Summit County Businesses
Conversion Architecture -- The Art of Visually Identifying Your Company's Primary Sales Funnels
A client recently wrote to me expressing two basic ideas - (i) he wanted to eliminate all his PPC traffic with organic search traffic, and (ii) his online marketing strategy was singular in dimension and focus -- to generate reservations. Without a clear online marketing strategy and a well-designed sales conversion architecture, all the fancy site design you can afford, will have little impact on the bottom line.
What follows is how I responded to help this client...
It’s important to realize that PPC campaigns draw from different audiences who have different tendencies than the audience who is predominantly attracted to organic search results. As such, organic search traffic doesn’t have the ability to replace PPC – rather, each drives a fundamentally different buying mind-set to the site. People who have a high propensity for clicking on PPC ads typically exhibit a very low incidence of depending on organic search results. It’s also important to note that there are four times as many people who tend to use organic search recommendations to guide their purchasing recommendations, than people who generally rely on PPC ads to do that for them. Ergo, it’s typical to get four visitors to your site using organic search results for every visitor compelled to click on a PPC or paid search ad. As such, high ranking organic search results are far more valuable than PPC campaigns but they are also harder to achieve especially in competitive markets.
In my view, any online marketing strategy should have a number of tent poles holding up a variety of traffic-generating avenues – both tactical and strategic.
The MyST solution (and any organic search model for that matter) should be considered strategic – often times requiring many months to see the first effects. Ideally, over a period of months and years, a broad and sustainable content base will dominate the search landscape making it near-impossible to not see your domain when searching for related content.
PPC, on the other hand, works [relatively well] as soon you launch it. But it has a relatively high cost-per-visitor, and it has no sustaining value; when it’s turned off it stops working. In contrast – when you publish a great article about say, rafting in Glenwood canyon, each post will find a new [but small] audience every day – every week – every month for many years into the future. Given this, the cost of building a content base, while seemingly steep and requiring significant human-effort, is an investment in accounting periods well out into the future.
I understand you believe that the only metric wothy of measuring success is if visitors buy something. However, I think there’s a significant volume of people who visit a site many times, leave, and then return to buy something on their 10th visit – I know I do this all the time; I’m sure you do as well.
My hunch is that even the market leaders in your industry experience this natural consumer behavior in spades. Given this certain behavior, you have to be cautious about the metrics you adopt to determine failure (or success). To mitigate the possibility of making mistakes about your performance assessments, you need to create a progression of calls to action that help you establish a relationship with a prospect in small steps. Based on your site design – there is only one step; an all or nothing step called a purchase transaction.
"The look of the website should be easy to see, easy to read, and easy to navigate without confusion."
Simplicity is not an irrational attraction; consumers like simple ideas, simple processes, and simple choices. But you cannot over-simplify the online e-commerce process either - prospects become customers over a period of time and typically through a series of touch-points.
Conversion architecture is the art of visually identifying your company's primary sales funnels and leading your visitors to take action. The action could be setting an appointment, sending an email, booking a reservation or picking up the phone to call for more information. It may also include a low level action such as signing up for a newsletter or mailing list for new offerings, updates and specials. Regardless of the action, it is a form of customer conversion and you should have a plan for all the types of actions that will help a new visitor become a paying customer.
To properly develop a conversion architecture, ideally you would start with a mind-map (or other graphical flow chart) that represents the sales conversion strategy that you want to integrate into your site design.
The fact that your site design is ongoing without a conversion architecture detailed in the marketing strategy suggests (to me) that your graphic design project probably doesn’t cover this aspect of your site’s ecommerce architecture or prospect funneling requirements. When you describe the online product marketing and selling process in broad strokes such as “easy to see, easy to navigate, and without confusion”, it’s ambiguous. I understand what you mean, but I don’t really get a sense of what your sales conversion requirements are for all manner of actions. Typically, graphic designers are not concerned with this element of online marketing and are simply relying on your directional queues to create a “look and feel” as opposed to “a look, a feel, and a sales funnel process”.
In my view (purely opinion) it’s not wise to build your site with one selling action in mind (i.e., a reservation or nothing at all). Online marketing is typically a progression of steps –
1. Capture awareness.
2. Capture sustained interest with a minimal email subscription.
3. Multiple brand impressions through subscription marketing, newsletters, direct-to-inbox blog posts, offers, etc.
4. Begin a relationship; the visitor joins your social network, shares your content, fills out an information request form, etc.
5. Sale.
If your architecture hops over steps 1 through 4, your success will be constrained significantly, and especially if your competitors create multiple touch-points that lead prospects down multiple progressive buying funnels.
Online marketing is no different than face-to-face marketing – people want to establish a relationship and often times, they need time to do that.
What follows is how I responded to help this client...
It’s important to realize that PPC campaigns draw from different audiences who have different tendencies than the audience who is predominantly attracted to organic search results. As such, organic search traffic doesn’t have the ability to replace PPC – rather, each drives a fundamentally different buying mind-set to the site. People who have a high propensity for clicking on PPC ads typically exhibit a very low incidence of depending on organic search results. It’s also important to note that there are four times as many people who tend to use organic search recommendations to guide their purchasing recommendations, than people who generally rely on PPC ads to do that for them. Ergo, it’s typical to get four visitors to your site using organic search results for every visitor compelled to click on a PPC or paid search ad. As such, high ranking organic search results are far more valuable than PPC campaigns but they are also harder to achieve especially in competitive markets.
In my view, any online marketing strategy should have a number of tent poles holding up a variety of traffic-generating avenues – both tactical and strategic.
The MyST solution (and any organic search model for that matter) should be considered strategic – often times requiring many months to see the first effects. Ideally, over a period of months and years, a broad and sustainable content base will dominate the search landscape making it near-impossible to not see your domain when searching for related content.
PPC, on the other hand, works [relatively well] as soon you launch it. But it has a relatively high cost-per-visitor, and it has no sustaining value; when it’s turned off it stops working. In contrast – when you publish a great article about say, rafting in Glenwood canyon, each post will find a new [but small] audience every day – every week – every month for many years into the future. Given this, the cost of building a content base, while seemingly steep and requiring significant human-effort, is an investment in accounting periods well out into the future.
I understand you believe that the only metric wothy of measuring success is if visitors buy something. However, I think there’s a significant volume of people who visit a site many times, leave, and then return to buy something on their 10th visit – I know I do this all the time; I’m sure you do as well.
My hunch is that even the market leaders in your industry experience this natural consumer behavior in spades. Given this certain behavior, you have to be cautious about the metrics you adopt to determine failure (or success). To mitigate the possibility of making mistakes about your performance assessments, you need to create a progression of calls to action that help you establish a relationship with a prospect in small steps. Based on your site design – there is only one step; an all or nothing step called a purchase transaction.
"The look of the website should be easy to see, easy to read, and easy to navigate without confusion."
Simplicity is not an irrational attraction; consumers like simple ideas, simple processes, and simple choices. But you cannot over-simplify the online e-commerce process either - prospects become customers over a period of time and typically through a series of touch-points.
Conversion architecture is the art of visually identifying your company's primary sales funnels and leading your visitors to take action. The action could be setting an appointment, sending an email, booking a reservation or picking up the phone to call for more information. It may also include a low level action such as signing up for a newsletter or mailing list for new offerings, updates and specials. Regardless of the action, it is a form of customer conversion and you should have a plan for all the types of actions that will help a new visitor become a paying customer.
To properly develop a conversion architecture, ideally you would start with a mind-map (or other graphical flow chart) that represents the sales conversion strategy that you want to integrate into your site design.
The fact that your site design is ongoing without a conversion architecture detailed in the marketing strategy suggests (to me) that your graphic design project probably doesn’t cover this aspect of your site’s ecommerce architecture or prospect funneling requirements. When you describe the online product marketing and selling process in broad strokes such as “easy to see, easy to navigate, and without confusion”, it’s ambiguous. I understand what you mean, but I don’t really get a sense of what your sales conversion requirements are for all manner of actions. Typically, graphic designers are not concerned with this element of online marketing and are simply relying on your directional queues to create a “look and feel” as opposed to “a look, a feel, and a sales funnel process”.
In my view (purely opinion) it’s not wise to build your site with one selling action in mind (i.e., a reservation or nothing at all). Online marketing is typically a progression of steps –
1. Capture awareness.
2. Capture sustained interest with a minimal email subscription.
3. Multiple brand impressions through subscription marketing, newsletters, direct-to-inbox blog posts, offers, etc.
4. Begin a relationship; the visitor joins your social network, shares your content, fills out an information request form, etc.
5. Sale.
If your architecture hops over steps 1 through 4, your success will be constrained significantly, and especially if your competitors create multiple touch-points that lead prospects down multiple progressive buying funnels.
Online marketing is no different than face-to-face marketing – people want to establish a relationship and often times, they need time to do that.
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© 2012 Created by Jolina Karen.
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