Internet marketing can be broken down into two simple categories: customer acquisition and customer optimization. Customer acquisition refers to the traffic to your website while customer optimization refers to how well your website converts customers into clients. Almost every business has invested time and money into the first category, customer acquisition, but spends little time working on customer optimization. The most obvious, fastest, and easiest to implement for getting customer acquisition is Google AdWords. Almost every company I have talked with has tried Google AdWords at one point in time but there are three reasons why focusing on just customer acquisition alone is a bad strategy.

First, Google AdWords is a very saturated market. There is a lot of completion and managing your AdWords account can be a lengthy process involving a lot of trial and error. I have found that not all companies will do well with Google Adwords. Many companies would do better on Bing vs. Google because there is less competition and generally costs a lot less during the trial and error stage of developing your marketing strategy.

Second, customer acquisition doesn’t give you economic leverage. Many times you have to continually pump money into customer acquisition to continue to generate sales. Further, because of the ever increasing competition, you will likely have increased costs in customer acquisition over time. Therefore spending a lot of time and money on customer acquisition without any focus on consumer optimization can be disastrous. Every company should instead prioritize their customer optimization over scaling up their customer acquisition.

Third, customer acquisition has a lot of different components. You will want to implement and optimize your SEO (SEO blog), do Google & Bing advertising (use Bing and Google ads blog), get good backlinks, do social media advertising, get referral traffic, get in directories, and do shopping campaigns. All of these tasks can be an overwhelming process, it’s far better to, at least initially, focus on customer optimization. I believe this second category should be the obsession of all new startups or businesses that are going online for the first time. Customer optimization means optimizing your website and the traffic to your website to meet your customer’s needs while getting your clients to convert.

Conversions are simple to understand because they are the backbone of your business. You want to look primarily at your conversion rate which is the ratio of customers that achieve your desired outcome, usually a purchase or sale, divided by the total number of visitors to your website. Customer optimization in essence is how to increase your conversion rate and conversions. That is what this blog will be focusing on.

Unfortunately improving conversions for customer optimization usually involves an aggregate of one hundred small improvements. Rarely will your conversion rate dramatically increase with one single “silver bullet” change. You might be wondering why you would work on customer optimization if it involves many small changes. Well because improving customer conversions, even a little bit, can create amazing economic leverage for your company. These tiny improvements can have huge financial gains.

Think about customer optimization as a funnel, no matter how much water (customer acquisition) you put into the funnel the funnel itself will dictate how much water (sales) you produce. Creating a better funnel is sometimes all that you need in making an online marketing campaign insanely profitable. The improvements you make to your customer optimization lead directly to an increase in revenue and are only offset by the cost of implementing the conversion improvements themselves. You will not find another single area of your business where small improvements can have this much of an impact.

Despite it being much more beneficial to initially focus on customer optimization 90% of companies I have met focus instead on customer acquisition. They want to find ways to improve how they are buying customers without implementing or understanding their conversion process. Because of this I want to continually give you a lot of small, and major, changes you can implement that can have a major impact on your revenue and conversion rate. If I haven’t sold you yet on customer optimization below are seven reasons why you should optimize your website and what major changes you can make to improve your customer optimization.