Developing website sales projections for a proposed website or landing page campaign can be exciting. You have tons of creative ideas, your organization largely supports the concept, but you’re just missing one tiny detail – how many sales are we going to get from this?
There are several variables that you’ll need to use to answer this question. From impressions to website leads to sales team conversions and average order value. It can feel daunting and somewhat hopeless to get a great answer you can bet your budget, let alone career on.
Although, the numbers will vary per industry, there’s a formula you should follow to get to the right answer. By doing this, you’ll be able to set realistic expectations and advocate for more appropriate budgets with metrics your executive team can understand.
Getting to the right answers includes some step-by-step processes. Over the next few blog posts, we’ll be outlining these steps with better granularity and you can download our website sales projections worksheet.
Questions you need to answer to increase your website sales
Sales Team Capabilities: If the goal of your campaign is to drive more leads to the sales team, there are two questions you first need to answer:
1) What is your AOV (Average Order Value)?
2) What is your sales teams average conversion rate?
More sales is not a metric, but if you ask just about anyone not on the marketing team, what they’re goal is, you’ll hear “more sales”. Get a number and then get questions 1 and 2 answered. This will give you the ability to better aim at your target.
Your Current Client & Prospect Market Size: Your client/prospect size could be family & friends, former co-workers, or it consists of a client list you’ve been building over several years. Get an idea of how many people are already engaged with your brand across all of your marketing channels. For example:
• How many email subscribers do you have?
• What is the size and engagement level of your social following?
• What market share do you currently have in your industry or space?
• How many website visitors do you currently have?
Website Performance: Is your website going to be a sales engine for this new initiative? The better it performs, the less you’ll have to spend on advertising and marketing because you’ll be able to convert at a higher level. Be sure you understand some of these questions.
• What is your website’s current conversion rate?
• Where do you rank for competitive keywords?
• How is your traffic finding your website?
If you don’t know the answer to some of these, or if this is a new website or landing page project, create your best guess and go VERY conservative.
Amazon’s Alexa is a good resource for website stats that could help you define some expectations per your market.
Once you know this information, you are going to need to work backwards from what you sales goals are.
Start with what you know and keep working backwards until you reach a metric you don’t know. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be breaking down how you get the answers to the questions you may not know how to answer. This blog will be updated with links to those new articles, so check back.