Using PIE to optimize your inbound marketing conversions

Let’s talk about PIE.

No, not homemade apple pie — more like conversion-increasing inbound marketing PIE. This particular delicacy comes in three slices: potential, importance, and ease. With these three slices, PIE can give you arbitrary numerical values that allows you to see, at a glimpse, what you can work on immediately to improve the inbound marketing performance of a website.

When you compare the arbitrary scores of your webpages, you’ll see which low-lying fruits are easily within your reach, so you can work on them and impact your bottom-line ASAP.

Let’s take a look at the slices of our PIE:

Potential

Potential is the measure of possibility — how much you can take a webpage and polish it until it sparkles. You probably have an ideal for what a specific webpage can be. Now, how big is the gap between your ideal webpage and what currently exists?

Assign this gap between what is and ought a numerical value from 1 to 10. That’s your potential.

Don’t just grab numbers out of thin air; you can break down what you need from a webpage into smaller categorical portions. Take a landing page, for instance. Let’s say its marketing copy is lacklustre, its contact form is bad and below the fold, and it doesn’t have calls to action. So you have three or four facets to improve — that’s your potential: 3 or 4. Of course, if you think a single item is worth several points, that’s your prerogative. Just keep in mind that how you weigh these facets should be equal across the board. Some elements of landing pages shouldn’t heft more weight than those of product pages or static pages. You’ll see why in a second.

Importance

Some webpages are simply more important than others — like landing pages compared to static “About Us” pages. You don’t consider that factor in the potential slice of the PIE, you consider it in importance.

Importance is how much business value you think the potential would bring in. If you focus on fulfilling a webpage’s potential, do you think you can earn 3% uplift in conversion? 15% more organic traffic? How does that impact your bottom-line? Again, these numbers are relative — 15% is way more than 3%, but if your 3% increase in conversion improves your bottom-line more than a 15% increase in traffic, then you know the webpage that can potentially increase conversion by 3% will have more importance value than the webpage that can potentially increase traffic by 15%. The difference is in your estimated impact on your bottom-line.

Based on that, assign another arbitrary value between 1 and 10 to importance.

Ease

Now, you know a webpage’s potential and its importance, but you also need to know one more factor: how easy — or in converse — how hard is it to fulfill a webpage’s potential and thereby reap the results of its importance?

The ease value — another 10-point scale — basically indicates how much resources are needed to fulfill a website’s potential. Let’s say you have three resources to consider: time, money, and effort. You can assign these three resources a part of that 10-point scale and then put them together to get your ease score.

Tally it up. To get a complete PIE score, aggregate the individual rankings. Start by tackling the high PIE score optimizations first. A webpage with 9 importance but also 10 ease might better be left for later, if you have a webpage with 7 importance but just 2 ease waiting in line.

This overall PIE, and the values you assign yourself or with an expert web marketing team, simplifies the identification of unique inbound marketing improvement opportunities that you can quickly fix and soon enjoy the benefits of.

And with this peace of mind, knowing that you’re when you’ve got your inbound marketing plan on the path to more conversions, why not reward yourself with a nice slice of the real stuff?
 

Image: Dinner Series, on Flickr

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