WebVisible: ‘Why SMB Advertisers Churn’
The churn rates for low-end local businesses are incredibly high. Why is that? WebVisible CEO Kirsten Mangers told Directory Driven Commerce attendees the reason we don’t see high conversion rates for low-end advertisers is their Web sites “really suck.” It is typical that they have “three-page, templated Web sites that they haven’t touched in three years,” she says.
They also don’t take advantage of opportunities to learn. “Forty percent don’t open e-mails we send them. The $10 hosting customers … they don’t know what they want,” says Mangers.
Citysearch, on the other hand, doesn’t have such high churn because it has “more sophisticated advertisers” who fill in the bells and whistles and take advantage of the state of the art.
Advertisers on Citysearch and other sites that “really participate” typically spend more money. They also have a 75 percent retention rate.
Mangers says a sure route to get better results is to get traffic from more than one network. There is always the fear of wasteful overlap, but it is mostly unwarranted. “We have three resellers in one market, and the overlap is less than half of 1 percent,” she notes. “Bring it on,” adds Mangers. “I’m looking for the day where we have 17 resellers.”