Chapter 9
Building Your Conversion Machine
In This Chapter
Why build a Conversion Machine?
Understanding the components of a Conversion Machine
Building your website engine
Fueling up with content
Lubricating the paths to conversion
Inbound marketers are attraction and conversion architects. As you build and refine your inbound attraction inputs and purchase path flow, you’ll be building a system that establishes a series of conversions that culminate in an action (purchase). I call this system a Conversion Machine (see Figure 9-1), and it consists of the following parts:
- Website engine: Building your website based on a conversion-centric architectural blueprint powers your online marketing efforts.
- Content fuel: Your website engine needs fuel to run. Premium, high-octane content powers your engine to run faster and more efficiently.
- Frictionless user experience: A Call-to-Action Map lubricates the user experience. Organizing your site based on an intuitive, natural customer path helps to increase engagement and conversions.
Figure 9-1: The Conversion Machine.
Your Conversion Machine runs on a well-tuned website, fueled by great user content that’s easy for visitors to access, discover, and engage with.
Understanding the Importance of a Conversion Machine
Inbound marketers tend to focus on the marketing parts rather than the whole. Envisioning the inbound process as a Conversion Machine with three simple components helps you connect the inbound marketing parts. Your website is the hub of your inbound-marketing activity. As such, it’s the key connection point between you and your lead-generation and conversion teams (usually your marketing and sales teams). It’s important to build a Conversion Machine that creates meaningful dialogue through publishing dynamic content. Automating marketing and sales functions helps integrate these objectives into your Conversion Machine.
Viewing your inbound marketing as a Conversion Machine working towards an efficient, frictionless conversion process, helps you avoid the pitfall of inbound disconnection. A website with no content is useless because it attracts no visitors. Content with no website hub is a mess. Websites built on traditional architecture aren’t consumer-centric and may actually hinder conversions. Remember that inbound marketing is a holistic process with inter-connected, interdependent parts. You’ll achieve a higher success rate by connecting these inbound components.
What’s a Conversion Machine?
Building a Conversion Machine means building a hub of attraction and conversion. Your website is probably broken in the sense that it’s probably not built on inbound conversion architecture. Most websites are not fully optimized, which causes user friction, stalling or thwarting conversion opportunities. In fact, if yours is like most websites, it’s not optimized for conversions at all. A Conversion Machine features a website designed to satisfy your visitors and the search engines by optimizing for both UX and SEO. The result is a frictionless purchase path for your customers and higher SERP rankings, respectively.
Furthermore, a Conversion Machine consistently offers high-quality, engaging content. Organizing your content to encourage a natural, systematic migration toward a purchase increases your conversion rates at many points in the Customer Conversion Chain, helping to achieve your sales objectives more easily.
Begin by designing and building your website as a powerful customer engagement hub. Dedicate resources to developing meaningful content to populate your website and then provide an easy path for customers to convert. That is a Conversion Machine and it’s what drives your inbound marketing.
Connecting with customers
In the last chapter, you learned of the importance of connecting with your customers at multiple levels based on their needs. Building a Conversion Machine facilitates this connection by attracting visitors to your website, serving them relevant content, and facilitating their journey down the conversion path toward a purchase.
You can’t really connect on a meaningful level without building this system of content publishing, organization, and distribution. Therefore, it’s important for you to build your Conversion Machine with a combination of personalized and automated communications. Backed with marketing automation software, your Conversion Machine enables you to concentrate on the most qualified prospects by connecting deeper and connecting sooner. Automating your attraction and conversion process frees up time for you to focus on strategy and personalized communications with those most likely to convert while automatically following up with those that may not be as qualified or are further away from a conversion action.
Connecting your internal parts
Building a Conversion Machine results in better internal communications. This is especially true between the two key departments that drive your business: marketing and sales. Practicing inbound marketing means blurring the boundaries between these two departments. This is a positive outcome if your company is adaptable because a Conversion Machine measures lead quality based on shared input from both your marketing and sales departments.
When your marketing and sales efforts are connected — truly connected — wins and losses are shared. So, the intent of building a Conversion Machine is to bring these two departments together to mutually define the characteristics of a quality lead and then to begin attracting and converting those leads. When you connect your website with analytics and measure those statistics versus your known sales and marketing objectives on a regular basis, you’ll have the information to refine your definition of a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and sales qualified lead (SQL). Once you have trend data from your Conversion Machine analytics you can now perform several worthwhile exercises including:
- Define and improve your cost-per-lead (CPL).
- Define and improve your cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
- Measure which conversion links are broken and fix those problems more quickly.
- Begin predictive marketing based on your known collected conversion data.
- Budget more efficiently based on the sources that are best at attracting and converting.
- Integrate marketing automation software and sales CRM for bi-directional internal communication.
- Reverse-engineer proven purchase paths by replicating the purchase paths taken by your most valuable customers.
- Follow up earlier in the purchase process and more quickly based on real-time alerts.
Connecting your internal process through your Conversion Machine is almost as important as connecting with your customers.
Building your conversion chain links
In Chapter 22, I go into detail about building your Customer Conversion Chain, which consists of a series of conversion links from first contact through first contract and beyond. For purposes of building your Conversion Machine, it’s important to understand the basics of the links that make up your key conversion points. They are as follows:
- Impressions
- Visitors
- Leads
- Opportunities
- Customers
- Repeat customers
- Lifestylers
Combining these important conversion points with your average ticket CPL and CPA elevate your marketing higher than your competitors who are not implementing inbound marketing best practices while creating connections between your marketing efforts and measurable results.
Building a Super-Powered Website Engine
Inbound marketing, by definition, requires a website. So what? You have a website just like everyone else. But is your website powering attraction and conversion? Ask yourself:
- Does my website act as a lead generation mechanism rather than a static brochure?
- Is my website customer-centric?
- Does my website provide engaging content?
- Do my website pages download quickly?
- Does my website allow visitors easy entry and quick navigation?
- Can I easily track onsite visitor behavior?
- Are there different visitor experiences for new visitors, returning prospects, leads, and customers?
Answering “no” to any of these questions should give you pause because you’re going against for inbound marketing best practices.
Fueling Consumer Connections with Content
Your website engine needs fuel to run. Content is that fuel. This topic is covered more in-depth in Part IV, but for now you should just understand the role of content as a part of your Conversion Machine.
Just like your car’s engine, your website engine needs to be refueled on a regular basis. Filling up with premium content and refueling often creates onsite engagement, and having more engagement opportunities helps your inbound efforts.
Premium content includes:
- Informative blog posts
- White papers
- E-books
- Online tools
- Videos
- Webinars
Publishing premium content means distributing meaningful, interactive content that encourages attraction and engagement.
Creating a Frictionless Buying Experience
If your website is the engine of your Conversion Machine and your content is your fuel, then the lubrication in creating a well-oiled machine is your Call-to-Action (CTA) Map (covered more fully in Chapter 11). Applying CTA Maps to your website navigation links and to your inbound campaigns increases fluid user flow. By allowing prospects to easily and intuitively navigate your site through your onsite structure, you pave the way for customers. CTA buttons, forms, and internal page links are the components you’ll use to build this streamlined path. Execute these tactics inside your marketing campaigns and don’t forget to measure and report!
Achieving Unusually High Performance (Success)!
When you’re building a Conversion Machine, you’re essentially optimizing the buying experience. After building your website, populating it with content, and organizing that content based on conversion, there are several things you can do as an inbound marketer to achieve a higher level of performance.
Figure 9-2 shows the conversion rates for digital marketers.
Figure 9-2: Conversion rates achieved by digital marketers.
Where do you fit in? What’s your conversion rate? Whatever your current conversion rate, building a holistic Conversion Machine, complete with conversion-based campaigns, helps you increase your conversion rates.
Building your Conversion Machine may seem like a daunting process. Quite frankly, it can be. First, get your website in order and begin generating quality content. Next, build out campaigns for your product pyramids, populating each product purchase path with appropriate content and CTAs to lead your visitor down the purchase path.
Testing Your Attraction and Conversion Points
The last thing you do after changing a simple task like changing a light bulb is to flip the switch to test the light and make sure it illuminates. Yet, according to Adobe’s 2014 Digital Marketing Optimization Study, 54 percent of companies do not test their digital marketing efforts. Traditional marketers have not been conditioned to perform testing. I believe this is primarily due to a historical lack of available data and the accompanying lack of accountability. Your inbound marketing must include testing because:
- Testing ensures that the website/campaign you built works.
- Testing helps you discover which CTAs work best.
- You can’t optimize your website, your campaigns, nor your processes without testing.
- Testing helps you determine your main conversion for each product pyramid and the resulting ROI.
That same Adobe study found that 73 percent of the top quintile of performers implement testing on a regular basis.
Measuring your conversion points
I highly recommend you invest in measurement tools beyond Google Analytics. You set your milestones and metrics in your SSB (refer to Chapter 5) and now that you’ve built your Conversion Machine, it’s time to monitor your success. It may seem counterintuitive at first, but it’s important to measure more than just the end sales result. At the very least, you’ll want to measure each point of conversion, each link in your Customer Conversion Chain. Successful companies go further in their measurements as seen in Figure 9-3.
Figure 9-3: Customer experience measurement and optimization tactics.
Measuring each conversion point, rather than just the end conversion point, acknowledges that each link in your conversion chain influences the other conversion links. So, although your end goal may be a number in dollars, the method of achieving that number may vary. You may need to attract more visitors or you may need to convert more leads, but you won’t know which will help you achieve your desired sales outcome unless you measure each conversion point.
Tweaking your conversion points
As my business partner, Nate Davidson, says, “Do more of what works. Do less of what doesn’t work.” Now that you’ve set milestones and you’re monitoring the success of each link in the Customer Conversion Chain, begintweaking your traffic numbers, conversion numbers, or quality numbers to improve your end results. Examine your attraction and conversion data over time (at least over the last three months initially) and begin to assess which conversion points are excelling, which content engages, which social media channels attract better quality leads, and so on.
Start with your base conversion metrics and look for your top-performing conversion points. Drill deeper to assess why a particular link in your Customer Conversion Chain is overperforming. Take the overperforming component and insert that component into another campaign. Is a particular landing page converting at a high level? Determine why, and then apply a similar landing page to another product pyramid in a different inbound campaign. Is a certain e-book getting more downloads? Discover why, and then create similar content for your other campaigns.
Start slowly, but A/B test the new component against the existing component to see which performs better. Don’t make wholesale changes — it’s preferable to change only one component at a time when replicating success.
Likewise, look for your most underperforming conversion point and drill deeper to find the cause. Are you underperforming? Do you need more traffic? Do you need to improve the quality of your leads? Form your hypothesis about why this is happening and then continually make changes to improve.
Things You Can Do Now
- Begin building your Conversion Machine website engine, taking into account your website/IMA assessments.
- Form a hypothesis as to which of your conversion links are weak and which are strong. Test your hypothesis.
- Attempt to populate all the links in the Customer Conversion Chain (if you need help, see Chapter 11).