SEARCH MARKETING BLOG

Post-conversion Marketing

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A lot of search marketing is initially spent on building traffic.. or "click marketing"; but this does not go far enough.  In order to ensure that your search engine marketing is successful, you can’t ignore what is happening once the searcher arrives on a web site.  Is the site persuasive?, have a clear call to action?, what’s the bounce rate like?, simple navigation? – these are all "post click marketing" issues.

A recent study by Omniture and InsideSales.com suggests that many companies are falling at the third hurdle – let’s call it "post-conversion marketing" (better known as lead conversion.. or "sales").

In this study, they made online enquiries from around 700 different companies.  They set up a dedicated email address and phone number and monitored the results – and the results were quite shocking:

  • Average email response time: 19 hours, 31 minutes (the optimum response time should be within the first hour)
  • Average phone response time: 36 hours, 57 minutes (the optimum phone response time should be within the first five minutes)
  • How many companies even responded? (only 47.3 percent responded via email, and just 7.5 percent responded via phone!)

Hard to believe on paper – that less than half even responded at all… but I have first hand experience of this myself when looking for various suppliers (most recently a new PR agency).

We have also worked with clients who complained about the conversion of their search marketing, only to find that they had problems with their mechanism for receiving leads.  In some cases, the enquiry form was broken – it never sent a lead through to the client.  We also ask clients to look at their junk email folder – and they usually find a small gold mine in there.

So getting search marketing right is important.. getting visitors (click marketing) and converting those visitors into leads (post-click marketing)… but don’t let your conversion processes let you down.  Make sure that your enquiry form / order form is working and that any emails being generated are not being dumped into your junk email folder.  But most importantly, follow up on sales leads.. at least by email, but a phone call can sometimes be better.