If your website isn't generating 5 new contacts/leads/sales for every 100 visitors, something is wrong and you are throwing away an enormous amount of money on a marketing funnel that is failing at the last stage.
TLDR — Summary
Every person who fills out a contact form on your website is worth at least $250 in the marketing costs required to get them there. So if you have 100 new visitors per month, and 99.5% of these visitors are bouncing, you are losing 95 potential clients with an inefficient marketing funnel that fails once they arrive at your website. So does it make sense to invest $1,000 or even $5,000 in optimizing your website so that it captures an extra 1% of new contacts per month? Yes! Instead of 1 new contact per month you could be getting 2, over 12 months those same optimizations will continue bringing you 24 contacts worth over $6,000 in marketing value, and actually far more in sales revenue (depending on your personal lead conversion rate and lifetime value of a customer). If we captured 5% of those visitors you would be getting 60 new contacts worth $15,000 in marketing costs. Stop letting so many visitors bounce!
Lead Generation Is Key to Growth
For service oriented businesses, success is determined by the quantity and quality of leads. Your website is the central hub where leads are funneled from all your various marketing efforts (ads, social media, SEO, networking), with the goal that a certain percentage will like what they see and eventually fill out a contact form or call you.
A business can only grow organically to a certain size based solely on referrals from happy customers. But relying on referrals alone leaves a business in a permanently precarious financial position, without any security of when the next client will arrive. In order to grow beyond this phase (necessary justify the investment necessary to scale) you need a reliable and scalable sales funnel.
How much is a single contact worth?
How much money, time, energy do you spend to get one person to your website? What percent of people who arrive at your website actually contact you? What percent of contacts turn into actual sales? What is one sale worth?
With this information, working backwards you are empowered to know how much a single contact is worth. And you can also then prioritize and justify the investment to improve your website so that it greatly increase the ratio of people who contact you versus those who abandon your website without taking action.
The cost of acquiring leads will vary by industry and product/service. But if we look at a few examples you can begin to understand the market value of one qualified lead for your business. A typical direct email marketing service will costs $250 for a scheduled meeting with one qualified lead. Someone in the Real Estate industry could pay a service like realtor.com $1,000 for contact information for a single qualified buyer/seller. Or you could pay for online advertisements that might cost $2+/click, so if your website has an average 0.5% conversion rate, each person who eventually fills out your contact form costs you $400+.
How much is one sale worth?
For the Real Estate market, 67% of buyers and 82% of sellers actually work with the first person they contact. So that means most realtors will get at least a 50% closing rate after first contact. That's incredible! Your situation may be lower, based on the Lifetime Value of a Customer (LVC) you can calculate the value of a single contact, e.g. 2 contacts will result in a sale with a $30,000 commission, so each contact could be worth $15,000!
How much is your website worth?
For the sake of this case study, let's assume the costs are $250 for a single contact. If you currently have 100 visitors to your website every month, how many actually contact you? If you are an average website, you probably get a 0.5% conversion rate, which means you get one contact for every 200 visitors. That means your website is generating 1 new contact every 2 months, which makes your website worth $125/mo. That basically just pays for itself.
But if you could make improvements to your website that increase conversion rates to 5%, that means you'd now generate 5 contacts per month, which makes your site worth $1,250/mo. When you consider it that way, it's easy to justify the cost of making these improvements, because it's going to pay for itself! And once you have conversion rates that are greater than 1%, you can mathematically justify the investment in advertising to drive not 100 but 1000 visitors per month to your website. At that same conversion rate, now you are getting 50 new contacts per month, which is worth $12,500 in marketing costs, and far more in sales revenue.
When you realize that every conversion is worth $250, you rightly begin to feel the loss of the 99.5% of visitors that are bouncing without taking action.
Next Steps: What Should I Do?
Ask us for a consultation to help with the following priorities:
Analytics. Begin tracking your traffic and conversion rate in Google Analytics to create a baseline to understand how to act.
Strategy. Determine what improvements to your website are the lowest hanging fruit to increase conversion rates.
Design & Writing. Make improvements to your website. Create engaging design to capture attention and set yourself apart from your competitors. Strategize your best value propositions that will answer questions and overcome objections. Write delightful content that builds trust. Add clear calls to action to compel visitors to contact you.
Pivot. Test our ideas, analyze the data results, and make changes until we see optimum performance.
Increase Traffic. Once your website starts converting more than 1% of visitors into contacts, you can start to justify marketing to increase the total number of visitors.
