Clients often associate ecommerce with having a website that sells products. However, many business-orientated websites are services based. A business website is one of the most useful and important weapons in a clients marketing toolbox, helping generate those all important sales leads, whether selling products or services.
Here’s an example that any business can apply to understand better the true value of website lead generation:
Food Events are a catering company who specialise in marquee catering. They have a customer base across the whole of the South East of England and regularly cater for around 300 events a year, which generates over £2 million in turnover.
Up until 2009 they had no perception of their website’s value. In our initial meeting they stated that:
“We get over 1000 hits per week”
“People often comment on how wonderful the website looks”
“We are not sure how many emails we get as the IT department sorts all that out”
Food Events average event is worth around £6,000. At the beginning of 2009 we began to track all web based enquiries and in the first 3 months, utilising web activity tracking, it was identified that the site was generating:
45 email leads
15 web form enquiry leads
60 leads in total
All the leads were then monitored by “Food Events” to see if they converted into a sale (or live contract). Of these 60, three were successful.
Its here that our average client value comes into play:
Average client value (£6,000) X 3 new contracts = £18,000
We now now had a clear marker to demonstrate that, with very little effort, the website had generated £18,000 of new business in one month. These figures highlighted to Food Events that there was potential to gain sales via its site. Following discussions with ourselves, a Website marketing strategy was implemented utilising a selection of different methods with a monthly budget of £2,000.
Website marketing activities included:
• SEO – Improving the site position for key terms that matched the company’s profile
• SEM – Improving the site with a customer-friendly focus
• PPC – Increasing targeted online advertising
• Newsletters – Using email marketing
• Link building – increasing links from quality complimentary sites
• Telephone – Ensuring all telephone leads are logged as to source
After 6 months the end result of all this work was that in the first 3 three months of 2010 the site generated:
120 email leads
90 web form enquiry leads
80 brochure requests
300 telephone calls
590 leads in total
30 sales were completed over this period that we can directly link to website lead generation marketing activities
Remember our average client value? (£6,000)
Let apply it again – £6,000 x 30 new contracts = £180,000
My experience has shown that many businesses have trouble in visualising their websites potential as an ecommerce sales tool – often businesses in the b2b sector roll out brochureware sites without understanding that they have a 24 hour virtual sales team that is talking directly to a customer trying to find services they supply.
Getting business to visualise this commercial value immediately moves the goal posts when developing online marketing strategies.
