Nice to read fresh new data that support management acumen:

A recent study from the Corporate Executive Board said that the best thing a company can do in terms of its digital strategy is to “master its own web site” but, unfortunately, most are not currently doing so.

As we blogged earlier, the status quo for marketers is to focus and invest primarily in driving traffic to the site via off-site factors such as banners, affiliates, email, etc.

The problem is that marketers often forget their job doesn’t end there. Now what?

Now marketers must master what their anonymous web visitors are actually doing on the site: marketers can no longer passively accept the conversion rate on the site but actively seek ways to improve the conversion rate. The tools are there for the asking (some like GWO are even free!)

Of course, to master the website, marketers need the resources to design and run the online experiments that will improve the conversion rate — but in many companies this is a new line item.

So the questions now become:

1. How much should marketers budget to master their websites?
2. Is mastering websites an incremental spend? Where will you find the budget?

How much should marketers budget to master their websites?

I believe that marketers must start by asking themselves “how much are we spending now to master our website”? In other words, identify the activities and budgets devoted to optimization today — and recognize there are probably more activities and a larger budget that will need to be spent.

In terms of specifically “how much”, there are some guidelines. For example, our friends at Omniture believe organizations should be spending 15% of their marketing budget on optimization, and have produced an excellent webinar to help you make the case for better testing in your organization.

In their 45 minute webinar, Brent Hieggelke (VP Strategic Marketing, Omniture) and Trevor Klein (SVP Business Development, AutoAnything) discuss:
• Why automated optimization is becoming mandatory
• Testing and Targeting Best Practices
• How AutoAnything uses automated optimization to increase revenues

So grab a cuppa and watch their video; it has the potential to dramatically change the course of your marketing career!

Is mastering websites an incremental spend? Where will you find the budget?

Here are the good news:

In our experience at WiderFunnel, where all our clients have seen conversion rate lift ranging from 10% to 270%, the cost of mastering their own websites is by far offset by the incremental gains of running online experiments.

In other words, yes, it does take a degree of vision on the part of the financial leadership of companies to advance the cash for the investment in testing and optimization, but the gains in revenues are more that likely to pay for themselves MANY times over.

ATTENTION LinkedIn MEMBERS:
To help BtoB and BtoC Marketers become more relevant to Sales by generating more and better leads while reducing their cost per lead, we have started two LinkedIn Groups:
• Join the B2B Conversion Optimization Network here
• Join the B2C Conversion Optimization Network here
…feel free to pass along an invite to colleagues!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 11:23 am and is filed under conversion rate optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.