Lead Generation Case Study: CONTINUED
B) Answers for: Why are only two percent becoming leads? How do we drive more leads?
It is a classic challenge. Our client knew a lot about the small fraction of visitors who convert, but little about the 98% who didn’t. The lack of this information hindered them from increasing conversion beyond 2%. They started to believe that a 2% conversion rate was their ceiling. It wasn’t. Here is what we found:
The “2% average” conversion rate told only part of the story. The actual conversion rate varied extensively for different sub-segments of Decision Makers. For example, our client was converting a healthy 4% of those coming to evaluate solutions, but only 1% of those early in the purchase cycle. This uncovered a large missed opportunity since many of those early in the purchase cycle were planning to buy in the next three to six months, but were slipping through the cracks on the website.- So, why didn’t those earlier in the purchase cycle convert? When our client originally built this site, they had made the reasonable assumption that the online target audience was similar to the people that they reached offline. So, they built a site to meet the needs of those later in the purchase cycle. However, as their online marketing evolved, many more visitors were earlier in the cycle. Since the site didn’t speak to or meet the needs of these visitors, they left and most never came back.
Results
Our recommendations focused on making the site work for Decisions Makers from early in the purchase cycle through late in the cycle. Per our recommendations, our client made critical enhancements to the homepage and landing pages. This contributed to the other half of the 85% increase in conversion rate.
C) Answers for: How is the site performing beyond lead generation…?
Lead generation rates, important as they are, only show part of the story. They don’t tell how the site affected perceptions, actions, and more. Since our client had additional business goals for the site, she wanted to know how the site performed against these goals and how to perform better.
The verdict? The site needs to be fixed. We found that the site performed poorly on a series of important metrics. For example, purchase intent among decision makers actually decreased due to a visit to the site, especially for those early in the purchase cycle. This reinforced and extended our other findings. This also provided the evidence needed to get the company to fund the improvements. - The cause? The “Resource” section and “Testimonials”. Decision Makers visiting this content were actually less interested in purchasing than before they viewed it. Our client had long felt that this content needed to be improved, but had no idea that it actually did damage – you simply couldn’t tell that from web analytics data.
Results
The head of marketing had wanted to overhaul the site for a long time, but the President didn’t believe that it was necessary. Given the traffic data that they had had, he was comfortable with the site and just wanted to squeeze more leads from it. Upon seeing and discussing these findings, the President stated: “We need to get going on redoing this website. This [information] shows us exactly what we need to do. Let’s get it done.” Getting the resources to redesign the site was no longer a problem…
D) Answers for: How do we improve the campaigns?
The online campaigns were expected to play an increasingly important role in driving new leads, but the company did not feel like they had a handle on how to improve them. They just weren’t getting any diagnostics showing why each was performing well or poorly and how to fix them. We found that:
- Many campaigns weren’t doing well because they weren’t driving the target audience. By integrating “who” is visiting with their clickstream, we were able to see which campaigns drove the target audience and which did not. For example, only 25% of the traffic driven by Campaign #3, an unbranded search campaign, was the target audience. This was the reason that this campaign’s qualified conversion rate was only 0.9%. We were able to see exactly which ad copy in this campaign was and was not effective at driving the target, providing clear improvement recommendations to the client.
- Offline campaigns and social media were VERY effective. While their online campaigns needed to be improved, their offline initiatives were extremely successful in driving the right audience to the site.
Results
Our client made campaign optimization changes based on the insights that we provided. These changes reduced the cost of driving a Decision Maker to the website by 40%. Coupled with the conversion improvements, the campaigns became highly profitable. Not only did they drive more leads per dollar spent, our client was also able to launch additional campaigns which previously weren’t profitable.
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