Preach to the Converted

Source: Seer Interactive

The popular Kissmetrics blog outlines eight of the most important conversion metrics brands should be tracking.

• Traffic sources
• New/unique visitor conversion
• Return visitor conversion
• Interactions per visit
• Value per visit
•  Cost per conversion
• Bounce rate
• Exit pages 

In a world where everyone wants more likes, more followers, more customers, and, honestly, more money, too much conversion focus is often placed on new and unique visitors. We say it’s time to preach to the converted a little more loudly. OK, maybe not loudly, but definitely clearly.

If someone sees a bracelet they like on Pinterest and clicks through to your site, you’ve got a prospective customer, a new and unique visitor. I would argue, that if that sale completes and the only follow-up communication is the email that contains a shipping tracking number, then you haven’t really converted anyone. You’ve had a successful transaction and certainly there are metrics for that. But the mark of a true conversion is the difference between a note and an ongoing communiqué. Defining a conversion as merely getting a potential customer to take some predefined action leaves a lot to be desired — namely, a stable denominator.

Consider the outstanding example written by WiderFunnel.

Well, I am not really sure what the value of that percentage is in practice. There isn’t a magic percentage that works across industries or even within the same company at any given time because of (as I stated before) that darn unstable denominator! WiderFunnel makes the case in several parts, but I’d like to focus on the following two:

1.    Your conversion rate is dependent on two components, the numerator and denominator. The numerator (the number on the top) increases if you increase the number of sales you make each day, which creates a higher conversion rate. That’s a good thing.

2.    The denominator (on the bottom) increases if you get more visitors to your website. If you get the same number of sales with more traffic, your conversion rate has decreased. But your sales are still the same. This is an irrelevant change as far as your business is concerned (assuming appropriate relative traffic cost) even though your conversion rate makes you think the business is in worse shape.

Of course, a comparatively low daily conversion rate could signal an issue with, say, the shopping cart not loading correctly; however, in the long run, conversion should be thought of as more of a measure of retention. After all, people don’t convert to a different religion just for the day, week, or year — it is the declaration of a commitment. Perhaps this is a matter of semantics, but think again about that denominator. How much truer an indication of business growth would a conversion rate be if the denominator were more consistent? You would more so know that of all the people who consume your product, X number of people reacted to this specific item (be that a piece of content, a product, or service, etc.). That information would help you tailor your next consumable to your legions of converted and it is to them who you want to keep satisfying because they have returned to your site again and again and they will get others to convert too. So always separate conversion rates into two camps, new visitors and returning visitors, to gain a clearer understanding of how these both affect campaign success. Use other relationship-building marketing tactics to support preaching to those converted, and that will positively affect your company success and mark true conversion.