ROI Marketing
How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization
I just arrived home from San Francisco where I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. As always, it’s great to catch up with friends and participate in enlightening conversations. A key theme of my presentation: how to get organizational buy-in to testing and conversion optimization.
Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of optimization and persuading more customers that we forget something. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.
Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.
Get the Math Right
When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:
- 100,000 people visit your Web site
- 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
- Your site gets 3,000 total conversions
What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?
- 3,030
- 4,000
Translate All Numbers Into Dollars
Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).
Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).
It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.
Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.
Leverage Your Reach
Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.
With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:
In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.
Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.
This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.
With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:
- Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
- Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.
Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.
Is There a Catch?
While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.
The Bottom Line
You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?
Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?
*Article cross-posted on ClickZ
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Editor’s Note: At FutureNow, we insist on measurable ROI for our clients. That’s we start by identifying the areas that will make the most difference to your conversion rate and other vital performance metrics. Please contact us to learn how we can help you, or an executive team you know, market better.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Screencast: How the Super Bowl Ads FUMBLED Online
This year’s Super Bowl ads once again found us scratching our heads. If you’re going to spend $2.7 million for 30 seconds of air time in order to send people to a website, why not sell them your product once they get there?
In this screencast, we’re going to show you how two brands — Tide to Go and Under Armour — continue to miss out on converting browsers into buyers, even after the post-game traffic surge is over. Depending on who you ask, these sponsors’ ads (”Interview” for Tide and “The New Prototype” for Under Armour) were pretty decent. The products don’t seem to be the problem, either.
Nope. What we have here is a failure to convert. So, much like the New England Patriots are doing right now, let’s see what we can learn from some video analysis:
Let’s take a look at some post-game stats from Reprise Media’s Search Marketing Scorecard:
- 6% of companies included a call to action, asking viewers to visit their websites–a decrease of nearly two thirds from last year
- 93% did not buy search placement for concepts relating to their ads, including spokesperson names, slogans and taglines. Among the brands that failed to buy featured stars’ names as keywords were Bridgestone Tires (Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons) and Sunsilk (Marilyn Monroe, Shakira and Madonna). Unfortunately, notes Reprise, given that the celebrities are often the only thing that viewers remember about an ad.
- 74% still neglected to include a call to action on their Web site landing pages, leaving users “directionless.”
These figures are important because they illustrate a common misconception among multi-channel marketing campaigns: While the TV ad’s success can be measured by the traffic it drives to the website, the traffic alone is meaningless. When visitors can’t convert, you lose.
Want help converting online? Download “10 Tips to Start Optimizing Your Site” for free!
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Ecommerce Marketers and Designers: Read This Book
If every designer (and the marketers who hire them) read Web Design for ROI, the new book by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus, the Web would be a better and more profitable place.
Sure, the book will show you design techniques that help generate positive ROI, but the best of all is that it’s easy to follow. The authors dissect a website into six common sections — homepage, detail or landing pages, category pages, product pages, forms, and checkout — found on commerce sites, and they walk the reader through various optimization tactics for each. The book is a pragmatist’s dream, full of examples and “best practices” (or is that “best principles”?) that make it easy to take leaps and bounds in understanding how to use your website to make more money by reducing friction in the customer experience.
If you manage an e-commerce site, or design them, and haven’t read this book or Call to Action by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa T. Davis, there’s probably a lot of low-hanging fruit left to grab on your site by modifying simple design changes and testing the results. These types of fixes don’t take a lot of effort but they yeild nice results in terms of boosting conversion rates and average order value.
While Web Design for ROI doesn’t venture as deep into the principles of conversion as Call to Action, its solid approach, combined with the authors’ personality, make it a worthwhile read for anyone fixing the money-leaking holes on their website. This book is about making your e-commerce site a strategic extension of the company’s business model while building it around the customer experience.
This is definitely not your typical design book, and thats why we’re giving it the thumbs-up here at Future Now.
For more info, check out WD4ROI.com before you checkout at Amazon.
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Written by:Ronald Patiro
Online Retailers Fail Customer Experience 101
My Company (Future Now) just released its “2007 Retail Customer Experience Survey,” revealing both good and bad news.
Bad news first. In aggregate, online retailers fall far short of offering good or even adequate customer experiences. A pathetic 4 out of 330 sites would get a passing grade in Customer Experience 101. It’s frightening to consider how much money is being left on the table and how many conversion opportunities are missed.
The good news? Companies show improvement over the last survey, though they’re falling short on many basics. These basics, however, can be relatively easily addressed and fixed. Companies committed to improving their customers’ online experiences can prioritize lower-cost and less-complex changes to improve their customer experience scores.
Improving Customer Experience Basics
While it’s easy to stare at the puddle of spilled milk and fight back the tears, there’s little profit in it. It’s a bit painful to get a less-than-stellar grade, but the smart marketer will look at missed opportunities and be sure not to miss them again. Provide an intense customer focus, and you’ll see more customers vote for you with their wallets.
Here are some actions retailers can take in the four key customer areas:
- In product presentations, provide:
- Better and more enticing product descriptions.
- Better-quality product images.
- Multiple images.
- Customer reviews.
- For fulfillment options, offer:
- Product availability.
- Easily visible return policies, shipping policies, and guarantees.
- Customer-friendly and easy-to-read and -understand return/exchange policies.
- Gift options.
- For checkout options, include:
- Multiple payment options (e.g., by check, PayPal, etc.).
- Estimated delivery times, and show in-stock availability for items.
- In-store pickup where physical stores exist.
- A progress indicator in the checkout process.
- Simpler or fewer steps or both in the checkout process.
- Third-party seals and security assurances.
- For customer service options, implement:
- Faster and more accurate replies to customer e-mail inquiries.
- Chat options.
- A visible phone number for questions and problems.
All these are significant factors that customers have come to expect online. Your customers notice little things that can make a huge difference. Companies that lavish attention on improving customer focus will reap more sales and will experience superior customer-retention rates in the long term.
You can continue reading on my column on ClickZ or read the full study on GrokDotCom.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Guarantee Holiday Sales
In cubicles and corner offices around the e-tailing world, eager marketers and merchandisers are cranking up for the 2008 holiday season, with visions of plump virtual shopping carts dancing in their heads.
Meanwhile, shoppers go about their lives. Time ticks. The burden of seasonal shopping grows bigger as the number of shopping days until Christmas gets smaller.
Each year the season seems to start earlier. Shoppers are faced with more choices than ever, and online retailers are getting savvier, offering better wares and new technologies all designed to increase sales, average order values, and conversion rates.
How can you get a leg up on competitors? How can you ensure visitors buy from you and not the guys and gals on the domain just a few clicks away?
One powerful tactic is the return/exchange policy point-of-action (POA) assurance.
With current economy concerns, gift buyers are likely to be more frugal than they were in 2006, and online retailers must address that reality.
Continue reading my column on ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
How Start-Ups Can Build Effective “About Us” Pages
Since writing on “about us” pages a few months back, I’ve received several inquiries like this one:
Thank you for a very valuable information on the “About Us” page, good examples.
How about new companies or companies that are being created? Customers are skeptical to engage with new companies. What would be your advice in terms of what is the best content to put in it, what to highlight, if you do not have history and you are staring from the “garage” location?
What do you do as a start-up? What do you do if you don’t have a laundry list of credentials and an extensive track record?
Continue reading my column on ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Michael Dell’s Lousy Investment Advice
“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Michael Dell said that about Apple 10 years ago.
Pretty, pretty…bad advice!
Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports:
Apple’s (AAPL) market capitalization today is more than double that of Dell (DELL):
Apple: $140.4 billion
Dell: $62.27 billion
But don’t shed a tear for Micheal Dell. According to a list of the 400 wealthiest Americans published last month, his net worth is more than triple Steve Jobs’.
Michael Dell: $15.5 billion
Steve Jobs: $4.9 billion
I’m not crying for either one but I just finished syncing my iPod with my MacBookPro. Apple marketing is brilliant but the company is very far from perfect. Apple’s brand is eroding and it missed a huge opportunity to make more headway into the business market because it insists on pursuing a broken distribution model.
Are you a better fortune teller than Michael Dell? Please let us know where you think Apple and Dell will be in 2017.
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
The Complexity of Closing a Sale
B2C, B2B, impulse purchases, straightforward purchases, considered purchases, nonprofit, lead generation…Your ability to persuade depends more on your audience’s key qualitative factors than on your business category and, many times, audience demographics. If you understand all the elements that make up your unique persuasive process — a marriage of how you sell and how your audience buys — and if you understand your audience’s needs, you’ll be able to create persuasive copy that dramatically improves online conversion.
Selling and Buying: “I Do”
A sales process includes steps to achieve a close. Not every business has a sales process, though admittedly some are more effective than others. Only you care about your sales process. It’s internal. It’s about you and your goals. It’s not about your audience and their goals.
Everyone in your audience has a buying process, steps people go through to satisfy their needs and feel confident they made the right decision. Sometimes this buying process happens in the blink of an eye. Other times it takes months. In some cases, it takes only one person to make the decision. In others, five different departments and a C-level executive have to sign off on the decision.
On top of that, not everyone’s in the same stage of the buying-decision process when she arrives. Some come to you during the late stage, knowing exactly what they want. Others turn up during the early stage, when they’re narrowing their choices. And some are in the middle stage; they’re not intending to buy just now, but they could be persuaded. Continue reading my ROI Marketing column at ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Conversion Rate Basics
How much time, money, and resources do you spend optimizing your conversion rate?
If you’re like many of us, the answer to this question would choke a rhino.
Tally up the megabytes of spreadsheets e-mailed to execs, the time exhausted gazing at analytics dashboards, and the invoice stacks courtesy of technology vendors. Then, count up the efforts poured into your PPC (define) campaigns, SEO (define), and A/B and multivariate testing.
It’s not for a lack of effort that the conversion rate needle refuses to budge. More times than you can imagine, overlooking the basics is the culprit.
What good is tweaking a high-performance engine if you neglect to change the oil?
Here are some conversion rate basics you can’t afford to ignore.
Continue reading my column on ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
A Half Dozen Business Choices
Every company has to make choices when it comes to how it markets and sells and, in some cases, who it is and what it sells.
In an e-mail exchange, Tom Grimes, a great and brilliant friend, shared with me what he’s thinking about in terms of business choices. Based on his list, here’s my own list of many of the high-level choices businesses typically make every day. It may help you make some more conscience choices of your own:
- Select or solicit?
- Tangible or intangible?
- Transaction or relationship?
- Speed or quality?
- Price or prestige?
- Lifestyle or utilitarian?
Click here for a further explanation and to read the rest of my column on ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
