Many business owners understand that the objective of having a website is to employ a lead generation process to drive traffic and prospective clients, a/k/a/ leads, to their home page. However, not everyone estimates their lead potential and questions how much to invest in it to maximize a return on their investment. Consider what a powerful tool the foresight of lead potential could give to your business. Knowing where you current lead potential is and how it can grow gives you the power to control your leads with effective lead nurturing over time.
So, how can you foresee, or project, lead potential for your website?
To project leads you need several criteria:
- Current Average Website Traffic
- Total Average Customers
- Average Sale Value per Customer
If you don’t know this data at the outset of your lead generation process, here’s how to obtain the proper data.
Step 1: Review Current Analytics
As a first step in the lead generation process and lead forecast, it’s necessary to examine the marketing analytics attached to your website. For example, , track the monthly traffic average for the last three months using your Google Analytics..
Don’t have a Google Analytics account for your website? Since the traffic data is absolutely vital to your ability to build a lead projection report, we recommend that you attach a Google Analytics account to your website for at least a month.
Step 2: Count Your Customers
Once you know your monthly traffic, you can move on to the next level of data compilation to begin your lead generation process. Lead nurturing is intended to result in new customers. That said, once you review your marketing analytics, compare that traffic to how many new customers you obtained during that same timeline. A customer is a sale or a new signed contract within the researched timeline. And then..
Step 3: Total Your Sales
Take a tally of your total sales for the months you pulled marketing analytics data for. These sales work as two points of reference:
- Based on three months of sales, you can assess an average monthly sales bottom line for your current website traffic.
- By dividing each month’s sales by that month’s customers to find your average sale per client.
Build Your Lead Generation Spreadsheet
Now that you’ve built your criteria for your lead generation sheet, it’s time to compile and project your lead potential.
- Starting with your first month when you pulled analytics, build a spreadsheet for the next calendar year.
- For reach month, create a row for each of the criteria you have pulled and based on your data, assess their baseline percentages. (See below)
Monthly Traffic 1500 per month
New Customers 3 [3/1500 = .002 traffic to customer conversion rate]
Sales $ 4500 [4500/3 = $1500 average sale per customer]
Using these numbers as a baseline, you can now project your leads potential based on the marketing and SEO efforts you put into place.
How does it work?
Assuming you are going to use your baseline numbers to build a marketing and SEO plan to drive more traffic to your website and increase lead conversion rate, you can estimate your increases. Using the above data as your month 1 column, assume a .05% increase in conversion rate on a quarterly basis. Also, increase your website traffic by 1% a month once you implement a marketing plan.
Once you build out the next twelve months with those increases estimated, you can see where your bottom line sales COULD be with increased marketing. Of course it’s only an estimate, but when monitored using marketing analytics on a monthly basis, allowing for adjustments to your marketing plan to meet or exceed your goals, the success of your lead generation process is much more defined than just working towards “more leads”.