Non-Line Blogging

What will you do with the 97% of visitors who won’t “convert” on your website today?  You know, the hundreds of people you’ve paid lots of money to get to your site?  Probably nothing – unless you have worked on your registration strategies.  Here is the quick and easy way to convert more of your hard-earned traffic for a really low cost... 

Some companies are recognising that they are wasting money on driving traffic just to harvest a small percentage of sales:  There are probably a lot of non-customers who will soon be customers, but sadly with your competitors because you can't get back in touch with them.  Avinash Kaushik in his excellent blog illustrates this with his usual elegent simplicity...

This suggests that as people move around your site they are seduced by your marketing and may gradually become tempted to convert.  But quite often there is no chance for people to register their interest and you cannot re-market to them. No email address means no future contact that you can initiate and there's nothing you can do.  What a waste.  How frustrating

That therefore means that we have a chance to introduce a second tier into our conversion programme, taking some of the non-converted customers and working hard at getting them to part with some personal data.  I've taken the liberty of amending Avinash's diagram to explain this.  It is not unrealistic to expect 5% or even 10% of your most qualified prospects to want to enter a permission-based email marketing programme.

Without this view we only have one way to convert visitors, so let's pretend we are looking at people who have arrived at our site via a premium search term.  Your only way to value them is via conversion rate...

All your acquisition marketing is invested into the “converted” visitors and they carry a hefty £16.70 cost per sale.  However, what if we could work really hard on converting some “suspects” into “prospects” so we can build a file to re-market to...

Now, let’s be realistic and assume that in the next week we can convert 20% through a follow-up email (or better still an email programme).  Now we can pick up sales for peanuts...

So, factoring in the new sales through a follow-up programme into the overall campaign cost we have a really staggering conversion rate that is almost 40% less than...

If we can create a “value exchange” that gets 10% of interested visitors to part with an email address we can therefore increase sales and reduce cost per sale for a campaign. This means that you can probably afford to pay more per click and generate even more sales or make poor-performing media cost-justify.  And all it needs is a couple of days working on your registration strategy.

I will talk about this in more detail in my next blog but for now here are 3 really quick wins for kick-starting your registration programme, all relating to the visibility of the registration form

Be bold.

Quite often the registration is a sad forlorn box tucked beneath the fold of the home page.  Ironically, once people leave the homepage they are probably more engaged and would have been likely to register...had they been able to see the registration form. 

MarketingSherpa is using a cookie-based “Roadblock Registration” at present so that every single visitor will see their email registration.  It may scare a few people off but it may also dramatically increase conversion rates...test it yourself and see what impact it has. 

Be seen

One client I worked with recently only had a registration form on the home page.  By placing the form on 4 pages they generated 4 times more email addresses straight away.  It’s that easy.  Failing that, have it on the primary navigation so that it is visible on each page.  Once you understand the immense value of prospect registration you will probably give your form access to much more valuable web site “real estate” at the expense of other weaker content. 

Be relevant.

Working for the fashion brand Kangol a few years ago we worked hard on making the “value exchange” relevant to where people were on their site journey.  It was not hard and it made the experience more relevant and boosted registration rates by 10% for every page...  

• If you were on the “Find Nearest Store” page the copy was “Want to hear when new stores near you stock our products?  Sign up for our emails”. 
• If you were on the “Spotted wearing Kangol” pages the copy was “Be the first to know what Kangol stuff the stars are wearing – sign up for our emails.”  
•  If you were on the “Products” pages the copy was “Hear about new products as soon as they’re launched – sign up for our emails” 

So, think strategically about why you should gather “non-converted” prospect details and work hard on making the process as efficient as possible.  Next blog we’ll look at what the US market calls “reciprocity” but what we in the UK still refer to as “bribery”...what ”value exchange” will make prospects part with their valuable personal data.