Chapter 1. The Journey from Clicks to Sales

CEOs and VPs of marketing ask this question every day. Many of them have accepted low conversion rates as a fact of doing business online. They believe that achieving a double-digit conversion rate is farfetched, or even impossible. Some executives have not only accepted low conversion rates, but will argue that there is no way to increase sales conversion rates. Having helped hundreds of companies increase their sales, we know the possibilities are endless. The question is not whether you can achieve a double-digit conversion rate; the question is whether you are willing to do what it takes to achieve a double-digit conversion rate.

Expectations for conversion optimization results should be combined with realistic expectations regarding the amount of work required to achieve these results. Because many clients do not understand the investment and commitment required from their team, they give up too soon. Conversion rates won’t increase overnight. You must start by understanding the visitors you are trying to convert. You then have to create hypotheses about these visitors and why they interact the way they do with your website. Then you have to validate these hypotheses by making changes to your website and tracking the customer response. All of these steps require time, resources, and a financial commitment, which is why they must be done accurately and with great focus.

In the physical world, many executives believe sales is a numbers game. The more calls or appointments you book, the more sales you will generate. Let’s assume your sales force is able to convert 10% of their appointments into actual contracts. What would it take to generate more transactions? You shouldn’t discount the fact that making more calls and appointments, if the same averages hold, will translate into more transactions. But most experienced organizations understand the value of trying to convert more of their current pipeline into transactions. Developing new leads and making initial contacts with them is a lot more expensive than focusing on the current pipeline and increasing its output.

The same rules apply to the online world. Sales is both a numbers game and a quality game. You should figure out ways to increase the number of qualified companies or individuals entering your sales pipeline. It is even more important to increase the conversion rate of the current funnel. But which of the two is a better option? In the long run, much as in the physical world, the cost of acquiring new visitors to a website or a campaign is expensive. Converting more of your current funnel into actual paying clients typically costs less.

Conversion optimization puts your customers at the heart of the sales process and yields better results by following three main approaches:

Determine current strong techniques that are working for your organization and enhance them.
Discover weak points in your selling approach and replace them with better tactics that have worked for your particular market.
Continue evaluating the sales funnel and test new elements to increase its conversion rate.

Over the long run, conversion optimization will generate more customers with the same investment in time and money.

One of our clients is a large provider of desktop sharing software, and spends tens of thousands of dollars on pay-per-click (PPC) and banner ads to drive traffic to the landing page of its most popular software product.

This wasn’t enough, though. According to its vice president of marketing, the company’s landing page was “simply not converting.”

He was correct. For every 1,000 visitors who landed on the page, the company generated five orders. That page had a measly 0.5% conversion rate. The VP of marketing gave the optimization team one month to increase the conversion rate; otherwise, they’d have to stop spending money on advertising altogether. Our team was brought on board as a last-ditch effort to rectify the situation.

As the optimization team dug deeper into the page and different campaigns, they discovered that there were many issues with the way our client understood conversion. The first landing page we evaluated was very typical and did not allow visitors to place an order directly on the page. The page explained the software features and benefits, and presented the visitor with an option to place an order with a clearly marked “Start Your Service” button. Clicking on the button took the visitor through a three-step checkout process.

Focusing on a single landing page does not usually produce results. The Conversion Framework asks you to examine the full path, from the point a visitor lands on the site until the point the visitor successfully places an order. Since the client used the same checkout funnel for many other products, they did not want us to evaluate the funnel, and instead wanted our team to focus on the landing page.

When we examined the data more carefully, we discovered that the landing page visitors were actually clicking on the “Start Your Service” button more than we were told. Four percent of the landing page visitors clicked on the button to place an order for the service. As a micro conversion point, all the landing page could do was persuade visitors to move forward in the conversion funnel and start the checkout process. And although 4% was not great, it was doing a lot better than the 0.5% conversion rate the client’s team thought it did.

Of the visitors who clicked on the order button and started the checkout process, only 12.5% completed the checkout and placed an order with the client. The remaining 87.5% were leaving the checkout process. As a result, the overall conversion rate for the campaign was 0.5% (12.5% * 4% = 0.5%).

Our team suggested examining the checkout process to determine why most visitors were not converting. The client, however, insisted that we focus our effort on optimizing the landing page itself. After one month of optimization, we were able to increase the landing page conversion (click-through) to the checkout process from 4% to 14.88%.

Although that was a significant increase in the click-through rate, final orders were still not coming through. Most visitors continued to exit the checkout process. At that point, the client refocused on the checkout process. Completing checkout process optimization increased the overall conversion rate from 0.5% to 6.1%.