As an experienced small business marketing agency Haywards Heath, we thought we’d share one of our marketing agency tools with you to identify where you should be focusing your marketing efforts and budgets.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is waste, and the problem is I do not know which half”
This is a very famous quote from Henry Ford. These days though, we do tend to know which half isn’t working as well as it could be. Either because we have the direct numbers thanks to tools such as Google Analytics or Google Campaigns, or we have sufficient data to infer the results e.g. indirect sales from activities such as Facebook or Instagram advertising.
What is marketing attrition
Marketing attrition is a bit of industry jargon, simply meaning the drop-off rates for customers as they pass through your sales funnel. This erosion of the sales potential happens because the path to converting a customer has become too hard, blocked, confusing, annoying or takes too long. If you can reduce the friction at these points by taking a marketing agency approach to it – you’ll see your conversion and, quite possibly, your order values increase.
The marketing attrition model
By way of example, let’s assume the business here is a marketing agency Haywards Heath. Please note these are dummy figures for illustration of how to populate the model for your own business.
| Annual searches for service /product like yours | Example starting No. 100,000 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Stage | Reason for attrition | Level of attrition | No. potential customers remaining |
| Google searches for chosen keyword e.g. ‘marketing agency Haywards Heath’ | Poor search engine optimisations, no paid advertising, so your search results rankings are low |
90% attrition
|
10,000 |
| Search result listing | Poorly written, missing or irrelevant description |
80% attrition
|
2,000 |
| On your website | Poor landing page, slow to load, poor design |
80% attrition
|
400 |
| Exploring your website | Poor navigation, hard to find info, no call to actions to enquire |
80% attrition
|
80 |
| Making an enquiry | Ready to buy straight away |
90% attrition
|
8 |
| Sales team convert enquiry into purchase |
25% attrition
|
6 | |
| Average order value of first time buyer | £500 | £3,000 | |
Now populate this tool with your own business’ numbers. Most of this data will be available in Google Analytics or your website platform, and your own sales data. How does it look? A good or a bad surprise?
Now let’s see what happens if you take our marketing agency Haywards Heath approach to improving your sales funnel...
- Search engine optimisation to help it rank better in the search results
- Well-written descriptions for your website pages which appear in the search results (the thing that makes people click on your blue link over everyone else)
- Faster website load speeds
- Redesign of your sites structure, images and messages
- Improved site navigation and internal linking across your site
- Strong sales writing on site to minimise objections and procrastination.
| Annual searches for service /product like yours | Example starting No. 100,000 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Stage | Reason for attrition | Level of attrition | No. potential customers remaining |
| Google searches for chosen keyword e.g. ‘marketing agency Haywards Heath’ | Modest SEO improvements for better search result rankings |
80% attrition
|
20,000 |
| Search result listing | Stronger, more relevant descriptions |
60% attrition
|
4,000 |
| On your website | Faster loading, mobile responsive and professional look |
60% attrition
|
1,600 |
| Exploring your website | Stronger copy, better direction and easier navigation |
60% attrition
|
640 |
| Making an enquiry | Effective sales copy to motivate action now |
80% attrition
|
128 |
| Sales team convert enquiry into purchase | Unchanged |
25% attrition
|
96 |
| Average order value of first time buyer | Increase to £550 | £52,800 | |
| Business Impact | £49,800 | ||
We can certainly tell you to achieve this type of modest improvement in attrition rates does not require anything like an investment of £49k to achieve it! There is a very, very, healthy return on investment here.
Marketing agency Haywards Heath - Take stock of your own business performance figures
Taking a moment to reflect on performance numbers like this, in context, can be a real eye opener of what the challenges are and what’s needed to fix them in order to grow your business.
Marketing agency Haywards Heath, and beyond, can offer you the skill-set of a data analyst and a creative thinker to offer a fresh perspective on your business. So if you are looking to grow your small, local business, why not give this tool a go for yourself and see what ideas it sparks. We will happily undertake a marketing or website review for you, just get in touch with our marketing agency Haywards Heath to book one, where we can discuss what the next steps are for you.
There you go Henry Ford, we know how to eliminate the waste in marketing for small businesses! For more tools and guides like this, you can purchase Growth by Design’s founder’s book which is full of handy tools, reflections and step-by-step guides.
