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For the last installment of our Mastering the Metrics series, we will cover Abandonment Rate.

Abandonment Rate most often refers to purchases started but not completed; so-called “shopping cart abandonment” has always been an issue of concern for online retailers. However, you can apply this metric in other areas as well, the most relevant of which would be form abandonment. Form abandonment is when visitors to your site begin filling out a form but do not complete or submit the form. The abandonment rate is a measure of just one aspect of a website’s conversion rate.

You can’t always be certain of the reasons for form abandonment. It might be that some visitors changed their mind, but most frequently the problem lies with the form design. Forms that ask for too much information at once or are difficult to fill out lead to a high rate of form abandonment. Redesigning your forms to make them simple, streamlined, and user-friendly is the best remedy for a high form abandonment rate.

Continuing our Mastering the Metrics series, we’ll be discussing Clickthrough Rate today.

Clickthrough Rate refers to the number of clickthroughs–when a customer clicks through pages on your site–expressed as a fraction of the total impressions. Clickthrough rate measures the effectiveness of an online ad by counting the number of viewers that are interested enough to click on that ad. Because clickthroughs only represent the first step in the conversion process, this is a metric best suited to measuring medium-term marketing goals rather than the end result of a campaign.

# of Clickthroughs / Total Impressions = Clickthrough Rate

Our next installment of our Mastering the Metrics series concerns Pageviews.

Pageviews are an expression of the number of times a webpage has is served. The pageviews metric gives you a way to measure the popularity of a website. A related metric, Hits, can be calculated by multiplying total pageviews by the number of files on a page. This measures not only popularity but is also an indicator of page design.

Total Pageviews * # of Files on Page = Hits

When implementing a marketing automation system, even all the bells and whistles in the world won’t save a site with a lack of great content. Content is key to conversion. Your marketing automation system will help you set up prospect-friendly forms and landing pages, but it is up to your offering to convince them to fill them out.

So what is good content?

Content should have some educational value. This doesn’t mean it can’t tie back to your product, service or sales proposition, but you want to offer something that will leave your reader or viewer with some solid business advice, best practices tips or thought provoking conversation starters.

Most companies have a variety of types of content, from case studies to webinars
to news stories about the company’s success. When seeking to increase conversions or lead activity, think about carefully crafting the right combination of these items. Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. When you are just discovering a new product, what do you want to see?

• It’s likely that you first want to understand what the product does and how it relates to your goals (white paper or webinar).
• Maybe after you’ve learned a a bit about the product, you may be interested in learning how others use it  successfully (case study).
• Finally, if you see value in the product you may seek out alternate vendors and investigate them more deeply based on factors like industry certifications, awards and success.

Conversion relies heavily on the first stage, education. If you don’t have an arsenal of interesting  offerings, the forms you built will remain untouched, the automation rules lie still and your database sits empty. Marketing automation is a tool to help ease the pain of lead generation, but it requires a solid strategy to set the wheels in motion.

When reading through the new BtoBMagazine Lead Generation Guide an article called “Soft Offers with Relevance and Value will Generate Leads” caught my attention. The article focused on generating leads without overwhelming buyers and pushing them away. A good rule of thumb is to think like the purchaser. As a buyer during the first stages of product searching, would you want to be haggled by multiple sales calls or would you rather be given information for you to draw your own conclusions about the product or service?

This is where the definitions of hard and soft offers come into the picture.  According to the article, a hard offer is “anything that incents the buyer to accept a call from our sales rep.” On the other hand, a soft offer gives the buyer informative information on the product.  From the buyer’s perspective, white papers or any other tutorial such as videos or webinars are usually preferred during the first steps of the decision making process.  From there the sales rep comes into the picture to really hammer home the benefits.

By offering a variety of compelling educational materials on your product or industry, you can start off on the right foot with a lead. A marketing automation tool can help you easily set up multiple campaigns to track the popularity of each offering. Then use forms and landing pages to grab information about a prospect and create drip nurturing programs that will send additional educational materials based on a lead’s area of interest.

Let’s go back to thinking like the buyer. First, you receive information about the product on your own terms. Once you’ve learned a bit about how it works, you decide the product could benefit your company and are ready to ask questions. Using the soft sell materials created by marketing, the buyer has moved from attaining readily available information to talking with an expert on the product.

Using this approach the buyer is more knowledgeable about your product, meaning sales has to spend less of their valuable time educating prospects and can focus on closing the deal. Ultimately, it benefits all involved parties when nobody’s toes are stepped on too early in the game.

I love Glengarry Glen Ross. There really is no better sales monologue than when Alec Baldwin berates the lagging office while driving home a few great points about sales effectiveness. The simplest of those (besides “coffee is for closers”) is ABC: “always be closing.” While that is of course great advice for a sales rep (even Jack Lemon’s character), it is equally true for a marketing manager when redesigning a corporate website. 

ABC: Always be Closing

Make sure that your visitors have a chance to convert in every touch that they have with your company. Think about the page visitors land on most frequently — your homepage. Most companies, in a rush to provide as many options as possible,  do not do a great job of converting traffic from this page. Think about the characteristics of the typical corporate site: dozens of links, some sort of lifestyle image in a banner, and either no call to action or too many call to actions.

1. Stick to one main call to action (flash demo, product test drive, key white paper, etc.) representing the one key thing that you hope your visitors do. 
2. If you have secondary calls to action, keep them smaller and in a different design element (different color, style of button, etc.)
3. Make sure you have a call to action at the bottom of each interior page, even if it just a text link(s) to other areas of your site. Most site content simply ends at the bottom of the page leaving the reader to scroll back up to the top or click the back button in the browser. 
4. If you are linking off of your site (to partner sites, articles, etc.), set the link to open in a new tab/window to avoid losing the visitor. 

A couple of sites that I think do a tremendous job of following all of most of these principals are mailchimp.com and verticalresponse.com