One of my clients, who has several high street retail outlets, is very happy with the millions of pounds of revenue it generates from its online store. But the conversion rate of the online store is a mere 2%. “What would you do with a bricks and mortar high street store that only converted at 2%?” I asked them. “We’d shut it down straight away,” they said. So, it seems that even traditional retailers are happy with appallingly low online conversion rates. Survey after survey reveals that the average online sales conversion averages between 2% and 3%; that’s dreadful. However, according to a new article on Internet Marketing I have just read there are online retailers achieving much higher conversions – around a normal retailer rate of 25%. So how do they do it? It turns out they don’t spend much of their effort on the online metrics. Many companies spend hours analysing traffic, tweaking keywords and so on, in a bid to improve conversion rates. However, the top retailers do much less of this and much more of getting to know and understand their customers. In other words, you need to spend much less time on the “Internet stuff” and much more time on connecting with and understanding your customers and their needs. Internet marketing is no different to traditional retailing after all.