How to double your conversion-to-sales rate
More information is better than less
Follow @infoworldEvery Web site that sells things -- and every site that earns a commission from sites that sell things -- is trying to convert lookers into buyers. No matter how many eyeballs are viewing your site, you can't pay the bills unless a healthy percentage of those people wind up handing over their credit card number for a purchase.
That's why I perked up my ears when I found that Epinions.com had recently claimed the top spot in converting workplace surfers to customers. According to Nielsen//NetRatings' home and work figures for the fourth quarter of 2002, Epinions beat out such giants as Yahoo, MSN, and Google. Because Nielsen can't follow a user all the way to a sale, the following figures represent an index of visitors who progressed to a secure transaction (an https page) and are not sales percentages:
Home - Work - Referring Site
82.4 - 91.7 - Epinions
80.5 - 89.8 - BizRate Shopping
87.0 - 86.8 - PriceGrabber
79.8 - 85.6 - DealTime
81.9 - 85.3 - CNET
70.8 - 84.0 - Yahoo Shopping
72.1 - 79.8 - MSN Shopping
64.7 - 78.9 - Google
61.5 - 76.3 - Overture
These rankings, of course, are not the same as actual profits or ROI. But I thought they were interesting enough to see whether Epinions executives would share with me the secrets of their high conversion statistics.
It turned out they were eager to talk, particularly since Epinions reached an agreement just two weeks ago to be acquired by DealTime, one of the largest price-comparison sites. (Both sites will continue to exist under their original names.) I spoke with NiravTolia, CEO of Epinions and who is becoming COO of DealTime, and Sarah Leary, Epinions' vice president of marketing.
The key to high conversion rates, Leary says, is to give visitors access to detailed and credible reviews of products. To test this approach, Epinions constantly experiments with the material that's shown at its site.
In one test, the company measured the rate at which people who clicked merchant links at Epinions wound up buying something at the merchants' sites. At random, some visitors to Epinions were shown pages that contained no reviews or links to reviews, while others were shown Epinions' normal design, which includes both. The results were dramatic:
