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Overview of the Company
TotalGym.com was established by Dave Dewey in 1996
(practically prehistoric in web time). Total Gym is very
well known for their infomercial, starring a buff Chuck
Norris and a sexy Christie Brinkley. Just last year, the
Total Gym became the most successful infomercial product
in history. Meanwhile, the U.S. Olympic Team has adopted
the Total Gym as part of their regular training, and more
sophisticated models of the Total Gym have become the
standard in many hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and
training facilities worldwide.
While Total Gym proudly offers “results you can’t
get anywhere else”, they also offer great values,
package deals, and support. TotalGym.com’s products
range in price from $200 to $3275. Also, they average
roughly 100,000 unique visitors per month. In terms of
selling online, that price range is important to notice.
Their products offer tremendous value, but they are not
“cheap.” Likewise, they have “real” traffic.
It’s interesting to be aware that all of their
traffic has been achieved thus far without spending any
marketing dollars at all to drive it directly. The url is
not even mentioned on the infomercial. (Sheesh! What were
they thinking?) People have to remember the company name
and either do a search or guess and type the url into
their browser. Motivated traffic, wouldn’t you say?
Presenting Challenge
So, now you might be thinking, “With all of these
great accomplishments, what could be wrong with their
site?” Yet their Customer
Conversion Rate (CCR) was extremely low.
Here’s what TotalGym’s Website Manager and all around
great guy Matt Rapoza told me. “I’d like to see if our
products and accessories are easy to find, easy to add to
the shopping cart, and easy to check out.” He wanted to
know what could be done quickly and inexpensively to
increase their sales. Follow me as I show you what we did.
GROK-Identified Primary Issues
· Site
Penetration Rate (SPR): 63 % -
which means 37% of visitors were being lost right at the
home page.
· AIDAS:
The home page was not engaging the visitors in the AIDAS
process.
· By capturing more people at
the top of the buying funnel (i.e., the home page), they
would automatically retain more at the bottom, which
would lead to a higher CCR and more sales.
The Key Short-Term Problem: Low SPR
Once we realized such a large chunk of people
was
being lost on the original home page, it became pretty
clear this was the area that needed attention first.
Picture the sales funnel and visualize how much of their
traffic was “bouncing out” right at the top. They
needed to draw more visitors into and through the funnel.
Their original home page <http://www.grokdotcom.com/totalgymoldhomepage.jpg>
was designed almost as a splash page. It attempted to
qualify visitors into 1 of 5 categories: Home Fitness,
Patients, Athletics, Rehab and Corporate. As we researched
further, we discovered that approximately 80% of all
visitors went to the Home Fitness page, leaving the other
20% divided among the other 4 categories. Sounds like
there’s a clue here, right?
Clearly, most people by far were interested in Home
Fitness. That should be no surprise when you stop and
think about it: it’s the focus of the infomercial. Well,
if 80% of the traffic is interested in Home Fitness, why
make them take an extra step, figure out where they need
to go next, and then finally get to the place where they
can actually start the buying process?
Of course, to really maximize sales, Matt and I agree
the whole site needs to be redesigned. There are many,
many, things TotalGym.com needs to do better. For the
purpose of the case study, though, we simply focused on
one thing that should have increased their SPR leading, in
turn, to increased CCR and increased sales.
One Simple Tweak
What we advised them to do was simply this: forget
about the current home page and drive all traffic to
the Home Fitness page.
The new process brings visitors directly to what
80% of them want. They get exactly what they came for, and
they can start shopping and buying right away. The page
also does include all the navigation necessary for the
other 20% to go elsewhere if they want to. By no means a
fancy solution, and not remotely a complete one. But this
was a zero-cost tweak they could do immediately,
and if our analysis was correct, it would have an
immediate impact on sales.
Results
This one small change
increased their CCR 39%!
Of course, in a normal case of tweaking a page to
increase SPR, we would be able to show you before and
after pages as well as compare before and after results.
In this case, though, we eliminated a page, so to
compare the old SPR with the new one would be like
comparing us Martians with Venutians (don’t get me
started!).
Again, TotalGym agrees with us the site needs a lot
of work. This is by no means a complete sales
solution. Technically, in fact, it’s not even a real
beginning. But isn’t it great to see how such a simple
and inexpensive tweak to the process can have such a
positive impact on your sales?
In closing, always keep in mind that an essential
ingredient in any effort to improve your sales is knowing
what your baselines are so you can identify where to start
as well as track your progress. For that, I truly don’t
know of any better tools than Future Now’s Digital
Sales Calculators,
and they’re free.
They worked for TotalGym and they’ll
work for you, too.
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Coming
soon to a website near you –
in fact, maybe YOURS!
Dear
Digital Entrepreneur:
You
guys and gals have been asking and asking, so OK:
I'm now making house calls. That’s right, I'm
visiting your own websites and will be writing in
future issues about how you can apply the stuff we
talk about here.
So,
want a free Grokanalysis of your site? It’s
simple. Just click
here, fill out the form, send it to us, and
if I think your site illustrates something that will
be of interest to a lot of our readers, you’re in!
Good
luck!!
The
Grok
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Measuring
Performance, Creating Success
Your
server logs are a gold mine if you know what to look for
and how to analyze the appropriate data relationships.
Combined with some basic financial information, the data
can produce some valuable insights. Why, without even
looking at your actual site, somebody else could tell you
a lot about how successful you are just by playing with
these numbers. So, let's play!
Pencils
and paper at the ready, dudes and dudettes. Time to see
how well your site is actually doing. These simple
exercises will give a snapshot of where you are, and if
you continue to do these calculations over time, you'll be
able to track the effectiveness of your improvement
efforts.
Customer
Conversion Ratio
Customer
Conversion Ratio (also called sales closing ratio and
sales closing rate) is the Bottom Line Metric out there.
It’s a measure of how many of your visitors actually buy
something. I've talked before about this important
indicator of your success (see article),
so I won't go into more detail this time, except to say
for most websites by far, the CCR is way too low.
Shop.org reports the average order conversion rate for its
members is 1.8 percent. That means less than 2
people out of every 100 who visit a site actually buy
anything! Want a point of comparison? Bricks-and-mortar
operations have an average CCR of about 48 percent. That’s
27 times higher! So if you wondered if there was
room for improvement, now you know, and isn’t that great
news?
If
you could increase your CCR from 2 percent to just 4
percent, you will have doubled your sales and
done it without having spent one extra penny on
marketing. Obviously, then, increases in the CCR translate
not just into significant increases in your sales but in
your profits, too.
It's
simple to calculate your CCR. Divide your number of orders
per month by the number of unique visitors (unique “hits”)
to your website. Multiply this number by 100. The result
is the percentage of your visitors who actually buy. And
even if the number is way higher than 2 percent, you can
still improve it, and by a lot. Have I ever lied to you?
<grin>
Site
Penetration Ratio
Site
Penetration Ratio (SPR) is a quick way to determine how
successful your home page is in drawing customers further
into your sales process. It often comes as a surprise to
many e-tailers that most of their visitors never get past
the home page. You spend all those marketing bucks driving
traffic to your site and the traffic does an about-face on
arrival. In fact, most of that traffic leaves before your
home page is even done downloading.
To
calculate your SPR, you divide the number of unique
visitors who click to any interior page by the
total number of unique visitors that “hit” your home
page. Multiply this number by 100, and you've got a number
that represents the percent of people who go at least one
level deeper into your sales process. Subtract this
number from 100 and you've got the percent of people who don't
even make it past your home page.
The
Fun Has Just Begun
These
are just two of the ways you can get an accurate handle on
what is really going on with your online business, as well
as monitor its progress as you make improvements over
time. The friendly folks at Future Now have put together a
free suite of calculators assembled into an Excel™
spreadsheet that’s a breeze to use. In addition to CCR
and SPR, the suite in its current version includes
Customer Acquisition Cost, Customer Retention Rate, Cost
Per Visitor, Average Order Size, Sales Per Visitor,
Customer Acquisition Gap, Site Penetration Index, Average
Visit Length, Clicks to Find, Clicks to Buy and Time to
Buy. Wow! You can "download" them (the file is
actually e-mailed to you) by going here: http://www.futurenowinc.com/digitalsalescalculators.htm.
So
help yourself (in more ways than one). Okay? Class
dismissed.
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