Never Lose Another Prospect: Proven Strategies to Maximize Conversions and Revenue
Olivier Chaine, Lockheed Martin, TicketMaster, USWeb @ Magnify360
Advanced Track

Turn prospects into sales, registrations, trials, etc. Turning traffic and interest into revenue over time.

2.3% is the avg. conversion rate of traffic into leads... 97.7% who come to your site aren't buying/registering/subscribing.

Savvy online customers have high expectations, less patience, while conversion rates are going down, harder to satisfy and convert.

Our home pages are too cluttered, too many hands in the mix. Many marketing mgrs. all get their say = too many links/info on many home pages. The home pages need to be cleaner, with clear calls to action, bigger images, less text, above the fold.

All of your campaigns and emails need to have a call to action and link to sign up, get a trial, take the next step if interested in a product or service.

Refer to notes from this same session during Institute, same slides...

Optimize your forms, A/B test, to see which get more fill-ins. Test the fields, only gather what you need, keep it simple on main form -- then follow up with an invitation to fill in additional information at a second step.

Keyword based headlines -- make the headline match what they searched for to find it, got a 17% life in conversions.

Google Website Optimizer -- to do A/B testing in a real way, free tool.

Understand offer/keyword clicked
Explicit prefs when they fill in forms and tell us info directly
Their browsing behavior is implicit, see where they're going
Forms together = perfect offer as we push them down the sales funnel

Need to careful consider how to message whom and when...

Change pages based on weekdays vs. weekends -- different visitors during those days, swap out pages based on timing might be another way to lift conversions. Same with time of day -- from 8-5, want specific information, transactional -- overnight/evenings, browsing, can have longer pages with more info.

Need to invest in optimizing conversion rates -- start with one page, then make 4 different versions, all keyword targeted to different users, then try 8, and see % conversions go up tremendously.

Faster Optiomizing = Higher Margins and Competitive Advantage