It's claimed that only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their sales conversion rate (source: e-consultancy). That sounds like a staggering statistic, but is it really that surprising?
There's two trains of thought with this if you think about it. Whilst it might sound surprising that so few companies are happy with their conversion rate, any ambitious business owner is always hoping for more, for better performance so many could be unsatisfied for that reason.
So you could read into this that the lucky 22% are those that are hitting all their targets, already over achieving, those that are hitting it out of the park. If you're in this boat then you're not needing to push harder, you're happy.
So what about the other 78% of companies?
Another aspect here is that there's a lot to go wrong, a lot of moving parts when trying to convert prospects into paying customers. There's many reasons that conversion rates might not be as high as you'd hope, lets look at some of them.
Proposition is unclear or missing in action
One of my favourite topics this. If someone is trying to sell you something and they're not taking a clear opportunity to brag about how well a product suits your requirements, they're not doing it right. I like the idea that when marketing things to consumers that you spell out really clearly what is is you want them to know without them needing to assume anything. Feels quite obvious doesn't it, that if the benefits are clearly laid out for a prospect to digest, that there's a greater chance of them spending some money with you.
Not focussing on conversion
With so many things to do when trying to win business, conversion can get overlooked. I mean it can be hard enough to get people onto your website right? It might be that marketing efforts are geared towards other aspects of funnel development or perhaps with so much to do efforts to optimise landing pages can be haphazard where various elements don't perhaps work well together.
High bounce rates
A higher than average bounce rate from a website will directly influence how much can get converted. What we should think about here though is what is actually causing visitors to leave; slow loading speeds, poor website design, bad content, hard to navigate, poor audience targeting, poorly designed proposition (again!) are just some examples of what can cause this to happen.
It's just too hard
We've all been on websites that we've aborted our attempts to do what we came for; maybe the content is hard to read, maybe the flow of the website just doesn't work, maybe the sign-up is to laborious or the checkout process takes too long.
Wrapping up
Recognising that you may be in the majority of businesses that would like to convert more is an important realisation to make. Getting this stuff right isn't the hardest thing you could ever do but it can be fiddly and trying to get it right piece by piece may not be the most effective way to do it. Getting a holistic approach in place is a solid idea that can pay dividends and see your sales soar.
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