Many shoppers educate themselves online before making a purchase. Floor traffic has dried up compared to the good old days. Visitors that do show up in person are better armed with more product knowledge than ever before. In this day and age, a purchase often originates from digital marketing efforts. This means you’d best be ready to do battle in this electronic arena. It’s where the shoppers are. The key is not how many you can reach, but rather how many you can convince to respond to your “call to action.”
A conversion is the point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action. There are many types of conversions: an e-mail open, phone call, a text response, a click through inside an e-mail to a landing page, or a click through to a page off of a search or a social media ad. These are all types of conversions in hopes of leading to the ultimate conversion: a purchase. At Prospects International, the ads we place for our clients have a simple message and goal which is to get a user (be it pay per click or social media) to click through to our client’s landing page or application.
That is the first conversion in the sales process. The second is when a visitor to our landing page clicks through to receive whatever call to action we have laid in front of them. The carrots are varied, but some staple offers are: an inventory list, a buyer’s guide, an app to help you chose the perfect piano, or a teacher referral promise. These items have true value which we offer in exchange for the right to acquire a prospect’s contact information. These items are why we can state with integrity that our landing pages and apps are optimized for conversions.
Simply stated, we get folks to perform an action. Optimization for conversion elicits an action. When optimization occurs, it eliminates the frustration of knowing, through analytics, that you have a strong number of visitors, but not a great deal of tangible opportunities.
We view web visitors most often as un-escorted visitors. All visitors are welcome and a positive thing, but without optimization techniques, the visitors come and stay as long as they please and leave when they please, often without a trace. Take weekend sales events: A great deal of preparation goes into the staging to make the savings feel real to the attendees. The sale site is most often dressed up aesthetically to portray that a special event is taking place. There is a greeter, a registration form, a pre-talk and an assigned sales person to show the specially acquired and staged piano inventory to the potential buyers.
The sales person is in charge of steering the attendees to the right pianos. It is a tried and true process which has served the industry well and aided in the sale of countless millions of dollars worth of instruments. My point being, it is a process. Having digital activity and web traffic without optimization is the same as taking away the greeter, appointments, pipe and drape, the pre-talk story to make the opportunity real, and assigned sales representative and allowing the traffic at a weekend sales event to come on in and wander around unescorted. They would be able to walk around like they were in a piano museum and let someone know if they saw something they wanted to talk about.
That is digital marketing without well thought out goals for optimization, activity without structure or channeling. The initial goal of digital marketing was to get traffic to the web in hopes that they would feel compelled to want human interaction. Create a lead, so to speak. At Prospects International, we cut to the chase and flow leads to our clients, whether they visit a web site or not. Digital Marketing has now turned to a new age. Ok, enough of that.
The first LeadFlow conversion goal, using the term in its ultimate sense, is to sell through to 10% of the leads generated. The attainable goal for a digital sales person who becomes proficient is 20%. For Event Flow, those numbers are slightly higher because of the urgency factored in by virtue of the fact that it is a harvesting event. The tiers of performance relative to that program would be 15% and 30%. During Event Flow’s first annual beta test in 2013, we provided over 500 annual leads in a B sized market and the dealer sold over 50 units. Point being, these are real world numbers, not board room fluff.
We think it’s important to address “ultimate conversion expectations” because that is the normal litmus test determining whether or not a client will succeed. If the client hits the first benchmark of converting 10%, chances are good that they will continue to get better at converting interest into sales and head toward that 20% number. Let me say that the best overall digital results are found when there is an Internet Sales Director who lives, eats, and breathes the internet activity.
This is a trend we don’t see changing in the near future.
Prospects International LeadFlow and EventFlow programs perform the function of capturing piano interest and funneling it to our clients. We create the initial conversion(s) so that you can pursue the ultimate conversion: the purchase. As lead generation specialists, we respect the need for other forms of digital marketing and the necessary support it gives to piano dealers. Because of our commitment to innovation, we believe that the future is bright. We are a digital marketing think tank that interacts intensively with our clients to achieve the best possible results. The basis for most all of our new approaches and lead generation methods are results. We urge you to commit to digital excellence and realize that this is where the largest school of fish are currently swimming. We also want to remind you that we are here to help optimize your performance should you see fit to contact us, which would be a welcome conversion.
Happy Selling,
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