What is the best way for you to make a sale online? The easy answer here is to place a targeted visitor in front of a converting sales letter. We all know that to get a target visitor one must get the traffic source from the right place. However, when it comes to conversions, there are a lot of factors at play here. One of the most neglected conversion rate boosters is the stick rate that helps with conversion rate. Let us look deeper into the relationship between stick rate and conversion rate and how you can utilize this relationship to help you increase your overall sales.
What is stick rate?
When we talk about the stick rate of a site visitor on your website, we are actually talking about the average amount of time people who stayed on your page. There are generally four ranges in stick rate. The first one being the 30 second range, and then the 1 minute range and then 5-10 minute range and lastly the more than 10 minute range.
The first range which is the 30 second range is the time where people stayed on your website for less than 30 seconds on your website. If people are leaving your site within this time range, then something is definitely turning them off the very instant they arrive on your site. It could be that your site is not loading for them; it could be because your website is down or it could be that your site’s first impression is annoying them. When you look at the numbers and seeing people leaving almost as soon as they arrive on your site, you need to quickly check and try to fix the problem. Find out if your headline is the problem or not by doing a split testing.
The second range would be the 1 minute range. If people are leaving your website after the 1 minute mark then you can be sure that this is due to the fact the your body copy is not interesting enough. They were definitely interested in your advertisement and your headline copy but after a quick browse or read on your body copy they decide that this isn’t for them or are not compelling enough to read on. Hence when this happens you will need to make changes to your body copy so that people will stay longer on your website.
The third range is people staying on your sales letter and reading for more than 5 to 10 minutes. These people are obviously very interested in what you have to offer and they are taking the time to actually read through your sales letter and making sure that what you have to offer is right for them.
The final range would be people who stay on your website for more than 10 minutes. People within this range could be due to the reason that they are hesitating with your offer, your sales letter is too long or it could be that they left their browser window open and went away from their computer to do something else. If the people in this range are high then you might want to strengthen your offer or use some scarcity tactics to help the people in this range be a little more decisive.
What is the relationship between stick rate and conversion rate?
The relationship here is massive. The better your stick rate the higher your conversion rate will be. Recent studies have shown that people who leave your sites early are likely not to convert at all and those who stayed on your website for more than 5 minutes are where most of your conversion rate will be coming from.
Not surprising is that people who stayed the longest still converts but not as good as those who stayed for 5 minutes to 10 minute range. What this ultimately means is that people who stayed too long could be due to hesitation or leaving your website on their browser while they went away from their computer to do something else.
The important thing to note here is that if you wish to improve your conversion rate then you must try your best to get your visitors to stay on your website for a long period of time (at least 5 minutes or more). To do this you must find out if there is anything that is causing people to leave your site early or not? Could it be your introduction video that loads too slowly? Could it be that your headline is not attractive enough? Once you are able to pinpoint the reason why people are leaving early, then you should be able to easily get more people to stay longer.
The next thing you would do is to make sure that they stay long enough to make a buying decision hence, your graphics and body copy has to be very interesting and benefit oriented to get the visitors interested and curious enough to read your entire copy or at least half of it.
There are many tracking softwares out there that is capable of tracking your visitors stick rate these days. Some might be even be able to show you the exact spot on your sales letter where people are leaving your site. All this information is crucial if you wish to tweak your sales letter and optimize it for the best conversion rate.
