Customers Want To Be Converted! Teacher: Kim Wingate An excerpt from "Turning Visits Into Action - Proven strategies, tactics, and techniques for improving Web site conversion ratios." Newbies to the Internet still surf a fair amount in their introductory period, but after a while we are all in the same boat. We just don't "surf" as much any more. Time is something most of us today just don't have enough of. When most of us get online, we are usually doing so for a reason. Most people who visit your site do so with a specific purpose in mind. (Unless of course your marketing efforts are very untargeted - but everyone knows better than that, right?) When you begin converting more and more of your existing site traffic into sales, leads, or whatever your site's key action is, it is a signal that you are satisfying the specific goals of more and more people. When you help people achieve their goals, it has a powerful effect. They tell their friends and family about their success. They recommend your site to others who have similar goals. Soon your business is growing exponentially by word-of-mouth alone! For most people, finding what they are looking for on the Internet is still a challenge. This provides an opportunity for those who are willing to exploit it. Think about it. One day, you decide to go online and find a memory upgrade for your computer system. You go to your favorite search engine and begin "hunting". You visit site after site without being convinced that you have found the right product from the right vendor. Your goal is to find that memory upgrade. You want to spend your money. But no one is stepping up to the plate and convincing you that you have found the right place. You become increasingly frustrated. Then you visit a site that has done a lot of work to improve their conversion ratios. The site quickly walks you step-by-step through a simple process to find the exact upgrade for your computer. The site design is professional and fast. All the information you need is placed right where you can find it easily. The content on the site convinces you that this specific product is exactly what you are looking for; this vendor is the right vendor to do business with; and the price for this product is very reasonable. The site encourages you to order through a very simple process and you order. Success! This site has helped you to achieve what you initially set out to do. You wish that you had found this site to begin with. You will recommend this site to your friends because it helped you to be successful in your quest. Of course, a bad "after-the-sale" experience will lead to buyer's remorse. But by making the user successful at this stage, you have achieved a high level of positive feeling that will be very difficult to erase. This is an important point to drive home - conversion ratios are not only a measure of how well your site is satisfying your goals, they are also a measure of how well you are satisfying your visitor's goals. By improving conversion ratios, you are creating a win-win situation for you and your site's visitors. You win by increasing the number of desired actions taken by visitors coming to your site. Your visitors win because you are enabling them to achieve their goals more easily. About the teacher: Kim Wingate is the founder of AvidSurfer and publisher of "Turning Visits Into Action - Proven strategies, tactics, and techniques for improving Web site conversion ratios."