Cut Your Marketing and Make More Sales Online

Isn’t it about time you started managing your website like your sales people? Everyone knows if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Although most companies now have a website, very few company Directors get any viable and actionable information on their website, worst still many Sales & Marketing Managers don’t value their website like their sales and marketing teams.

In an economic environment where value for money is important; where everyone needs sales and new accounts and where there is extreme pressure on costs, “it is a relatively easy win for companies to make more out of their websites” says Steve Harvey-Franklin Internet Consultant with WSI, “most senior executives and marketers should seek training on at least the basics of Internet Marketing such as Search Marketing, Web Analytics and Social Media, so that they can understand the jargon, realise what hidden profits they could be tapping into and better manage their own web marketing agency.”

So what are the key steps to make more out of your internet marketing budget?

1. Start Measuring. Google Analytics is excellent for most sizes of business; use analytics to measure key statistics on a regular basis.
2. Set Goals and Targets. Identify the website behaviour that you want to encourage

Goals may include:

• Sales
• Leads
• Brochure Downloads
• Contact Requests
• Time on Site
• Specific Page Paths

Ie anything that you consider valuable economically or to your brand

Targets may include: Increasing Sales or Leads. This may be additionally broken down to include:

• Increasing Conversion rates
• Decreasing Bounce rates on a page
• Increasing visitors to the Basket
• Decreasing Basket Drop out

1. Set up a simple 1 page report of the vital information that you need either daily, weekly or monthly, depending on the intensity, importance  and volatility of your traffic and  goals.
2. Make the targets measurable and quantifiable

As your system gathers data, you can then start to hone in and ask very specific questions to determine what is making you money and what is losing you money, then your marketing investment decisions become very easy.

For Example:

Once you can focus on a specific section of the site that is driving the most interest, the marketing campaign can be fine tuned or even reduced, by focussing on what is successful or by refining what is not successful. For example,  on the same Keyword :

• Establish the best format for your advert by running 2 adverts with identical headers but different text bodies. Then reverse the test keep the best advert  body  and testing the heading. Using your analytics see which advert works best over time.
• Establish the best page layout and images for your adverts to land on, again in a controlled way varying elements of your web page, possibly running them side by side over time, to eliminate seasonal factors.

This process is known as split testing or multi variant testing

Steve Harvey-Franklin commented that he has seen “remarkable results for our customers by testing and varying significant elements on page. If we can move a client’s conversion rate from 1% to 1.5% their sales are actually increasing by 50%, who wouldn’t be interested in increasing their sales by such volumes?”

Google Landing Page Analysis

In tests that Google performed, they increased their own sign up conversion rate by 56% by testing and making 4 relatively simple changes. In the image above. The page on the right outperformed the page on the left by 56%.

Mike Smith from Ripley Training who runs courses on Internet Marketing and Web Analytics commented that “the need for this level of knowledge, and the results that our courses can drive are switching senior executives onto our new Internet Marketing Courses…….  where we educate them to improve their return on internet investment ”

Most businesses today do not take advantage of how important it is to test regularly. The key for any business wanting to achieve online success is knowing how to communicate to your target audience and knowing that all parties do not act on the same principles. This also allows you to figure out your online ad spend in an effective manner. The average online conversion today is between 1% and 2%, which means that a large portion of ad budgets is not being used effectively.

The key is really to keep the testing simple and uncomplicated and once you have established your benchmarks then you can start the process to target, measure and refine. This can be a simple process or a more complicated one but the key is simply testing, testing and more testing of the right things and you will increase your online conversion.

Steve Harvey-Franklin is an Internet Marketing Consultant
at WSI Yorkshire, the Huddersfield Based Digital Agency