Conversions mean different things to different web sites.

visitors to do. Are there other people in your organization who have a stake in the web site? Get their input and come up with a list of desired actions. Ask the following questions:

• How do people find your web site?
• How do you get customers?
• What do you want people to do on your site that makes your company money?
• What information is critical to the success of your sales efforts?
• Who are our most valuable customers?
• Who are our most regular customers? Do we want more of those?
• Are there particular products or services that we're trying to sell more of right now or in the near future?
• Are there customer service objectives for our web site or only sales objectives?
• What audiences (investors, employees, technical support, news media, and so on), besides customers, use our web site?

These are all considerations when making conversion decisions.

Path to conversion

Once you know what you want visitors to do, it's time to define clear steps you want them to take to do those things. If clicking is easy and provides value then there's a high chance the user will take the next step towards becoming your customer.

Key to understanding what your customers are thinking is to understand what path they will take through your site. What follows are some simplified paths based on the type of web site. Using your analytics, write the percentage of people that take each action next to the decision point. Then, start working on the pages that have the worst results.

The following flowchart shows the process of e-commerce path to conversion:

The following flowchart shows the process of lead generation paths to conversion:

Strong calls to action

Once you know what you want them to do when they visit your site, you need to ask your visitors to do what you want them to do! No, I don't advocate actually coming right out and saying it but you should at least make it obvious and easy for them.

Phone number

One of the most obvious mistakes I see is from companies who want site visitors to call them. If you want people to call you, put your phone number big and in bold text at the top of every page. It's one of the easiest ways to tell people, 'Hey! Call us!'

Add to cart

For e-commerce sites, the ubiquitous Add to Cart button has become almost invisible to web visitors. What can you do to make it stand out? Try different colors and sizes, perhaps even flashing it once when the page is loading just to get the eyeballs to notice that there is an action to take. However you do it, make sure the Add to Cart button gets at least some of your attention.

Contact Us

Another great call to action is the Contact Us link. Just like the phone number, it should be prominent and easy to identify not tacked on as an afterthought to the bottom of the page. Make sure the contact form is short, sweet, and only asks for information that you absolutely need to have such as, name and phone number. Be sure to have an open field where people can type their own message to you. Give assurances as to how the information will be used and build trust by only using it that way.

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This is a very effective method of building a house list that internal list of email addresses that you can mine for customers. Giving something away is the tried and true marketing technique that continues to work. The key is to drive interested customers right to the freebie that they'd be most interested in.

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