This one’s for the folks who generate leads online then follow up and close the deal offline. Bricks and mortar businesses like builders, solicitors – or anyone that has to speak to someone before they close the sale.

So if you sell online with no offline contact, you’re better off skipping this one.

Let’s go…

If you’re still reading, I guess the bulk of your online business comes from website enquiries that you contact, qualify, follow up with and then close offline.

It might just be a humble email address to put into an autoresponder series or a highly detailed form, asking for everything about the enquirer – from what they had for breakfast, to their inside leg measurement – to follow up with on the phone.

Whatever the case, you could end up in a pickle if you don’t measure enquiries properly.

Here’s what I mean:

You could have a high enquiry conversion rate – maybe 30% of people who land on your page fill out your enquiry form – but when you get their information, it’s fake.

Or if you can contact them, they’re un-contactable, disinterested, rude or flat-out deny ever enquiring.

On the other hand, you may have a very low enquiry conversion rate, but most of those who do enquire go on to be excellent (big spending) customers.

Sound familiar?

Two extreme ends of the scale – high conversion/low lead quality or low conversion/high lead quality – neither of which is a good place to be. And both of them are profit killers for different reasons.

High enquiry conversion rate but low quality is a time waster. You have to call twenty or more ‘micky mouse’ numbers, get insulted and waste your life explaining who you are – just to speak to someone who may convert to a sale. It’s only a little better than cold calling, no fun and a waste of time.

Low enquiry conversion rate and high lead quality isn’t much better either, although it doesn’t eat your time and jangle your nerves like the other end of the spectrum does. The problem here is scale. Because conversion rate is so low, it’s hard to extract enough business from the market and your budget. This is especially true in niche or local businesses where search traffic is limited.

What causes these extremes?

It’s impossible to list everything because factors change depending on your market, business, location and a plethora of other variables. There are, however, some common ones that seem to affect landing page conversion rate and lead quality consistently.

They are…

Friction:

• The higher the friction (things that cause resistance to enquire) the lower the enquiry conversion rate.
• This isn’t always a bad thing because if you use friction subtly, you can put off the people you don’t want, while letting in the ones you do (think a ‘no trainers’ policy in a night club).

Information, questions and objections:

• If you answer common questions most people ask you when they enquire, you’ll automatically disqualify some of your visitors. (For example: if a common question is about price, publishing prices on your landing page may decrease conversion rate, but should improve lead quality, as those who enquire have accepted your prices to some extent.)
• This can work both ways though. If you or your staff are good at selling, it may pay to leave questions unanswered on your landing page. Then you (or your sales people) give the prospect answers on the phone and immediately address objections, which ups the odds of closing the sale.

Relevancy:

• The closer your ‘scratch’ is to your visitors ‘itch’, the higher your conversion rate will be.
• Same goes for lead quality. If your offer is just what your prospect is looking for, they’re going to want to talk to you and find a solution.

From that list, it’s pretty clear that there’s no fool-proof way to get good quality online leads while holding a good conversion rate.

Even the best of us can only make educated guesses about what’s going to do well – and even then, there are no guarantees we’ll get it right first time.

And like all good direct marketing, you’ve got to test variations to figure out what works best.

This is mercifully simple online – so simple that even a hapless, non-technical, self taught web designer like me can do it.

But before I show you the details, let’s dive in and talk about the principles of tracking leads, because that’s where the money is.

The trick to tracking…

The trick with online lead generation is linking up:

• the keyword,
• the landing page,
• the prospect,
• and what happened to them after they enquired.

So for each person who enquires, you know the keyword they typed in, the page that persuaded them to enquire, whether they bought anything – and if so, how much they bought.

That means you can directly tie revenue to a particular person, a landing page, a keyword or an ad.

Think about that for minute.

You get the luxury of knowing – not guessing – which keyword is making the most money. A luxury that’s usually reserved for strictly e-commerce websites, not lead generation sites that sell offline, like yours.

Why this is so important:

When you’re generating leads, lead conversion information in analytics is very limited, because it’s very difficult to directly link a keyword to an offline sale.

This causes all kinds of problems where you end up guessing about what’s working or not, rather than knowing for sure.

The terrifying reality

Let me explain with an example…

Picture this: you’ve got two top keywords, and you’re trying to work out which one is producing the best return. Let’s say for the sake of simplicity, each keyword has had 1000 clicks each this month – and cost per click is £1…

Keyword 1 converts 25% of visitors to enquiries, costing £4 per enquiry in clicks, and has generated 250 leads for you.

Keyword 2 converts 15% of visitors to enquiries, costing around £6.67 per enquiry in clicks, and has generated 150 leads.

Based purely on this information (which is all most of us have in online lead generation), Keyword 1 looks like a clear winner.

But wait… let’s add our sales information we’ve linked to this data.

For Keyword 1, 20% of our enquiries lead to a sale and average spend was £150. That’s £7500 in sales and an average revenue per enquiry of £30.

But for Keyword 2, 45% of our enquiries lead to a sale and average spend was £195. So that’s £13,162 in sales and an average revenue per enquiry of £87.75.

Who’s the winner now?

Keyword 2 is dwarfing Keyword 1 when it comes to revenue.

But the scary thing is, if we hadn’t linked our keywords to sales, the worst of the two would’ve been declared the winner – and money lost. Not at all pretty.

In fact, if you’re generating leads online to follow up with offline, you’ve probably got a few keywords like this in your Adwords campaign.

And if you’re not tieing leads to keywords, you may be losing money or at best, missing out on more.

Let’s talk about getting it fixed…

Some of you will have in-house marketing and web designers or agencies, but a large chunk of you do most of it yourself and call in help as-and-when you get stuck.

For the folks who have in-house people, you just need to ask them to pass the keyword from Adwords to your enquiry form using dynamic URL parameters and hidden form fields. They should know what you mean.

For everyone else, I’m going to be releasing a series of videos that show you how to do it step by step. It’s pretty straight forward if you’ve ever tinkered with a web page.

And in the mean time, remember that when you’re testing advertising of any kind, go for the biggest picture you can. That’s input vs. output.

Anything else is like measuring temperature with a ruler: you’ll get data, just not the right kind.

-George.

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