TURN YOUR WEBSITE INTO A PROFIT ENGINE

TURN YOUR WEBSITE INTO A PROFIT ENGINE

Turning your website into a profit engine: where to start In a competitive market, generating more leads from your website traffic has become crucial to maximising ROI. Today s technology sees both sales and marketing approaches continually shifting in an effort to stay one step ahead of the consumer and increase profit margins. This whitepaper will explore which approaches are currently working, which ones are emerging in the market, the facts and statistics to back them up and the tools you can use to increase your own profit margin. Contents: Current trends for sales & marketing.....3 The evolution of website design...3 How Google Analytics is an enabler....4 Why lead generations growth is exponential.. 4 Website personalisation: It is here to stay....5 How to make visitor tracking less invasive..5 Increasing your average order value on site...6 Why your ROI lies in lead nurturing.....7 Current statistics..7 How marketing automation can help 8 Effective Lead Management.. 9 Tracking conversion rates and ROI.9 Implementing successful future practices. 10

Current trends for sales & marketing Cold calling and marketing to every channel at your fingertips are no longer acceptable means of generating new leads and therefore, generating more ROI. However, as lead generation ingrains itself into the online world, best practices are still being developed. Marketing can no longer be expected to just generate leads through different mediums. Using data to develop targeted strategies and reduce costs are key priorities in 2015, as is the development of lead nurturing and marketing automation campaigns. Sales, too, are moving away from quantity leads and focusing on the quality of their sales pitch and product. As personalisation has developed online, so too has the sales strategy. Business Development Managers are expected to know the client in advance and tailor the product to suit their needs. These changes are validating the age old saying; the customer is always right, and enhancing it by adding the customer is inactive until convinced. After all, just 2% of traffic reportedly fills out contact information forms on your website. Moving forward, your business plan must successfully address the latter statement of the customer s persona for both your sales and marketing departments. Case in point would be Twitter s new Project Lightning. The feature gives Twitter users and non-users the same access to real-time events as they unfold online. The feature will be hosted on Twitter s homepage for the use of everyone. By creating a feature that doesn't require any sign up details or commitment from their customers, Twitter is set to increase their engagement and sign up rates tenfold. Customers now want everything for free, but with the correct technology and business practices in place, you can still turn your website into a profit engine. The evolution of website design To address your profit engine, you must first address your website design. Often taken for granted, website design is seen as responsible for your company s credibility and authenticity according to general consumers. The following key features are essential for your website to thrive financially: Quick loading times - if slower than 3 seconds you lose 46% of your traffic

Responsive web design the market is mobile, your consumers are mobile, and therefore your website must be adaptable to any device Quality content content marketing is here to stay and your website must meet Google s Panda restrictions to maintain a high Google ranking 40% of traffic will bounce from your web page if they do not like the design Intuitive user journey users must be able to get where they want within 3 clicks to become an interested lead How Google Analytics is an enabler You would be forgiven for thinking that Google Analytics solves all your marketing problems when it comes to collecting detailed data that shapes your future business plans. However, if Google Analytic best practices aren t adhered to, results can cause business plans to become stationary. Let us look at a common scenario: You ve built a website and spent time, money and effort to drive traffic there. 2% of that traffic has identified themselves as leads, so you turn to Google Analytics to reveal where the other traffic has come from. Of course, if you haven t suppressed your own IP, half of your traffic is likely to be your own employees. If you are relying on Google s cookie technology, the companies that appear on your website (let s say Starbucks ) will be users coming from a registered IP location rather than the actual company itself. So instead of engaging with Starbucks, you simply had one user sitting in Starbucks that perhaps accidently clicked on your link. Still, Google Analytics can reveal companies that have been on your website and showed, on average, 10% more of your leads than you had previously. Which you d be forgiven for thinking was a good place to start. However, reports indicate that 50% of your website traffic is interested in your business and product. With sales and marketing focusing on weeding out the companies from Google Analytics results, there are no spare resources to dedicate to the 38% of the interested traffic you haven t yet identified. From that 38%, almost three-quarters of them will never be contacted.

Google Analytics is a great starting point for all websites, but if you truly want to turn your website into a profit engine, you are going to need technology that produces more results and shortens your sales cycle by doing the work for you. As always with the digital age, there are no guarantees that the marketing approach you re using this quarter will continue to have the same success rate the next. A number of factors constantly influence marketing, first and foremost the consumer s behaviour. Why lead generation growth is exponential Lead Generation technology is still relatively new, but growing in demand every day. Because its focus is not on data but on identification, this software can produce greater lead results than Google Analytics. With adaptable coding that can be built into your website, lead generation uses IP lookup technology to find the actual company that has appeared as a lead on your website. With the right provider, you can access company details, employee names and email addresses and have this software integrated into your CRM to cut time spent chasing leads. In terms of future potential, both marketing and sales experts in the B2B industry have labelled it the obvious next step for optimising marketing channels and increasing profit margins.

Website personalisation: It is here to stay Unlike most online trends that have emerged in the past five years, personalisation is a feature that is set to stay. Whether you target your email campaigns with first names, add technology that personalises the user journey such as pop-up chat features and recommended products or you use native advertising personalisation is fundamental to improving your user experience on your website. The first step to creating a successful user journey that closes a sale is to analyse which aspects of the journey need work. Visitor tracking can be implemented here to give you the data you need to understand which web pages are performing successfully and which could use improvement. How to track visitors intuitively No consumer in the world is ready to accept that their every online movement can be tracked and they certainly don t want to hear it from a salesperson. Instead of pointing this out, or having a googlebot track them for you, there are simpler ways of ensuring the leads you are tracking are truly interested in your product. While lead generation can find you the lead, it cannot explain what that lead is doing there, what they are interested in or how you can tailor your campaigns or sales pitches to entice them further. Lead scoring, on the other hand, can. Currently, lead scoring is based upon the amount of time a lead spends on a particular web page. However, this isn t enough in a technological age with a thousand distractions. Lead scoring must also take into account the content that provokes the consumer s responses within your website. This is why lead scoring must also consider web page scoring. By using a simple but effective point scoring system, both marketing and sales can track which leads are interested in which products and content, and prioritise them as they move through the sales pipeline. Where a homepage or blog interaction leaves little to assume the lead is truly interested in the product, key feature pages and pricing pages indicate otherwise. As your leads move through their user journey, lead scoring technology will give you the ability to rank them and then tailor your nurturing campaign or sales pitch according to what their results show. Homepage = 1 point Info page = 2 points Product page = 10 points Key sales page = 22 points

Increasing your average order value on site One of the first strategies considered when trying to turn your website into a profit engine and increase your ROI is to increase the average order value of each consumer on your website. B2B sales often struggle with this more than B2C due to the features used. Recommended add-ons, a minimum set price for free delivery and a bonus scheme from a loyalty programme simply don t sing to leads the same way they do to everyday consumers shopping in the retail world. However, B2B sales CAN increase their order value. The main two elements used to do this include lead nurturing and combining complementary products that promise your lead a higher ROI for less cost, both for you and them, otherwise known as a win-win buy. To truly see an increase in your average order value on your website, e-commerce is essential to your business. The more your sales can be effectively dealt with online, the higher your average order value will climb. In fact, an econsultancy report showed that companies who moved their ordering process online increased their average order value by 44%. In addition, 38% of those companies surveyed acknowledged that customers spend more online than in person or over the phone. This percentage increased to 47% when you consider adding lead nurturing technology into your website sales cycle too.

Why your ROI lies in lead nurturing While technology has connected us together, it hasn t streamlined the sales process. If anything, it s made the sales cycle longer. In just two years, the sales cycle has reportedly increased from 6.4 months to 8.1 months. In that time, 43% of businesses have seen a rise in the length of their sales process and 90% of them have a sale cycle longer than a month. There are four reasons why this has become the case. With 65% of UK businesses reportedly not having lead nurturing in place, sales cycles are set to become even longer as companies fight each other while consumers wait and bet on the winning businesses. Lead nurturing can effectively change your position in the market by systematically hitting consumer pain points with product innovation and answers. The sales process has lengthened due to a number of key factors, including: As a matter of fact, companies already utilising lead nurturing technology have seen their sales team convert 50% more leads successfully while their costings have reduced by 33%. Nurtured leads have also reportedly produced, on average, 20% more sales opportunities. Recession-wary consumers Overindulged consumers Overcrowding marketplace Additional key decision makers in the buying process Current statistics Current lead nurturing trends, while new, show the development of the technology already rising: Lead nurturing is the second most important organisational goal with 85% of UK marketers making it their first priority. (First was engagement at 91%.) 65% of businesses currently do not use lead nurturing. The businesses excelling at lead nurturing have 9 times more BDMs meeting their monthly sales Lead nurturing email campaigns get 5% higher click through rate and 4-10 times the response rate of standard emails. Lead nurturing on a quarterly basis is at just 15%, whereas lead nurturing on a monthly basis currently sits at 34%.

How marketing automation can help As lead nurturing grows in importance and content marketing continues to develop into a faster, more consumable pace, marketing automation is keeping companies one step ahead of the rest. Effective marketing automation not only requires the right software in place, it also requires knowledge of your target demographic and their changing buying behaviour, tracking the origins of your leads and understanding why certain marketing campaigns work. Once you have this knowledge in place, marketing automation can process this information and use it to begin your lead nurturing process. 79% of the top performing companies have been using marketing automation for over two years With visitor identification and tracking technology, you can enhance your marketing automation to send targeted communications based on what your leads are interacting with on your website. With access to real-time data too, you can adapt your marketing strategies within your automation to stay one step ahead of the buying behaviour curve. The correct marketing automation software can also give you the chance to discover leads from one to one emails and track their user journey through your website. With personalised URLs embedded in your email campaigns, you ll be able to understand which personalisation techniques are working and what content is considered valuable in the industry in real-time. You ll also be able to focus on areas that need more attention to drive higher traffic through your campaign channels. Marketing automation will allow you to keep nurturing leads until they are ready to buy, improving your retention rate. Combined, lead generation and marketing automation offer you a seamless lead nurturing cycle to take advantage of. With a content marketing strategy already developed, you can have targeted communications that hit every pain point of your sales cycle. The time saved here will allow you to look at areas of improvement or forward-thinking solutions that you can include that will enhance your product, drive more leads and grow your sales and profit margin.

Effective Lead Management With the sales cycle having increased in length, lead management has actually become more critical to a healthy ROI than lead generation. After all, what good is finding leads if you can t keep them? Of course, not all leads will end up as future clients and customers. Some will be tyre-kickers, others will be competitors, some could be suppliers and a fair bit of your traffic may come from current customers and employees of your own. So to make sure genuine, qualified leads are being addressed as your first and foremost priority, lead management is essential. There should be a particular focus on the marketing generated leads being passed through the sales pipeline too. Effective lead management software should allow you to filter out your competitors, customers, employees and suppliers and focus on the leads that need nurturing. In order to see valuable ROI, you need to be able to watch your leads move through the sales pipeline. Lead management s key function is to show you these results. Lead Management Statistics Companies that automate lead management see a 10%+ increase in their revenue in just 9 months 46% of marketing departments with lead generation have a sales team that follow up with 75% of market-generated leads 25% of marketing departments with lead management report sales teams contact leads within one day Companies with lead management have a 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rate With management software in place, not only can you safeguard your leads from receiving a miscommunication or your sales team losing a lead through poor time management, you can also see where your sales team is under or overperforming. Continuous improvement of conversion rates and ROI To improve your conversion rates and ROI, you must first understand what is happening to your leads through the sales process. If you are losing any of the 50% of leads that have shown interest, when did they become disengaged? Was the user journey too hard to navigate? Was the content off-topic? Should they have been driven to sales sooner? These questions can be answered thanks to the technology touched on in this paper. With lead generation, scoring, nurturing and successful management, you will know each leads action and reaction to every business decision in the buying process. Once these aspects are successfully executed and gain momentum in their conversion rates, you can start to focus on other key influencers, including retention rates of current customers and product innovation for upsell opportunities.

Implementing successful future practices In summary, turning your website into a profit engine need not take up more time, resources or budget than you have to spare. All it takes is the right technology in place to strengthen both your sales and marketing teams in order to produce continuously high performing results. With a move towards lead nurturing, marketing automation becomes more important and lead management takes care of the sales pipeline. As an initial step, however, it is important both sales and marketing are on the same wavelength when deciding what makes a qualified lead and the steps that both parties should take in order to produce more qualified leads. From there, continuous analysis and restructuring of your strategies and business plans will keep your website up to date with the latest trends, allowing you to grow within the industry and stay in the top percentiles of your organisations goals. To start improving your profit margin today with more leads and a faster turnover, find the technology and tools mentioned in this whitepaper. Keep up to date with your website s data: Real-Time Analytics Grow your lead potential: Lead Generation Track your visitors intuitively: Lead Scoring Technology Shorten your sales cycle: Lead Nurturing Streamline your marketing campaigns: Email Marketing Automation Enhance lead conversion rates: Lead Management

About WOW Analytics WOW Analytics was founded in 2008 by Lee Chadwick and Aaron Yates. Both work in senior IT positions in high profile technology companies. During the last few years, they have been researching, testing and creating web analytics solutions for B2B companies, using the best technology to accomplish the markets needs. WOW Analytics Version 2.0 is a powerful web analytics and lead generation tool which has been successfully implemented into the market through its user-friendly design and advanced sales and marketing functions. The platform offers you real time data feeding and powerful lead scoring capabilities, allowing you to get more from your online investments, and ensure that you never lose another online prospect. Contact us website: http://www.wowanalytics.co.uk e-mail: info@wowanalytics.co.uk telephone: 0844 880 2899