At Fruition, we talk a lot about Web site usability and good online user experience. It’s kind of what we do around here. But as a business person, why should you care about whether your Web site is clean-looking and easy to navigate?

It’s about conversions

Increasing your site’s conversion rate is the easiest and most cost-effective way to generate new leads and new revenue from your site. Period. You don’t need to spend a dime on driving new traffic to your site  to generate additional revenue if you can increase the number of your current visitors who become customers. And the payoffs can be huge.

Let’s take, for example, a site that gets 20,000 unique visitors in a month. There are a lot of sites that do this kind of traffic. If we can increase their conversion rate — the percentage of those visitors that become customers — by 1%, that’s 200 new customers a month.

What’s the lifetime value of a customer to your business? For a lot of our clients, that number is in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. And what would you spend to increase your sales by $200,000 a month?

So how does Web site usability factor into this math?

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