You’ve seen it before, the common day-to-day unfolding of most organizations. They start somewhere between a second serving of coffee and a verbal rehash of yesterday’s news. Between the foreseeable dehydration and irrelevant debate, few decisions are made about the state of their web presence. What is far more daunting is that when the website is considered a topic of discussion, nothing profound or progressive pushes the rhetoric further than the aesthetic of the website.

Granted, to those involved in filling a 9 to 5 block, it may seem like time well spent picking pretty colors and finding more reasons for the website to “Pop!”. Unfortunately, these sorts of discussions are not sufficient in understanding the impact of an organizations website. Those in charge of making big decisions must come to terms with the idea that their website is an investment and should be cared for with the same amount of discipline. To those in the know, such accusations may come off as unsound or irrelevant due to the adoption rate of the internet. However, the affects of the internet along with simply having a website do not guarantee results.

I challenge you to examine your next company meeting and see if John-Doe from marketing is determine to send out his polished mailers or Jane from sales is set on buying more leads. If the latter describes your organization’s current state of investment, loosely, then I invite you to read on. On the other hand, if you’re fortunate and your company’s adoption characteristic in conversions is what Geoffrey Moore describes as pre-chasm(early adopters and or visionaries) in his book “Crossing the Chasm”, then we commend you and invite you to read for leisure. For those of us in the early majority, let me focus on the opportunity of converting a return on investment through the explorations in Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus’ book “Web Design for ROI.”

According to Loveday and Niehaus, certain organizations are plagued never to maximize a return on investment because they insist on making adjustments for the web in a traditional quantitative approach. Slow adopting organizations have quickly found themselves spending quality time pointing the finger at one another resulting in adverse discourse and no real solutions. Loveday and Niehaus suggest that the circular blame pointing desperately needs to end. They insist that it starts with the leaders of set organizations believing in the adoption of a strategic approach to web site design. Their research suggests that a strategic approach supplies impressive gains. Such gains are ultimately controlled by a combined metric: enhancing usability, a profound understanding of ones audience, and conversion optimization.

You may be asking, so what does that mean? What sort of “impressive gains” will I be making if I enhance my usability, understand my audience, or invest in my conversion optimization?

Initially, we’re provide a spectrum of evidence, but encouraged not to think how a site redesign will double our sales. The goal is to encourage one to think about how the design can improve the user experience and therefore positively improve business metrics.

Initial Numbers & Charts for those of you who enjoy them:

–

Loveday and Niehaus express that their experience falls around these same findings and they’ve seen gains of 30% to 1,000% as a result of of conversion optimization. However, the test of estimating your likely return will depend on many factors; including, ones industry, objectives, online strategies, your site’s quality, the target audience expectations, and the competitive environment.

If you haven’t noticed, the motif that is unfolding is an organization’s need for self reflection. Spending the time to explore this approach from the inside-out as well as from the outside-in, is crucial. Accordingly, Loveday and Niehaus draw parallels of this system to a sales funnel. In the business case of acquiring more sales there are two obvious choices: drive more traffic, which yields a proportional gain; or, adopt an active focus on one’s conversion rate to yield transcending gains. Using the sales funnel analogy one can determine that the conflict is whether to put more into the funnel only to produce slow and costly results or widening the bottom of the sales funnel and achieve a higher conversation rate at a lower cost. Using their simplified metric, we can see charted results that once were unimaginable. Note, Loveday and Niehaus mention that the numbers are rarely this clear and easy but used in the following example for clarity and encourage one to conduct a similar exercise adjusting as needed.

–

–

–

–

–

Ultimately, conversion optimization is “the gift that keeps on giving” because it’s biggest asset is time. The beneficial element of increasing conversion is that it consists of a one-time cost with an ongoing benefit. Buying traffic is a one-time cost with a one time benefit that can become costly. An organization must spend the same amount to purchase traffic each month or else traffic diminishes.

So conversion optimization is the ideal method for succussful ROI. What next? Easy, managing your ROI, of course. In our next session we’ll discuss principles for successfully managing web sites for optimal ROI.

As you were.