Conversion Optimization: How to Get More Leads without Spending More Money
by Susan Tatum
If you're like most business owners or marketers, you're probably working
hard to increase your lead generation while at the same time lowering your
marketing costs. And chances are good you're missing the very best ways to do
this: Conversion Optimization.
Simply put, "conversion optimization" means converting more website visitors to
prospects, and more prospects to sales-ready leads or customers. It requires
paying attention to the points in your marketing process where you want your
prospects to take action and tweaking those points to get a greater percentage
of visitors to do that.
Salespeople are naturally focused on this because they are regularly judged
on how well they turn qualified opportunities into sales (the closing ratio).
But marketing people tend to focus solely on driving more website traffic or
generating more leads, and they miss the tremendous opportunities that come from
creating a better process.
Let's look at the whole picture instead of just the front-end of lead or
traffic generation. Between the first visit to your website and the decision to
buy your product or service, your prospects actually make a number of decisions
to keep moving forward toward a purchase - or not.
Each of these decision points generally involve some type of action and can
be tweaked to be more effective at keeping prospects engaged and moving them
forward toward the buying decision.
Here are a few common examples:
- Your homepage - does the visitor stick around or leave immediately?
- Newsletter and other subscriptions- what percentage subscribe?
- Product demos - what could you do to get more visitors to take a look at
your demo?
- Free trials - how can you get more people to sign up and actually use
the free trial?
- Trial-to-customer conversions - what happens after they start the trial?
- Landing pages
- Contact Us forms
- Download whitepapers or reports
- Event registrations
You get the point.
Compounding Interest.
Increasing the number of people who take any one of these actions will
ultimately increase your sales or sales opportunities. Over time, even the
slightest increases compound into big numbers. It's the same "power of
compounding interest" argument the Motley Fools and other investment advisors
use to convince us to invest early and often.
Let's look at product demos as an example.
Suppose that currently 50% of prospects who experience your product demo
become customers and suppose that each new customer is worth $2500 a year. By
increase your demo-to-customer ratio just 5% a month, you can nearly double your
revenue in one year.
Imagine how much your revenue can grow if you optimize multiple conversion
points. It's surprisingly easy and immensely rewarding. And the best part may be
that you can get more leads without spending more money on lead generation.
If you're new to conversion optimization, you're not alone; and if you act
fast you can get a real jump on your competition - especially those who are
cutting back on spending and watching their pipelines deteriorate.
Copyright 2009 Tatum
Marketing Inc. |