Advantages of seeing the whole customer sales journey

As a web design company, we usually deal with the middle bit. That is, our job is to ensure inbound visitors convert to outbound leads. When we started out doing this for clients, we honed our skills on optimising website conversions, and threw around impressive stats to clients about our conversion rates.

But conversion rates alone don’t pay wages or grow businesses.

The trouble is, most web agencies are blinkered, we don’t always know what marketing activity (on and off line) is generating traffic, nor do we know what happens to the lead once we’ve passed on the details to a CRM – so how can we work effectively? We’ve got our conversion rates to shout about, but so what?

The trouble with this model, there are two breaks in the customer sales journey, and this is the fundamental flaw within a high percentage of businesses generating business online. This isn’t a problem when sites are selling actual products online, as the website conversion (sale) is the final point of sale. But what about the service industry, B2B sites? What we may usually consider the final step of website conversion (prospect contact), a CRM would consider to be the first step in the sales process.

This frustration was home grown, and most of our work and solutions we offer clients now was developed by scratching our own itch.

Take this as an example. We start a Google Adwords campaign, and set up two sub-campaigns (Ad Groups): ‘Website Design’ and ‘Website Development’. We’ll assume for arguments sake they both have the same Click Through Rate and cost the same per click.

We then optimise our website, and track what keywords are converting. We note that 15% of ‘website design’ visitors leave their contact details, where as only 10% of ‘website development’ visitors leave theirs (we can also track what keywords were used when someone picks up the phone rather than fill out a form, but that cleverness is worthy of a different blog!)

So surely the better converting ‘website design’ is where we should increase our budget as it gives us more leads, right? This is the mistake everyone makes. Leads mean nothing – it the sale, and the quality of the sale that counts.

We work closely with Workbooks, an online CRM that integrates perfectly with what we do. We set this up for our clients, but also use it ourselves. After using Workbooks for a while, we noticed trends in lead-to-sale conversions. ‘Website Design' leads were converting at 15%, where as ‘Website Development' was converting at 33%.

Add this all together to get the whole journey (the important bit!) and we know Web Design clicks-to-sale conversion is 2%, and Web Development is 3%. It turns out, that Web Development is the more profitable keyword, Google Adwords and Analytics would have told me the exact opposite.

In the real world, it gets much more complicated than that, throw in the fact that clicks vary in cost, and sales vary in profitability, so clearly there’s much more to consider. The good news is within our systems we record everything – so we know the actual cost of the lead that generated into a sale that generated X profit.

It’s only when the full journey is joined together that it’s possible to know just how well marketing budget is spent. Do you know exactly what’s working for you? Are you getting great news from your SEO agency, your web agency, and your sales team, but still can’t understand the marketing costs? It’s easy for all three to give impressive results when in fact there is still massive room for improvement.

We love all this at Rawnet, it helps us know that what we’re doing is making a positive financial impact for businesses. When we’re tasked with ‘the middle bit’, which is generally all that’s expected from a web design company, we know there is so much more at stake and to never underestimate the value of getting a continuous view of the whole customer sales journey.