Different businesses define the term "customer" and what it takes to become one in different ways. Even so, gaining more customers will always be a central tenant to the success of any business.
Your Web site is a vital mechanism to helping you grow your customer base. Knowing how to identify and target the point when a prospect converts to a customer on your Web site can be an amazing asset. It can also be surprisingly subtle! Yet, tracking customer conversions takes more than launching a new marketing campaign and checking the site statistics a few weeks later.
In this enewsletter, we’ll identify steps you can take and important considerations to increase customer conversions through your Web site. We’ll touch on aspects such as interaction points, lead generation, conversions, campaigning, tracking and reporting, and testing.
For the sake of simplicity, this enewsletter refers to prospects and existing customers who you seek to retain or increase the level of business with as "prospects" without distinction.
Identify all online prospect interaction activities
Your efforts to drive increased online conversions should start with an audit of all the online activities that encourage prospects to get closer to your business and interact with it. An "interaction" is any action by a site visitor that involves them either giving or requesting information. Here are some common examples:
- Viewing specialty content (FAQs, image galleries, demonstration videos, etc.) - request
- Downloads (PDF, free trials, collateral, etc.) - request
- Email or phone (‘mailto:’ hyperlinks, 1-800 numbers) - request
- Form submissions (contact, support, surveys, etc.) - request/give
- Registrations (newsletter, campaign, free gift, seminar, etc.) - give
- Purchases (products, service, training, seminars, subscriptions, etc.) - request/give
While auditing your site, ask yourself, "Is this an activity that brings a prospect closer to my business?" Through the interaction, the prospect can gain information about your business, you can gain information about them, or both can occur simultaneously. Even if you don’t know exactly who the prospect is, you can gain valuable information through usage patterns for certain activities and learn more about what your prospects seek from your site.
Classify lead levels for each interaction activity
Each activity can be classified into broader lead types which can be as simple as Low, Medium and High to start. Go through your audit and assign a lead level to each interaction. Your High or highest level leads should be considered your highest opportunity for achieving an online conversion and typically can be viewed as a more stable and loyal customer base than lower level leads. You’ll focus on just the high lead levels to hone in on conversion opportunities.
Determine conversion points
Prospects will interact with your Web site very differently than they will your offline marketing. Are you confidant where an online conversion can occur, if at all? If not, put some thought to what you think it takes for a prospect to become a customer in an offline medium and consider if your site addresses these steps and accommodates the necessary actions based on the audit you’ve just completed. This can require taking a deliberate step away from your site and the audit and looking at the bigger picture of what makes your company successful. Then examine how your site fits into the bigger picture.
Some online conversion points are easy to identify such as completing a purchase transaction (as straight forward as it gets!), searching for a sales representative’s direct contact information or registering to view restricted content.
Other conversions can be tricky to isolate for some B2B companies and non-transactional, non-personalized sites...but not impossible given some creativity! In this case, shift your focus to activities that encourage more of the intangibles of your success such as building brand and company image, accessible product and/or service detail and readily available contact information should questions arise or if help is needed. For example, a prospect who downloads a detailed product bulletin or views graphical examples of your product can be considered a high opportunity for conversion. Signing up for an enewsletter and submitting a contact form for information are both great opportunities to win over prospects at some point in the future. And the often ignored About Us section of your Web site can be a valuable tool to educating prospects about your company’s strengths and successes and help build up your image and brand in the marketplace. Keep an eye on how traffic flows to this section and work to keep the content current and strong.
Isolate the steps to a successful online conversion
Once you determine the conversion points on your site, think about how easily prospects can reach these points through the site navigation and messaging. Is it clear and intuitive or are prospects having to dig and search to find them? Consider promoting and highlighting conversion activities from your home page and ensure they are easy to find through simple to find and straightforward navigational elements.
It’s important to not have these points or the steps required to reach these points buried. If either is the case, your site would benefit from a usability refresh that examines the site’s navigation, user calls to action and graphical layout to help drive prospects to the information
they want to access as well as the information
you want them to access. For more on that concept, see our enewsletter, "
Do you know the difference between a GOOD and a GREAT Web site?"
Target the high opportunity leads via timed marketing campaigns
Once you’ve done the housekeeping on your site and are confidant prospects can find the conversion points, start driving and promoting more traffic to your site. One method is through search engines, both natural and paid search campaigns. A paid campaign can "deep link" to an actual conversion point multiple clicks into the site whereas natural search is typically harder to control which pages will appear in the top results (thus why it’s important to have your site’s navigation clean and intuitive before you promote!).
Another effective method is through direct offline marketing materials that promote a unique and easy to type URL that targets the high level lead conversion points through a Web page redirect. The unique URL can serve as an excellent tracking mechanism during a specific period of time and help you separate general visits to the conversion point versus campaign specific visits. Creating a new and unique URL for each new campaign and for a specific, defined time period is generally considered a best practice online marketing method. It will help you measure the effectiveness from one campaign to the next and play with the variables until you find the results you are after.
A similar approach to direct marketing is to do timed, self promotion on your site’s homepage. You’ll capture prospects who go to your site first from name and brand recognition versus those who use a search engine or are on your mailing list. You’ll also reinforce the conversion activity with prospects who’ve already been exposed to it in a prior promotion.
Track and report the usage activity against the number of conversions
Knowing exactly which Web pages or components are tied to the conversion activities gives you real data to consider. In addition to tracking usage of the activity and conversion Web pages or components, it’s also important to track the number of conversions to the best of your ability. How many downloads? How many forms submitted? How many purchases? Sometimes this has to be a manual tracking process.
More often than not, Web site analytics and statistics are not useful as actual numbers. Rather, it’s the trend over time and percentage of change that will provide the most insight and value. The pattern over time of conversions should correspond to the analytics trend for the conversion activity pages. If conversions go down while activity goes up, your marketing tactics may be losing effectiveness or there may be a technical issue on the site to consider. If conversions go up while activity goes down, you’re likely becoming more effective in your messaging and targeting.
It’s also important to note that timed campaigns are much easier to track and report on than open-ended promotions. Time periods when no campaigns are running can serve as a benchmark for normal activity and subsequent campaigns can seek to increase that activity.
Try another lead activity and compare the results
Soon, you will be able to test one campaign against the next and see which tactics prove to be more effective. A/B testing can be a very powerful change device and can even help you discover specific terminology, semantics and graphical treatments that prospects connect with. There can be subtle changes from one campaign to the next. It’s important to document all the campaign variables so that you can evaluate over time which methods proved successful. For more on this topic, see our past enewsletter, "
Raising Your Web Expectations" that looks at achieving repeatable and measurable results.
External factors to consider
There will always be external factors to keep in mind with campaign marketing and comparative results measurement. Seasonality, the length of the campaign, the target audience and what the competition is doing can all greatly impact the success, for better or worse, of your customer conversions. Keep these external reality factors in mind and weigh how much impact they may have.
Conclusion
The Web will likely always be a complex marketing medium that continues to bring many businesses much closer to their prospects. Yet, unless your business has a highly targeted and personalized Web site with direct one-to-one access to prospects, efforts to get close to prospects and show measured conversion improvements can take creativity and diligence. Keeping a fresh perspective on your site, its structure, content and a planned focus on lead generation activities and ultimately conversion opportunities will help you draw prospects, achieve greater customer conversions and have useful measurements to leverage the successes in future planning.
If you have any comments or questions about any Aware InSites, feel free to contact us at
info@awareweb.com or call 800-783-8919.
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