From Traffic To Conversions

While the majority of our time during the past five years has been spent increasing traffic to websites, we are starting to look for more ways to help clients with conversions. It seems like a fairly logical progression for us and our customers. More traffic is almost always a good thing, but what businesses need most are more sales. The more experienced Internet marketing companies have created proven systems for driving targeted eyeballs, so the next challenge is figuring out how to turn eyeballs into dollar signs. That seems to be a direction we are headed in now.

A few years ago I read a book titled Call to Action by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. Much of it pointed to developing pages, paths, and content based on the anticipated “personas” of your visitors. If you had a good idea of who your visitors were, you could lead similar ones down a path toward a conversion based on their needs. While this was the first book on the subject I’d read, it never seemed like a practical approach for small business owners and for those on a tight web marketing budget. At the same time, the concepts appeared to work well for bigger companies like the diamond store in their main case study.

I am currently reading another book by the Eisenberg brothers titled Waiting For Your Cat To Bark. This one again builds on the personas approach to improving conversions, but so far it is an easier and more practical read. I am hoping to find that it also includes some information we can use to help the companies we work with.

One of the best books I have found on the subject of improving conversions comes from Seth Godin. If you don’t follow Seth’s blog or read his books, I’d highly recommend you check them out. Surprisingly to me, most of our customers are not familiar with Seth’s work - even though I think he has one of the greatest marketing minds of our time. Anyway, the book I am referring to is an older one  (from 1999) titled Permission Marketing and it is all about learning how to get permission from your potential customers to market to them now and in the future - in exchange for giving them something of value.

We’ve applied Godin’s Permission Marketing principles to dozens of websites via an email marketing tool called Aweber (affiliate link). This tool is a great way to capture leads and improve website conversions by getting some basic information about your site visitors. On just one of our customer’s sites they are averaging over 700 leads per month using this tool (a great value for about $20 per month to start).

Converting website visitors into leads is a big topic of discussion and we are just getting started here in Des Moines. It makes sense that customers are much more interested in learning how to turn traffic into leads rather than just building more traffic - and I can see this becoming a bigger part of our service offerings in the future. As always, I’ll keep you updated on our progress and we’d like to get your feedback on the subject too!