I subscribe to the view that marketing and sales together have to work to grow the revenue for any organization.  Over at Revenue Journal, Kirstan Zhivago articulated very succinctly that a new breed of  Chief Conversion Officer (CCO) is  needed to drive the company’s top line revenue.  She argues that one person needs to be responsible not for just sales or just marketing but rather (just) conversion to guide the efforts of all groups towards the one goal of conversion and empower them to make the tough decisions and get rid of the road blocks.

I love this philosophy, but how does that apply in the organization and who is responsible for each piece. To bring it into sharper focus, let’s meld two concepts together: Zhivago’s “marketing VP” with a conversion funnel.  The conversion funnel is different than a lead or opportunity funnel as it extends the traditional sales funnel to include all of marketing activities right up to the earliest touch point.  To keep things simple, I am only going to divide the funnel into three parts:

1. At the top of the funnel is purely marketing activities that includes both inbound, [webinars, blogs, social media] and more traditional outbound lead generation techniques [tradeshows, e-mail newsletters, direct mail, etc. ] that drive acquisition.
2. The bottom of the funnel is where conversion happens as salespeople engage in conversations with prospects to provide information, over come objections and build trust through stories and shared experiences.
3. And my favorite part: everything in between or as I like to call it,  No man’s land.  This is the arena of persuasion and traditionally where sales and marketing  point the fingers.  Typically this portion of the funnel is punctuated with questions like “Where are the warm leads?” from sales, “Why wasn’t that lead follow-up?” from marketing or disagreements over what was qualified.



With the kind permission of Jim Sterne, one of the more interesting ways I have seen funnel shapes visually expressed is as bar glassware.  The highest conversion rate starts with driving targeted visitors, further dividing them into segments, persuading them with the right message and converting them with the right sales or shopping cart process.

So how do you over come the problems with finger pointing and poor execution that is normally associated with the middle part of the funnel and drive the right kind of conversion shape?

There is no silver bullet that is going to solve all the problems but an organization focused on conversion and driven by a single individual compensated accordingly is a strong start.  The keys to success are strategies and tools that smooth the transitions between job functions and IT systems.

Having set the stage and quickly running out of room in this post, in future entries I will look at the role of a CCO starting at the top of the conversion funnel and explore strategies, tools and hand offs as they apply to each stage.

Since our June 26 webinar is an advanced session on email marketing with Loren McDonald from Silverpop co-presenting, I thought I would take a minute to share an awesome ”before and after” email case study featuring Sitebrand client, Legendary Whitetails. The study isn’t hot of the press; in fact it was picked up by MarketingSherpa back in March.  But you know what, the findings are highly relevant and there’s still a lot of learnings to be learned! According to the Email Experience Council’s recently published “Retail Email Rendering Benchmark Study”, a shocking 53% of marketing execs say they are NOT factoring the realities of “images off” into their email designs. Call me crazy, but there’s a lot of money being left on the table! Let me explain why…

Very simply, this case study zeroes in on the impact of an email design’s ratio of HTML to text…especially as it relates to deliverability and response rates…which of course lead to revenue.

For this study, we did an A/B split test: the retailer’s image-based campaign vs. a nearly identical ‘email-optimized’ version which factors in best practices for preview pane/image blocking software.

KISS (Keep it simple, silly!) was the driving factor behind the creative strategy for this campaign. The message was simple and compelling “Free shipping for a limited time”; therefore the creative was simple and straightforward, using common look and feel elements from the web and previous campaigns. The only difference between the two versions was that text from the optimized version was coded in HTML (not images) in order to render properly even when images were disabled. In the screenshots below, you can see how both versions appear with images on…and then off…

While the concept, message and creative may be summed up as ’simple’, the results are nothing short of amazing. To get meaningful, accurate results, the database was randomly split into two with each containing almost 33,000 recipients.  

The optimized version received higher results across the board. Deliverability went up from 78% to 98%, opens climbed from just under 10% to over 13%, clicks went up from 3% to nearly 5%. While, aside from deliverability, the improvement may not seem too dramatic, the most important metric, conversions, were unbelievable. The ‘before email’ brought in 139 purchases at a 0.4% conversion rate. The ‘after’ version brought in a whopping 495 purchases, or 1.5% conversion rate.  This represented a revenue lift in excess of 379%.

With results like these, Legendary Whitetails could clearly see the lifts associated with optimizing emails for the inbox. And the “after” is the “always” when it comes to their email designs.

While this campaign may not be glamorous, complex or even have any bells and whistles, it does have the power of best practices and respect for the email medium backing it up. The numbers don’t lie and they show a compelling argument for what email expertise can do for a retailer’s bottom line. Unfortunately, as exposed by the EEC, many retailers are ‘behind the times’ in this area.

That said, I believe this case study and its results are another ”wake-up call” to those who’ve been ignoring or skeptical of industry expertise.

In closing, I have two questions and I encourage you to comment with your thoughts:

1. As a recipient of retail emails, are you seeing a trend towards emails that render well even with with images off or are you still receiving lots of image-heavy, direct mail style emails?
2. If your email client defaults to images off, how often do you turn images on? Never? Sometimes? Often?

If you talk to ten different eCommerce sites that are using Analytics, the odds are good that at least five of them are using Google Analytics.  If you talk to ten different Google Analytics (GA) users, probably only one of them is using their Goal tracking for anything other than cart conversions.  Long story short, an awfully large percentage of retailers aren’t getting a lot of value out of Google analytics.

 This is in part due to the fact that most companies using GA don’t tend to have a full time analyst asking specific questions of the website data, and also due to the fact that while GA is great free software, there is no vendor support in terms of best practices for tool usage.  (If you want an analytics vendor with a top-notch customer support/analysis team, look no farther than our friends at Coremetrics)

Here are two alternate goals, and one new way to look at them using Google Analytics. They are easy to set up and monitor, they will give you a lot more visibility into website outcomes, and will help you start asking the right questions about what you can be doing to optimize your website for increased conversions. 

For additional information about how to set up goals in Google Analytics, click here. 

Goal 1: ‘About Us’ page visitor conversion 

If a visitor cares enough to want to learn about your business, they are that much closer to converting.  Set up a goal funnel with the first page being the About Us page URL, and the last page being the transaction completed page.  You now have an report that shows you the conversion rates of people who visit your ‘about us’ page as part of a session.  Once you have the results in, you can start applying changes to this page in an attempt to increase conversion outcomes.

Goal 2: Micro Conversion Points 

A micro conversion point is a non shopping cart transaction.  Examples include newsletter signup, catalog request or wish list signup.  Better understanding of how many visitors choose these micro-conversions will give a better understanding of what a visitor really wants from your site.  Also if any of these micro-conversion points has multiple steps, you can build a goal funnel and look at step abandonment, just like for your shopping cart.

Goal Tip: Use filters to segment your goal results 

By filtering your Google results based on different traffic source segments, you can get a much better understanding of how visitors from different sources convert for different goals.  For example, what does the cart abandonment funnel look like for direct type in visitors vs. paid search traffic?  Setting up funnels is also fairly straightforward, and you can see a more detailed posting from the team at Lunametrics on how to accomplish this by clicking here.

A better understanding of site outcomes equals an ability to optimize them over time.  Taking the steps above will add invaluable marketing insight to your analytics tool.

Cheers,

Jim