electronic commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...

, conversion marketing is

marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

with the intention of increasing ''conversions—''that is, site visitors who are paying customers.

Measures

Conversion marketing attempts to solve low online conversions through optimized

customer service Customer service is the assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services. Each industry requires different levels of customer service, but in the end, the idea of a well-performed service is that ...

, which requires a complex combination of personalized

customer experience Customer experience (CX) is a totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages. Pine and Gilmore described th ...

management, web analytics, and the use of customer feedback to contribute to process flow improvement and site design. By focusing on improving site flow, online customer service channels, and online experience conversion marketing is commonly viewed as a long-term investment rather than a quick fix . Increased site traffic over the past 10 years has done little to increase overall conversion rates, so conversion marketing focuses not on driving additional traffic but converting existing traffic. It requires proactive engagement with consumers using real time analytics to determine if visitors are confused and show signs of abandoning the site; then developing the tools and messages to inform consumers about available products, and ultimately persuading them to convert online. Ideally, the customer would maintain a relationship post-sale through support or re-engagement campaigns. Conversion marketing affects all phases of the customer life-cycle, and several conversion marketing solutions are utilized to help ease the transition from one phase to the next.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to a website who take action to go beyond a casual content view or website visit, as a result of subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators. :

\mathrm = \frac

Successful conversions are defined differently by individual marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers, for example, a successful conversion may be defined as the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was initially sparked by clicking a banner advertisement. To content creators, a successful conversion may refer to a membership registration, newsletter subscription, software download, or other activity.

Measurement

For websites that seek to generate offline responses, for example telephone calls or foot traffic to a store, measuring conversion rates can be difficult because a phone call or personal visit is not automatically traced to its source, such as the Yellow Pages, website, or referral. Possible solutions include asking each caller or shopper how they heard about the business and using a toll-free number on the website that forwards to the existing line. For websites where the response occurs on the site itself, a site's analytics package can be used to track user behaviour.

Common conversion marketing services

;Recommendations:

Behavioral analysis Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual' ...

that identifies products and content relevant to the customer's perceived intent. ; Targeted offers: Targeting attempts to fit the right

promotion Promotion may refer to: Marketing * Promotion (marketing), one of the four marketing mix elements, comprising any type of marketing communication used to inform or persuade target audiences of the relative merits of a product, service, brand or i ...

with the right customer based upon behavioral and

demographic Demography () is the statistical study of populations, especially human beings. Demographic analysis examines and measures the dimensions and dynamics of populations; it can cover whole societies or groups defined by criteria such as edu ...

information. ;Ratings and reviews: Using

user-generated User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...

ratings and reviews to increase conversion rates, capture feedback, and engender visitor's trust. ;Email personalization: E-mail with embedded recommendations and chat that are tailored personally to the recipient. ; Chat: As consumers tend to abandon sites after only three clicks, attempts to use proactive chat, reactive chat, exit chat, and click-to-call to convert consumers quickly. ;

Click-to-call Click-to-call, also known as click-to-talk, click-to-dial, click-to-chat and click-to-text, is a form of Web-based communication in which a person clicks an object (e.g., button, image or text) to request an immediate connection with another person ...

: Supports cross-channel conversion without losing the context of the conversation when visitors move from the website to the phone. ;

Call to Action Call to Action (CTA) is an American organization that advocates a variety of changes in the Catholic Church. Call To Action's goals are to change church teachings in such areas as mandatory celibacy for priests, the male-only priesthood, the selec ...

: Statement designed to get an immediate response from the person reading or hearing it. Broadly used in business as part of a digital strategy to get your users to respond through one single action. ;

Cobrowsing Cobrowsing (short for collaborative browsing), in the context of web browsing, is the joint navigation through the World Wide Web by two or more people accessing the same web page at the same time. History of cobrowsing software Early cobrowsing w ...

: Tool for support agent infrastructure (chat or call) to assist customers in transacting online. ;

Voice of the customer In marketing, the voice of the customer (VOC) summarizes customers' expectations, preferences and aversions. A widely used form of VOC market research produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, ...

: Feedback about products, services, and online experiences that is captured through carefully analyzed structured and unstructured data. ;Automated guides: predetermined steps that allow a customer to better understand product features, and options to assist with the selection process. ;

Retargeting In software engineering, retargeting is an attribute of software development tools that have been specifically designed to generate code for more than one computing platform. Compilers A retargetable compiler is a compiler that has been designed ...

: Identification of visitors interested in particular products or services based on previous site browsing or search to offer relevant content through targeted ad placement.

Methods of increasing conversion rate

The process of improving the conversion rate is called

conversion rate optimization Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of users or website visitors to take a desired action (such as buying a product or leaving contact details). History Online conversion rate optimization (or website o ...

. However, different sites may consider a "conversion" to be a result other than a sale. Say a customer were to abandon an online shopping cart. The company could market a special offer, like free shipping, to convert the visitor into a paying customer. A company may also try to recover the customer through an online engagement method, such as proactive chat, to attempt to assist the customer through the purchase process. Among many possible actions to increase the conversion rate, the most relevant may be: * Employ ''Attention, Interest, Desire, Action'' (AIDA) principles to design the user experience through the

conversion funnel In e-commerce, the conversion funnel is the journey a consumer takes through an Internet advertising or search system, navigating an e-commerce website, and finally making a purchase. The consumer is seen as being "converted" from a visitor to the ...

* Enhance the user's credibility and trust in the site, the product, and the business by displaying third-party trust logos and by quality site design * Improve site navigation structure so that users can browse and shop with minimal effort * Improve and focus the website content, including text, photographs, illustrations, and video, towards target conversion * Review, and edit or remove obsolete or distracting data * Increase usability to reduce barriers to conversion * Create a self-serving customer service format by letting the user reach informative answers quickly with a learning database. * Offer active help (e.g. live chat, co-browsing) * Generate user reviews of the product or service * Gather a baseline user experience by recording user actions and compiling key objections {{citation needed, date=July 2015 * Enable clear tracking of standardized metrics using website analytics software for a predetermined conversion goal (e.g. "increase volume of newsletter subscriptions" or "decrease shopping cart abandonment percentage rate") * Take repeated action to monitor and improve the site, based on quantitative and qualitative metrics

References