Here’s a great lesson on your customers journey. Which is really important, because understanding this can give you more money, or take away money from your business.
A couple of business partners and myself, where sitting down with a client in their office in West Sydney. They had a very good problem that they wanted some help with.
Website Conversion Problem
Their problem was was they had between 8,000 – 10,000 people every single month visiting their website and reading the helpful information in their blogs!
This company sells natural medicine, so their website is established and has lots of articles about the thing that their products fixes.
The problem is that, these 10,000 people who visit the website every day are obviously their perfect customers. Because they do a google search for their ‘thing’, they find their website and they click on their website and start reading!
You can’t get a much better targeted customer than that online – unless they end up buying from you on the spot.
With 10,000 visitors, they thought they should be getting more sign ups (and they’re right). They were only seeing about 1% of these people sign up for more information and a call back.
There was a huge opportunity on the table, they knew it. And we knew it.
But why would only 1% of people ask to get more information when we already know they have the exact symptoms that this products helps with. It seems very strange. A website conversion rate of 7%, 10% or higher would be more expected.
Organic Traffic
Before going ahead, let me explain that ‘organic traffic’ is what they had, 10,000 of them a day. Organic traffic is people who find your website all by themselves.
You didn’t have to pay for it and tell them to visit your website “right now.”
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is the opposite of organic. You do need to run an advertisement somewhere, and pay for the customer to click on your Ad and go to your website.
These two different types of traffic (traffic = people who are ON your website) will behave surprisingly different.
Our company was running paid traffic, marketing campaigns for this client. We were advertising their service on Facebook and targeting their target customers.
Our campaigns basically looked like this:
- We would spend $10,000.
- We would get 12,000 clickers onto our website (not their website).
- And from this: 2,400 or so would sign up for a call back. (20% conversion rate)
So on our website, 20% of people would sign up for a call back.
But on our clients website, only 1% of people would sign up! Everyone was thinking, well this is a big opportunity here and we can all share this bounty!
Website Conversion Fix
It was suggested by my business partner that we run a trial. For one week, anytime someones goes to one specific page on their blog (just 1 we all chose), instead of showing the person the blog article they were there to read, we would show them our web page instead!
Because we were getting 20% sign ups, and we knew their blog page was getting 1%.
Personally, I saw the problem with this idea which ended up coming true. But everything is worth a try, because sometimes you just never know.
My business partner was chairing the meeting so I held my tongue. And this is the lesson here anyway. This is the reason I’m telling you this story.
Pre-Framing
The path your customer arrives to you on, is very very important. It’s not something you should overlook.
When we made the change above, to everyones surprise: there was no improvement with the 1%. By coincidence only, the conversion rate on our page for this same organic traffic, ended up being about the same.
This shocked some people, and caused some ripples.
Why was our page only getting 1% of visitors to sign up, when we use the same page for our Facebook ads and we get 20% and sometimes higher?
It’s the pre-framing these visitors have been put through.
The mistake we made was ignoring this golden rule.
The pre-frame the companies customers were going through previously was like this:
- The customer has a problem.
- The customer goes to Google to search for solutions to this problem.
- The customer finds our clients website, and clicks on it.
- The customer gets EXACTLY what she was looking for: INFORMATION!
- The customers reads the information, and 1% sign up for a call back.
Everything in RED above, is the pre-frame.
When we inserted our page into the mix, we removed Step 4 from right underneath them! They didn’t see the page they were expecting with all the information, they now saw our page which had less info and more of a “fill out your details now” kind of a feel to it.
Our normally effective page, that converted on average 20% of people who we go to click on our Ad, was suddenly only producing a 1% conversion rate. That is a very, very big difference. Absolute night and day, and it shocked most people who were sitting around the table that day.
The Lesson
We all re-learned that day that you need to pay attention to the customer journey. How they have been pre-framed before they come to you.
Where did they come from? Was it a google search? Or where they referred to you from a friend?
Or did they respond to your paid advertising you had running on Radio?
We re-learned that we need to be handling each of these types of people differently, and so do you.
Whatever message or idea your customer has in their head before they come to you, try and continue on their path. See their path through, answer the question they had, deliver what they were expecting and only then once their scratch has been itched, should you turn the conversation to where you want it to go.
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