Bridging the Gap Between Conversions and Sales Online

Businesses are beginning to understand the amazing opportunity the online space offers them, and are now moving towards it quickly. As more consumers search for products or services online, it becomes increasingly important to determine the value of every interaction with your brand. When a prospect visits your website, micro site, or online community, and responds to a call-to-action, in online marketing we define this as a ‘conversion’. Depending on your goals, offerings, and business structure (B2B, B2C), a conversion might be as subtle as a form submission requesting additional information (whitepaper, case study, etc.), or it could be as obvious and instant as an online purchase transaction. While true eCommerce websites revolve around online purchases, others create opportunities for offline sales, including those which occur at a much later point in the sales cycle, thus creating a gap between conversions and sales. Understanding how to reduce this gap between a non-transactional conversion and an actual sale is crucial to extracting maximum value from any online presence. Listed below are three tactics worth considering.

1) Optimize Your Online Presence and Leverage Local Search

Crucial to increasing the chance of converting a prospect into a customer is the relevancy of the information offered. The often brief span between information gathering and purchase is the critical moment in which your website must entice the prospective customers with the required product or service, and then convince them to take action. To this end, optimizing your online presence to provide targeted, relevant content is essential to gaining prospects’ attention—and keeping it.

Leveraging local search is one particularly effective way to engage users and drive relevant traffic to your site. Many businesses, and eCommerce sites in particular, struggle with tuning into the local online market, and instead put all their efforts toward generic product searches. Targeting local searchers goes a long way toward reducing the total length of your sales cycle, and local clicks are often better qualified leads, which in turn drive higher conversions. Consider a typical search for a product online, a camera for example. The search results include multiple listings for companies that sell cameras, but if there were also a link to a page for the Ritz Camera store closest to your zip code, you might be more likely to purchase from this store – either online or in person. Leveraging local search has the potential to drive loyal, local traffic to your site as well as your physical location, should you have one.

So what are some specific ways to leverage the advantages of targeted local traffic for your website, blog or Facebook page?

• Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and best practices to show up in local searches with the top search engines
• Provide flexible buying options – on- or offline
• Provide quick and easy directions to your local sales rep, store, or dealership, to facilitate rapid connection with the prospect

2) Create a Behavioral Model to Prioritize Leads

Marketers often use traditional lead generation practices as part of their online efforts by offering brochures, demos, whitepapers, and other content assets in exchange for registration information, gathered through an online form. Too often, these web inquiries are considered “warm”, and passed to the sales team as qualified leads. Unfortunately, the sales team may not agree that these leads are warm enough, and it’s likely they might not be actively pursued.

Along the same lines, it is absolutely critical that sales and marketing establish common terminology, and come to a consensus on lead classification and definition of value. One solution here is the implementation of a lead scoring system whereby teams can clearly prioritize the leads generated, and encourage active follow-ups. The scoring system applies a statistical method to assign a point value to your prospects based on any prior interaction with your company, and their projected needs for your product or service. For example, a prospect who is further along in the sales process, and engages more frequently (e.g. requests a whitepaper, or additional information), would usually receive a higher lead score.

A successful scoring model would typically assess and factor in:

• Level of prospect’s engagement through multiple touch points
• Size of the company
• Annual sales volume

The development of a custom scoring model unique to your organization is essential. Equally important is a lead-capture/nurture system that is capable of pulling data from multiple sources, including the CRM, sales database, contact management systems, and other relevant third party data. Another solid tactic is to incorporate third party research companies to help blend background data with behavioral data and further assess levels of lead scoring and qualification.

3) Invest in a Sales Automation Tool

Given that not every click-through becomes a prospect, and not every prospect will lead to a sale, the sales cycle can be fairly long. Proper nurturing of leads in this scenario requires several contacts and/or interactions with the prospect before a sale ever happens. But tracking and servicing all the prospects in a system presents a significant set of logistical and organizational challenges. These complexities can potentially be solved by investing in e-CRM or sales automation tools, such as Eloqua or Salesforce.com, to assist in making informed decisions and acting accordingly at the right stage of the sales process.

Sales Automation tool benefits might include:

• Centrally located prospect data can be analyzed and mined for trends and variances to help refine the conversion process
• More customer-centric conversion process
• More personalized interactions with prospects, based on their individual preferences and behaviors
• Sophisticated segmentation to split prospects into more precise groups
• Automated communication according to the prospect’s stage in the decision-making process

Conclusion

As online marketing continues to grow, it becomes imperative for marketers to develop a successful conversion platform that will translate leads into sales. Throughout the process, leveraging SEO tactics like local search, implementing new lead scoring methodologies, and consolidating data using a sales automation tool will ensure your conversion process becomes tighter and smoother, and in turn, will help bridge the gap between conversions and sales.