The Real Truth About Conversion Rates

In this installment of my real truth series, I'm going to tug on a topic that is going to make quite a few marketers out there a bit uneasy. These are the guys who boast of really high conversion rates in order to make the rest of us feel really inferior. Well, don't be fooled by a lot of the smoke and mirrors people. Yes, that's exactly what a lot of it is...smoke and mirrors. This article is going to give you the real truth about conversion rates once and for all.

Let's begin with these marketers who claim these outrageous conversion rates of 10% or more. Here is what they don't tell you. See, a lot of these figures come from very highly targeted list mailings. In other words, these people are most likely previous buyers who are simply looking for more of what they already bought. What the marketer fails to tell you is that these buyers came from an initial campaign that only converted at 2%. Now, when you figure that only 10% of this figure bought something else from the marketer, that doesn't really say a lot about his product now does it.

Okay, but what about conversion rates by themselves, without any kind of special circumstances, such as a previous list of buyers? What about a campaign targeted to new prospects? Well, in this case, there are a number of factors involved, not the least of which is the psychology of the prospect himself. In other words, what is his mindset?

Let me give you an example so you'll understand better.

Let's say you're selling a product in the "how to make money online" niche. These people, if they're not exactly new to this niche, have already been pitched to death, have bought maybe several products that have let them down, and therefore are going to be very apprehensive about buying another "make money" product. So the nature of this niche is going to call for low conversion rates. Compare that to somebody who is selling things in the entertainment niche and naturally the conversion is going to be higher because there isn't as much resistance.

So when somebody tells you that their conversion rate is through the roof, take the figures with a grain of salt because a lot of it may have to do with either targeting previous buyers or selling in a niche that is easy to sell to.

And this doesn't even take into consideration market saturation, quality of sales page and so on.

That's the REAL truth about conversion rates.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim