At times we worry about increasing online conversion rate but lose track of the bigger picture. We have been working with a public relations firm for the last few weeks tweaking a couple of their landing pages. As you may have assumed, the site is a B2B lead generation site. After testing different elements on the site, we were able to increase the landing page conversion rate by close to 66%.

Since the site is a lead generation site, the actual sales are closed offline. I was chatting with the marketing manager about his overall close rate. I was certain that the overall conversion rate must have increased since we managed to increase the online rate. Unfortunately, not true. The offline conversion rate hardly moved up. Strange but it sounds familiar. The truth is that we faced the same problem with few other clients. There are generally two main problems that would cause the offline conversion rate to lag while the site conversion rates are increasing:

- The site is not sending quality leads: As certain or exact conversion rate might be, the truth is that it is a very vague term. Sure, give me a lead generation site and I can double its conversion rate in less than a week. Strange? Increasing conversion rate for a lead generation site translates into delivering more leads into your inbox. However, you should never forget to evaluate the quality of these leads. It is useless to double your conversion rate if all I am doing is sending more leads who are not interested in the service you provide. In this case, our client works with large size companies who require more extensive PR services as well as can afford to pay for that level of service. They do not want small businesses that do not have the budget contacting them via the website to inquire about PR work. The site design, copy and other elements were constructed to qualify a lead before he fills the contacts form. For example, we made sure that the minimum monthly budget of $10,000 is clearly indicated to anyone who might want to hire them. The client’s page which included companies such HP, Johnson & Johnson, and Ford gave a good indicator of the size of companies they work with.

- The site is sending quality leads but your sales staff is still asleep! It is great the client is filling the contact form. But here is the big question. How long does it take your staff to respond to a client inquiry? Let me give some examples from our own work because we have been tracking this data for the last 7 months. We found out that if we respond to a client request in less than 30 minutes, our chances of closing the sale with that client increases by 70%. The longer we wait, the less the chances are of closing the sale. Waiting for 24 hour, lowers our chances of closing the sale to less than 10%. Waiting for 48 hour or more, lowers the chance of closing the sale to less than 1%.

What is the best way to respond to an inquiry?  Inboxes are flooded with emails. Your email will be just another email amongst hundred others. So, get on the phone right away! When we did a quick analysis with our client, the delay in response to website requests was the culprit. It was taking the staff on average about 4 days to respond. No need for a lengthy speech here; that simply does not work.

Do you have a similar experience?