John Lewis reports 42% growth in online sales

by Dr Tony Berg

Conversion efficiency

More and more major retailers are seeing their Internet sales grow significantly faster than their bricks and mortar counterpart.

For the major brands the key issue has not been visibility in the search engines.

HMV direct recently invested heavily in a major re-branding and design of their website.

By paying careful attention to their customer feedback and incorporating skilfully crafted pages, they are also reporting a significant upturn in their online revenues.

In particular the average spend per order has increased as well as the conversion efficiency - measured as the percentage of site visitors who actually continue through to a purchase. A double win situation.

For the smaller less established brands, search engine visibility is still a key concern. But in our experience the follow through to conversion efficiency and maximising transaction values is a neglected area.

We recently increased the conversion efficiency of a client website by more than 30% over a six week period by use of powerful A/B and multivariate testing techniques.

Historically these sophisticated tools were beyond the reach of the SME business world. But thanks to Google they are now available to all of us.
Conversion efficiency is the next step in getting the highest return on your website investment.

And that applies to all websites not just e-commerce sites.

Being found is just the beginning of a journey that leads to growing revenue and bottom line contribution.

And the opportunity is just waiting to be exploited.

Dr Tony Berg
Managing Director - Realnet Ltd
tonyberg@realnet.co.uk

Article originally published in Cambridge Network Connection magazine Issue 35, 01/11/2007.

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