Ever heard some sales rep claiming “with our solution you can increase your conversion rate by 25%!”? What he is really telling you is “if everything goes as well as in this pilot project I did with my buddy under laboratory conditions, you can add 25% on your 0,8 % CR”. Percentage calculation seems to be a strongly declining skill nowadays. So, I’ll give you a hint: you will not end up with 25,8%
There is a problem with those kind of claims:
They only address one tiny part of the value chain, customer journey or whatever affects the conversion rate in your case. They never take a holistic approach that looks at your particular business model. That would be too hard to sell. And we all want easy answers, right? Let’s see in which way it will impact your business:
If you are small, then chances are that there are plenty of things that can increase your conversion rate. But what you should focus on is SALES and whatever increases this number (SEO, SEA, Affiliate Marketing etc.). If your online shop generates a hundred orders per day then an increase from 0.8 to 1% in CR will not have that big of an impact.
If you are big then you probably did already your homework and you have one or more web analysts AB-testing every inch of you search, check-out-process and whatever has business relevance. An increase of .2% in CR would be huge! But it is improbable that a highly mature business offers such easy leverage.
So who benefits from such a sales pitch?
Probably nobody apart from the sales rep.
That pitch is designed to draw easy attention and tricks you with a large percentage. It sounds too good to be true and in reality, it almost always is.
I said it before, “onliners” seem to live in a world where old school business rules do not apply. But in my book, they do. And either those guys do not know them or they know . In both cases, you would not want to do business with them.
Want me to increase your conversion rate? Double, triple, to 90%? Easy. Just sell everything for 1$ or for free.
This simple example illustrates that there are more important things to a business – like assortment, price or purchasing power. But wait – that is old school, right? Oops.