Lee Eisenberg’s THE NUMBER: A Completely Different Way to Think About the Rest of Your Life quickly became a NY Times bestseller. The book flipped traditional financial planning on its head by focusing on “The Number” (the amount of money you need to live the lifestyle you want when you retire). It provided readers with a single, meaningful metric that they could use on to set goals and gauge success.
For online marketing there is a number as well. It is the number of sales that you make in a set amount of time.
Your sales number, however, is an outcome. It is the final result of all of your online marketing efforts – your work generating leads, following up and closing. So while I always recommend that clients frame their ultimate goal in terms of sales, I recommend that on a daily basis they focus instead on tracking and continually tweaking the critical numbers that create sales: Visitors, Conversion Rate, and Closing Rate.
Visitors: Visitors are the number of people who visit your site on a daily basis. These are folks who have some level of interest in what you offer and whom you may be able to engage in conversation.
Conversion Rate: This is the percentage of visitors who take action on your site. For some ecommerce sites, this may the percentage of visitors who make a purchase. For many companies, however, it is the percentage of people who opt into your sales funnel and become a warm lead by requesting more information, downloading a free report, or signing up for a free consultation.
Closing Rate: For ecommerce companies, the closing rate and the conversion rate are the same metric. But for most businesses with a website, your closing rate is the percentage of warm leads that you ultimately close as sales.
So to achieve your sales goal you have three steps:
- Get visitors. If no one is seeing your site, nothing else happens. This is where a well run SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns becomes crucial.
- Convert visitors into leads. Until they “opt in” and give you their contact information, you can’t complete the sale. To increase your conversion rate, make sure that your website is built to demonstrate value, build trust, and prompt action.
- Close your leads. Not everyone is going to buy today. For those who aren’t ready yet, make sure you have a great system in place for staying in regular touch through newsletters or social media. This ensures that – as soon as they are ready to buy – you will have already earned their business.
Whether or not you are going to achieve your all important sales number is ultimately determined by your visitors, your conversion rate, and your closing rate. So monitor these numbers on a daily or weekly basis and always focus on improving them!
