Whether you buy into it or not, there’s a lot of recession talk in the news today. Marketers and business owners consider curbing spending during a recession, which means that there’s often less to spend on online marketing.

There’s an easy way to improve your online sales to compensate for the lack of marketing spending. Recession proof your online marketing by focusing on your web site’s conversion rate. Whether your web site generates leads or sells goods/services, every web site could benefit from improving conversion rates.

It could be your web site’s usability or just your e-commerce checkout flow, but I’d be hard-pressed to name a site that can’t squeeze an additional 10% of revenue from the site by optimizing it.

Also, search engine optimization is a good way to improve your web site’s long term position in search engines, giving you free traffic over time.

There’s been a lot of convincing research released in the past few months around customer ratings and reviews. Clearly, web site customers find ratings and reviews useful and not only rely on them to make purchase decisions — they also participate and share their own experiences. Here are a number number of recent articles and blog posts that discuss customer ratings and reviews:

Forester: User Ratings Top Consumers’ Online Wish Lists

User reviews and ratings were the most-asked-for web site content and functionality, beating even coupons/special offers and price comparison tools.

Deloitte: Companies Must Learn to Compete in a More Transparent Age

User ratings and reviews are having a “considerable impact on purchase decisions.” Sixty-two percent of shoppers read customer-generated product reviews when shopping, and nearly 80% say the reviews have a direct impact on their purchases.

MarketingCharts.com: User Reviews a Must for Retail Websites

98% of surveyed shoppers read the reviews on e-commerce websites prior to purchasing. Many shoppers spend over 10 minutes reading reviews before making a purchase decision.

PowerReviews: New Study Analyzes the Positive Effect of Online Reviews on E-Commerce

Internet merchants say that customer ratings and reviews:

• enhance the customer experience
• ease the burden on customer service by answering many basic product questions
• improve trust and loyalty because of their unbiased nature
• are mostly positive
• are best utilized on the product page

eMarketer: Customer Reviews Increase Web Sales

Customer ratings and reviews increase site traffic, conversion rate and average order size. They also improve customer loyalty/retention and improve search engine optimization.

As you can see, adding customer reviews and ratings to your e-commerce site is not just a helpful tool for customers to interact with your site — they lead to purchase decisions.

You probably read this headline and scratched your head. No, the flu bug that I’m still getting over isn’t speaking to me — your customers really can help design your site. But don’t send them an email asking them to buy Photoshop just yet… Even though your customers know nothing about effective web design, there are two ways they can help you design your site.

The first is covered in GrokDotCom’s recent blog post about A/B testing. The premise is that your designer can post two versions of a page or page template, measure results and keep the page that works the best. This way, you enable your customers to indirectly tell you what they like best. Continually testing new designs doesn’t have to be time consuming or costly — it can be as easy as changing the placement, size or color of a button, or just pulling important copy out of a paragraph and making it a headline.

Second, you can conduct a usability test of your site with customers. This can be done in a lab (which can be a very expensive option), or you can test your site with remote users. There are some new options in the remote testing arena that are promising, especially for sites that have never been tested before (and nearly 77% of online retailers don’t test their sites). Remote testing, while less costly, will identify “low-hanging fruit” that you can easily fix.

No matter which you choose, you can let your customers design your site through their feedback and through the use of both quantitative and qualitative data.

Many retail ecommerce web sites ended 2007 with a bang according to Nielsen Online and MegaView Retail. Of sites that had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month of December, here are the top 10 sites with the best conversion rates:

The Popcorn Factory: 29.5%
L.L. Bean: 23.6%
Abebooks: 20.6%
Hollister: 17.6%
Amazon: 17.6%
Lands End: 17.2%
Coldwater Creek: 17.1%
QVC: 17.1%
Cabela’s: 16.8%
Gymboree: 16%

See the chart for yourself at MarketingCharts.com.

Until now, the de rigueur of ecommerce web design says that add-to-cart buttons belong on the right column of the screen. Crutchfield.com is breaking that convention, though, by placing the add-to-cart button on the left column. Rather than showing a screen here, you can see one on Grokdotcom’s blog post or at Crutchfield.com.

Having worked at Crutchfield for a short time a few years ago, I know that there are some brilliant minds there, and that they used to test a lot of different screen designs. I wonder if this is a test or if they have seen some data that indicates that a left-side add-to-cart button works.

In any case, I can’t believe that an add to cart button on the right side is actually more effective.

It’s interesting to me that even sites that should be effective at e-commerce instead succeed at frustrating customers.

Case in point: I clicked over to the eTail 2008 web site last week to look at the agenda to see if I might want to attend. After browsing the site, I saw an advertisement selling the eTail 2007 conference audio presentations.

Interesting, I thought. I can listen to this past year’s conference in the comfort of my home or office. The advertisement led me to this page.

The page asked for my credit card information but made absolutely no mention of a) how much it costs, or b) what I get for my money. Also, the page said to “Complete this form to register for the webcast.” My expectation was that I would receive audio, which usually comes in the form of downloadable MP3s, not a webcast. There was also no mention of if my purchase would allow me to download the presentations to my iPod or if the presentations can only be accessed once online (a “webcast” is typically a streaming file viewed or heard online).

Due to the poorly conceived page, I immediately bailed to try to find that information elsewhere (unsuccessfully).

There’s a lesson in this experience. When selling something, clearly let customers know how much something costs before asking for their payment information. Additionally, you should briefly let them know what they are getting for their money. In the example above, the eTail conference folks might want to set my expectations of the price and product before asking for payment information.

Setting customers expectations before asking for their payment information is not only a best practice, but a way to reduce customer complaints when they don’t get what they expected.