Here at GTRsuite, we’re passionate about helping the furniture industry sell more. In this series of blog posts, we will be looking at how you can improve your integrated marketing plan to generate more interest and convert more sales. Today, we take a look at Conversion Rate Optimization.
What is conversion rate optimization (cro)?
Simply put, CRO is a process of continuous improvement where your website is fine-tuned to drive shoppers closer to making a purchase. For example, the conversion of browsing on your website to making an online inquiry, from making an inquiry to visiting a dealer, and from visiting a dealer to actually purchasing. Conversions take place from initial interest all the way through to repeat purchases, and they need to be measured to bring about improvement. This improvement is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
Why should you care about cro even if you don’t sell direct to consumers?
Because every piece of furniture or accessory you have ever made has ended up in the hands of a consumer.
Demand for your products isn’t driven by your dealers but by the shoppers that buy from them. Everything starts and ends with a shopper, and your digital presence is a critical component to the success of those products in the market. When it comes to shoppers, your primary goal is to make it as easy as possible for them to find your products when they search online and where to buy them. This is where GTRsuite comes into play.
It all starts at the top of the funnel
The sole purpose of your entire digital marketing spend is to attract attention, drive traffic to your website, and have shoppers engaging with your product pages. This is top of sales funnel interest, and it’s primarily generated via paid or organic (free) search. The more interest at the top of the funnel, the more sales come out of the bottom. This is conversion.
GTRsuite ensures that you will get the most organic interest without any additional marketing spend. This is accomplished by leveraging your network of dealer locations to produce highly relevant, content-rich, local search results. Google loves local, and the results from our customers show that the value of the top-of-funnel interest created using our platform is 2.3x-2.5x annual revenue.
Turning interest into action
The easier you make it for shoppers to connect with your dealers, the higher the chances are of converting shopper intention into a lead. With over 63% of shopper journeys starting1 online but 87%2 of consumer retail spending taking place in a brick-and-mortar store, seamlessly bridging the online to offline experience is imperative. According to GTRsuite customers, they convert over 2.5% of this top-of-funnel interest into actual direct-to-dealer leads.
From browsing to buying
Manufacturers invest millions of dollars in business development activities designed to increase the size of their dealer network. A critical component for CRO is to ensure that every dealer in the network understands the importance of responding to high-intention leads. These are shoppers that have engaged with your website and want to look at the product in-store, or at least engage with a salesperson online. Being able to track every lead that is sent to a dealer and the history of activity is essential to CRO improvement, especially given that the effort put forward by the shopper to engage up to this point usually results in much higher rates of conversion. Because of this, GTRsuite customers report that over 57% of these leads convert to actual sales.
Results and revenue
Tracking and optimizing for conversion will bring a positive impact on revenue. Although you may not think of yourself as a B2C business, every item purchased at a dealer needs to be replaced by another that you make. You need to have a direct connection to the end consumer and should deploy technology that vertically integrates your supply chain. As described, this can lead to an increase of 2x-3x in top-of-funnel interest, the capturing of the shopper intention, and creation of direct-to-dealer introductions. The reward for getting this right is at least a 3% increase in revenue.
References
- https://www.drip.com/blog/online-shopping-statistics
- https://www.globest.com/2022/05/13/consumers-rediscover-the-joy-of-brick-and-mortar-shopping/?slreturn=20220903080947
