Big Numbers and Small Ratios- Making the Web a Better Salesperson

The latest Internet Statistics Compendium from eConsultancy contains some fascinating numbers.

Multichannel retailers are focusing their efforts on their websites (88%), email campaigns (84%) and social media activity (66%). Most B2B marketers (69%) are expecting their budgets to remain fairly flat over the coming year. Their top priorities are generating new leads (60%) and converting those leads into customers (57%) as opposed to creating brand awareness (45%).

So we have an environment where companies are trying to create and convert more leads, using online tools, without increasing their budgets.

That may be sensible: money doesn’t seem to be the problem. According to ZenithOptimedia $56.8 billion was spent driving traffic to websites last year. But as we have highlighted before, only 2-3% of visitors actually convert. Amazingly only 36% of marketers report being dissatisfied with that stat. As our own James Tew has pointed out: “If the web was your marketing manager, you’d give them a bonus. If it was your sales director, you’d fire them.”

The conversion rate is (almost) never going to be 100%, but when you are spending a measurable amount of money to bring each visitor to your website, surely it makes sense to try and increase this pathetic ratio?

The typical approach when companies look to address this problem is split or multivariate testing: seeing how different versions of your website affect buyer behaviour. But this approach is problematic for many: it is time-consuming, expensive, requires expertise, and needs a reasonable number of visitors against which to test. It also only addresses a small fraction of the potential reasons why your conversion rate might be low.

We’re taking a different approach. We want to treat every single visitor to a website as an individual. Get to know them and treat them appropriately. We believe that the more we can help companies to understand their online prospects, and the easier and more efficient we can make it to respond to those prospects’ needs, the more chance they have of turning those prospects into customers.

That’s the dream at the heart of CANDDi Prospect Analytics. We hope we can make it come true for you and your business.