Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

With every business scrambling today to do more with less, it surprises me how many are missing the very best way to increase leads or sales with existing resources.

Marketers call it conversion optimization, which borders dangerously on being jargon but I haven’t thought of anything better to call it yet. What we’re talking about is paying attention to the points in your marketing process where you want your prospects to take action and tweaking those points to get a greater percentage of visitors to do that.

Sales people do this all the time. They are regularly judged on how well they turn qualified opportunities into sales (the closing ratio). But marketing people for some reason have stayed away from creating a better process instead focusing solely on driving more website traffic or generating more leads.

This is expensive – especially if you are driving leads into an inefficient marketing system.

If you think about your prospects’ buying process there are likely to be several points at which the prospects decide to keep moving forward toward a purchase – or not.

Here are a few common examples:

• Your homepage.
• Newsletter and other subscriptions
• Product demos
• Free trials
• Trial-to-customer conversions
• Landing pages
• Contact Us forms
• Download whitepapers or reports
• Event registrations
• Any link you want your visitors to click on

Get more from what you already have.

Increasing the number of people who take any one of these actions ultimately increases your sales or sales opportunities. Over time, even the slightest increases compound into big numbers. It’s the same “power of compounding interest” argument the Motley Fools and other investment advisors use to convince us to invest early and often.

Let’s look at product demos as an example.

Suppose that currently 50% of prospects who experience your product demo become customers and suppose that each new customer is worth $2500 a year. Here’s what happens if you increase the demo-to-customer ratio just 5% a month.

Imagine how much your revenue can grow if you optimize multiple conversion points. It’s surprisingly easy and immensely rewarding. And the best part may be that you can get more leads without spending more money on lead generation.

If you’re new to conversion optimization, you’re not alone; and if you act fast you can get a real jump on your competition – especially those who are cutting back on spending and watching their pipelines deteriorate.

Tatum Marketing runs conversion optimization programs for all kinds of clients. Contact Us if you want some help.

** Inspiration for the above chart comes from a Future Now video.

Technorati Tags: conversion optimization, conversion rate, leads, traffic, sales, prospects