How to be a marketing rock star without spending a nickle on traffic generation

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of executing digital marketing strategy for a lot of different companies. From lead gen to e-commerce. From mom & pop to Fortune 100. And if there’s one prevailing theme that I’ve garnered from these experiences it’s the vast majority of organizations either don’t know about or refuse to engage in the one marketing tactic that can literally grow ROI exponentially without having to drive a single incremental site visit.

Have you guessed which tactic I’m referring to?

If not, let me spare you the suspense. I’m talking about conversion optimization.

Regardless of whether it’s a huge brand or some small, local start-up it seems like conversion optimization always takes a back seat to more conventional marketing and advertising initiatives if it’s part of the consideration set at all.

And this is nothing less than tragic in my opinion because some simple math proves the immense value that conversion optimization and testing can provide. For example, if your marketing program generates $1,000,000 per year in revenue and you currently convert at a rate of 2% (e.g. 2 out of every 100 visitors) improving your conversion by just half of a percentage point (e.g. 2.5%) will increase your revenue by $250,000 per year. Moreover, that increased revenue will continue to roll in over time, making conversion optimization efforts a high equity activity (e.g. the impact is felt well after the work is rendered).

In other words, that incremental $250,000 will likely continue to roll in year after year well after you invested the time, resources, and marketing budget to lift your conversion rate (and that’s assuming that ongoing conversion optimization testing doesn’t result in ever growing conversion rate percentages).

Factor in the relatively low cost of conversion optimization services and technology (Google Analytics offers a very sophisticated A/B & multivariate testing platform for free) as well as the fact that improving conversion means you can make more money off the existing volume of traffic you receive and the value of this tactic becomes all the more clear.

And there’s one final and fairly subtle benefit that’s worth mentioning. For companies that struggle with very low conversion rate, investing in advertising channels like paid search can be a real challenge due to negative ROI, and so for those companies investing in conversion optimization can help open the door to paid channels that would have previously been more or less out of reach.

If your company or clients haven’t seriously invested in conversion optimization you know what to do. Get cracking because you’re leaving all sorts of revenue on the table.