With an Inbound Marketing approach, your company’s website is one of the key tools for generating sales leads for DIY consumer brands and building products manufacturers. Several marketing tactics, such as digital advertising, email marketing, content creation and social media marketing all play into driving traffic to your company’s website where visitors are offered valuable content in exchange for their contact information to guide their purchase process and convert them into qualified leads, and ultimately customers.
Most businesses set a revenue goal as part of their annual planning. For example, they may set a goal to increase company revenue by 20% in the next year.
This is often broken down into smaller goals where each team, department, or individual contributes to achieving the broader goal. For example, the sales department may be responsible for closing more customers, and individual sales reps might have monthly sales revenue targets. Meanwhile, the marketing team may be charged with creating marketing campaigns that attract more website visitors and generate more qualified leads.
But how can you predict how many website visitors you will need to achieve your revenue goal?
Do you get enough visitors to your website currently?We’ve created this useful Revenue to Website Traffic Calculator to help answer these questions. Just enter your revenue goal and estimate your conversion rates to project how many website visitors you will need to hit your goal. It’s a Google Sheet, so you can make a copy, then follow along in this article as we walk you through it.
Access our free "Revenue to Website Traffic Calculator" here and make a copy to your Google Drive.
To understand how many visitors it might take to achieve your revenue goal, you first need to know what that goal is. For example, if your company made $1.5M last year, and your goal is to increase to $2M, the goal for new revenue is $500,000. Enter that number on row 7.
Assuming your existing sales and marketing activity remains successful, this is the shortfall that any new marketing tactics – in this case, your website visitors – will need to be accountable for.
However, not all new business will be attributed to your website. Revenue comes from many sources, including:
To account for this, we’ve added a multiplier. On row 10, input the percentage of business that you expect to be generated primarily from your website. For example, if you estimate that half of your new sales leads will come as a result of trade shows and professional networking, then perhaps your website is only responsible for the other half. If so, you would enter 50% on row 9.
As shoppers do their due diligence to research products online, they gather more and more information to help them make their purchase decisions. By collecting visitor contact information in your CRM and understanding how those users browse and interact with your web pages, blogs, emails, and other content, you can segment good-fit prospects from unqualified contacts. The more they engage with your content, you will move contacts through their Buyer’s Journey from one Lifecycle Stage to the next:
You entered your revenue goal and the value of a typical new deal above. Now, you can work backward through your sales and marketing funnel to calculate how many new website visitors you will need at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey to achieve your business growth goal.
First, you need to understand how successful your sales team is at turning qualified Opportunities into customers. When supplied with good quality leads (Opportunities), many sales departments can close 20-50% of Opportunities into Customers.
Start by entering your Sales Close Rate on row 12. Your Sales Close Rate will calculate the number of contacts you need in the Opportunities Lifecycle Stage.
HOMEWORK: Define a "good quality lead." What actions does a contact demonstrate to be considered an "Opportunity" for your sales team to have the best success at closing?
An Opportunity is a contact whom the sales rep has contacted and decided is likely to become a customer. A contact is usually considered an Opportunity when they show real buying intent, such as when a new deal is created. The sales rep marks the contact as an Opportunity manually in the CRM.
A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is one that your marketing and sales teams have agreed is worthy of an introduction. SQLs have demonstrated by their marketing actions, that they are actively doing due diligence and would be open to an introduction to your company. Typical actions include filling out the "Request a Quote" form or requesting a meeting. Or you might consider a SQL a "good-fit" contact if they have visited several key web pages, such as a pricing page, and have clicked some of your marketing emails. Using the SQL Lifecycle Stage will help your sales and marketing teams agree in terms of the quality and volume of leads that are handed over to your sales team. A typical MQL to SQL rate for many businesses is 50-70%.
Enter your SQL to Opportunity Conversion Rate on row 14.
HOMEWORK: Define the qualities that make a SQL for you. What actions does a contact need to demonstrate for you to consider them “Sales Qualified?”
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) fits the demographics of what a good customer looks like, although they may not be ready to purchase. An MQL is a contact that has actively engaged with your marketing content, though they may not yet have explicitly requested to be contacted by a sales rep. Perhaps they have downloaded some of your high-value content and have visited several of your web pages. MQLs are high value contacts that would make good prospects or customers when the time is right.
Use marketing automation to keep reaching out to MQLs with helpful and relevant content and encourage them to learn more about your company and take an introductory meeting.
A good benchmark MQL to SQL conversion rate for many businesses is 20-40%.
Enter your MQL to SQL Conversion Rate on row 16.
A Lead is a contact that has converted on your website by providing their name and email address to receive at least one of your marketing content offers. You have saved their contact information in your CRM and can monitor their engagement with your marketing to automatically update their Lifecycle Stage throughout their Buyer’s Journey.
Several factors can impact Lead to MQL conversions, including the relevance of your content, availability of calls-to-action (CTAs) on your website, or simply timing.
A good benchmark Lead to MQL Conversion Rate is 20-40%.
Enter your Lead to MQL Conversion Rate on row 18.
This calculator works backward to estimate the number of contacts you need in each stage of your marketing funnel. With all your estimated conversion rates in place, we can finally get a gauge of how many visitors you will need at the top of the funnel to achieve your business growth goal.
A Visitor is someone who visits your website. Visitors can come from many sources, including search engines, ads, social media, emails, links from other websites, or directly entering your website address.
An industry benchmark Visit to Lead Conversion Rate is 1-3%.
Enter your Visit to Lead conversion rate on row 20.
Edit any of the conversion rate percentages you entered (in the green cells) to see how they impact the calculation. For example, if you plan to develop a killer marketing campaign that you think will convert loads of new Leads, changing the Visit to Lead Conversion Rate from 1.25% to 2% means you would need fewer Visitors at the top of the funnel to hit your revenue goal. Experiment with your inputs of other conversion rates to see how they impact the result.
As the hub of an Inbound Marketing program, your website is a potential sales tool to help you achieve your annual business goals. With an idea of how many visitors you’ll need to attract to your website, you can now set out to develop the necessary marketing campaigns to drive that traffic and convert leads. If you’ve designed your website with an Inbound Marketing strategy in mind, your website will be a source for attracting visitors and generating leads that will help you achieve your business growth goals this year.