The Three Most Overlooked Elements of Digital Marketing

Executive Summary

The three most overlooked elements of Digital Marketing, simply put, are:

• Conversion,
• Conversion, and
• Conversion.

CRO targets bottom-line results

Conversions Tie Directly to Revenue

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is focused on precisely one thing – tightly tying the money spent optimizing conversions to actual revenue achieved by the company.

Conversion

It’s easy to ignore conversion. Offline media, such as print advertisements, have begun their slow – or, in some cases, rapid – decline. However, as social media have exploded, the complexity of business has increased for many businesses. What was once simply a loosely correlated set of metrics to revenue, such as “brand awareness,” driving marketing spend, has been replaced with a myriad of key performance indicators (KPIs). The prevalence of cost-per-click (CPC), for example, is one in a long parade of metrics whose relationship with ROI is not a direct correlation. Click-through rate (CTR) is another.

Many, many marketers have started into the Digital Marketing world armed with these metrics. Other KPIs followed, too numerous to list here.

Faced with such an array of KPIs, focusing on ROI – return on investment – can somehow seem less important. CPC and CTR might be things that you’re currently tracking, but will they directly drive revenue for your business? For almost everyone, the answer is a distinct “no.”

Conversion

Adding to the fire, there are always more activities to do and more ways to explore reaching potential customers by driving traffic through unique media such as mobile search, affiliate marketing, banners, commerce and e-tail sites, digital outdoor, e-mail, and pricing promotions, just to name a few that spring to mind. Again, the proliferation of Marketing channels is astonishing in speed and breathtaking in adoption.

None of these media – which can deliver surprising traffic uplifts, used in the right business context – will guarantee additional revenue, however. The best ROI case is that one assumes that a “more relevant” set of potential customers can be reached through the right campaign in these media.

However, generally speaking, more traffic creates a linear uplift in revenue in the best case, i.e. 1,000 more visitors, 50 convert at our 5% conversion rate, and so we now have 50 more customers. In the best case.

Conversion

CRO is one of those rare things in business that offers “low-hanging fruit” (to use an overused term) in terms of additional business benefit. Most companies have not embarked on CRO previously – barriers such as complexity to execute the test, a dip in conversion rate as the test is ongoing, a desire to re-launch one’s website rather than make the existing one “sweat” more were all reasons NOT to embark upon CRO – and it offers the opportunity to get an exponential ROI, not just a linear uplift. When’s the last time a project had a believable hockey-stick revenue shape to it?

With Hiconversion’s next-generation CRO, those barriers have fallen. Testing can be done by virtually any business person that can point-and-click; conversion rate rises DURING the test; existing websites can become revenue-generation machines without the need for a risky or expensive overhaul.

Best of all, with no increase in traffic, converting just 10% more of the visitors will exponentially increase revenue – starting virtually immediately.

Conclusion

CRO is a discipline that can no longer be ignored. This “new frontier” of eCommerce has now been opened and will deliver high ROI for those that choose to embark. What’s stopping you?