Friday, July 27, 2007

Website Conversion - What is it costing you?

In converting Website visitors to leads/sales, etc. let’s first look at what an increase in conversion could mean to your bottom line.

This information is on our Website under Website Conversion, but we feel it is so important to understand we are going to address it here.

Below is the site production numbers for Sample Site A & B :

Average monthly unique site visitors: 1,500
Average monthly marketing cost for site: $500.00
Average monthly number of customers: 30
Average total purchase per customer: $50.00
Average gross profit margin 50%

Monthly revenue is calculated by:

# of customers x dollar amount of average total purchase per customer
= Monthly revenue in dollars

Gross Profit is calculated by:
(Monthly revenue minus gross margin) minus marketing expenses
= monthly gross profit (profit before fixed overhead)

Sample Site A has a 2% conversion ratio which yields
$250.00 gross profit

30 x $50.00 = $1,500.00 monthly revenue
( $1,500 - 50% profit margin)-500 = $250.00 gross profit

Sample Site B has a 3% conversion ratio which yields
$650.00 a month of gross profit:
1500 site visitors x 3% conversion ratio = 45 customers
45 x $50.00 (average purchase)= $2,250.00 monthly revenue

Profit ($2,250 - 50% profit margin) - $500 = ($1125) - $500 = $650.00 gross profit

That is a 160% increase in profit by increasing your conversion by only 1%

You can plug your own numbers if you know what they are. For many people the first place they need to start is finding out what their traffic is on their site.

Next we’ll talk about looking at some of your site statistics and what they mean in relationship to your conversion and marketing.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

What is Website Conversion and Should You Care?

For years now experts in Internet marketing have been talking about Website conversion, but the message does not seem to be getting through many marketers. Any marketing manager or director I’ve talked to is very familiar with offline marketing conversion. They seem to fully understand conversion when it comes to their print, radio, TV advertising but they somehow miss the connection when it comes to the Internet.

Website conversion means measuring, monitoring and converting site visitors into leads, customers or clients. You want to convert people on your site from just visiting to take the desired action. For example, if you have 5000 visitors to your site in one month and 5 visitors complete your inquiry form you have a conversion of .1%. Divide your number of results, in this case completing a form, by the number of unique visitors.

Why should you care about this? Why not just get more traffic? Maybe the other 4995 people in the above scenario just weren’t interested.

Well, perhaps the other 4995 unique visitors somehow came on your site and found it wasn’t what they wanted and left. Perhaps the visitors are interested in your product or service but didn’t want to complete your form, couldn’t find the form or got lost, frustrated, or confused on your site.

Do you really want to spend more money to get more people to your site until you first find out if your conversion ratio is at its optimal level? If people are leaving your site because they are confused, or lost wouldn't you want to correct those issues? What if site visitors start to complete your form or buy your product and then stopped? Wouldn’t it be better if you first corrected that before you spent more money to have more people fall through the holes? Would you want to at least find out if you have that problem?

Tomorrow we’ll address what your current conversion rate is costing you.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Mobile Marketing Survey

If you've subscribed to our newsletter, you will receive a link to our newest survey on Mobile Marketing. There are only a few questions so it won't take long to complete.

The best thing about the survey is that your name will be entered into a drawing to win a free mobile webcam.

If you haven't signed-up for our newsletter you can click below to take the survey and enter the drawing for the mobile Webcam.

Click here to take our mobile marketing survey.

The survey will be closed on August 5th. Winners of the mobile marketing survey drawing will be notified by email and announced in our August newsletter.