Is Your Website an Asset or a Liability?

Parker Dickens

Director Of Accounts, Oozle Media

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I really appreciate it. I’m super excited. The content today at The Summit has been great, a lot of stuff on social, Beauty as a Business, we’re going to change gears here a little bit, but first I just want to say thank you to everyone for the warm welcome in the chat. Lindsay, with Altoona Beauty School, I saw your comment on the hair. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Really exciting to be back again with The Beauty School Summit, getting to present last year, honestly, one of my favorite things. Whether you became a client of Oozle Media or not was just spending time with the people who did take up that hour consultation offer to just meet, go through numbers, go through things. If you’ve seen any webinars I’ve done in the last five years that I’ve been at Oozle or the Beauty Summit last year, I’m big into numbers.

This presentation, fair warning, is not going to be too different. We’re going to go through a lot of numbers, but I think they’ll be really good numbers to go through and to understand. So, let me get my screen shared here real quick, and we can jump right into things.

Alrighty. And go ahead and put in the chat if you can see my slides here. Should be rocking and rolling. Perfect. I’m seeing a lot of “yes”, so that’s a good sign. All right. So like Chris said, is your website an asset or a liability? That’s the topic for today. Are you getting what you need out of your website, or is it costing you money? Is it costing you opportunities?

We gave a website away last year. We’re giving another one away this year. And last year, that was something that when I was meeting with Tammy, the Admissions Director at the College of Cosmetology, we’ll see a video of her later, she did say her old website was costing her opportunities, that they were missing out on leads that they could have gotten and just what a difference their new website has made. So we’ll jump into that.

Everything Leads To Your Website

But the first thing that I really want to get into and touch on before we go through numbers or anything, is why websites are so important. Why you hear people talking about them so often. And that kind of builds on something, a saying you’ve heard people at Oozle say probably hundreds of times now if you’ve been at our webinars or Summits in the past, excuse me. And it’s that all roads lead to Rome.

So, you can kind of see here, this slide, all roads lead to Rome. If you think about your website and that saying, whether you’re doing business cards and mailers and billboards, the traditional advertising, or digital advertising, pretty much everything that you’re doing is leading people back to your website.

Prospective students are going there. They’re going to learn about what kind of school you’ve got, how much is it going to cost, it should answer all their questions. It should be really clear what actions you want them to take.

Because it becomes that center point, that focal point that so many people are using as their first introduction to your business, maybe second to wherever they see you on some of these slides here, whether it’s on Instagram, social media, etc., on ads. They’re going to land on your website, and then the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, “Are they going to know what to do once they get there?”

So, we’re going to talk about that a little bit. Like I said, does your website cost you money, or does it make you money? And we’re going to find that out together. We’re going to find out how to calculate that, how to understand the conversion rate on your website. And I’m just going to put a big pause in the middle of this to give this disclaimer.

Conversion Rates vs. Enrollment Rates

I’m going to reference conversion rates, and I’m going to reference enrollment rates in this presentation. Enrollment rates are what I talked about a lot last year, that’s the percentage of leads who end up enrolling. Conversion rate, in the context of our conversation together today, is going to be a little bit different.

Conversion rate is going to mean any traffic to your website, and what percentage of that traffic converted into a lead, filled out a form, called you, got in touch in some way with your admissions team. So, when I talk about conversion rate, that’s what we’re talking about.

Enrollment rate is the percentage of those who get in contact that end up enrolling. So, hopefully that’s clear. If there’s any confusion later in the presentation, go ahead and put it in the chat, I’ll answer any questions if we’ve got time.

How To Calculate Your Conversion Rate

And let’s talk about how you calculate your conversion rate. I usually recommend picking a big date range, at the smallest maybe three months, really look at a full year of data, and find out which marketing channel you want to look at.

You can look at all data, you can look at all your traffic to your website, all conversions, or you can go specific. I want to know what my conversion rate is for Google ads or for organic or direct or a number of different channels that you want to look at and kind of decide where you’re making your money, where there’s opportunities, is there opportunities to have a conversion rate higher here or there.

We’re going to pull those two numbers that we’re going to divide over the top of each other. So, we’re going to pull that visitor data from Google analytics. We’re going to go to our marketing reports, look at the leads, and we just divide those numbers as a percent. Not super complicated there.

Again, if we go over to the Google ad screenshot under acquisition, this is the current version of Google Analytics. Those of you who might be familiar with Analytics know that it’s going to be updating to GA4, Google Analytics 4, next year, so this screen will look a little bit different, but right now this is what Google Analytics looks like for the vast majority of folks.

We’ve got our date range set. You can see, in our top right corner, the whole year of 2021. This is an actual beauty school that we work with. We can go to “overview” under “acquisition”, and we get a breakdown of all their users that have visited their website, unique visitors by channel here.

So, just to keep it simple, we’re going to calculate an organic conversion rate for this beauty school. There is an argument to be made that maybe you add in direct traffic to organic, but to keep it as simple as possible, I’m just going to use the organic search traffic. That’s traffic that makes it to your website from Google or Bing or some sort of search engine, that would be organic search. And this is how we calculate it for most of our websites anyways, just to keep it simple, organic search.

Then, I go to their marketing report. I’ve got some data historic for them. I can see what they’re spending, all that. I’ve added up their leads for 2021. We’ve got 2,849 leads. You can see the big red arrow pointing that out, and we just divide those over each other.

So we’ve got the 2,849 leads. Again, I got that from the marketing report. We divide that by the visitors. If you’re wondering where I got that 22,000, it’s that number right there. Times that by a hundred, and you can see that this client gets a 12.6% conversion rate on their website. So they’re doing pretty solid there, which is great to see.

That’s the number that you want to go look at to figure out if your website’s costing you money, or if it’s where it should be. Realistically, if you’re lower than 5, 6%, it might be worth considering why that is and investing in it. If you’re doing 10, 12, 15, 20%, you’re definitely doing above average, which is awesome.

How To Calculate Enrollment Rate

I’m going to jump over for a second to enrollment rates. This is a slide from my presentation in last year’s Summit. I went and talked to a bunch of beauty schools across the United States and Canada. They provided me their enrollment data and their lead data, and I pulled a bunch of averages. So, this is enrollment data. This is the percent of those leads that end up enrolling.

You can see organic is averaging about 12 to 15%. I’m going to go into an example here in a second that’s going to use these numbers, which is why I bring this up. But I would say screenshot these.

Also, go figure out your enrollment rate. I don’t have time to talk about enrollment rate in the same way that I did last year. You can always check out the replay if you want to get some of those numbers. But go ahead and screenshot that, compare your own numbers, whether you’ve got an in-house marketing person, or you’ve got an agency that you’re working with, or even if you don’t work with any marketing team, these numbers will really help you evaluate how you compare to the rest of beauty schools in the nation.

What Does an Increase in Conversion Rate Look Like for Your School?

The thing that I want to talk about with these numbers in mind is what does a one, a two, a three percentage point increase look like for your school? If we increase that conversion rate, and we take that enrollment rate, and let’s just say 12%, we’ll go on the low end of organic, what is that going to look like?

Let’s take this hypothetically here. Imagine we’ve got a beauty school, maybe they’ve got a couple locations, they get 3,000 visitors a month. This is monthly data. We’re getting into the numbers now, so bear with me. We’ll go quick. It’s not too complicated here. I know some people like the numbers, some people like the creative side, we’ve got a lot more social media stuff coming up later. We’ve also got, like Chris said, some tax stuff coming up later. So we’ll have a good balance. Bear with me.

For this beauty school, we’ve got 3,000 organic visitors a month, and they convert at 4%. So 4% of 3,000, they’re getting about 120 leads a month between their campuses, and these are completely hypothetical numbers here. Just easy math. Let’s say they enroll those 120 leads at 12%, so they’re getting 14 enrollments every month across their couple locations. And, I just went with $15,000 for revenue per enrollment. I know for those of you that have got cosmetology, some of your revenue looks like $20,000-$25,000 per student. On the esthetics side, we’re more on the $6,000-$10,000 range, and nails and makeup can be $2,000-$4,000. So, I just chose $15,000, somewhere in the middle, to help visualize how impactful this can be.

And so, if all 14 of those students end up graduating, they all pay their tuition, the hope is that you collect on all that at $216,000.

Again, I totally understand that that’s an ideal situation that everyone sees things through to the end, but let’s just change this number up here, this 4% and see what a difference this does to our students, our enrollments, and revenue, money in our pocket, so to speak as, as beauty school owners or staff.

So if we are able to optimize our website and get a little bit better of a conversion rate and go up to 5%, we’re now going from 14 students to 18 students in a month, and we’ve added $54,000 to our revenue by the time they’ve graduated. And we’re doing that every month with that extra percent. 6%, we’ve added $108,000. 7%, $162,000. We’re now at 25 enrollments between our various campuses.

And then again, if we double our conversion rate, we go from 4% up to 8%, we’re now getting almost 30 enrollments a month. We’re making double as much revenue every month from that, and the thing that I’ll remind everyone is, this is not SEO. I’m not talking about slow blogging and content and that long-term investment that you should be making. This is still with 3,000 organic visitors to your website. This is just making your website easier to use and clearer what you want these 3,000 people to do, that’s netting you double as many leads, double as many enrollments, and twice as much revenue.

Actual Conversion Rates for Beauty Schools

And if these numbers seem way too out of left field, this is still unrealistic. I went, I didn’t cherry pick these, I found seven schools of varying sizes. I’ve got the months of data. Some of them have had an Oozle website for four months, some of them are going on four years. I took their average traffic. I’ve got their average conversion rate. We’ve got highs and lows in there. Some of these have multiple locations. Some of these are one location, but one thing that I really, what’s satisfying for me to see is those averages down here actually come out pretty close to these hypothetical numbers I made up before pulling this data.

We’ve got, on average, Oozle websites between these seven schools, 3,000 visitors, 288 leads per month, and again, we’ve got some people with this school I know has five locations, they’re bringing that average up a little bit. Conversion rate 8.8%. What’s interesting is two of these schools actually get a lower conversion rate with an Oozle site than they got before, but they netted more leads. And the reason for that lower conversion rate is their website started ranking so much better that they’re getting more traffic. So, even though that traffic is converting at a lower percent, it’s still netting them more leads than they had previously on a monthly basis.

And if you take this and compare it to the numbers that they had before with their old websites, they got 70% higher conversion rates on average, and I also averaged up how many leads that netted them. Not quite as high, but it was an extra 50 to 60% on average more leads with an Oozle website.

How Much Are You Willing To Pay for More Leads?

So I’m not trying to sell anyone on an Oozle website, my point in this presentation is actually just updating your website to make use of the traffic you’re getting. But one of the things I do have to kind of ask is what price, how much are you willing to pay for 50% more leads with a one time investment, right? Not ongoing PPC, not ongoing socialSEO, one time investment in getting a better website, something that’s going to work harder for you, how much is that worth, right?

And how many students do you need to get before that website has paid for itself? How many extra students do you have to get before that’s paid for itself? So, kind of interesting thing there. How many extra students does your website need to get? Go and calculate that using your own revenue numbers. Should be interesting. Now, if you heard all this, you’re saying, “Okay, we know we want a new website.” I saw a couple people in the chat with the website giveaway earlier say, “We need this.”

And you’re thinking about whether or not it’s something that your school can afford or not. You’re in luck. There is a chance that one of you walks away, there’s a 100% chance that one of you walks away with a free website at the end. So, I don’t know if Chris can throw the link to that giveaway in the chat if he hasn’t already, it looks like he did so, perfect. Fill out that form. You do need to be in attendance at the end of today to get that free website, and you need to fill out that form letting us know you want a free website. So fill out that form.

The Impact of an Oozle Website From Last Year’s Giveaway

I’m going to show you guys who won last year and play a quick video on with the Tammy, the Admissions Representative from the College of Cosmetology. And they’re so nice. Let me just tell you before I show this video. They even made a TikTok saying, “Which marketing agency did your website?” And had Oozle Media in it, and I don’t have time to play that today, unfortunately, but it was really nice of them to put together.

So, this is their old website. Once that loads, excuse me, that’s their new website. This is their old website. You can see here, definitely needed a little bit of updating by their own admission.

And this is what they won last year. So we worked with them, put this together. They actually ended up paying a little bit to have us write some extra content for it, and I’m going to go ahead and shut up and play this video of Tammy talking about the impact that it had on her school.

She’s also got a great little story of contacting the very first lead that came from this being really on top of things. So like I said, I will be quiet and play that video now.

Tammy:

“Great. Honestly, it’s been amazing. They did a really good job, and we couldn’t be happier with it. It’s beautiful. It’s really, it’s just beautiful, and we couldn’t have planned it better. And I like the way they incorporated some of our students in it also. So it has more of a connection to our school. So I love that.

People will see people that they know on our website, and that’s fun. And I love that the Instagram streams right to the homepage, that’s been so much fun, having the students get excited about doing something on Instagram because it’s going to show up on our website. They’re walking on cloud nine all day, because they’re on that Instagram page. So it’s been really fun.

A hundred percent I feel like we lost stuff. The one thing we had a hard time was getting it to connect to my email. So I had to log in every day or every couple days to check and see if anyone had sent in a request, and you know how life gets, it’s hard to always be checking in on that stuff, it’s much easier when it comes right into your inbox. It’s amazing to have it right there. Which, I know we’d had it set up kind of like that before, but our website was dated, and it just wasn’t running properly, and so we were always, I can’t tell you how many times I heard, “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you guys, and I haven’t been able to.” And that’s frustrating because if we want them, like I want all the students, so it was frustrating to not get those leads. And then this has just made it so much easier. They come right in, quickly.

And the first one I got, it was amazing. It was really kind of a funny, little thing. We launched on the 20th, and I was so excited. I was sitting here at my computer and all of a sudden I see this thing come up and I’m like, “I got my first lead!” So I pulled it up, and I hurried and called her, and the lady’s like, “Wow, I just left that like two minutes ago.” She wasn’t ready to talk to me yet. It was really quick. I’m all, “I’m sorry. I was just really excited!” It was exciting. It’s just fun, too.

And honestly I feel like this has really brought our business to a whole new level. We launched January 20th. It was so much fun. She’s great. The team was fantastic. I really feel like they made this process as smooth as possible. They didn’t interfere with any of my other stuff. It was really good. We ended up having them write the content, which I’m really glad we did. At first, we thought we can use the content and stuff, but I don’t think, we couldn’t have done the quality that they did.

Parker Dickens:

Awesome. So that’s the little clip. Again, someone can be Tammy this year, win another website which is exciting. Tammy, if you’re on, thank you for letting me record that Zoom call and share that with the Summit audience today. I loved meeting with you and just hearing what an impact that’s had on your school. So again, the link is in the chat, fill it out, win one of these. I’m not trying to push. I mean, it’s going to sound like I am. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it, but more than anything, I want people to just be empowered to find out if their website is doing what it should for them, getting leads.

I’ve dedicated the last half a decade at Oozle Media to growing beauty schools. I love working with schools, helping them grow, helping them get the leads that they need.

So take advantage of this one hour free consultation. We can go through a conversion rate analysis. We can do an enrollment rate analysis. My email’s up on screen. Chris just threw it in the chat pdickens@oozlemedia.com. I am happy to meet with anyone, whether or not you become customers of Oozle Media. I just love going through these things. As Tyler just said in the chat, I don’t know if everyone can see that, this pic is from when I was 12. Not quite, but it is pre mustache days on my wedding day, a couple years ago, but that’s everything for me today.

Thank you so much, Chris. I’ll turn it back to you.

Chris:

Yeah, no Parker. Hey, we’ve got a couple minutes. I’d love to get any questions about websites. But, real quick, a couple of things that stood out to me that I wanted to verify with you. On average if you have a good website, that converts the traffic, in your case an Oozle Media website, they had a 70% lift in conversion rate, which equaled at least between 50-60% increase in leads.

Parker:

That’s exactly right. So, even for those schools that were on what we would call that low-end conversion rate, 4,5, 6%, they still saw a significant increase in the number of leads that they were getting every single month compared to what they were doing with their old websites. Even if they had good websites before, not everyone’s going from a terrible website. In fact, an interesting story, we’ve had two or three clients I can think of that have been clients for six or seven years who just in the last year have gotten a new Oozle website to replace an old Oozle website that they had from a couple years ago. And, also similar increases in their conversion rates and the number of enrollments they were getting.

So, even a good website, something we stood by a couple of years ago, eventually the chassis start to rust, you end up getting a hole in your oil pan, you just got to take care of things and at a certain point, you have to throw out the old car, sell it, and get something new.

And with numbers like that, you almost can’t afford not to. I mean, really, I was trying to prove myself wrong every step of the way, like, these can’t be right, these are too good to be true, I can’t stand by these numbers. Any way you cut up the data, you’re looking at 50, 60, 70% increases for the overwhelming majority of beauty schools, at least, that get these websites.

Chris:

Yeah, and just thinking about websites, a couple pro tips, and you can add to this Parker, we’re living in a mobile-first world. It has to be optimized for the phones, that’s where the majority of beauty school leads are converting is on the mobile website.

Some pro tips there, you’ve gotta have a linkable phone number icon at the top right, that’s where people are used to clicking a phone number, as well as seeing the hamburger menu. And then, the form. Students are filling out forms. They want to request more information. That has to be at the top on mobile and desktop. I mean, we’ve seen just schools taking the form, like “request more info” from the bottom and then putting it at the top and that has increased leads dramatically.

Also, I would say another pro tip is your content is huge. What you’re saying on your website, especially on the home page. I always ask schools, “Are you addressing at least the top two concerns of students on your home page?” And most beauty schools are not.

What they’re usually doing is they’re talking about themselves. Potential students don’t care about you as much. They care about themselves, and their concerns. Are you answering their questions? Are you addressing their top concerns? Anything you want to add to that, Parker?

Parker:

No, if I have anything specific to add, I’ll do it in a free conversation going through stuff with you. So, thank you, I know we have another speaker here in three minutes, I think on admissions, if I’m not mistaken, so I’ll let you do your job, and I’m actually going to jump back into being your sidekick. But thank you everyone for your time and your warm welcome.