As a result, Wal-Mart continues to be one of the world’s largest and most successful retail companies. Regardless of whether you like Wal-Mart, the company’s planning, attention to detail, and successful execution provide critical lessons. As Wal-Mart has proven, choreographing every step and element of the sales process translates into more revenue. You must get into the minds of your customers. You must optimize your selling process to meet the needs of your customers. Ultimately, you must guide your customers through the sales funnel toward a conversion.
The Web’s interactivity makes conversion fast. You can convert a prospective customer into a paying customer more quickly on the Web than in other media. People receive various messages through advertising and promotional media attempting to persuade them to take action. Although traditional offline media can broadcast those messages, it’s hard for people to act on them immediately. On the Web, a prospect could receive a message and, in mere minutes click on a link and buy a product.
Although this is wonderful, converting a prospect online is not that easy. The speed at which the conversion can occur is matched only by the speed at which the conversion will unravel, creating new kinds of challenges. Online prospects can become distracted and within seconds decide to navigate to another website, never to return to yours. So, how can you minimize the chance of your prospect leaving your site, and maximize the results of your online promotion?
Conversion optimization analyzes the behavior of consumers, focuses on what motivates a particular market segment to react in a certain way to marketing elements, and advises companies on how to adjust their marketing and sales mix in response. As the name suggests, conversion optimization is focused on increasing the percentage of visitors that “convert” into buyers for a marketing campaign. Conversion optimization is a departure from traditional marketing, where it is sometimes difficult to measure and quantify the impact of a particular campaign. Quantitative measurements provide a foundation. Although you should define a conversion based on your own specifics, you must be able to track the number of conversions during a certain period.
The process of conversion optimization starts with quantifying the numbers for each campaign you run. Different campaigns will track different kinds of conversions. For a retailer, these numbers might be the number of orders the retailer receives in one month or the average order value during the same period. For a law office, it might be the number of website inquiries or the number of new cases signed up. An online news website or magazine might track the number of subscriptions or how often stories are viewed. A nonprofit organization might track the donations collected in one week or one month.
After establishing an initial baseline, the next stage is to understand the story behind the numbers. Why did your target market react a certain way to a specific campaign? What did they love or hate about it? What could you have done better? Again, the customer is at the heart of this analysis. We will dig deeper into consumer behavior throughout the book and give you more specific examples to help you understand your customers’ behavior.