Why is Website Conversion Important?

Well, maybe it’s better to ask yourself what’s the purpose of anything you do? We aren’t in business just to produce, just to feel good, but to make money and create a return for ourselves. So, if you’re doing things that aren’t helping you generate more revenue, subscribers, customers, or whatever it is that you need to make your business run, well then you really aren’t doing anything are you? Conversion is the single most important metric on your site. Let’s take an analogy to look at this further.

Let’s say someone came to you and says, “I can get more people to walk into your store. ” Would you be convinced to buy their service? Would you still be interested in what they have to say? Now, let’s compare that to someone that says, “I can get more people to buy your product and become a customer.” Big difference huh?

Make Sure You Build for Conversion

The most important thing you can do is build your online presence with the goal of conversion. If this is your centric decision, it becomes easy to decide what else you need to put on your website and what you do not need. Here are 4 suggestions to help create conversion:

1. Give a strong call to action – People need to know what you want them to do. Make sure you communicate that to them. Tell them what it is that you want from them. Tell them why they should do it and then commit them to do it. It’ll eliminate confusion.
2. Add value to your customers – Just like in any business, you need to make sure you’re helping people get the things they need and want. Why not create something through your website that will help your customers get that? It might be hard if your main business is in a store, but tell people that. Tell them why they’re looking at your business and why they should become a customer.
3. Make an incentive for your customers – A lot of marketing deals involve things like “loss leaders.” Places like Groupon are attractive for customers because they create a way for you to give a deep discount to lots of new clients. Deals don’t always need to be negative, but they should create a better than normal incentive for your future customers. Figure out what they want and give it to them.
4. Create a way for customers to subscribe to your business – Give yourself a way to get in touch with your customers once they leave your site. Sometimes you can’t create a sale on the first visit, but getting their information so you can contact them again and remind them about your business, is a close second. You should have either some type of newsletter or coupon subscription list. You can do this through either email or our personal favorite, text messaging campaigns. You can’t win every customer the first time, but you might be able to get them on subsequent tries. So make sure you give yourself that chance.

Each visitor to your site, business, brand, needs to be treated with care. You want to create action and figure out how to get them going. If you focus on conversion, you can figure out how to turn your website into a customer creation center.

If you would like a free consultation on how you can better create conversion, get a quote from Biz Ingenuity

Marketing is purely what your customers are telling other people about you.  Who would you trust?  An email newsletter sent by ABC Company about the good things ABC Company is doing, or a friend who calls you up, tells you that you HAVE TO go and try ABC Company’s services because their customer service is incredible?  I bet all of us would trust our friend more.  Why?

Godin ends, “You will never keep people from talking. But you can take actions to influence the content of what they say.”  What actions are you taking to influence the content of what your customers, clients and associates are saying about you online?  If you have no idea, we may be able to help.

1. Add your keyword/group name to your printed receipts – Why not use something that you are already giving your customers and something they already are in a habit of looking at to create another way to get them to come back to your business?
2. Promote your keyword online – Your website is something current and potential customers visit every day, why not implement something that helps them come back over and over again?  You already have dedicated followers on facebook, twitter and other social media platforms – don’t forget to include them!  You’ve worked so hard to gain a following, do not depend on just one form of marketing!
3. Promote your keyword offline – You have flyers at conventions and conferences?  Business cards?  Print advertising?  White/yellow pages?  Include your keyword there!  Engage your customers when they aren’t at your store or on your site.  This is a great way to gain new customers.
4. Get your customers to share – Many times, all it takes is including a “Please forward to friends.” at the end of your text message for your message to reach people who have no idea you exist.  Sometimes all you need to do is ask them to forward your discounts, deals, promotions, news (new store opening, new menu items, grand opening party, etc.)
5. Add incentive and urgency to signing up NOW – Add an instant reward for signing up to your keyword right there at the register.  They are ALREADY in your business, doing business with you.  Don’t lose them after one visit!  Offer them $1 off their meal for signing-up when they pay their bill.  Give them 10% off if they sign-up at checkout of your sporting goods store, etc.  Give them a reason to sign-up.  If you make it worth it to them, they’ll make the “work” to get them to subscribe worth it to you.

Use your existing marketing channels to get the word out.  The more times a customer or potential client interacts with your business, the better.  If you haven’t already, please take the time to go through this list one-by-one and formulate a strategy to build your text message subscriber list!

Need ideas?  Feel free to contact us.

Haven’t started your text message campaign yet?  Get started today.

Lets use our demo keyword: BIZDEMO as an example.  Let’s pretend that BIZDEMO is actually a restaurant that offers incredible pizza.

1. Build your subscriber list.

How are you going to make use of this incredible service if you don’t have any customers that have subscribed?!  Ask your customers to text BIZDEMO to 41411 so they can start receiving your discounts, coupons and exclusive offers.  The key here is to offer them something they can’t get anywhere else. You should print it on your receipts (“text BIZDEMO to 41411 to get deals and special offers!  Free breadsticks if you sign up now!”) and include it in your marketing emails, on your billboard, on your front door, by your cash register – everywhere you can think of!  Don’t forget to mention it in your TV and radio ads, too!  Everyone who texts in will be automatically subscribed and get an automatic initial response that welcomes them to the list.  It’s that easy.

2. Create urgency in signing up with a strong auto response.

The best way to get people to subscribe is to have a strong offer to make signing up urgent.  In our case, if they subscribe to BIZDEMO right now, we’ll give them free breadsticks with their order!  From here on out, you’ll instantly have access to customers who have already taken time to come to your store.  You have already paid plenty to get new customers into your store, so stop overpaying to keep customers coming back.

3. Know when to send offers.

Timing is key. Statistics show that SMS is instantly read by 97% of recipients, so the most effective way to use it to drive sales is to send a message when your customers are already thinking of making a purchase.  In our pizza place example, we could send out a promotion on a Saturday afternoon before the football games start for free breadsticks with a Pizza purchase.  Your subscribers are already itching for some food, why not choose you?  Give them that reminder at the right time, and they’ll come back to your place.

Ready to get started?

If you’re interested, we can set you up with a trial on your very own keyword, just contact us or simply find a keyword you like and register it on our text messaging sign-up page.

We’ve completed their site and it looks great!  Eleanor’s is VERY happy with their site!

A little about Eleanor’s:

We’re a family with Celiac Disease. A big ole’ family. And we like to bake. So we opened up shop to share our love of good gluten-free food with you. (Shh! Don’t tell anyone it’s gluten-free and they’ll never know.)

We decided to call our cute little shop Eleanor’s, because my beautiful grandma (Eleanor) is the living matron of our disease. She lovingly passed it on through the gene pool to all of us. Without her, we wouldn’t know the joys of gluten free cooking, or the pains of figuring it out!

If you want some great gluten-free food (really, I’m not gluten-free, but it tastes good!), check them out!

How many people does it take you to expose your idea to in order for you to get one paying customer?  That’s a good measure of how efficient your funnel is.  Biz Ingenuity’s solutions are setup so that we can make your funnel as efficient as possible.  Through email campaigns (capturing email addresses on your website for potential customers) and txt messaging services (having customers sign-up for discounts, coupons and fun news in your store or online to increase customer loyalty) as well as our analytics services to clean up any holes in your website, we can help make your funnel very efficient.  What does this mean to you?  More customers.  Less money paid per customer.  More profits.  Cash.  Money.  Dollar Bills.  And we haven’t even talked about how your customers will love you more.

Who wouldn’t want this?  Get a custom quote today.

Find more information on funnels from Seth Godin here.

Marketing is a tricky thing with so much technology out there.  Everybody has so many distractions around them competing for minutes, even seconds, of their attention each and every day.  Constant bombardment has turned us off to most marketing tactics.  Just remember – Tivo was created to get around commercials, adblock on internet browsers is there to not allow distractions while surfing the internet, spam filters are built into all major email clients.  I’m sure you’ve even signed up for a service or site newsletter using a secondary email address you use just for junk so you are not spammed.

So what is ROA?  What do your customers get from you?  What is the benefit to them to give you their attention?  Biz Ingenuity can help you form successful, targeted email and txt message campaigns so that your subscribers actually feel like they are getting something for giving you a piece of their attention.  Long-term relationships are formed.  Data is collected to increase the ROA of each of your campaigns.  ROA creates a win-win situation for you and your subscribers/customers.

Is your current marketing plan taking into account ROA?

Data is so easily collectible these days that businesses can with relatively little cost gather, store, analyze, and use data in every day decisions. This can sometimes cause indecision, but if used correctly businesses can be run from good data driven decisions. This improves the overall effectiveness of businesses in that they are taking the guess work out of decisions. This is revolutionizing the way we do business today.

What will you do?

Are you going to be a part of the 21st century? Are you going to let your business be driven by data? It’ll be hard, but all the studies have shown that it is more effective to conduct business this way. Here are two books we suggest to learn about it:

1. Competing on Analytics
2. Super Crunchers

Let’s take a look at how these social media platforms has hurt big companies. Let’s go to Youtube.com and search for Comcast, the large cable provider. The first video you see will be this one:

With this particular video having over 1.5 million views, you can see how this can hurt Comcast’s image and brand. I think we can see that they had to take costly interactive measures to overcome this problem. You can see that they are currently running their customer service campaign offering customers free services when they don’t perform perfectly. This surely has cost them over a million dollars, all started by a simple video on youtube that was shared through Facebook and other platforms like wildfire.

You decide. Just like the old days, you have to manage your company brand and image. The problem in today’s world is that a PR department with a news release is not enough to manage this anymore. You need to proactively get engaged in this social media world and not let the groundswell effect ruin your company.