Tracking Conversions to Achieve Your Business Goals
Monday, March 29th, 2010How many leads do you need to make the amount of money you want to have in a year? As simple as this question might be, I’ve found very few people actually have this number in the top of their minds.
When answering this question, there are two considerations. The first is your costs. You should make sure to have an online accounting program advanced enough to help you analyze your costs and how they relate to your profitability.
Second, you need to know how well you are able to turn your prospects into sales (conversion rate). The more efficient you are at converting leads, the more income you will be able to make.
Let’s take a look at the process more closely:
The first step is to determine your monthly sales goal. For our example, let’s say you want to make $100,000 in sales a month.
Now you need to figure out your conversion rate. Let’s suppose that all of your leads are generated through you website in order to keep this example simple.
Suppose you convert 2 and a half out of 1000 visitors into paying customers. You have a .25% conversion rate.
Here is a formula to calculate the number of visitors your would need to meet your monthly sales goals. To keep this example simple, we will assume every “conversion” described above will ultimately purchase from you.
(Desired Sales / Sale Price / Conversion Rate) X 100
The formula would look like this, if you want to achieve $100,000 a month in sales, you have a conversion rate of .25% and your average sales price is $20:
($100,000 / $20 / .25) X 100 = 2,000,000 visitors needed per month to achieve your sales goal.
Yikes! That is a lot of visitation! Luckily, there are a few adjustments you can make. You can increase the average sales price. Or, you can increase your visitors or the conversion rate.
Most find the easiest fix is to improve conversion rate. It is very possible to increase to ablut 2% from an original .25% rate.
Let’s look at the difference that would make using the formula:
($100,000 / $20 / 2) X 100 = 250,000 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal.
What a difference!
By increasing your average sales price to $47, you can improve your results even more:
($100,000 / $47 / 2) X 100 = 106,383 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal.
Everyone would rather work smarter than harder. Hopefully these examples drive home the importance of planning the leads you will need to reach your sales goals, and testing the factors you can change to become more efficient.
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