Increase Website Conversion: Definition of a Conversion

What is a Website Conversion Machine?

– Often, we hear the word ?conversion? being tossed about in reference to websites and online activities. But what exactly is a Website Conversion?

Q: How do you define a Conversion for your organization?

A: It depends.

The definition of a Website Conversion for your organization may be quite different from that of a competitor from those operating in a different industry vertical.

For instance, an e-tailer may define a Website Conversion as an online sale. A 501(c)3 may define a ?Website?Conversion as a donation. But a Website Conversion doesn?t always have to involve the exchange of funds from a purchase or charitable contribution. In fact, most organizations should begin measuring Conversions much further up the Website Conversion funnel.

Regardless, the definition(s) you choose are important because that will be one of the key measurements of future success. So, it should start with the goals and objectives you outline in your Strategy.

Definition of a Website Conversion

A Website Conversion is the exchange of consumer data or currency in exchange for an offering of a product or service with a perceived value equal or greater to that which the consumer is giving up.

So, you can?t ask for customers? emails without offering something in return. And, if your offering is not perceived as valuable, seen as a trick or scam, or if you ask for too much information too early on in the relationship (point in customer purchase funnel), you may lose that customer. Forever.

By definition, a Website Conversion cannot occur at the top of the purchase funnel because that is the Educate Phase. Conversion can occur at the Engage and Embrace stages in the funnel. Logically, a Website Conversion occurs, by definition, at the Engagement phase. (View the 4 E?s of Content Conversion here).

Examples of Conversions

Four E's of Content | Marketing Matters Inbound

Four E’s of Content for Inbound Marketing

Conversions occur when you collect consumer data. This could occur online, onsite, or offline.

Free product trial (Engage)

Free downloadable content (Engage)

Free webinar/seminar (Engage)

Newsletter sign-up (Engage)

Sweepstakes (Engage)

Customer purchase (Encourage)

Charitable donation (Encourage)

Suggestion of additional similar items at checkout (Encourage)

Post-purchase follow-up email (Embrace)

?Customers who purchased this also bought?? (Encourage)

Loyal Customer Programs (Embrace)

Shared Website Conversion Definition
Between Marketing & Sales

When you build a Conversion Machine, it connects your website with your other traditional and digital marketing components like PPC and SEO. ?(Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization)

By documenting goals & objectives and sharing them between Marketing & Sales, your organization can begin to qualify leads. Over time, this leads to greater efficiency in the sales process because Marketing hands over more qualified leads to Sales. These are called Market Qualified Leads (MQLs).

MQLs are defined by their interactions with your brand/website online. You can score Prospects? onsite behavior the following ways:

Frequency of Visitor

Recency of Visitor

Page depth of Visitor

Content consumed by Visitor

Amount of consumer data offered by Visitor

Together, Marketing & Sales can infer intent and interactivity of Prospect onsite behavior. They can then collectively assign a weighted score on this activity.

When a Prospect reaches a mutually agreed upon score a Lead becomes an MQL and is handed off to Sales for follow up (in addition to automated follow up). Your sales team may now access data to follow up, speaking intelligently about a Lead?s needs and how your product/service may satisfy those needs.

Much of the assumption and guesswork from salespeople may now disappear.

Scoring Market Qualified Leads makes it easier for your organization to fulfill a customer?s needs on an individual basis!

Website Conversion Reports for CEOs/CFOs

Here are some metrics the top brass are going to want to see:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost

2. Marketing % of Customer Acquisition cost

3. Ratio of Customer Acquisition Cost to Lifetime Value of Customer

4. Time to Payback Customer Acquisition Cost

5. Marketing Originated Customer %

6. Marketing Influenced Customer %

These numbers won?t be perfect. But they?re more accurate than marketers have been able to track in the past with traditional media.

You can see this requires Marketing and Sales to be on the same page. Communicating, documenting and sharing objectives between the two is paramount. We call this Digital Brand Alignment.

Our partners at Hubspot defined these metrics even further here.

1. Start with Strategy.

2. ?Identify and document online customer Conversion Paths.

3. Create relevant Content based on Content Strategy.

4. Create and test Calls-to-Action based on a CTA Map.

5. Measure Conversions at multiple points in the customer purchase funnel.

6. Test and adjust.

Look for trends and give your online marketing, lead gen and customer nurturing a chance to work. It takes time to build relationships.

Interested in learning more about Conversions? Contact Us.

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