Thoughts on the conversion funnel from #WmWott
Glenn Schmelzle presented a good introduction to the online conversion funnel last night at Web Marketing Wednesday in Ottawa.
It’s a pretty simple structure on the surface:
- Attract people to your website using great content distributed through the proper medium;
- Convert these people after they arrive on your site.
There are different models, and there are always two factors you can impact to increase the number of conversions:
- Increase the reach of your message (i.e.: attract more people to your website), or;
- Convert more people after they arrive (i.e.: Increase conversion rate).
If we had more time last night, I would have liked to have gone into segmenting audiences and insuring that your reaching out to the right group of people online. This has a couple of benefits:
- You don’t appear to be spamming people who don’t want your message;
- You pay less by not advertising to people who are unlikely to convert;
- You increase your conversion rate on-site by having fewer people arrive on your site overall.
Attracting more people to your website is not always the solution for a poor conversion rate or an ineffective funnel. More thought needs to be put into the audience and the desired conversion itself before reaching a larger audience will improve the number of conversions and ultimately leads and revenue.
Raising Houston Music Prices Good Business, Bad PR
Two words: dynamic pricing. Those could be magic words in the media business these days.
When you walk into Wal-Mart and see the DVD released last week, you’ll pay $28 for it. In two weeks, $21; in 3 months, $14. That’s just cashing in on demand - it’s the most common practice in the retail world.
But we don’t live in the DVD world any more, we now live in the digital distribution world, where prices can be altered as quickly and easily as updating a twitter account. That’s dynamic pricing. (See local gas station for another common example).
You won’t see a Wal-Mart employee running down the music aisle with a price gun after hearing of a singer’s untimely death, but I bet that if they knew it would bring in an extra $2-million, they would send someone sprinting.
Hard to blame Sony for dynamic music price
So I find it hard to blame the reported mid-level Sony executive who raised the price of Whitney Houston’s digital music downloads in the wake of her death this week.
