“My Conversion Rate’s Too High” -- The Affordability Conundrum

Usually, when I’m writing on the topic of turning visitors into leads, I share tips and tricks for how we think about raising conversion rate i.e. getting more people who visit your site to fill out a form.

However, when we move into the topic of affordability, we start to move into the realm of when conversion rate goes too far.

I’ll tell a brief story from a few months ago when I was having a conversation with one of our account managers here at FranchiseHelp. Anna was passing along some feedback that one of our clients thought their lead quality had been a bit low in the past few days. I told her I’d look into it, and when I did, I came to a startling finding – a dis-proportionally high percentage of the clients leads had been acquired and converted using language about the “affordability” of the franchise.

To be fair, this franchise had a liquid capital requirement well below the median that we see on our site, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t other very marketable qualities about the benefits of owning this franchise.

And that’s when it hit me, “My conversion rate was too high!” In an effort to attract more people to that franchise, we had accentuated a specific quality that didn’t necessarily lead to ultimate franchise sales.

So what is the affordability conundrum?

I’ll generalize by saying that by promoting the affordability of a franchise, a marketer drives more people into the sales funnel at the cost of mitigating the likelihood that any individual candidate ends up opening a franchise.

Let me give you an analytical idea of the power of promoting a franchise’s affordability.

One of the metrics you can use to determine how much certain messaging resonates with an audience is by measuring the click-through rate. (For the time being, I’ll define click-through rate as the percentage of people who read something who actually click to the next step).

If you were to look at a sampling of subjects of emails that we sent to potential franchisees in August and September 2014, you’d see this distribution of click-through rates:

So, versus the average click-through rate, we can expect a 66% increase by using messaging associated with the “affordability” of franchising! If conversion rate was the only thing we were focused on, then we would likely only market franchises as affordable.

This same logic applies to the copy on the website as well.

So here’s the balance that you have to keep in mind. Every time you promote your franchise as affordable, you are certainly doing a more effective job filling your franchise’s sales funnel. More people feel qualified to open a location, so you’re going to get more people to fill out a form. However, those who do fill out a form may not be the people you’re looking for! So make sure you keep an eye out for how that crop ultimately falls out in terms of opening a franchise.

Questions on affordability? Let us know!