Is your web site sleeping while you work or working while you sleep?

How to convert your web site into a lead and sales generation tool overnight

It's not hard or expensive to convert a “sleeping” web site into one that is actually working for you. You just need to know what to do.

Your web site should be filtering out all the “nuisance” calls and converting suspects to prospects to customers and eventually advocates.

Here’s how we converted a sleeping web site into one that generated three online sales in one hour after announcing it to just 27 people. And it only took a few days to turn this site around.

Now this site works for its owners while they are busy doing other things. They have a sales and marketing resource that works for them 24 hours-a-day, 7 days a week. This resource handles multiple inquiries from all over the world simultaneously and most important is constantly being fine tuned into a lead and order generation machine.

What did it cost? You’ll be surprised how little it cost. But before you even consider the cost-benefit, the question to ask is does it even make sense to go through the effort of thinking about this avenue?

Return on effort

Research says an average sales call costs about $300. How many of these sales visits result in business? When you know your conversion rate, you know how much it costs for you or one of your business development colleagues to spend time converting a potential customer into an actual customer?

Even to have someone answer phone calls that come through as a result of advertising and word of mouth costs you money each year. If you can reduce the number of such resources you need or free up time with these resources to do other higher value activities, wouldn't it be worth considering?

For instance, you could automate certain amount of your order taking by getting it on to the web. If this ends up costing you less than $10K and in the process you are able to release one phone operator that costs about $30K per year, you will enjoy a return on investment in just four months. What's more you drive new revenue outside of business hours.

Now consider the following true story.

True story – the challenge

A partner company of ours had a web site that was designed to simply educate customers on the company and its products. The web site was set up at low-cost when the company started and the content was changed only about three times in three years.

Although the company made some pretty good progress in terms of sales in the real world, it never received one inquiry or order through the web. They did get good feedback about the web site, but that was it.

Reviewing the web site user logs, it was clear that site traffic had in fact grown along with the company, yet it had not received one inquiry or order. The belief was that at least the site was educating people who eventually placed orders through the phone.

We decided to see if we could do better.

What we did - Six simple steps

Step 1. The content on the site was not bad, but it was all about the business and their product. None of the content addressed any real questions a potential customer might have while researching what the best alternative was for their particular need.

So we helped create some new content that educated the visitor in a manner that showed the visitor what they were getting that was unique by chosing the company behind the web site.

To come up with this content we simply asked, what type of questions are likely to be in the minds of these people. We then put together some interesting reading to help answer these questions – much like the article you are now reading.

Step 2. Gave it a great headline. Just think of all the magazine and newspaper articles you end up reading. What attracted you to actually read it? The beauty of the web as opposed to hardcopy alternatives is that you can change headlines until you find one that works.

Step 3. The first steps are great, but at the end of the day, you need to drive these potential customers to take action in your favour. Our end goal was to get these people to order the company's product and do it online. Payments needed to be made up front, since orders were going to be small.

So we created a very simple online store. This was done overnight. The next day, this company was able to accept credit card orders. They did not have to worry about the convoluted and expensive process of applying for merchant accounts.

Step 4. We decided to test the site by simply announcing it to an audience of only 27 potential customers via e-mail. Within an hour of sending this e-mail out, we received 3 online orders. The payments went straight into the online bank account and all the company had to do was mail out the product.

Step 5. Now that we knew we had a working system, we decided to build a more complex online store. We then started advertising it through the main international search engines and sites. So now they get visitors and orders from all over the country and the world. Most of their international visitors come from the United States.

Step 6. We decided to help this company convert its customers into advocates by setting up an “affiliate program” that financially rewards people who refer other people to the site. The system automatically tracks all sales resulting from referrals and gives a percentage of each sale to the referring party who has an online account on the web site.

The referring party can log in to the web site and review how many people have come to this site as a result of their marketing. They also get to see in real time how much money in commissions they have made as a result of sales generated by their referrals!

And what did this cost?

It cost the company less than $5000 and was all done in a matter of days.

Is it worth the investment?

To work out whether such an investment would be worth it for you, simply ask yourself how many additional sales would you need to make while you were sleeping for this to be worth the investment. We can now offer you a solution for less than $2500.

Have a look at the site

Go have a look at the site for yourself. In fact, sign up as an affiliate and then follow the instructions you receive to see for yourself how to build advocates. You can e-mail people you know to review the site or create a link off your web site. If any sales result from people you send to the site, you will receive 10% of the sale! It's that simple to generate advocates.

www.serenetea.com

Key question

Now let's ask the key question: What other sales and marketing resource (at the above mentioned cost) do you know that:

• works for you 24 hours-a-day, 7 days a week
• handles multiple inquiries from all over the world simultaneously
• you can constantly fine tune into a lead and order generation machine

How to make your site do this

Simple – provide us with your contact details by filling out the form below and one of our consultants will contact you.