I hope this is a worthy tip of the month. Increasingly in my quest for returning true value for money I am focussing on measures of success using Goal and Conversion points.
Goals – these are successes within the process of gaining genuine sales. All to often we do not have access to actual sales information. A website can only gain so much interest before the company behind the website has to intervene and complete the sales process.
Conversions – these are the points in the process where we can see a noticeable action undertaken by the website user. Again we as web designers can only get so far through the sales process before some else has to take over.
So we need to maximise the reliability and reporting for a website, at present we rely heavily on Google Analytics – where setting up Goals to measure conversion is relatively easy. But we cannot track:
- Phone Calls – anyone who decides to ring with their enquiry
- Emails – if people prefer to click an email link
- Direct – if people decide to visit your shop, location or office
The only things we can measure are actions on the website. Here are common examples:
- Sales made via eCommerce
- Enquires and forms filled in
- Specific pages visited
- Specific documents (PDF’s word etc) downloaded
- Others for example the time spent or the number of pages visited on a website.
More is better
Measuring more is better than less. In website design in our quest for paying customers what matters most is what changes over time. We not worried about things like gender, education, background, location. (‘thou we could be if required) – what we want to see and know is that sales are expanding. And the more ways we can do that the better.
Actions to Take
In the past the typical action is the just get sales teams to enquiry ‘how they heard’ about an organisation. That works, but is tricky and a lot of tracking falls through the net just because the sales team are trying to secure the sale.
But another action is to record ALL enquiries formally and properly regardless of where they came from. You can then keep them updated and track the progression of a client. This is known as customer relationship management or CRM. And it’s incredibly important to get this right these days.
So Options:
- Invest is a proper CRM – www.salesforce.com and www.netsuite.com are two of the best known CRM specialists today. But we use www.zoho.com and it works extremely well.
- Keep a spreadsheet on Google Docs – for smaller business this is simple and straightforward… just a name and a few columns for each enquiry
- A ticket or help desk solution such as the one I have set up here http://support.ncompass.co.uk, it just allows you to record very easily what is going on.
Caveats
We all rely on email – and this is the most common place to store new enquiries for your business… but think about it, when was the last time you went through those enquiries and checked up properly on them. Or maybe you just file them away automatically.
The problem with email is that it’s useless, you lose emails, Spam gets in the way, filing relies on your memory to find them, you get confused about whose said what and you can’t track phone enquiries. Email is completely unreliable.
The solution is to be more disciplined about dealing with enquiries. We have many clients spending hundreds of pounds a month (or more) and then complaining that sales are hard to come by (it’s the economy) when actually a website might be getting thousands of visitors per month and dozens if not hundreds of orders.
A simple CRM solution would solve all this.
And as a final comment – they say the easiest sales is to your existing customers and that finding new customers cost vastly more than selling to existing customers. So if you organise your sales leads you have a ready made marketplace for future sales.
If you want more guidance on what would suit your website best – please do call me.
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