TheBigBee

Hey guys...

What is your WORST conversion rate for a TARGETED cold offer? Cold meaning they are just meeting you for the first time online. Targeted meaning they're presently in the market for your offering, were very recently in the market for your offering, or very likely will be in the market for your offering in the very near future. Also, conversion = they bought something.

I'm seeking guidance as I try to refine methodology for an experiment I plan to conduct and can't do it without making some assumptions... the more reasonable the better.
This is the least dumb question I could come up with... Thanks!

onSubie

Worst conversion rate is 0. Many people send lots of "targeted" traffic directly to offers and get 0 conversions.

If you look through the forum you will find many posts about this and the recommended "fix" is to send the traffic to a squeeze page first for opt-in rather than sending cold traffic directly to an offer.

Many, many people experience 0 conversions even when sending targeted traffic.

Based on that, the worst conversion rate is 0.

Jason Kanigan

This is where established marketers with sizable budgets have the upper hand. They can force continued traffic into their funnel, and make it work...without caring what the conversion rate is. As long as they're getting break-even or positive ROI, they'll keep doing it.

Say I'm selling a $2000 product. And each click costs $1. As long as I have $2000 to spend on driving traffic, I don't care what my conversion rate is. I have 2000 "at bat"s, and that's amazing. Odds are, no matter how incompetent my conversion method is (bad copy, poor qualifying, wrong offer) I will find ONE out of 2000 at least somewhat-targeted people who goes for it.

So at that point you'd be saying "Oh, man, 1 sale in 1500 visitors...that's a 0.07% conversion rate; how AWFUL!!" but I would do that ALL DAY LONG because I'm making a fat $500 every time the ka-ching happens. And that is what we call a happy ROI: Spend $1 to make $1.33...give me a consistent, repeatable, predictable traffic stream to do that with and I'll stick with it as long as I can.

And then I go out and say, "What a success; I made a zillion sales here--don't you want to be like me?" and everybody laps it up and nobody asks about conversion rates.

That's something to think about for your experiment.

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Steve B

BB,

Just a word of caution to you ...

Conversion rates in IM are all over the map. Why? Because every offer is unique, every niche has a different level of "hungry" buyers, every product and service has different utility and value, every sales page is different, and the timing of offers is different.

What I'm trying to say is that someone elses conversion rate has absolutely no bearing on what you will or should experience in your own marketing.

I have found that "average" conversions are pretty sad. It's because there is so much junk marketing and junk products hitting the marketplace. Buyers are becoming less fickle and more insistent on quality.

If you listen to the masses, you will begin to settle for less than mediocrity in your expectations of what might be!

Steve

Steve Browne, online business strategies, tips, guidance, and resources
SteveBrowneDirect

TheBigBee

I was hoping to get folks' worst performance - a number greater than zero. But you hit the nail right on the head with regard to cold traffic. I just figure if I can get targeted but cold traffic dirt cheap, why not try use it for this experiment.

There are small time marketers grinding out a few hundred bucks a day in profit... But I agree with you on the appearance of a super low conversion rate percentage being bad. Not the case with larger ticket sales or if your initial sales lead to subsequent sales - particularly of larger amounts.


Absolutely agree here. Just like to conduct experiments with controls based on math. So taking everyones WORST and then making an average of that was the plan. I'm from the B2B world and we have to "close the sale" to get paid. In my world, the business owner never pays us directly (we get commissions). So we think about conversions entirely differently. There have been many marketing campaigns where I would purposely diminish conversions to get a higher quality lead - given the time invested in getting a deal done because when you lose time on a dud you can't get it back.

onSubie

Only because you put "worst" in capital letters.


I think it is probably tough to get conversions sending cold traffic directly to an offer because the market is much more savvy than say 10 years ago.

You go to any major news source or sports or entertainment and read the comments after the articles. You will find many are just affiliate links trying to send random traffic to offers.

It could be an article about Johnny Depp's recent poor movie box office performance and you will see comments like:

My mom makes $2,156 a week working only one hour from home. Check out how she does it: scamlinksortener.biz/12dfg5z

or

I lost 39 pounds in 3 hours! Learn how I did it here: anotherscam.info/bd9712t


It's not just that this kind of link dropping doesn't work, but it "ruins" cold traffic for more concentrated efforts. People know all about landing pages, advertorials and weight loss and work from home scams.

It is one of the reasons you need to warm up the traffic or pre-sell in some way.

I'm sure there are experienced marketers that make money sending traffic direct to offers, but they probably have a lot of experience managing PPC campaigns to get super low cost clicks and have "secret" places to promote the clicks for best effect.

It may be that is your plan. To find cheap but targeted traffic for ultra-low clicks that can turn a profit on a 0.0001% conversion rate.

I just think with a lot of the new landing page designs it would be easy to create a pump-n-dump autoresponder series that basically hammers the offer to prospects and then drops them if they have not converted after 30 days of email blasts.