Too many people try too hard to get people to whip out their credit card and purchase online. Unless you are a huge brand name online, the highest conversion you can expect (the amount of sales you get divided by your total number of visits) is about 2%. I hardly see more than a true 2% conversion rate when you ask for a credit card. 

Now, when it comes to gathering data (an online lead) you can get as high as 15%. If you are a good sales person, you should be able to close half of your warm leads. If you closed half, your overall conversion would be 7.5%. This is about 4 more sales that you would have if you would have relied only on your website to close the deal down. 

Imagine what you would have to do to get your website to close 400% more sales. You would most likely need to do 4x the amount of marketing. What would you rather have?

Recent studies have shown unanimously that recognizable brands convert at up to 300% more than companies with no little or no brand recognition. The industry ecommerce average is hovering in the 1% range; Staples.com has a 20% conversion rate. 

The problem is that companies are spending more and more of their dollars online. Online advertising companies are very direct-response driven. Clients expect to see the ROI for every dollar spent. This data has been a 2-edged sword. It is great that you can see where your dollar goes; in fact, I pitch it all day long. The problem is that the very ability that allows us to see the fine detail of where marketing dollars goes gets clients (of all sizes) away from branding and simply obsessed with a sale or conversion. In addition to this, most online businesses are not funded and require making a profit each month on its marketing dollar. This makes it very hard as a combination direct response/branding campaign is hard to pull off. 

It is my belief that the internet will do a dramatic shift from its’ early pioneers of young people building seriously profitable garage-based businesses to large brands dominating the space. The “little guys” need to start coming up with a clever way to get people brand aware before it is too late.