Defining your conversion point and tracking your conversion rates is the best way to ensure any of your marketing efforts are producing the kind of results you hoped for. That’s why we wanted to start a series on lead conversions as far as defining them for your business, ways to effectively track them, and optimizing your website to enhance your conversions. To start, we wanted to define a website goal and how these connect to conversion points.
Find the goal to complete, aka the “Conversion Point”
A goal describes the steps necessary for your customers to complete a profitable transaction. These are fairly standardized, but must be unique and specific to your needs. In fact, there are many articles about what makes a goal, including an article from Mindtools.com about SMART goals, a concept developed by George T. Doran in 1981. A discussion of goals should be a fundamental piece of your discussions with a digital marketing agency.
Goals are also referred to as “conversions”, so when we refer to conversions, we are referring to the goals we want people to achieve when they are on our site.
Examples of goals are:
- Completing a contact form that goes to a sales team member or into a CRM software.
- Logging in to check in a bank balance or take a class.
- Booking an appointment with a doctor.
- Creating a new account.
- Viewing the portion of the page with an office address, business hours and NAP information. NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone number.
- Completing a purchase.
- Signing up for an email list.
- Clicking to browse a specific page on your site or microsite.
- Completing a form or survey.
Not every transaction has to involve revenue, but does add monetary value to the company. Therefore, when you define your goals, you should come up with a value of what that conversion offers to you. As another example of a conversion, an e-Learning company partnered with Squid Ink views a conversion as downloading a course syllabus from their page. This is something unique to their industry, but still shows them valuable information. Like previously mentioned, it is important to find and define your own meaning of a conversion. In fact, the most common formula is as follows:
Conversion Value = Average Order Value * Average Close Rate of Leads
Now, let’s put this into tangible terms. For example, let’s say your average order value is $100. Here is how to calculate conversion value for a form submission or a phone call using hypothetical close rates of leads gathered using these:
- If you close 50% of the form submissions you get online, the conversion value can be calculated as $50.
- If you close 1% of phone call leads, then the value of a phone call to a number you use on your website has a conversion value of $1.
Once you calculate this value for each of your goals, you can set that as the conversion value when you set up your conversion tracking, which we will discuss in the next portion of our series. Remember to have a clear definition of what a conversion means for your business and follow these conversions closely. This can be done easily by taking advantage of tracking tools, which we will discuss more in depth in our upcoming blog, A Conversation on Lead Conversion: Tracking Conversions Effectively.Does that all sound a little overwhelming to take on by yourself? Well, you don’t have to do it alone. Squid Ink’s team of digital marketing gurus can help you understand, define, track, and optimize your lead conversion in a snap. Whether you need assistance strategizing, implementing, executing, or any combination, Squink Ink can offer their knowledge and skill-set for a number of projects to help keep your lead generation and conversion rates moving forward. Schedule a consultation with Squid Ink to start seeing the impact that defining and tracking goals and conversions makes on your profit margins.
