I like to think of lead generation in terms of three stages.
- The marketing goal to increase prospective consumer interest in your product or service offering. Businesses with websites often speak of the goal to increase the quality and quantity of lead generation, sales conversions from your website, or more specifically phone call leads.
- The measurement tools that you use to see how successfully you are accomplishing this goal.
- The finish line. Here companies face the difficult decision of when and how much to invest in constantly improving their website’s conversion rate. Where do you draw the line that you have reached your conversion goals set in stage #1?
Each of these stages merits its own focus, but for today we’ll focus on the questions that arise in the third stage. In an ideal world, all companies would contain unlimited funds to continue navigating through these stages in a cycle. After reaching the finish line of their original goal, the business would begin again from the start, set up new higher goals, and start working towards them. Of course, we also realize that we do not live in a utopia.
Searchengineland‘s article “Not Yet Done – A Tale of 2 Years, 3 Landing Pages and 6X Conversion Improvement” begins with the question, “how much conversion improvement is enough?” The article highlights the case study of Ifbyphone, a cloud telephony provider, and uses the study “as an example of why you should never consider your conversion work done, even after impressive gains.” This statement might seem a bit bold – how could one realistically argue that your work is never done?
But a close read of the case study demonstrates an extremely sophisticated methodology of the three stages discussed above, the project goals, the measurement tools (such as Ifbyphone’s call tracking, Ifbyphone’s Google Integration, A/B tests, multivariate tests, etc.) and the finish line.
Ifbyphone’s original landing page, in 2008, reached a 3X conversion in 2009 and another 2X conversion in 2010. What made them restart the process of website design in 2010, after already reaching a 3X conversion in 2009? In other words, how did they decide to draw a new finish line?
In this case study, the article highlights 3 reasons:
The competitive environment had changed, with an increasing number of players on the field. This, by itself, was a compelling reason for a redesign. The company’s messaging and product offerings had been through multiple refinements. This let us concentrate on pure visual treatment for the page. Also, the design restraints were removed. We could bring in new colors, imagery—basically do what we thought best from a conversion standpoint.
How do you decide when to set new goals for sales conversion? Do you think that conversion work should ever be considered complete?
Read the article on searchengineland, and share your take on the Ifbyphone case study by commenting below.
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