Conversions, Conversions, Conversions!

Hits, impressions, and visits to your website are worthless without a well thought out strategy for converting them. I am not talking about adding hidden religious messages; rather, I am talking about receiving an order for your brochure, a purchase from your e-Commerce store or a hot lead your salespeople can close.

Setting Percentage Conversion Goals
It is very tempting to set goals in hard numbers. Resist! Traffic to your website will vary from hour to hour and day to day. The number that remains more consistent is percentage of visitors converted. Examples of goals are:

• An increase in daily orders by 20%
• 10% of visitors filling out your lead form
• 40% increase in visits to press releases

Tracking if your Conversion Goals are being met
Once your conversion goals are clearly defined it is important that you have the tools in place to clearly track if you are meeting these goals.

Google Analytics
There are many tools on the market that can be used to track if your goals are being met. One such tool is called Google Analytics, which shows in graphs and charts your visitor to conversion ratio. Google Analytics and other similar tracking tools make it easy to see trends in your traffic and percentage goals. We set up Google Analytics for many of our clients, so if you need our help for this please email Bob, our President.

Salesforce.com
Conversions that require an in-person visit or phone call cannot be tracked through a tool such as Google Analytics. To track this type of conversion goal a customizable customer relations management (CRM) software is needed. CRM software is used to track contacts and prospects as they make their way through the sales pipeline.

One such product is Salesforce.com, which can be integrated with your website so that when visitors enter callback information it is entered into a leads database that can be worked by your sales team. These leads should be flagged to clearly indicate the time they arrived and that they are from the website. As sales people close sales, conversion reports can be configured to show number of visitors to number of sales conversions.

For Advanced Snow and Ice Solutions, a nationwide commercial snow removal and ice control facilities management firm in Southampton, NJ, we integrated a quote request form on their website with Salesforce.com so that quote requests are automatically recorded as leads in their Salesforce.com application.

Meeting Conversion Goals
Now that you have set your Conversion goals and have the tools in place to track if you are meeting them it is time to fine-tune your website to achieve these goals.

Some techniques that work very well for our customers are:

• Placing lead intake forms on pages that describe services. Making your customer leave the page to find your telephone number or Contact Us page provides an obstacle that rarely is hurdled. (See DebtSettlementUSA.com as an example.)
• If you placed an ad in an online yellow pages directory your web designers can determine this and immediately show a sales callback form that allows your visitors to enter their contact information for a sales person to get back to them. (We ourselves advertise in the local online yellow pages. Type in web designer…Cherry Hill, NJ and you will find us at the top.)
• If you have an e-Commerce application, and your goal is percentage increase in sales of product X, allow customers to purchase and learn about product X on the home page of your web site. (See HealthPromotionsNow.com as an example.)
• Show products or information on your home page that customers searched for in the search engines. With some search engines it is possible to determine what keywords a user searched for to find your web site. You can display an appropriate article or product based on search criteria. Showing customers what they are looking for on the home page rarely fails to increase conversions. (See Resintech as an example.)

These along with other techniques can be used to meet your goals. It is important that you set clear goals, put in place a strategy to track these goals, and fine-tune your website to meet your goals.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.