Connect the Dots Between Marketing and Sales
As marketers, we spend a lot of time focusing on how to attract customers. Open rates, click-thru rates, visit times and bounce rates are some of our most-watched metrics for lead-generation activities. For SEO efforts, we pour over ranking positions, page authority, domain authority and more. While all of these things are important indeed, they can at times distract us from what we really need to be focusing on—sales.
At the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter how many unique or repeat visitors our site had or how many people left a page after how much time. What matters is how many conversions we achieved and what the revenue from those conversions is.
The 1-2 Punch
The businesses that will be able to outlast their competition are the ones that connect the dots between marketing and sales. They really are not opposing teams but very much one unified team. Search engine optimization, email marketing, paid ads, remarketing ads and more are like the first members of a relay team. They set things up and create the momentum—and then hand it over to the team that must finish the job.
Your website should really be thought of as a sales engine and developed with conversions in mind. Certainly, for e-commerce sites, this is rather obvious (although everyone knows of such sites that do a very poor job at facilitating this). But even for businesses in which ultimate sales happen offline, that online conversion such as filling out a contact form, calling you or something else must remain the primary goal.
Don’t Ignore Offline Efforts
A friend of mine was complaining to me the other day. While at his Dell laptop he received a notification that his Dell printer was low on ink. The notification included a link, clearly with the intent to buy more ink. He clicked on the link and was taken to the main Dell home page. Talk about a disappointment and high level of customer frustration. He counted and it took him 14 clicks to get to the shopping cart. That’s no joke.
What should have happened is that the link should have taken him right to a shopping cart page with the ink for his printer already added to the cart prompting him only to complete the purchase. If he had made prior purchases, his payment and shipping information could also have been pre-populated. A huge part of making a sale is about making it easy for the customer. Do not make them work for it—you are the one that should be working for the sale, not the customer.
Keep Your Eye on the Prize
When developing and executing any marketing campaign or web update, walk through the customer experience from beginning to end. Think about how you could more easily facilitate that “buy” action at any step in the process.
When you do this, you not only get a particular customer to convert one time but you are far more likely to create a repeat customer. Ease of doing business with a company is important to customers today who have limited time to research or conduct certain transactions. Let yourself be the company that gives this to people.
