For a marketing professional or business owner to get the most out of their marketing investment, it really comes down to three key areas of Internet marketing. The first area is traffic generation.
The second area is website conversion. And the third area is email conversion. As an Internet marketing firm, we refer these three areas of marketing as the three zones. Before getting in to these zones, however, it’s important to be able to track the results of your overall marketing campaign. You want to establish some key metrics to compare and contrast different marketing campaigns that you are running. For a lead generation campaign, the metrics and leading indicators include the cost and volume of unique visitors and leads. The lagging indicators of success include the volume and cost per presentation and sale. Without an understanding of these key metrics, it’s difficult to understand what’s working and what’s not working efficiently.
Now let’s take a look at each zone. In zone one, traffic generation, many people spend a large portion of their marketing dollars. To succeed in zone one, it’s essential to be tracking and comparing the cost per unique visitor to understand which channels are producing the best result. We often see many people get caught up in a particular channel to drive traffic because it’s the latest technology.
Technology is simply an enabler, and each industry and business is different. Some businesses achieve exceptional results in terms of the cost per unique visitor and volume of unique visitors through print and SEO while others achieve great results through display advertising, stand alone emails, and pay per click advertising. It all comes down to what you’re able to buy the media for and how effective your ads are at generating a response. So now you have generated unique visitor volume, now what?
Remember we said that unique visitor volume is a leading indicator? It is. And the reason that we stated that it is a leading indicator is because it is a purely a quantitative indication of success. The lagging indicators including presentations and sales volume give you a qualitpative indication of how each channel is truly performing.
Let’s jump into zone two, website conversion. Now that you have driven traffic to your site, it’s a matter of maximizing the conversion to lead or online sale. This is another key area where a lot of money is won or lost. The difference of a site converting to lead at 5% versus 10% is an impact of double the sales. It is for this reason that websites and landing pages should be properly designed and split tested continuously to get the most out of your traffic generation investment.
There is a lot of psychology in selling and many companies don’t consider this when building their marketing campaigns. Quite often, business owners and marketing professionals generate a lead and send it directly to a sales person to contact the prospect even though the majority of prospects are not ready to make a purchase decision. People buy from people and they need to feel a sense of confidence, credibility, and value before making a purchase decision. This is the purpose of zone three – email conversion.
With email conversion, when the lead is generated, they are dropped in to a campaign which includes a sequence of emails that develop a relationship with the prospect, establish credibility, produce value, and prepare them to attend a sales or marketing presentation and convert to sale at a higher rate. What’s the biggest challenge that you are facing within the three zones?