More Traffic Does Not Equal More Sales
by alexdn on 2007-09-23
If you were to ask 100 (Internet) marketers what is the #1 thing they want, the answer almost always boils down to: More traffic!
Sorry, folks, but this is a great example of asking the wrong question and chasing the wrong thing! What I am about to say is almost the equivalent is skewering a sacred cow, so I will proceed cautiously.
Getting more traffic is not necessarily the end-all-be-all solution. For many marketers, getting more traffic is not the problem. Getting more sales is the problem. What do I mean by this?
Closing a sale involves many steps but for the sake of this conversation, let's focus on 2 key ones: generating traffic and conversion. Way too many marketers focus on traffic generation and not enough on traffic conversion (that is, converting the lead to a sale). This is especially important when selling high end products because many times, generating a lead is very expensive (because of the industries I am in, I sometimes pay more than $3 with pay per click advertising and have to do very expensive direct mail so I can quickly go broke by generating more traffic, if I am not careful).
To be honest, almost anybody can generate more traffic. The real question is: once you have the traffic, do you know how to convert that lead to a sale? In many cases, it may be the sales process that's broken. Let me give you an extreme example (this is real and therefore all the more tragic). I have clients that run expensive newspaper ads, but are then too busy to answer the phone but are also too cheap to send the calls to an answering service. This is an industry where a sale can generate tens of thousands of dollars. Yet, when I ask them what the problem is, they tell me: "We need more leads!" So, they continue to throw more money on lead generation and not fix the conversion problem.
This happens in more businesses than you may think.
In real estate investing for example, you can have only a moderate-sized list but make good money because the average transaction size in these industries is large enough for to spend that type of investment in the lead generation.
Now that you know this, really think through your problem: is it lack of traffic or lack of conversion? In many cases, it may be the conversion process that's the problem.
Sorry, folks, but this is a great example of asking the wrong question and chasing the wrong thing! What I am about to say is almost the equivalent is skewering a sacred cow, so I will proceed cautiously.
Getting more traffic is not necessarily the end-all-be-all solution. For many marketers, getting more traffic is not the problem. Getting more sales is the problem. What do I mean by this?
Closing a sale involves many steps but for the sake of this conversation, let's focus on 2 key ones: generating traffic and conversion. Way too many marketers focus on traffic generation and not enough on traffic conversion (that is, converting the lead to a sale). This is especially important when selling high end products because many times, generating a lead is very expensive (because of the industries I am in, I sometimes pay more than $3 with pay per click advertising and have to do very expensive direct mail so I can quickly go broke by generating more traffic, if I am not careful).
To be honest, almost anybody can generate more traffic. The real question is: once you have the traffic, do you know how to convert that lead to a sale? In many cases, it may be the sales process that's broken. Let me give you an extreme example (this is real and therefore all the more tragic). I have clients that run expensive newspaper ads, but are then too busy to answer the phone but are also too cheap to send the calls to an answering service. This is an industry where a sale can generate tens of thousands of dollars. Yet, when I ask them what the problem is, they tell me: "We need more leads!" So, they continue to throw more money on lead generation and not fix the conversion problem.
This happens in more businesses than you may think.
In real estate investing for example, you can have only a moderate-sized list but make good money because the average transaction size in these industries is large enough for to spend that type of investment in the lead generation.
Now that you know this, really think through your problem: is it lack of traffic or lack of conversion? In many cases, it may be the conversion process that's the problem.
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