How an effective Offline Strategy Can Boost Online Sales - 2014

Getting a great offline press presence is invaluable in PR terms but the difficulty arrives when you attempt to convert those column inches into sales.

All the PR in the world can be fruitless unless it achieves its ultimate objective - making money – and with $56.8 billion (ZenithOptimedia) spent online this year alone, there's plenty of incentive for online retailers.

This is where conversion rate optimisation shows its worth.

In the conversion school of thought, one can apply the tactics usually reserved for offline point of sale to the web, encouraging the captive audience to click through and buy your product. Simple.

In the words of Wayne Campbell of "Wayne’s World" fame… "if you book them, they will come" - If you get them onto your site, they will buy and, if you do it properly, you could even boost an average conversion rate of 2-3% into something that can have an invaluable impact on turnover.

So let's create the scenario – your PR team are firing on all cylinders and have got you the column inches you've been after for months. You've noticed a considerably increase in traffic that can be attributed to your PR presence and want to avoid static sales by capitalising on this while the press is still hot.

Like it or not the buying public are a fickle and temperamental bunch and with so many offers and deals in direct competition, it's paramount to employ these three simple steps, not just in the run up to any press coverage you might get, but right across your website's lifetime:

1. Understand the buyer
2. Maintain their attention
3. Keep it simple

Plenty of businesses tailor their communication strategies to meet the needs of their buyers but it's important to understand the intricacies, worries, goals and Achilles heels of your audience even more so; particularly with the help of online market research that needn't be costly nor time consuming.

Customer surveys like 4Q, for example, take moments to create, while free applications like ClickTale unobtrusively monitor click behaviour and site interaction before presenting the findings in a useful 'heat map' format.

Opting out of mailshots, navigating data capture and entering personal and financial details can quickly become a turn off even for the most dedicated consumer – over 40% of customers bounce off at this stage - so, it's especially important to accurately assess the kind of people who are using your service in reality (not hypothetically) so as to create an effective and rewarding sales experience; not just for yourself, but for the customer as well.

Maintaining consumers' attention is important for websites of all persuasions, but even more so for businesses who gather traffic via PPC campaigns. Everyone knows that high bounce rates have a dire effect on the strength of your PPC ad rankings, and the same methodology applies to PR. If a web user has taken the time to visit your site on the back of an article they've read, it's vital that the message or offer continues online.

Maintaining visitor attention in this way not only ensures you've not wasted valuable PR but also enhances consumer trust at the same time. Get a good deal first time around and they'll not only be more likely to return, but also pay attention to any PR you do in the future.

Finally, the most rewarding piece of conversion rate optimisation you can apply to your site is to keep it simple. Confronting potential consumers with an awkward payment system or making your best-selling products difficult to find, are perfect ways to encourage a non-sale. In terms of finding an online resonance with offline PR, it's worth considering a temporary icon or landing page which obviously relates to said piece of PR, subsequently putting the would-be customers mind at the rest that, yes, this is the site that they read about and - more importantly - their intent to follow up this up is easy to do.

A solid conversion rate optimisation campaign can bring increased numbers of people through the sales funnel, add more value to your bottom line and most importantly, ensure that the hard earned column inches and offline activity result in a well deserved sale. Can you afford not to?