Increasing your conversion rate will make you more money. Duh. That’s obvious. But what about the visitors that do not buy? If they didn’t buy now does that mean they won’t buy ever? Are they really worth nothing at all?
In the next 500 words I’ll prove to you that your non-converting traffic is your single most valuable – and unused – commodity.
Your non-converting visits are likely 95% or more of all your total traffic. How many of those people might buy from you later if you had just a little bit more contact with them? On average, it takes 6 contacts with a prospect to make a sale, so it should be no surprise that most people do not purchase on a first visit.
Look a bit deeper in your analytics and you’ll see this is true. The same user will routinely click multiple ads and organic listings before finally converting – often on a direct type-in of your domain name. And if all your traffic is from Adwords, think about what all those repeat clicks are doing to your cost of sales!
One of the reasons remarketing works so well is that it provides an easy – and cheap – way to re-touch your non-converting visitors. With each additional impression of your brand or offer, prospects are moved closer to converting. The primary limitation of remarketing is the very limited “value” in the touch since it’s really just a banner ad.
But what if you could talk to your prospects in some depth? And provide them a lot more information and valuable content about your product or service? And what if you could plan and sequence these contacts instead of just hoping the person found you by accident?
This “miracle” I describe is email – the single greatest marketing invention of all time (IMHO).
But unlike remarketing – where all you have to do is drop a cookie – to use email follow-up you’ll need your visitor’s email address. So how can you get people to give up their email? Clearly they will want something of value in return.
Your Missing Funnel
In addition to the funnel that converts visitors to buyers, you need the one that converts visitors to opt-ins. Now instead of 95% of all visitors slipping away, you might get email addresses from 25% of them. These are people with an interest in your product or service that are not ready to buy right now. How many of them will you eventually convert to customers? That depends.
Flipping the Script
If you run an ecommerce company (as many of our readers do) you are accustomed to people giving you money and then you giving them a product. Email marketing requires the precise opposite! You must first provide valuable information – which cost money to produce – in advance of the prospect giving you money for your product or service. This is the process we call “nurturing”.
The opposite of nurturing is to send nothing but promotions and we see this far too often. If all you ever send is a coupon or a special offer you will “burn out” your list and it’ll be worth nothing to you.
On the other hand, if you provide valuable insight – even if it includes an offer – your email list will be your single best marketing asset.
Consider:
- Email is a traffic source you actually own,
- It grows from traffic that was previously wasted,
- You can’t be banned for using it, and
- Opt-ins have prequalified themselves as prospects!
The people on your email list already want what you have, maybe not now, but some day. That’s why they opted-in. Your job as an email marketer is to educate, inform, and even entertain them until they are ready for what you have.
All you need is content
And that is where most of stop dead in your tracks. We understand that. Creating unique, relevant, and valuable information to nurture your list is involved and potentially expensive. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
That’s why we created our Content Marketing Service. It’s totally disclosed here so feel free to build it yourself, or you could have us build and run the entire system for you at a cost that is less than a single minimum wage employee.
To get started now, and be up and running before Halloween, book a free assessment with me as soon as possible.
