Lift in lead-gen search marketing: 3-ways
By being discriminating in your search marketing, you can reduce top-line spend and improve conversion quantity and quality. This increase in quality can impact your close rate (the percentage of converted respondents who turn into customers) and your average sale value (the value of what they purchase that first time or over their lifetime as a customer).
I’ve had a number of meetings recently regarding lift in lead-gen online marketing. Typically, when you talk lift, marketers think in terms of conversion rate: ‘how much of an increase can I get if I do x, y or z?’ But there are two other key metrics in lead-gen that can be lifted when you optimize your search marketing. And while these two metrics are familiar, they’re less likely to come up when you’re setting optimization goals. These two metrics are close rate and customer value (or average sale).
Three metrics, one goal: customers
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who click on your search ad and then convert to a lead
- Close Rate: The percentage of those who converted to a lead that later close and turn into customers
- Average Sale (or Customer Value): The initial (or lifetime) value of those customers closed
Rising tide lifts all ships (sometimes)
There’s discriminate optimization and indiscriminate optimization. If you shoot only for conversion rate, you have the option of being indiscriminate to get your massive lift. If you want your rising tide to lift all three metrics, you have be more cognizant of quality. Both close rate and average sale are metrics that increase only when you increase the quality of the people that make it through your conversion funnel. But how?
Start with the keywords
Without turning this post into a white paper on search marketing, I can’t delve deeply into the shotgun versus surgical approaches to search engine marketing. Suffice to say I have years of evidence that keeps me firmly in the surgical camp for lead gen. That means far fewer keywords much more strategically chosen. Your rising tide to lift all three metrics starts right there at the top of your funnel.
Then there’s the ad
With strategic keyword choices, comes the opportunity to write strategic ad copy. Instead of trolling to trick misfits into clicking, paint an honest benefit picture and get the best people to click. This is your second quality filter and one that you must test, test and test again, until you find the most effective banana to attract the most hungry gorilla. And once the gorilla clicks, the real fun begins.
Post clicking your way to high water
Now that you’re paying for something (that keyword ad click), it’s incumbent upon you to do something (great) with it. Enter your post-click opportunity. If you’ve chosen your keywords wisely and been honest and compelling in your ad copy, you’ve got some good, solid people at your front door. Time to convert them to leads.
- Get More Specific: Test after test confirms that getting specific with content leads to quality conversions. This means segmenting your respondents into buckets so you can speak more personally to their needs.
- Make Them Want It: “Gorilla, we’re offering a large, plump, perfectly ripe banana. It comes from your favorite tree, and when you eat it you’ll feel great.” The more specific the pitch, the higher the likelihood that they’ll take the leap and convert. More than anything, never lose track of what they came here to get when they clicked. The second that falls off their radar, they’ll fall off your conversion path.
- Ask Nicely/Trade Fairly: When you present a form, you’re asking for conversion. At that point, your requirements must be proportional to their desire to get the banana. If the form has thirty fields in it and they’re going to get brochureware in return, odds are you’re looking at a bushel full of abandonments. Make your lead record as short as it can be to pass onto sales.
You don’t need to ask a million questions if you have a solid lead-gen system tracking behavioral data. Without form fields, you should know, and pass to sales, everything they did in your pre-conversion funnel. That means you’ll pass the keyword, the ad, their segmentation choice, the call-to-action that triggered their conversion, geolocation data, time/date stamps, etc. That’s a lot — without a single form field. So all you need to ask are name, email address, maybe website or organization name, maybe a buying cycle question (or better yet, infer that from behavioral choices).
Where’s the lift?
By being discriminating in your search marketing, you can reduce top-line spend and improve conversion quantity and quality. This increase in quality can impact your close rate (the percentage of converted respondents who turn into customers) and your average sale value (the value of what they purchase that first time or over their lifetime as a customer).
Next steps
Read the Bronto Software case study as one example of this practice in the real world. And get our free Online Marketing ROI Calculator to model your own potential rising tide. All three metrics are represented in the calculations and you can see how relatively minor moves have significant impact on revenue.
I wrote a follow-up to this that includes an illustration of the two strategies overlayed as contrasting funnels.