The web is a volume business. Once you know what your conversion rate is, you know where your priorities lie: if your conversion rate is 2% or more, your site is doing well and you should concentrate on getting more visitors. If your conversion rate is less than 2%, you’re wasting the visitors you’re getting and should put your efforts into improving the site.
If you do want to improve your site, you need to establish where it’s failing. The secret is to work back from your Target Action. The first thing to ask is, “how many are getting to that point in the site?” This is your Prospect Rate.
At its simplest, the Prospect Rate is the percentage of visitors who viewed looked at your wares, viewed your product pages. However, you may want to establish Prospect Rates for different sections, such as product pages, the shopping cart, and the credit card payment page. The most important, and often overlooked, area in online shopping is the credit card payment page, so you may want to concentrate on that first.
Between viewing these pages and completing the Target Action, the visitor has to do something. If it’s a form, they have to fill it in and hit the submit button. If it’s a shopping site they have to fill in a credit card page and submit that.
People who look at these forms and don’t complete or submit them are said to have “abandoned”. Each form therefore has an Abandonment Rate, which is the percentage of people who looked at a page, but didn’t complete it.
The basic rule for reducing abandonment on forms is to ask fewer questions. Many people treat contact forms as an opportunity to engage in some market research. They may ask questions like “how much is your budget?” or “where did you find our site?”
Each of these questions will be a reason for someone not to complete the forms. Remember what the form is for – to get the contact information from a potential customer so your sales team can start talking to them. Is losing a potential customer a reasonable price for a little market research?
For sales systems with abandonment issues, the lesson is to keep selling. Don’t assume that once a visitor has put something in the shopping basket they’re committed to buying it. They’re only committed when you’ve got their money. Many people have second thoughts about buying a product once they’re asked to put in their credit card information.