Understanding the Business Value of Social Media Marketing

Last week David Carter, Founder and CTO of Awareness, provided insights about how the field of social media marketing is maturing. We are a long way from completely understanding the business results for social media efforts and an even longer way from fully integrating them into a single-source set of marketing metrics. But real progress is being made in understanding and communicating business outcomes.

Awareness has a new ebook, with the lengthy but descriptive title “The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing.” That is, after all, what we as marketers want to do, and we have to link our efforts to actual revenue generation, not just to having a bunch of people who like us! This is the funnel; the entire book is well worth reading. Note that they start with what is essentially segmentation. Their definition of a social profile is the “aggregated interests, comments, and overall behaviors of a fan, follower, or RSS subscriber to a branded social network platform such as a brand’s Facebook fan page, Twitter profile, or blog.” The definition alone is challenging; it requires a full view of the person’s behaviors in social channels which is a big order for the social media metrics capabilities of most firms at this point. However, in order to influence, the marketer must first listen to what the customer is saying. That’s a keystone of SMM strategy.
Next, the marketer must have clear goals that impact the business. Those can range from qualifying and nurturing sales leads to providing excellent customer service and more. Then there are a variety of engagement strategies that marketers can use including engaging in conversation and collecting feedback. Most marketers will find that they need to use all these engagement strategies at one time or another. Which they use will depend as much on the stage of the customer’s relationship with the firm (customer lifecycle) as on the marketing campaign or on the product. This all fits nicely with the organization of Awareness’s social media hub software—publish, manage, measure and engage.

In his presentation he talked about these stages:
• The first is a robust content marketing strategy, deploying (and “repurposing”) your content widely across the web. A large firm will need a robust content management system to both facilitate and control the content marketing process.
• It is essential that the marketer first listen, then engage in the conversation the customer wants to have—not the product-oriented conversation the marketer wants.
• Collecting feedback required monitoring and, carefully done, leads to the social profile.
• Then measure results that can be linked to business outcomes.
The presentation represents reflections on the state of our art from a respected practitioner. Take a look.

My Slides from speaking to Harvard's Social Media Marketing class

View more presentations from Awareness Inc.

In it he asks the question that all marketers must keep asking themselves—for their corporate SMM strategy as a whole and for each campaign they run: what stage of the customer lifecycle do we need to impact? If you buy my argument that all SMM is lead generation, then the practical question becomes “what is the definition of ‘conversion’ for this particular SMM activity?” Is it a fan for our Facebook page, a qualified lead for our sales force—what exactly? Can we link it directly or indirectly to our SMM activities? Those two questions help focus the mind of the social media marketer.

It also leads me to my favorite quote from the ebook. Jeremiah Owyang says, “Don’t give engagement data to executives, as it doesn’t measure the actual effect on business goals.” Ouch; I wonder how many of us have made that mistake.

Social media marketing is moving in the direction of proving its actual business value. It has a way to go, however, and all of us should play an active role in moving it forward.

Social Media Business Model - Lead Generation?

Every once in awhile I have an ‘ahha’ moment. That’s one of the fun aspects of working in an emerging discipline where we are still figuring things out. A few months ago it was the realization that we don’t need to use awareness—in the traditional media sense—as a social media objective. Why spend money on marketing research to measure creation of awareness when we can offer people reasons to act? Is it possible for a person to take action, even a simple click-through, without having some minimal level of awareness? I don’t see how. We can manage the results of behavior to take them a step further, perhaps following the steps of the traditional hierarchy of awareness, but we can use behavior to measure each step, not marketing research. Here’s one related post.

That line of thinking probably led to the ‘ah ha’ I had last week. Almost all social media marketing is the first step in a conversion process. There are several possible scenarios:
• Most marketers are not going to sell things directly on social networks, at least for some time to come. Threadless is one of the few successful businesses doing so. Others like Zappos use social media as an integral part of their online communications but sell from their website. That’s the typical model today.
• Whether you are using social media to drive people to websites or to retail stores, there is clearly a ‘next step’ behavior you want them to take. It is possible that you link to a product page on your website or to a retail coupon, and the ‘next step’ is taken immediately. If so, you have metrics, and you can track the referral back to the social media site. However, research shows this is often not the case; purchases are often not made as a result of a first visit to a website. That requires the marketer to build a complex tracking process to match a later purchase with first exposure. That is part of conversion marketing metrics.
• Social media is often part of a relationship building strategy. Getting people to friend our Facebook page or getting them to register for our enewsletter represent two good examples. There are all sorts of reasons why people may not purchase right away. There are an equal number of good reasons why marketers should be in touch while they move through the purchase cycle.

All except the immediate click-through and purchase represent the need for formal conversion marketing strategies. I don’t have any data, but my guess is that the second and third bullets represent the bulk of social media-initiated contacts with customers. The second scenario requires creating a conversion path through the website. The third requires a conversion strategy that’s based in a set of communications steps. Both are conversion marketing!

That begs a simple definition of conversion. Consider the possibilities. For the social marketer, “conversion” can be a referral from the social network to the website. For the online marketer it can be registering for brand communications. For the brand marketer it is likely to be the purchase. It’s a process, the traditional conversion funnel. Today there are even more marketing actors involved in the process. That’s complex from the perspective of the marketing organization. It has to be seamless from the perspective of the customer.

So does this statement make sense? Most social media marketing is the first step in converting someone from a spectator to a customer.

Does Search or Social Media Have More Impact?

Of course there’s a secondary question—impact on what? For several days I’ve been thinking about two specific questions:

1. Does search marketing or social media drive more traffic to websites? I’m going to limit it to PPC and not include SE0.
2. Does PPC or social media have more impact on sales?

Both sound pretty simple and straightforward, right? If we believe that, we’ve forgotten all we know about the interconnectedness of media. Nevertheless, starting out with two specific questions led me to some interesting data.

Going backwards, we also know that question two is not as simple as phrased; there is immediate impact on sales and delayed impact. From early studies we know that web exposure, which was mostly display advertising at that time, had some immediate conversion impact but also had longer-term impact. In other words, it often took more than one visit for a consumer to decide to make a purchase. Think about your own behavior—does that make sense? We also learned that conversions occurred offline in retail stores after consumers had visited websites. That was a pretty common phenomenon in the early days, “research on line buy offline.” Again, we’ve all probably done that. Are we more likely to just go ahead and buy online today; probably depends on a number of things.

The same is true of the online vs. offline conversion issue. These 2005 data seem pretty straightforward. More people convert offline. comScore went on to say that they “analyzed the time lag between consumers’ initial searches and subsequent purchases made in the same categories during November and December of 2005. . .more than half (56%) of consumers’ online holiday buying actually happened in subsequent internet sessions, clearly demonstrating the strong latent impact of search.”

I’ve been looking for a replication of this study ever since. I’ve never found one. Does that mean that the latent impact of search has become part of Internet marketing conventional wisdom and no one sees the need? I did find a marketer’s analysis of a single campaign in 2009. He found that initial Google results were faster to come in than Yahoo’s, but that 31% of all results came in after his (approximately 1 month) campaign was over. I’ll take that as confirmation until someone shows me otherwise.

Ok, so here’s what I found in terms of traffic. The answer to question 1 looks pretty simple, right? Search is the winner by a huge margin. But look at what else eMarketer said (newsletter, October 22, 2009):

According to research by ad network Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic your way than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing. More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal.

It doesn’t say that the loyal users were more likely to buy, but would you agree that the likelihood of a purchase goes up with repeat visits? It does seem likely; how much is unanswered, at least in any recent research I could find.
The most interesting data I found is this 2007 study of the influence of newspaper advertising on web traffic. 44% of people who saw an ad did additional research; 67% of them did their research online; and 31% went to a search engine first.

But strong brands matter; in 2009 Nielsen found that 61% of the holiday traffic of retail web sites came from direct visits, not search. A Nielsen spokesman said:

the fact that such a high percentage of people go directly to retail sites and even those that search generally have a pretty clear intent as to which website they'd like to go to -- it makes a compelling argument that brand and past experiences [with a marketer] matter an awful lot and will be far more significant determinants of success than any customer acquisition strategy that they're going to engage in."

That’s really interesting. Two things strike me. First, that’s holiday shopping data for retailers and it may be different for purchases during the rest of the year. Second, all marketers have to do customer acquisition, so the question as to whether social media or search is best for acquisition still matters. Each and every marketer has to answer that by looking at quality vs. quality of initial referrals and the persistence of customers who were acquired in various channels—in other words by Customer Lifetime Value. At the same time, it’s unlikely that one acquisition channel will ever be enough; the question is allocation of resources.

Question 2 one more time--does search or social media have more impact on sales? Here’s data from the current Razorfish Fluent Report. Offline friends are most trusted when making a purchase—WOM again and always. TV was also trusted by these respondents, then “online” activities of several types appear. Search is down at the bottom as far as trust when making a purchase is concerned.

The issue is not straightforward in the sense that either search or social media is “best.” However, there seems to be a pretty clear picture in these data. Search brings more people to your site; social media gives them more trusted information on which to base their purchases. It’s not either/or.

Several times while I was looking for data I came across a good piece of advice. Marketers must measure the impact of various media at each stage in the conversion funnel. It changes from “just looking for information” to “deciding to buy something” and in between. That’s the real message; marketers must use all the tools in their arsenal—wisely!

I'm an Avatar: Can I Help You?

Yes, perhaps they can. Since the early days of the Internet artificial intelligence experts have been touting the potential of “virtual people” to provide customer information, service and support. I’ve been writing about them for most of that time and run into the same problem each time; the firms whose products I used as examples before are no longer around. This has been a really difficult market in which to get sufficient traction to survive.

That’s why a post on Dave Jackson’s Weekly Web Tools blog a couple of weeks ago caught my eye. He focuses on small businesses and really cares about customer service, so his evaluation of some of the current services was thought-provoking.

SitePal essentially allows you to create “talking FAQs” using their avatars or customer avatars from a photo you supply. All their services are based on a one-time fee. They have 3 service packages ranging in price from $9.95 to $39.95 per month based on usage and number of avatars. Check it out for yourself, but turn the volume down; all their pages open with an audio message—that’s what they do, after all.

Live Face on Web (also opens with audio) produces those little people who walk onto your screen and start talking to you. These are essentially videos, so they have a different business model—a one-time fee for production. Prices range from $259.95 for a 15-second/50 word video to $3,281.95 for a 300 second/1,000 word video.

The difference between these live avatars (is that an oxymoron? I don’t know!) and the earlier chatterbots is that these deliver audio, either automatically or on request by the visitor. Earlier versions were chat or SMS-based. They are the “chat with a live agent” functions that you see on many ecommerce sites, just using the bot to put a face on the chat. The Marketing & Innovation Blog reviewed several of these back in March. The VirtuOz site, for example, offers several agents, each to perform a specific task, from customer service to lead generation and conversion, on your site.

MicroSoft Live Agent also offers chat-based agents. You can take them for a trial run on their site and they have a good gallery. They offer APIs so developers can customize applications for their own sites.

There are lots of solutions out there. Hopefully some of these will survive, because the possibilities of improving customer service and support in a cost-effective way are real. The early developers loved to say that these agents don’t take coffee breaks or vacations. True, and the opportunity for consistent service 365/24/7 is important. Marketers have to remember, though, that good customer service requires access to a human agent if the automated services don’t satisfy the need. The trick is getting people to use the automated services before they pick up the phone or fire up their email program.

These autoplay video avatars are intrusive and annoying to some of us (not to mention the person in the next cubicle!). However, they may be what’s needed to say, “Use the cost-effective automated support service first.” How you say “then you can access life help if you need to” without encouraging people to go directly there is a problem. I’d suggest that you probably don’t make the offer until the automated service is finished. What’s for sure is that a good plan for customer service escalation is required to keep customers happy and costs low!

Who Do Marketers Trust?

In September Universal McCann released a new study of social media. This one is called “When did we start trusting strangers?”










It’s full of interesting data, including their listing of social media channels—wow, that’s a long list! (The full report is available here; there's also a presentation with additional data). Let me hit a few of the high spots for you.

A basic theme is the fact that we are all both influenced by and influencers in this new media world. I’ve written before about the importance of consumer ratings and other sources of individual, as opposed to marketer-initiated, information. The report asked what opinion sources people used (the question didn’t appear to include paying more attention to ads). Search and email from friends win hands down. Next on the list is visiting the brand’s website, which makes sense. That’s tied with IMing with a friend, though!

To me, the most provocative piece of data is “who do you trust?” It’s a long list. The report points out that the 4 top-rated sources are personal and 2 are online. WOM as the most credible source of information is not a new phenomenon—it’s always been the most trusted. What this says is that there are so many more ways for WOM to circulate now. That adds to its power to influence. On the marketer-initiated side you have to go considerably more than half way down the chart to find an occurrence. When you do, TV ads are the first, followed by magazine, newspaper, PPC and radio. The key issue is that these marketer-initiated communications are only rated as being about half as trustworthy as the personal sources that were highest rated. Marketers take note!

The next set of trusted sources start with consumer reviews in various channels, includes articles by known bloggers, as well as magazine and newspaper articles. That’s where the “strangers” come in. According to Universal McCann:

• We now trust a strangers recommendation as much as our closest friends

• We trust recommendations in social media channels more than paid-for communications

Big wow!

From the earliest studies of social communication we’ve known that many people were opinion leaders in contexts in which they had special interest and expertise. That’s still true according to these data. People both seek opinion and give opinion, and how many seek vs. give differs by product category. I’d also make a bet that the actual people who seek vs. give differ from one product category to another. I’d seek the opinion of one of my tech-savy friends before buying a computer, and I’d be happy to give him my best fashion advice for his big date. We have different areas of expertise.

What does the report recommend? It says marketers should:

• Be open, honest and transparent. If they’re not, they’ll get caught. Ask the politicians.
• Be part of the conversation. They actually advise marketers to advertise on the social media; it’s advertising that supports these free influence channels. Interesting point!
• Encourage everyone to contribute experiences and opinions.
• Reach out to what they describe as the super influencers, the new creators who blog, podcast, create videos and upload their photos. They should be considered “some of the most powerful voices in the future.”

It’s pretty clear who the public trusts—the best description is probably “people like me.” I started by asking who marketers trust. Do they trust their customers to engage with them in a reasonable and responsible way? Data to the contrary, I suggest that many marketers still do not trust their customers enough to engage in direct conversation with them!

Surround Marketing

I’d like to introduce a concept developed by Arun Poojari. Arun is the National Sales Head - Brand Solutions for Microsoft Advertising in India. His Surround Marketing is clearly a new media concept. The title is reminiscent of the surround session media buy offered by publishers including The New York Times, but it’s much broader.

The media model he uses is Entertain > Connect > Inform > Assist > Convert. It bears some relation to the one I wrote about several months ago, but it focuses only on acquisition. That’s find, since the purpose is to look at new media in the acquisition process.
And that’s an interesting perspective. His stages and the techniques in each are:

•Entertain. Use video, games, and/or rich media

•Connect. Banner advertising, which can be on social networks or other sites like portals. Social networks can also host marketer pages; Target is a good example. So can virtual worlds, which Arun doesn’t have on this graphic.

•Inform. Email, mobile advertising and applications of many types sit squarely on the line between Connect and Inform. They can be used for either purpose, perhaps both at the same time. Special events and other on-line promotions can be highly informative.

•Assist. Organic search is often the first step in finding out about products and services and the brands that offer them.

•Convert. He sees paid search as closer to the end of what we used to call the conversion funnel. Paid search should be coupled with campaign-specific landing pages and a clear conversion strategy and path.

This is a content ecosystem, not the conversion funnel of olden days (a decade or so ago). The conversion funnel could be controlled by a savvy marketer. No one controls the ecosystem of content, which includes but certainly is not limited to, marketer messages. Content of all kinds, much of it user created, swirls around in rather fashion. Marketers can be—must be—part of that ecosystem, but they cannot control it.

Today’s marketer wants to use the new media to reach certain target audiences. The Sears ArriveLounge campaign I wrote about yesterday is a good example. Sears is using the large social network portals as well as audience-specific networks. That’s good, but are there other places on the Internet where this target audience hangs out? Undoubtedly. I’d suggest that no media buy is going to cover them all, even for a deep-pockets marketer. If your online budget is not robust, a media buy covering all sites is unlikely.

That puts a premium on engaging the audience so they’ll share with their friends. Everyone is trying to do that—at least everyone puts a share this link or icon on their communications. That’s the facilitator, but it’s not enough to get the potential customers you do reach to help you reach others that haven’t been reached yet. That requires content that is actually worth sharing.

And that’s the challenge in a nutshell!

Social Banner Ads?

This morning’s Media Post reports on a keynote speech at the IAB Social Media Conference by Seth Goldstein, CEO of Social Media Networks. His agency is preparing to introduce a new type of “social banner” ad format, so he is not unbiased. That doesn’t make what he says less relevant.

"Social media is killing advertising," Goldstein said. "A few years ago people started to become more interested in each other [online] and less interested in advertising." With response rates for standard banner ads under 1% and search not geared to brand advertising, social media is the next frontier for major marketers to attack.

Even Google admits that its deal to serve ads on MySpace “is not monetizing as well as we had expected.”

In his talk Goldstein mentions advertising for the BMW Series 1, which I’ve mentioned before. I looked around to see what was going on specifically on Facebook and this is what I found; a contest on the Facebook Graffiti Wall app. The shot of the top looks pretty much like other contests we’ve seen, particularly in that viewers can not only participate (note that participation is directly on Facebook) but they can also vote on the winners. The bottom half shows product information that’s part of the page. According to what’s on the page the contest (now over) drew 9006 entries and 2143 fans who presumably followed it closely. Ok, so you’ve looked at the top of the page and you see entries by 2 highschoolers. What good does that do BMW (think tomorrow vs. today when answering that one)?


I looked further to see how much I could find about the entrants. You can see the Top 150 and the Winners. Do take a look—a screen shot just can’t do these justice! If you click through on the names of some of those who placed highest, you find that you can’t see their full profiles unless you “friend” them (which requires their permission if you aren’t a denizen of Facebook). So there’s a vote here for a modicum of privacy among these young adults. And from their pictures, it’s obvious that the winners and top entrants are young adults, not teenagers messing around. Young adults, remember, is the target market for the BMW Series 1.
Is this a digression? Maybe not. I found a hint about what social banner ads might look like on Goldstein’s corporate blog. He describes the evolution of online advertising as being, first, display then behavioral with social on the horizon. I know you can’t read what’s on that section; I had to blow it up so much I couldn’t copy it, but here’s what it says:

•“Where do you want to take a test drive?”
•“Have you seen Indiana Jones yet?”
•“Have you heard the new Goldplay (?) CD yet?”

You get the idea, especially once a social banner is on a targeted site. Where do you want to test drive (virtual or real?) the BMW? Let’s talk movies. Let’s talk about some band (that I’ve never heard of, so don’t target me!).

Engage people in a subject that interests them and begin a dialog with interested prospects. That’s the theme song of social media! Here are a couple of interesting ways to think about doing just that!

Customer Retention--How the Internet Has Changed It

Read the first installment (strategy) here.
Read the second installment (acquisition) here.
Read the third installment (conversion) here.

When I began to think about this series of posts, my initial reaction was that retention had changed less than acquisition and conversion. I like the Peppers and Rogers model of retention – Identify > Differentiate > Interact > Personalize. It’s a data-driven approach to retention and that’s as is should be.

Long before the Internet, marketers who were able to identify their end customers and obtain a mailing address for them sent retention mailings—letters, catalogs, and offers of all kinds. The main difference is that the Internet allows more marketers, especially traditional mass media marketers, to identify their customers and communicate with them.

I was half right. Or maybe I was right until social media burst upon the scene a year or two ago. With that the retention scene was changed just as radically—and as permanently—as acquisition and conversion.

First, there’s email. My sense is that most marketers are using it badly. We have an email list and we blast emails to it frequently. It’s cheap—so what if we only get a small open rate or smaller (and declining) click-through rate? It’s not hard to get an ROI that looks pretty good. We should be asking how it looks to our customers. Are we contacting them too often with communications of too little relevance? Do we need to go back to the chapter on Segmentation 101 and begin applying it to our electronic communications? It will take a bit more time and effort, and therefore will cost a bit more. Will it be worth it in terms of both conversions and—even more important over the long run—the image of and trust in our brands? Look in your own inbox, take a quick tally of how many commercial emails are really relevant to your needs, and answer the question for yourself.

Second, there’s social media in the broadest sense. It gives us opportunities to push content—in a totally permissioned environment—to customers. In the process, it also allows us to reach people who might become customers, but my sense is that most of the best marketer uses of social media are for customer retention.

This whole blog is about social media, so let me just give you two brief examples, both from one of my favorite best practices sites. National Geographic publications and broadcast long predate the Internet, but they moved onto it well and smoothly. Take a look at the site and see how well they do cross promotions.

But my examples are pushing content to users on other sites and pages, all in ways that drive people to the site. They always have a great selection of screen savers and I change mine often. I’d love to show you the current Madagascar hibiscus, but my desktop is too messy. What I can show you is the bar that remains at the bottom of my desktop page. That’s a constant reminder of who provided the lovely photograph that improves my pc experience and imprints the National Geographic brand in my mind.

Then there’s the widget I downloaded to another blog a couple of months ago. The Green Guide Tip of the Week widget is perfect for the “Living Green at Wellfleet Bay” blog. I had to cut the size down a bit to fit in the column, so it’s a bit

small, but it works. If you look carefully, you can see that there’s the tip itself and two more pieces of “green” content that would drive readers to the National Geographic site. What you can see is the large “Get This Widget” bar. It should be somewhere; it is one way to increase the distribution of the widget. However, it’s the largest item and it’s easy to mistake it for the content. When you click, you get HTML, which could be confusing to the non-Web 2.0-savy reader. Overall, it’s a great performance, though! Their newsletters are wonderful in terms of content, but I don’t get the sense that the content is personalized to my activities on their site.

We all need to do branding. That applies to current customers as well as prospects. We all want to bring users to our site. We want customers to return frequently to consume content, purchase goods—whatever our objectives are. We want non-customers to come to our site in a way that makes them prospects for conversion. Good Web 2.0 applications can do both, but I maintain that retention is usually the primary objective.

For retention to work we have to be present in customers’ lives in ways that are non-intrusive but that support their needs and lifestyles. We have a lot to learn, a lot to experiment with, to make that happen. I suggest that Web 2.0 applications are a great way to accomplish retention in ways that are welcomed by our customers.
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Conversion--How the Internet Has Changed It

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

There’s a simple answer to the question. Pre Internet, only B2B marketers and B2C marketers who sold multi-step products (think automobiles and life insurance, for example) had to engage in conversion marketing. Mass marketers acquired customers and perhaps they had retention programs, but most, especially consumer packaged goods marketers, didn’t have to do conversion marketing. How could they? They didn’t know who potential customers were, what they were interested in, and how to reach them. The web has changed that, dramatically and forever.

The direct marketing conversion process is still the basis. It is stated as Acquire > Qualify > Distribute > Follow Up. In direct marketing, especially B2B, distribution is especially important. Leads could be distributed to the field sales force (high cost), to an internal sales force (moderate cost), or to non-personal, usually mail, follow up (low cost). Then there were two remaining challenges. One was to nurture leads until they were at a high readiness state and then forward them to the field sales force for closure. The other was to motivate the field sales force to follow up leads. Those issues still exist, but the larger challenge for all marketers is using the Internet, especially the website, effectively in the conversion process.

The conversion process (and the retention process also) will be more effective if acquisition has been well done. That means acquiring high-potential customers, not necessarily acquiring the most customers. Successful acquisition requires targeting, as discussed in the previous post. Unless people stumble onto your website by accident, they are coming in from advertising or some other online (or offline) content. Don’t just dump them onto a home page and hope they’ll find what they need. If you can simply drive them to a product page with no chance of confusion in what they are looking for, that’s great. Often that’s not the case, and even if it is, it risks visitors taking a look and leaving without giving you a chance to capture an email address. That is an important function of a landing page. A good landing page is also promotional and moves visitors a step further in the direction of purchase.

Once the visitor moves off the landing page onto the site, the question becomes how to move the person through the site, resulting in an eventual purchase—whether that takes one visit or many. It is very useful to study the paths visitors take through your site and to try to understand what pages are moving them closer to purchase, which pages are not, and where they are leaving only to return later, and where they are abandoning for good. Commercial metrics services provide path data. They can also help you segment both identified and anonymous visitors. Different segments are likely to follow different paths and are almost certain to convert at different rates.

To help understand segments, it is helpful to create personas. Personas can be thought of as a way to put some human flesh on your segments. They help everyone from web designers to marketers develop approaches that work for each segment. Staples redesigned its site around personas. Best Buy (item 1, item 2) has used them both in site development and in developing concept retail stores.

Whatever else you do, keep in mind that most visitors don’t purchase in a single session. Metrics guru Avinash Kaushik recommends measuring “days to purchase” and “trips to purchase.” With that data in hand you can develop a meaningful contact program. That may include offering a carefully-timed incentive to close the final sale. At that point the visitor officially becomes a customer, part of your retention program.

Think carefully about what “conversion” is in your particular situation. It is always desirable to be able to track a visitor from the first contact through to a final sale. If all the activity occurs online, that’s possible. If conversion occurs offline, it can be difficult, and you may want to establish a number of metrics mileposts on the way to final conversion.

Acquisition costs a lot of money. A well thought out conversion strategy is the first step to ensuring that money has been well spent.
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