How to Improve Your Online Business through Testing (“Signups Increased by 60%”)
You run a small business and use your website to sell goods or generate interest from consumers.
You might even use analytics tools to track your visitors’ behavior. If you want to make more informed decisions about your website, include testing in your online marketing plan. It’s an effective way to determine what works and what doesn’t with your website.
Conversion Rate
To start, you need to know that conversation rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a conversion goal. For example, you want to know how many visitors to your website purchase a product. In this case, your conversion rate is the number of sales divided by the number of visitors. Other examples might include the number of visitors who register new accounts, fill in forms or click on a particular link.
In order to optimize your conversion rate, you need to know your current conversion rate and clearly define how much you want the conversion rate to improve (e.g. 10% increase in sales or 15% increase in leads). Now that you know the basics, you’re ready to make some changes to your website.
How do I start improving my conversion rate?
Testing can be described as a series of experiments that enable you to comprehensively track the activity on your website. By conducting testing, you can effectively determine the variations that are impacting results. Possible variations to test include redesigning the landing page, featuring a single product or service, changing the headline to include a more direct call to action or changing the color or text of action buttons. Here are some variations to test.
A/B Split Testing
This type of testing is called A/B split testing because visitors are directed to variations of your website in order to track your conversion rate. You can test variations simultaneously and get real-time results, which means that you can implement changes to your website as soon as you get conclusive results.
For example, UK job site WikiJob changed their landing page by highlighting customer testimonials while greying out the rest of the page. This variation proved to be very effective, increasing sales by 34%. You can read more about this test here.
Signups Increased by 60%!
It’s important to test because you can never be certain of your customers’ behavior. Vendio, an e-commerce business was able to improve signups by 60% in a very counter-intuitive way: by removing the sign-up form from their landing page! You can read about this test in detail.
Why Testing Really Matters
Your customers are talking to you every time that they visit your website; their mouseclicks tell a story that you can better understand through real-time testing. Whether it’s implementing testimonials, adding photos, or improving your site’s copy, testing helps you understand which variations improve your conversation rate and help create a site with a great user experience. And all that hard work will pay off when a potential customer becomes a paying customer. After all, isn’t that why you’re in business?
If you’re new to testing, I encourage you to give it a try. You will gain valuable insights into your customers’ behavior that can improve your business decisions and your revenue. You don’t need any technical expertise: paste a piece of code, create a test with variations of your website and prepare yourself to enter the world of online marketing. Enjoy testing!
About the Author: Anish Kothari is associated with Wingify, the company behind world’s easiest A/B testing tool: Visual Website Optimizer. Thousands of businesses worldwide (including Fortune 500 companies and SMBs) use it daily to increase their online sales and conversion rate. For interesting tips on conversion rate optimization, follow us on Twitter @Wingify.
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Thanks Anish Kothari it was really helpful. Actually testing is the base for successful business. This process is very much important for newbies. I think basic mistake that small business owner make is that they stop the process of testing when they feel like they have achieved some goals. Its very frequent mistake. We should keep continuing the process of testing no matter what success we have gained. Sky is the limit and we should always look for more and more opportunities.
And yes there is no one sure way of increasing business. Customer behavior is different for every site so we will have to test our visitors to see which policy will be better for increasing sign ups.
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Dear i want to become a business man,its my dream, Thanks for help about will be signups increased….and your post will help me.
I think it is very important to track the performance of a site. personally i use google analytics to track who my customers are and what they trend in regards to search words in order to land on my pages. it is a fantastic tool and would recommend for anyone to relies heavily on internet traffic to bring leads or sales.
Great article. I completely agree with all points and it’s true
we need to track the performance of the site…great tips!
No doubt these are helpful tips for all users,i have been searching such resources…thanks for the info.
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Testing and failure it’s the birth of success, nobody knows for sure how well a page will convert a visitor to a buyer without testing first a few different sales pages, it’s not just important to test before your final decision but essential for the success of an online business…
Regards Kostas | OpportunitiesPlanet
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