To be an excellent marketer, you must deliver not just website traffic, but traffic that converts into a lead. In the last few years, we have had one of the best markets in our lifetimes, and most marketers have gotten used to being able to turn up traffic, which would translate to an increase in leads and appointments and create more new home sales. Now that the market has been shifting, marketers may be getting pressure from above to turn up the website traffic if sales are waning.
Our data shows that it’s not as easy as turning up the traffic to create leads like it once was. As many marketers are finding out, it is harder to deliver more traffic in a shrinking market without compromising lead quality. Here is a quick guide to help you determine and analyze if extra traffic is needed and if it is worth the investment.
The best way to start is by checking your traffic total weekly (or monthly) then hopping into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and pulling your leads. Define leads as people in your CRM from online form registrations, first-time calls and texts, onsite registrations, and possibly chat – if the conversation was productive. Divide the leads by your total traffic. The benchmark is 1% of your traffic should convert to leads. That said, we are currently seeing a range of .4% to .8% with most Builders that work with us doing a little better than that.
If your conversion ratios are on the low end, say, .3% -.6% then it is worth first addressing your calls to action on the website. Do you have many different types of CTAs that speak to all the stages of the funnel? Some of my favorites are variations on: “Have Questions? We can help;” “Ready to get started? We’re Here to help," and “Ready to take the next step?”
Right now, “Schedule a tour” & “Get prequalified” are too strong, so if you have those as your main CTAs, it is time to try adding something fresh. If your site’s conversion ratios are great, then you get to move to the next step of the funnel.
Check your leads-to-appointments ratio. A good benchmark is 25%-35%. Chat regularly with your OSC. Focus on asking what objections they get most often, so you can tailor your marketing messages to help minimize some of the objections. As marketers, we don’t have control over their process, but we can give them materials that help make getting the appointment easier for them.
Communicate with Sales
And lastly, take a closer look at sales, sit in on the sales meeting, but also reach out directly to your sales team. A healthy conversion ratio for this part of the funnel is about 15%-30%. If the rest of the funnel is on the top end of normal, this should be your signal to increase traffic to compensate. Let the sales team worry about incrementally improving the appointment-to-sale ratio. Now if your conversion rate is below 10%, it is going to be difficult to buy enough quality traffic to compensate, so the responsibility to solve the conversion issue is on sales, not marketing, unless sales asks for content or collateral to help address an identified issue. If management asks us to solve the sales issue with more traffic anyway, increase traffic for a short time (30 days max) to see if that improves sales. This type of lesson usually shows that traffic is not the issue and helps management identify that the value proposition may need to be addressed.
Knowing how your traffic affects the whole funnel can help you show leadership that buying traffic isn’t always an investment in sales but that you know how to tell the difference and make sure the company is investing in sales!
