Are you extactic about the way your website performs?

Is your website an incredible 24/7/365 marketing machine which just keeps churning out the sales / leads / enquiries?

If the answer to this is “NO” – or “I SODDING WISH!!!!” then keep reading….

When I speak to small business owners, and then I look into their google analytics stats, their traffic, page views per visit, search engine positions, PPC spend & so on – most of the time the missing peice of the puzzle is the exact same thing for pretty much all of the business owners I speak to who tell me they’re not happy with the performance of their website as a marketing tool.

The missing peice of the puzzle – is email list building & marketing.

The problem is, that most people hugely over estimate when working out what their conversion rates will be from web visit to sale, or to enquiry.

Most people expect conversion rates to be in the region of 2-3%, and assume that if they’re getting 100 visits per day, for example, they should get a few sales or enquiries per day – but the the reality is that conversions are usually WAAAY lower than this.

In fact, the best cross – industry average I’ve been able to find – is 0.25% – which means 400 visitors are required for one conversion!

The majority of small business websites, in every day businesses, in every day industries, do not get enough targeted traffic to be able to make very mych impact with a conversion rate this low.

What’s more – is that many businesses are are losing money hand over fist, and don’t even realise it.

Think about it – if you make £50 Net profit per sale, and your average CPC is £0.50, with the above conversion rate you’re spending £200 to make £50 – not good business!

(By the way – do you know what your conversion rates are? It astounds me how many people use PPC marketing without using conversion tracking. Get conversion tracking on all your PPC campaigns – and if you can’t, then assume a very low conversion rate, and do your figures from that, or you could end up wasting a lot of cash with PPC)

Yes, we can work on trying to increase conversion rates, and we can work on getting more traffic – but as I said earlier, for most small businesses, the missing peice of the puzzle is list building & marketing.

There’s not a lot in marketing which is certain, but this is – if you’re not utilising email list building & marketing as part of your website marketing, you’re leaving a pile of cash on the table.

What’s List Marketing – is it Spam??

Email list building & marketing is not Spam – Spam is when peope send out unsolicited emails, list building & marketing is where you give people an incentive to join your list – to give you their permission to send them emails.

So they opt in to your email list – they want to receive your email, because you give them some incentive to do so, so for wehatever the reason, they want your emails, and you now have the ability to email them, to start building a relationship with them.

It’s far easier to get people to opt in to a list from first visit than it is to get them to buy from first visit.

mm2 208x300 Turn Your Website into a 24/7 Marketing Machine With Email List Marketing. Download FREE In my guide “The Ultimate Marketing Machine” I tell you exactly how to set up & run email list building & marketing.

I’ll just copy the first part of the guide below, to download the guide FREE just enter your details below.

What’s more, it comes with re-sell rights, so you can re-sell the guide (whether or not you originally got it here free).

Once 100 people have downloaded the guide free – I will start charging for it – at which point
you will also be able to re-sell it, even though you got it free.

Here we go:

1: The difference between catching fish with a rod & using
a net.

In order for you to really understand the power of list building &
marketing imagine a guy stood on a boat with a fishing rod as apposed
to a guy who lays down fishing nets.

Who do you think will catch more fish??

Also who do you suppose will be catchingpassive fish, in that he won’t have to be stood there twiddling his thumbs in order to catch the fish?

Of course the net fisherman is the one who catches the most fish, and he catchespassive fish, in that he doesn’t need to be stood watching the nets, he can cast his nets, then go have a snooze, come back & reap the rewards.

If a website is trying to gain sales & enquiries purely from the first visit then this is exactly the same as rod fishing! The chances are far more slim that a fish will take the bait on a hook, as apposed to the chance that the fish will swim into a large net and the chances are far more slim that a visitor will buy on the first visit as apposed to the chances that they will join your list & then buy from you in the future.

A more accurate analogy.

Once you catch fish in a net, you have the fish so the above analogy isn’t 100% accurate. It would be more accurate then to see list marketing as catching your fish in a net, and then having the opportunity to catch your fish one at a time from the net which is far easier than trying to catch them in the open sea.

So, basically a website without list building & marketing is dependant on visitors buying from the first visit, which is similar to hoping that in the wide open sea a fish will come take your bait.

Whereas a website which does use list building & marketing, is far more likely to gain list
signups, and you then have the ability to communicate with your list, which is the same as catching lots of fish in a net & then fishing from this net rather than in the open ocean.

WHY?
There are a few reasons list building & marketing is so important.

Firstly, standard sales conversion rates from visit to sale are TINY! In fact the area that most website marketers fall down is that they have far higher expectations of their website’s potential conversion rates than is practical to expect to achieve. On average, sales conversion is somewhere in the region of 0.25% – which means that youneed
400 visits to make one sale!!!!

OK it’s difficult working with averages, and you may achieve more than 0.25, or you may achieve far less, it depends on the market, your product, your pricing, how good your sales copy is & so on but I believe it’s better to hope high but expect low, so you don’t end up over spending on marketing, so I always take 0.25% as an average conversion rate if there are no conversion stats to show me the actual conversion rate.
As I wrote in a recent blog post : is PPC marketing destroying your business? , it is very difficult to afford to use paid marketing methods when you’re achieving a conversion rate like this. If you’re paying $0.30 per click, for example, it’s going to cost you $120 on average to make one sale, if your conversion rate is 0.25% – and if you make $30 profit per sale, then you can see how this wouldn’t work?

When you’re using the fishing rod method, in that you don’t have list building & marketing implemented into your website, then any form of marketing is going to yield very small amounts, so if you’re paying for marketing services such as SEO, then it’s going to be very difficult to make a return even if you’re doing all of the marketing yourself, you could end up earning very very little per hour when you work out time in vs. money out.

This is why list building & list marketing is so important!

As long as you follow the following instructions, especially when it comes to creating an
incentive for people to join your list your conversion rate from visit to new sign up is likely to be substantially higher than you could possibly ever achieve as a straight sales conversion rate.

It’s not uncommon to see list signup conversions of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% or even higher!

To read more – just enter your name & email below to download the guide, free.

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