Any digital marketer worth their salt is constantly pursuing conversion optimization, with many utilizing marketing automation tools and A/B testing along the way, but Ottawa-based entrepreneurs John Rau and Keith McGibbon noticed there wasn’t a service incorporating all three – until now.
This week the duo’s digital marketing startup, Accel Web Marketing, launched a new “managed conversion optimization” service, SalesRev, that combines marketing automation technology, A/B testing, retargeting, and Accel’s own optimization expertise to help high-traffic websites leverage their existing traffic to boost conversion rates.
“A lot of other services will only look at one aspect of what can be done,” Rau tells ITBusiness.ca. “We look at the big picture – lead-nurturing, personalized website content, A/B testing, lookalike audience targeting, remarketing – and make them all work together in harmony.”
“We’ve found that having a unified team delivers much better results for our customers, rather than having separate agencies work on each piece,” he adds.
Central to Rau and McGibbon’s approach when developing the new service was their understanding that many customers already had at least one solution in place, and did not want to migrate from their current service providers.
And so Rau and McGibbon, who cofounded Accel to provide conversion optimization consulting services in 2011, have primarily incorporated existing digital marketing service providers such as Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot into their clients’ SalesRev packages, connecting them with a provider – or, in the case of marketing automation, Accel’s in-house software – if they don’t have one already.
The new service is already yielding results for at least one Accel client, small business-facing financial management platform Finsync Inc., which increased its conversion rate by 238 per cent while decreasing its cost per customer acquisition by 58 per cent during the past year, according to an Aug. 23 press release.
Though digital marketing is big business, with advertisers spending almost $75 billion on Google Adwords alone last year, for the most part conversion rates – the percentage of website visitors who buy something or fill out a form – remain rather low, frequently hovering between two and three per cent.
In that light, utilizing SalesRev, which begins at $999 per month for websites with up to 30,000 monthly visitors, $1,499 per month for websites with between 30,000 and 100,000 monthly visitors, and $1,999 per month for websites with between 100,000 and 300,000 monthly visitors, might seem expensive, but it can certainly be more cost-effective than buying more ads.
Rau notes that the base prices exclude marketing automation licenses.
“What we’re offering is the service, and the additional tools we use to administer that service,” he says.
Accel will also be running a webinar for those interested in learning more about how SalesRev can help them use website traffic to optimize conversions on Sept. 21.