Study the analytics
Recently, I worked with a client and the first thing I did was set up website analytics to start collecting good data. After a period of 9 months, we looked back at the data and made some startling discoveries:
- The site received 30,000 visitors
- 23,000 of the visitors were unique
- Over 13,000 immediately pressed the back button
- Of those 10,000 visitors who stayed 700 contacted the company
- Of the 700 who contacted the company only 70 became customers
Web Optimization (SEO) Score card:
- 56% of the unique visitors bounced, they immediately pressed the Back button
- Of those visitors who managed to stay on the site, 5% decided to make contact
- However, this represents only 3% of the total unique visitors who visited
- Of those visitors who made contact, only 10% became customers
- However, less than 1/3 of 1% of unique visitors became customers. That sucks!
So, what does all this mean?
It means that even though you may rank 1st place on Google for your desired keywords, and even though you have tremendous website traffic, you cannot neglect the rest of your stuff. People get so obsessed with ranking first place or first page on Google, but they completely lose sight of that fact that it’s the conversions that matter most, not the website traffic.
True, it’s difficult to convert customers if you don’t have website traffic. But, my point is this. If you did a great job of converting your prospects then you could do just as well on a fraction of the traffic. My other point is that if you don’t step back and look at your data, if you don’t measure and track results, if you don’t monitor your performance then it’s almost impossible to recognize what areas need to be improved. Website analytics provide the data necessary to take a rational look at your performance and make solid recommendations for improvement.
Measuring your Call to Action
In most cases, a websites primary Call to Action is for the website visitor to do something, i.e., pick up the phone and call, send us an e-mail, fill out a quote request form, or click the buy now button. Other Calls to Action might be to sign up for a newsletter, download a PDF White Paper, or maybe comment on a blog. Whatever it is, your Call to Action is a clearly measurable action, monitored by Web Analytics, and reportable. In the case of my client, the primary call to action is to contact them and it gets done 3 ways:
- Pick up the phone and call
- Send an e-mail
- Fill out the quote request form
Now, how do the first 2 actions get tracked? In the case of my client, it gets traced through their Customer Relationship Management (CRM)< tool, which in this case is SalesForce.com. They also integrate the SalesForce.com API into their quote request form and Google Analytics to better track the keywords and PPC campaign return on investment (ROI).
Bounce Rate: Reasons for Failure
In the case of my client, I am convinced that the reason why 56% of their website visitors bounce is because their website has become too sloppy and crowded over the years. It lacks a clean and simple interface. Their navigation is not conventional. They have some items on the website that might have been cool 5 years ago but are just not that cool right now. And, they feel compelled to throw a lot of junk on the home page thinking that this is what is driving their website traffic.
Most importantly, they don’t clearly answer the client’s most burning questions: Have I come to the right place? Who are these guys? What do they do? What have they done in the past? What can they do for me? And, how much do they cost? If you don’t answer at least 4 or 5 of these questions then you are going to lose them forever.
Failing to answer these primary questions are, in my opinion, why they are wasting 13,000 unique visitors over a 9 month period. That’s well over 1,000 potential clients per month they are turning off or turning away by their poor user interface.
Conversion Rate: Converting your Prospects
Okay, forget about the lost visitors. They are gone. What about those who have actually contacted you? The ones who have taken the initiative and the effort to actually make contact. There is a wealth of information here that most people fail to recognize.
The first thing you need to do is make sure that you respond quickly to your clients. If they contact you and you don’t respond soon, sometimes immediately, then they move onto the next vendor. Every business is different. Some business need to respond within seconds, others within minutes, others within hours, and perhaps a couple within days. Although, few companies can get away with returning a phone call or e-mail 2-3 days later.
Next, you need to qualify your client. What are they looking for? Do you do or offer what they want? What is their budget. I know they don’t want to tell you, and I know they’ll tell you they don’t have a budget. But believe me, EVERYBODY has a budget, even people with almost infinite money have a budget because even though they can afford it, they still don’t like to burn money or throw it away.
Finally, you need to satisfy their questions, approach them with an offer or proposal, follow-up regularly (until they say no), and go for the close … ask for their business. You don’t have to be pushy, but if you don’t express an interest in serving them, if you seem disinterested or too busy then they are less likely to take the action you want them to take. They will be served by somebody else who is more professional and proactive.
Checklist for Converting Clients
- Make sure you respond quickly, adequately, and professionally
- Ensure your portfolio is up-to-date and reflective of your quality
- Ensure that your prices are optimized properly (the sweet spot)
- Ensure your proposals and documentation adequately explains
- Follow up in a professional manner
Good luck and remember, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you need assistance with web analytics, web optimization, web design, or sales automation, please contact us.
photo credit: Bahadorjn
Seth Godin made a very important point today about the way businesses deal with their customers who call, and he could very well have said the very same thing about replying to e-mail. Seth writes about how he calls to complain about what he perceives to be a drop in the quality of his favourite luxury black chocolate, and what he gets is a coupon for a replacement bar of “the same mediocre product [he] was calling to complain about.” Result: one unhappy customer and a lost chance to get some important feedback from where it really matters.
Granted that in today’s day and age, people can buy your products automatically online without ever speaking to you directly. But when a call or e-mail comes in, it is a golden opportunity to communicate with a person who’s receptive to what you have to say and so win over a new client - or retain an old one, as the case may be. In fact, with many businesses, all the marketing you do is just a prelude to that coveted enquiry or lead - the perfect chance for you to engage in a round of permission marketing, because this time your potential client is contacting you.
Seth writes:
Think for a minute about how much you spend (and how high up in the organization the discussions go) when it’s time for a new logo or a new Super Bowl ad.
And yet, even though the rules have changed, the lowest-paid, least-respected, highest-turnover jobs in the organization now do the most important marketing work.
The most important marketing work, of course, being answering calls and e-mails.
So, who is answering your company’s phone calls and e-mails? What sort of treatment are your customers getting when they get in contact with you? Are you showing a genuine interest in your customer’s concerns? And maybe most importantly, are you listening to what your customers are trying to tell you and learning from the experience?
If your business calls and e-mails are being answered by a string of phone operators or secretaries who change every few months, maybe you should consider the implications of giving them this all-important job. Seth suggests that maybe someone in marketing should be doing the job and, while this may not be practical for many businesses, some sort of compromise would be a good idea.
The thing is that the best marketing in the world will fall flat on its face if what your customer finds when she calls is a phone operator who seems to be instructed to get rid of her as quickly as possible or offer an ‘out of the box’ solution - all the more so if she had to spend an eternity on hold to get in touch in the first place. And the same applies to those cold, standard e-mail replies.
Seth ends his post by saying:
The goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.
How is your company faring in this regard? Maybe you should make a call or two, or write a couple of e-mails, and find out for yourself!
photo credit: Jan Tik
One of the easiest things to do with your website or blog is to make sure that visitors do not ever come back to it again. Our 7 tips to make sure your visitors forget about your website and never ever return are so powerful that any one of the first six will probably do the trick very well on its own! Check them out:
1. Be unoriginal
Make sure that there is nothing that makes your website stand out from the crowd. Just say what everyone else is saying and do as they do. The idea is to give your visitors the ‘been there, done that’ feeling the first time they land on your website.
2. Choose a complicated domain name
Beware of short, memorable domain names that visitors can easily type in. If you want your website to be easily forgotten you need a nice, complicated domain name that is as long as it is dull. Also, avoid the popular .com, .net and .org and go for something obscure and forgettable like the .ws domain suffix.
3. Use the same old template as everyone else
Creative, professional web design will surely make your site or blog more appealing, so avoid it like the plague. Just find a cheap or free template that everyone else seems to be using and go with that. And the default WordPress template is just what you need to make sure your visitors realise that yours is just another blog.
4. Make sure your website is hard to navigate
Bad navigation is a sure way to keep people from returning to your website. After all, if you make it too easy for them to find their way around, they will quickly find what they are looking for and come back for more next time. Don’t waste time planning an organized and logical structure that links your different web pages together. Also, make sure your links to different parts of your website have obscure names and are not easily visible.
5. Write mediocre content
This is one of the greatest tricks in the book. Page after page of poorly-written, irrelevant content will not only make sure your visitors never come back, but it will scare them away immediately and avoid you the bother of having to respond to a stream of enquiries. The best dull content for your blog or website begins with a drab and uninviting title that will make sure few visitors even click through to the piece. Still, be sure to have a monotonous opening paragraph as a second line of defence.
6. Update your site or blog rarely - if at all
If you add new information to your site or blog every day or two, or even once or twice a week, you will get people checking back to see what’s cooking. The trick is to forget to update your website, so that your visitors forget about it too.
7. Avoid offering social bookmarking features
Give your visitors the chance to bookmark your website with services like Digg or StumpleUpon and not only will they keep returning, but they will share your site with others and bring you still more pesky visitors. Same thing goes if you make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog feed or e-mail your posts to a friend with one click. Don’t do any of this!
As you can see, scaring people away from your website is not as difficult as many out there would have you believe. In fact, with a bit of luck your website might very well be doing a good job of this already and you don’t have anything to worry about!
I recently heard an interesting anecdote about Ray Kroc, the milkshake mixer salesman who turned McDonalds from a single fast food restaurant into the humungous multinational corporation everyone either loves or hates.
Kroc was giving a talk to a group of business school students and he asks them what they thought McDonalds’ main goal was. Obvious answer: selling burger meals. ‘Wrong,’ says Mr. Big Mac to the surprise of his audience, ‘I’m in the real estate business and my goal is to own prime real estate on high streets around the world. Selling burgers is just a way of paying all those mortgages.’
Now I know that McDonalds is primarily a franchise business and actually runs - let alone owns - only a small fraction of their restaurants. But whether this anecdote is true or not has no bearing on the lesson to be learned about the importance of knowing what you want to achieve from your business. What’s more, your goals may not always be what you think they are!
Determine your business goals
If you are starting up a new company, you absolutely need to sit down and think hard about what you want to achieve with your venture. Put pen to paper and list your objectives and then break your objectives down into the sub-goals that you will need to work towards to achieve the main objectives. Once you do this, it is also a good idea to revisit your objective list from time to time and see what you would change.
If you’ve already been in business for some time, do this exercise now and compare your actual objectives with what you are doing to see if you are still on track. Maybe you have drifted off course or your original goals have changed. You could very well be surprised at the results!
Know out what you want from your company’s website
The same thing about goals and objectives applies to your website - what do you want your website to achieve?
Will you be selling your products directly online, or is your purpose to develop a strong relationship with your prospective clients and build their trust so you can sell to them at a later date (a good example of this kind of business is real estate). Is your aim to get your visitors to shell out $9.99 once for an e-book, piece of software or other product, or is getting them to subscribe to your blog or become active on your web forum more important to your long term goals of developing a strong client base?
Only once you know what basic goals you want your website to achieve, can you actually have your website designed to attain them.
So, whatever your goals really are - or should be - you’ll never know until you take a break from the rush of setting up or running your business and stop to ponder where you stand and where you want to be. Once you’ve done that, you, your employees, your website designers and everyone who is part of your team will be much better able to work together to turn those goals on your list into reality.
