What is the _efficiency_ of your website? How do you know when things 
are improving or getting worse? How can you decide where to 
concentrate your marketing efforts? 

"Build it and they will come" - not! 
In the early days of Internet commerce, many entrepreneurs seeking 
online success thought that it was sufficient to build a nice looking 
website. All you needed to do was to learn a little HTML, put up a few 
pages, and wait for the sales orders to come streaming in.  

Well, that is a bit like saying that to go to the moon, all you have 
to do is build a rocket, buy some Tang, pack your lunch in a 
toothpaste tube, and take off. It just ain't that simple. 

There are many different models, or frameworks, that you can use to 
understand the Internet economy, and to develop an appropriate 
business strategy. One of the models which I use is the five stage  
conversion process. I find it helpful to analyze our "website  
efficiency", and to know where to invest more on our marketing  
efforts.  
  

The Conversion Process 
When you ask most people about their objectives for their website, 
they typically tell you one thing: to maximize sales. It seems that 
many people still have the "build it and they will come" attitude. The 
goal of marketing, for these people, is simply to convert a potential 
buyer into an actual buyer. 

However, "conversion" is more complex than that. Research shows that 
it is not a single step process. In fact, for online businesses, it is 
helpful to think of five separate questions.  

1. how do people find out about your site? 
2. why do they initially visit your site?  
3. what makes them stay?  
4. what makes them purchase?  
5. and what makes them come back for more?  
  

More formally, we can describe the conversion process in terms of five 
stages, and the associated objective at each stage.  
  

Stage----------------------------------- Conversion Objective 
________________________________________________ 
Awareness------------------------------- surfers --> aware surfers 
Attraction ------------------------aware surfers --> hits 
Contact -----------------------------------------hits --> visitors 
Closure ------------------------------------visitors --> purchasers 
Retention ----------------------------purchasers --> repurchasers 
  

At each stage, it is possible to measure your efficiency at achieving 
the conversion objective. Below is a description of each stage, and an 
explanation of how to calculate the relevant type of conversion 
efficiency. 
  

Awareness 
The first objective is obviously to build awareness of your website; 
to make your website known to potential visitors. At this stage, you 
want to effectively target your market, advertising in places where 
you expect to reach the most appropriate audience.  

Awareness efficiency (AWe) refers to your effectiveness at making your 
target audience aware of your website. Awareness efficiency can be 
calculated quite easily: it is equal to the number of aware surfers 
divided by total number in your target audience. 

AWe =  aware surfers / target audience 

Attraction 
Once you have built awareness of the existence of your website, the 
next objective is to attract them through the front door. It is 
important to distinguish between awareness and attraction. For 
instance, I am aware that The Gap has a website, but I have never 
visited it. Similarly, a certain segment of your target audience may 
be aware that your website exists, but have not yet visited it. Before 
they can visit, they need be aware of its existence. 

Attraction efficiency (ATTe) refers to your effectiveness at 
converting an aware person into a "hit" at your website. The 
attraction efficiency of your website is the ratio of number of hits 
to the number of aware surfers. 

ATTe = hits / aware surfers

* if your web pages load too slowly, or  
* if it is unattractive, or  
* if they discover that the website is not what they expected, or 
* if they were busy doing something else, so they don't have time  
 to make a thorough visit. 

For this reason, a "hit" is not the same as a "visit".  

Contact efficiency (CONe) refers to the ability of your website to 
turn a fleeting "hit" into a meaningful visit. A "meaningful visit" 
might be interpreted to mean "visit for more than 10 minutes", or 
"visit more than 5 pages", or "read the contents of a particular 
page". The point is that you want people to become active visitors, 
interested and engaged with your website. How *you* define "meaningful 
visit" is a question that depends on the objectives of your business.  

However you decide to define "meaningful visit", the contact 
efficiency (CONe) of your website can be measured by taking the ratio 
of visitors to hits. 

CONe = visitors / hits 

Closure 
Ultimately, you want the visitor to take some desired action. In many 
cases, that means making a purchase, however, it may be subscribing to 
your newsletter, entering a contest, or downloading your software. For 
simplicity, I will refer to this desired action as a "purchase". 

Closure efficiency (CLOe) refers to your website's ability to convert 
a visitor into a purchaser. It can be calculated by dividing the 
number of purchasers by the total number of visitors. 

CLOe = purchasers / visitors 

Retention 
Perhaps even more important than closure is retention, which is your 
ability to convert a purchaser into a repeat purchaser. Depending on 
the nature of your products or service, repurchases may actually 
represent the lion's share of your revenue.  

Retention efficiency (RETe) is calculated as the ratio of purchasers 
to repeat purchasers.  

RETe = repurchasers / purchasers 

Maximize Website Efficiency 
The overall efficiency of your website is a function of each type of 
conversion efficiency described above. Ideally, you would like to 
maximize all of the five: awareness, attraction, contact, conversion, 
and retention efficiency.  

Although each is important, you will probably find that it is rational 
to focus on one or two in particular. 

The first step is to begin measuring each of the conversion efficiency 
indicators for your website. This will help you to know which areas 
need improvement, and where your marketing efforts will be most 
effective. 

In upcoming articles, I will discuss each of the five stages in more 
detail, and provide some tips to maximize efficiency at each stage. 

------------------------------------------------------ 
Paul Needham paul@linkmedia.com 
Co-Publisher of Active Internet Marketing. 
http://www.inetexchange.com/inet-mailer.htm 
"Business Intelligence for Successful On-line Marketers" 
Subscribe today to the free A.I.M Ezine. 
mailto:subscribe-Inet-Mailer@send.memail.com 
------------------------------------------------------ 

Discuss this article, and other aspects of Internet marketing at 
the Zap! Cafe: http://www.thezap.com/cafe/ 

Copyright Information: You are welcome to republish this article on  
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the author, and include the author's information with the article. 

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The Secrets of Our Success 
On any given day, we receive 20-30 emails from our readers 
asking questions about internet marketing. Two of the most 
popular questions are: 

1: How do you mail out your newsletter? 
2: What is the best way to promote my web site? 

Here are the answers. 

1: How do you mail out your newsletter? 

We first began mailing out our newsletter using Eudora Lite 
email software: http://eudora.qualcomm.com/eudoralight/ 
This software is free and will be useful for you if your list 
is under 500 in subscribers.  

Once our list got a little bigger, we realized that a full service, 
mailing list manager program was what we needed. We found an excellent  
program by the name of World Merge, that would email to a list of any  
size and would even merge our mail from a data file, which gave us the 
ability to send personalized emails. It was the best $39 investment 
we ever made and we still use the program daily for some of our many 
mailing lists. It can be used for multiple lists.  
http://www.linkmedia.com/merge/index.htm 

When we hit 30,000 subscribers, it was taking too long 
to email everyone using a dial up connection, so we moved to 
a server based mailing list manager program. The best we found was  
called Lyris: http://www.lyris.com/  

So there you have the "behind the scenes" details on mailing to your 
list. Happy publishing! 
  

2: What is the best way to promote my web site? 

This is a small question with a big answer. There are so many ways 
including using ezines, posting in newsgroups, using free classified 
ad sites, posting at free for all link sites and posting to the  
search engines. Heck, we publish the A.I.M. newsletter twice a week  
with articles that address this question. There is no simple answer. 

Here are a few resources to get you going: 

1. Get the list of 300+ ezines  
<mailto:new@yoken.com> 

2. Get the list of 400+ Free link pages  
<mailto:free-links@rapid-reply.com> 

3. Use automated submission software 
If you don't yet use an automated submission software, try the 
Netsubmitter. Just click on the link below and download a free  
sample copy good for unlimited submissions to a small, select  
group of search engines. 
http://www.inetexchange.com/netsubmitter/index.htm 

4. Read as much as you can about internet marketing from the 
experts: http://www.inetexchange.com/reports.htm 

5. Visit Corey Rundl's Internet Marketing Center, the free tips 
and tricks will keep you busy for a long, long time! 
http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/8261/ 

_____________________________________________________________________ 
  

Yes! Advertising in the A.I.M. Ezine pays off! But, don't take  
my word for it. Listen to what others have said about their  
A.I.M. adverting! 

--------------------------------- 

> I had 1,037 hits to my page on 
> Wed June 3, 1998 that's 2.96% return 
> to the ad. And Oh yeah, I profited $2,329.97 from 
> 1 week on being in your newsletter. 
> Thanks again Joe B. 

--------------------------------- 

> I've advertised with all the major on-line publications.  
> Some have circulation's of over 300,000 people, yet your  
> publication is continually giving me the best results.  
> I couldn't be happier with your service!  
> Thanks again, Dennis Estelle 

---------------------------- 

> Greetings, 
> I just want to say thanks !! After placing my ad  
> for my newsletter, 100's of people signed up. My  
> subscription rate keeps growing daily now !!!! 
> Tim Whitney- Editor- HealthNutz 2000 
> It also brought a great deal of traffic to my 
> Health Mall as well !! 

--------------------------------- 

> you know we had our ad twice in the AIM High spot, and both times, 
> hits went through the roof. I am impressed. Your name has been  
> added to our file of advertising placements. We will be contacting  
> you again soon I am sure! 

--------------------------------- 

> First of all I'd like to thank you for 
> the response I've received for my advert 
> in your newsletter, over 75 and 4 buyers 
> for my report "SecretWealth". 
>  
> Thanks, Jason 

--------------------------------- 

> Just wanted to say thanks for the ad we ran. In two  
> hours we had over 200 responses to preview our site,  
> and the next few days were phenomenal! We will be sending  
> you much more business! Over 700 responses to date! 
> Rick Graham, Online Success Corp 

--------------------------------- 

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