When Are Your Customers Buying? A Deep Dive into Sales Conversions
At Conversion Pipeline, we work with a variety of clients across all industries. Whether they be business to business based, or business to consumer, our main goal is to increase that client’s conversion rates.
We look at conversions primarily through two criteria. First, we look at contact form conversions, where a user fills out a form on the client’s website. Second, we look at phone conversions. Call tracking is a mandatory service we provide for all of our Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization clients. When tracking phone calls we embed a code into the client’s website that triggers a specific tracking phone number. When a user sees a certain marketing piece or clicks into the website from a specific source, they see a unique tracking number. This allows us to report and compare the results month over month.
Software Advice has just released a fascinating study of business to business (B2B) conversions. This study prompted us to begin looking into our own conversion data, more on that in a moment…
The Software Advice report takes an in depth look at when B2B buyers do web research, when they convert on a website, and when it is easiest get them on the phone. They looked into time of day, week, and year to see if any trends were present.
Here are some of their key takeaways:
Call leads fast-really fast. When we call a lead within 5 seconds, our odds of qualifying them are 29% higher than if we call within 5 minutes.
Tuesday through Thursday is the best time to reach buyers. Leads that come in Tuesday through Thursday qualify at twice our average rate for other business days.
Time of year matters. Vacations are likely responsible for lower conversion activity in summer months. Meanwhile, conversion rates drop in December as companies prepare for the new year and may be less likely to engage with sales teams about a new purchase.
Time of day. Conversions that come in from 9:00 AM until 12:00 PM qualify 11% higher than our average qualification rate.
Understand online behavior. Knowing when buyers are researching purchases and calling conversions right away can significantly improve your ability to qualify leads generated on the web.
Click here to read the full 2013 Online B2B Buyer Behavior Report.
After seeing this report we got to thinking about how our conversion rates do across industries. We found that while Software Advice did a good job at looking into B2B conversions, we wanted to look into our business to consumer client base. Since Conversion Pipeline services both business categories, we wanted to see what was happening.
We examined a random set of 2000 conversions from February, across only our B2C clients. The data comes from many industry categories. We found that Monday and Friday are the best days for conversions.
While this directly goes against what Software Advice found, keep in mind we were looking at a different set of clients from one another.
Wonder why conversions are so different between B2B and B2C?
I suspect it has something to do with basic psychology. A Monday is, well, a Monday. Getting into the office and getting ramped up for the week, with your mind still on that weekend project, is the perfect time to surf a little and maybe buy something. Perhaps is it a service…after working in the yard, you realized you need a fence repair, so Monday morning you do a quick search in Google and then call the fencing company. Monday’s are a perfect time for people to execute online consumer purchases.
Similarly, there is probably some mental “check out” on Friday’s when people are thinking more about their personal lives (read: consumer) than about work.
In this way, it our findings match up nicely with the Software Advice study. B2B is best on Tuesday, Weds and Thurs and B2C is best on Monday and Friday.
Turn this into actionable intelligence! If you run a B2C company, use this to plan your next email blast, blog post, news release or any other marketing effort. Knowing that your prospects are more likely to pull the buying trigger on a Monday or Friday can only help.
Our findings are interesting enough results to warrant an even deeper look into our clients, look for a follow up post next month!
When are your busiest times? When does your company take the most orders?
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