CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION
Digital Marketing for a Home Service Business
Conversion rate optimization provide methods to generate leads or sales without your involvement. It provides data to optimize to create more leads and sales. Below is a series of articles about how to improve conversion rate optimization.
Conversion Rate Optimization Articles
Home Services Business Conversion Rate Optimization
A conversion rate could be used to measure a number of things. A conversion is defined by a change in something to something else. Two typical conversion rates to measure in a small business are leads and sales. For leads, a conversion rate could be the number of impressions of ad or views of your business profile on a review website that take an action like clicking the link to your website or calling your business phone number. For sales, a conversion rate is typically when a lead converts to a sale. The conversion rate is typical a calculation of one number divided by the other number and then converted to a percentage. For example, if you had 100 leads and 10 of those converted to sales, you would divide 10 by 100 and the result would be 0.10 or 10%. The conversion rate would be 10%. The rest of this article will discussion conversion rate as it relates to digital marketing though a small business could have other conversion rates in its business operations.
Create method
The first thing you need is a method to record the two parts of a conversion. You might already have a process through your marketing or sales workflow but if you aren’t able to track a result, you won’t be able to calculate your conversion rate. Here are some example of typical methods you could create.
- Website visitors
- If your use your marketing efforts to drive potential customers to your website, you might want to determine how effective those marketing efforts are in creating leads to your website. One way to track where people visiting your website from is to install a website analytics solution like Google Analytics. It will record the source of your website visitors.
- Phone calls
- You might have put your phone number of a number of marketing efforts like a direct mailing letter or a radio ad. Unfortunately, that phone number is probably your main phone number used for all business telephone calls. One way to track is to get another phone number for your business and only use that phone number for a specific marketing effort.
- Quotes
- You might have a business that needs to give a customer a quote or estimate before they agree on the service. One way to track is to add a form on your website that the customer enters their contact information and additional information to determine which service they would like performed.
- Internet ads
- One of the benefits of Internet ads is the built-in ability to track results when compared to traditional advertising options like TV, radio, newspaper and magazine. Most of the Internet ad platform have included ways to track results.
- Sales
Sales are usually handled within the business or by the sales team. One way to track is to enter these sales in a line-of-business application or a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Once this sales data is recorded, it can be linked to other data to calculation a conversion rate.
Calculate conversions
Once you have created the methods to track your desired outcomes on both sides, you can calculate the conversion rate. Again, the math is straightforward to divide one result by the other result. This could be done on a calculate for a quick analysis or a spreadsheet for a way to record the conversion rate.
Your business might not have just one conversion rate. In fact it could have many. Here are some examples:
- Marketing to leads conversion rate
- Marketing to quotes conversion rate
- Marketing to website conversion rate
- Internet ads to leads conversion rate
- Phone calls to leads conversion rate
- Leads to sales conversion rate
- Ads to sales conversion rate
A better way is to setup solutions that allow you record all the data and then perform conversion rates for different aspects. One of these aspects could be time whether that be yesterday day, last week, last month or even last year. By looking at conversion rates over time and comparing to other time periods, patterns start to been seen.
Make improvements
Once you have your conversion rates calculated, you can look for place to make improvements. There are so many places to make improvements but the beauty of records your results in a data system, is you can look at the main areas of improvements. You can compare them other different time spans and looking at different sources and different results. One caution is since there are so many options, you might get lost in the analysis and forget the purpose. The key purpose is to find ways to improve your conversion rate.
Here are possible improvements you may find:
- Certain marketing efforts perform better then others at getting leads.
- Certain Internet sources bring more traffic to your website then others.
- Some salespeople close more deals then others.
- Some leads result in more sales then others.
Summary about Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization is the comparing of one result to another to determine the rate of conversion. The first step is to create method to record the results of both sides. The next step is to calculate the conversion and record the data to be able to analysis in different ways. Finally, the conversion rates can be analyzed to look for areas of improvements.
HOME SERVICES CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION VIDEO
Digital Marketing Extreme is your source for digital marketing tips and techniques for your home service business.
Why do you need conversion rate optimization for your home service business? This video will go over what is conversion rate optimization, examples, conversion rate optimization techniques and conversion rates.
If you would like the video slides as a PDF, click to download “Home Services Business Conversion Rate Optimization“.
CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
So in this presentation, we can talk about conversion rate optimization for small business. Some of the topics we’ll go over are what is conversion rate optimization, some examples, some techniques and discussion about conversion rates.
What is Conversion Rate Optimization
So what is conversion rate optimization? Well, first we have to actually identify what our conversions and these are typically business operations where one thing converts to another. So it could again be marketing to a lead, lead to a sale, sale to a shipment, things like that. So that’s the conversion, the optimization is looking at ways to make that conversion more efficient, effective or more frequent.
So, one of the things we need to be aware of is we have to record data. This is the data related to The different aspects of the conversion the before or after. So all that data in data needs to be recorded. Then once we have that data and the before and after I, we can then look at actually a conversion rate, which is basically the changing of something to something else, converting pretty straightforward.
There are ways in which there are different ways the conversion rate optimization shouldn’t help one actually, you can just educate your customer better. That’s one way to improve the conversion rate. And there are many ways that conversion rate optimization can help because if you can actually eliminate your involvement, for example, having to make a phone call or waiting for reply back on an email, quote, these are ways you can optimize your conversion rates at different things.
Examples
So let’s look at some examples.
Marketing
First example of places where I can look for conversion rates are in marketing, and there are a number of different things here. One could Be the website visitors that you’re receiving to could be if you’re using paid advertising on the internet. If you’re in the home services industry, there are different websites where people could find your business to then move through into a lead and sales process. People may find you through your social media account. And just generic review websites may actually bring in different forms of marketing that then could be looked at to use conversion rate optimization to improve.
Leads
Another place for data for conversion rate optimization may be recorded is in the lead process. So you may have quotes that are available on your website. Many if not all businesses except phone calls, which a lot of people call to learn more about the information and hopefully move into sale. And people sometimes like to just send an email and ask questions.
Sales
The next area where you may be having data that can be looked at for conversion rate optimization is within your sales on depending on the type of business, this could be appointments that are made for service based business could be product sold, if you’re into a product based business. If you’re are in products, it may be again shipping those products out. And in the end, many businesses will have forms of customer service, they must, they need to complete at the end of the process before the interaction with the customers concluded.
Techniques
So let’s look at some techniques of conversion rate optimization.
Website Form
One way you can do this is through a website form on your website. Basically, you would create a form that people would fill out with different information, probably some personal information about themselves, if it’s a service base could be a quote, if it’s a product, it may be wanting to learn more information about it. So you would, but the benefit is you can actually capture all this information with involving employees. Hence right there, you’re already improving the process. These forms can get very complex and have multiple steps which again, aids in getting all the information you need. And some of the forms can actually be conditional in the sense that if they select one option, a different path of the flow may be triggered.
Website Landing Page
Website landing page is another place where conversion rate optimization can be looked at. This could be a dedicated webpage just for one purpose, for example, getting a quote or signing up for a service or a product. The key already about website landing pages, it can be a simplified webpage, you don’t have to have all the information that you might need on your homepage. And you can really focus on to a single call to action once they go to the page, say from an internet ad. What do you want them to do once they’re on that page?
Telephone Call Tracking
Telephone call tracking is another place where conversion rate optimization could apply. One option is instead of having just one phone number on your website, you actually have a pool through a call tracking service. And those numbers are rotated. So you can actually identify specific people what they’re doing on the website. And if they do decide to call, then that information can be passed along. Other places you could do in your marketing is provide individual phone numbers for each marketing effort. Thus, you can see which marketing efforts are generating, which leads and look at ways that conversion rate optimization could be applied to that process.
Conversion Rates
So let’s talk about the actual conversion rates, conversion rate optimization.
Website Visitors
So there are specific places where conversions occur. One is your website visitors and there are a number of different metrics that might be useful on there to look at what conversion rates one would be from the source. Where are they coming from to land on your website, depending on your You may have people in multiple physical locations and that information can be collected through website programs. The device type, in this case desktops versus mobile, you may have specific campaigns you’re running and that information can be passed along. The pages themselves may hold information that helps you understand the nature of the website visitors. And certain goals could be identified, for example, going to a web form and then clicking the thank you page. And then those are again different conversion rates that can we get all calculated.
Phone Calls
Ready to phone calls and conversion rates, um, if again, using the tracking information, you could determine the source of it. So for example, if it’s an internet ad that you paid for, and you had a specific phone number, you now know that’s paid as opposed to say your website which may be organic or paid. You could have a phone number on a billboard and hence, that’s a paid ad and phone number in the yellow pages or something like that. phone calls, of course have some inherent nature to them time when did they call this can be useful between morning and afternoons or weekends or after hours. And the employee that actually answered the call, which in the sense, if these are sales people, then that information is also available in to be recorded to look at the conversion rate.
Website Quotes
If you get into something specifically like a website, quote, again, multiple sources could be determine if the source comes from a paid again, an internet ad or something like that, or organic through natural things. They found your website because of a search query, or they found your Facebook page and then click the link to learn more or something like that and came to your website.
Internet Ads
Internet as themselves provide tons of data that can be useful in the conversion rate. The platform again, is it a Google App is a Facebook ad, you may have multiple campaigns within each of those, which then may have different ad types that you’re actually going through. Number of conversion rates are kind of built into the systems for example, the click through rate and return into your ad scene. And then as it clicked, because these are paid platforms, there’s a cost related teach click. And ultimately, if they perform the action, your desired conversions can be displayed.
Sales
Sales has many conversion rates. If you’re doing products or services, obviously the selling of those can be different quantities, the different amounts that are actually charged sources that may or may not help in the sales, whether again, it’s an internal salesperson or through a lead that came from marketing source. And again, much like phone calls, which employee was involved in that sale, which may be information that’s beneficial and looking at conversion rate.
Conclusions about Conversion Rate Optimization
So some question conversion rate optimization, there are a number of benefits. The first is that it allows if you record the data to perform conversion rate optimization, so it’s very important to record all the data that may be near interested in looking at trying to convert at a better rate. The data then can be looked at to show different ways you can optimize it. Many of these methods actually can be helped along by educating your customer at different aspects or different phases of the different process which could help for in performing higher conversion rates. And many of these techniques and examples have ways to show where you don’t actually have to be involved so they can be automated and made more efficient by different implying different conversion rates optimization to your business methods.
