Website Conversions - What are they good for?

Lets face it, website conversions (form submissions) are good for everyone because it's typically someone out there who is browsing your website and saying "I want something more from you guys". A web conversion, could be a request for some additional information, someone sending you feedback or an online purchase. Instead of focusing on how to get people to your site (like every good marketere should focus on), I want to share a tidbit I readin a recent MarketingSherpa (I love this site) case study that inspired me to write this blog post instead of going to bed (how is that for feedback!). While the conversion is crucial, it's also important to focus on the post-conversion website clickpath of your recent form submittor.

Georgia Aquariam did something very simple that was brilliant. Once a form was submitted, they used a plain generic confirmation page without any links for the first 24 hours after the site was launched. They then tracked to see where people visisted from this confirmation page. They then added the most popular links to the confirmation page - simple, yet brilliant. The goal of this is to keep people on your website, help them find the information that they're looking for and to make this whole process very easy. They could even have taken this a step further by using an autoresponder email that countained these same links popular links so that a user could easily visit these pages at a later date. Lets throw another idea out there: After 3 months, take out these links on the confirmation page and assess where the user click to all over again. Testing never ends when your a marketer and if you have the tools to easily track this data, it makes it a whole lot easier.

To sum up, it's great that not only did you get the person to your website, and even got them to submit a form (maybe even buy something!). Now what? Remember to think about how you can keep them on your website so that they can perhaps view some additional information, sign up for an event or maybe even buy another product.

Chad H.

PS - Now that you read this post, leave me a comment if you've tried something like this (or will now try this). I'll definitely pass this tip on to my clients.

Technorati tags: Conversion, Georgia Aquarium, web design, MarketingSherpa