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.