioned above (2) is not met. Obviously you will still get visitors to your website but the conversion rate of those visitors will be lower. Keep this in mind when buying advertising from other websites.

When targeting traffic from the search engine you will need to think carefully about which keywords you want to rank for. The more relevant they are then the higher the conversion rate will be. If you come first for something obscure that doesn’t accurately describe what you do then you may still get visitors to your website but they wont buy from you.

There are other ways people use to promote their site like pop-ups for your site and sneakily redirecting people to your site. The conversion rate for these sort of techniques will be extremely low. So low that you would need millions of “visits” in this way. If everyone used this type of marketing then no one would ever end up on the website they were looking for. It can never work in reality.

How Well Does The Site Convert Traffic

You may think you have a great site because you have good info on all the services you offer within the “Services” section, info on how good your company is on your home page, some quality customer testimonials on your testimonials page and clear contact details and enquiry form on a “contact us” page. What you really have is a website that requires visitors to find their way round at least 4 different pages to get the info they need to make a buying decision. On average people will decide based on the 1st page they land or they will go back to the search engine. Each page should contain everything the visitor needs to make a buying decision.

So if you offer various services then each service should have its own page but every one of those pages should have testimonials, contact details and an enquiry form.

For further information look up “landing pages” or “splash pages” as these type of pages do a very good job of converting visitors in to customers.

Conclusion

If you offer a service where people have to enquire before you can give them a price then your conversion rate can be up to about 3%. If you wanted 15 good leads a month then you would need 500 visitors a month. 500 @ 3% = 15. This is 500 visitors from relevant sources and keywords. Don’t include traffic from other sources as this wont have the same conversion rate.

Leads in this way have a high chance of converting to clients. If you convert 2 / 3, manage to retain each client and do work for them every month then after 12 months your company would be doing work for 120 clients each month. For someone that offers a service like an Accountant or Internet Marketing (as I do) this is a lot of work!

Good copy is important for a range of marketing activities. You need good copy for sales letters, direct mail flyers, email, printed advertising, websites and online advertising. Effective written communication is important within a company and with suppliers and other stake holders so this in a way is also a chance to produce good copy too.

To write good copy first you need to clearly define what you want the response to the copy to be. Usually you will want to achieve one or more of the following:

• Educate – make people aware of something. This may be your brand, products, services or just something important you want to make people more aware of.
• Consider / Think – absorb and think about what you are saying e.g. “how often do you have to buy new ink cartridges”
• Persuade – to take a specific action / response. E.g. pick up the phone, go to your website, attend an event or tell their friends and family about you

A lot of the time you will want people to do all three. Don’t just pick which of the three above is relevant, you need to clearly define exactly what you want the response to your copy to be. To achieve these goals it is best to have a structure to your copy. Below is an example structure to a leaflet that is intended to be delivered door to door to local business and houses:

1) Get their attention – usually with a heading that asks a question

2) Quickly give them a “hook” – to keep them reading until the end

3) Give them an overview / summary – this allows them to quickly check what it is they are about to read. If you don’t get to the point quickly they won’t want to keep reading through the whole leaflet in the hope it might be relevant to them.

4) Make your offer – this is the bulk of the content. Try to make it personal instead of referring to yourself in the third person. It is much easy to say nowhen reading “ABC Ltd does this for our customers” then “WE can do this for YOU..”

5) Overcome any likely objections – cost, delivery time, delivery method, quantity, quality, any guarantee or warrantee and so on.

6) Build credibility – do this through testimonies or talking about experience and remember to keep it personal and relevant. So instead of “ABC Ltd have 5 years experience” it should say “WE have been helping customers like YOU for over 5 years”,

7) A call to action – there should in fact be several of these. One at the top,one within the main copy and one at the end.

So, here is some example copy following the above points. I have put the relevant points in brackets.

(1)How Often Do You Have To Buy New Ink Cartridges?

(2) We could save you a lot of money and help the environment by refilling those used ink cartridges.

(3) We offer a quick and affordable cartridge refilling service. We provide you with self addressed packaging to send us your used cartridges. Our experts fill them up and send them back next day delivery. The refilled cartridges work as good as new.

(4) If you are interested in becoming another one of out satisfied customers then contact us today. We will send you the self addressed packaging free of charge. To prevent any delay you should order the packaging now so you have them ready for when your cartridges run out.

As soon as your cartridges run out package them and send them to us. We will fill them up from as little as £10 per cartridge and send them back next day delivery

Our unique patented refill system is quick, cost effective and affordable. It is also much more environmentally friendly then buying expensive new cartridges. We also thoroughly clean the inside and outside of the cartridge to keep them working as good as new.

(5) You can pay for your refill by bank card by telephone or even online. We also accept postal cheques. Check our website for a full list of cartridge models we can refill and the exact cost for your cartridge.

6) “Since hearing about Refill ABC Ltd I have not bought a single new ink cartridge. With their help I have saved a lot of money which has added to my company’s profit” – Mr Smith, XYZ Ltd

7) Call today to make sure you have your packaging ready as soon as those cartridges start to run out again.

For any kind of mail shot you may want to add a specific special offer such as 20% of your first order if they order before a set date.

It is important to check afterwards how effective your copy has been if you want to get better at producing it. The best way to do this is not to look at the copy itself but the response it elicited. This is true for all forms of communication. So if you send out a leaflet to 10,000 homes and get a response rate that was ½% higher then last time then your copy and communication was better. If the response was lower then your copy was not as good regardless of how cleverly worded and persuasive you may think it was.