Conversion goals are one of those odd things every arts marketer seems to know they need but for whatever reason, most groups have too many webpages with zero goals.
For those on the outside of marketing-jargon, conversion goals are the thing you want a visitor to do at your website. For the most part, they can be broken down into three basic types:
- Revenue generation: purchasing a ticket or making a donation.
- Lead generation: a visitor adds their contact information to your database (name, email, address, phone, etc.).
- Social engagement: a visitor shares an event or page and/or begins following your social feed.
By and large, most groups do a great job with revenue generation: adding purchase links/buttons for events, subscriptions, and donations.
Lead gen and social engagement tend to fall into distant second and third place positions but that doesn’t mean they are less important. Pages missing goals tend to be ubiquitous static content such as mission statements, about pages, directions, etc.
What’s really surprising are how often content like donor lists and board members pages don’t have a single conversion trigger.
For board member pages, focus on lead gen by including a “contact the board” form. Messages don’t have to go directly to board members but providing the point of contact means the organization can collect visitor information (just be sure to include the necessary disclosure in the form).
Donor lists should absolutely include a goal driving visitors to leave a gift at levels high enough to see their name on those lists.
On something like a mission statement page, include a specific social engagement action to follow one of the organization’s social media profiles. “See how we put our mission statement into action by following us on Facebook and leave questions for us about our mission driven activity.”
If you have the ability to include something like a click-to-tweet function, that’s a great way to highlight a key point from the mission.
In the end, there’s no reason why any page should be devoid of one or more goals. Give it a little thought then be sure to measure that impact; after all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. I’m willing to bet the results will make for a fantastic report your executive and board committee will be grateful to see not to mention better mailing lists and beefier social engagement.
