How the ‘Five-Minute Rule’ Could Triple Your Conversions

According to a recent study by Microsoft, the average attention span of a human being has dropped to just eight seconds. That’s less than a goldfish! But what does this mean to you and I?

Well, it means two things. Firstly, it means that 2016 will be a year where delivering key information fast will be crucial. Secondly, it means that I’m about to lose your attention. But please stay with me, I promise this won’t take long.

Today, we’ll be looking at two critical speed-related metrics that you should be working on if you want to seriously increase your conversions.

Critical Metric #1: From Click to Contact – The ‘Five-Minute Rule’

If it takes you more than 10 minutes to contact a new prospect after they’ve expressed an interest in something you offer, then you might as well not bother.

According to an epic 100,000 lead MIT study led by Professor Oldroyd, you have the highest chance of qualifying a lead if you contact them within the first 5 minutes of ‘opt in’. 10 minutes is also great, but 5 minutes is the absolute optimum. Anything after this and you begin to experience a significant drop in qualification rate:

So why is the first 5-minute period so crucial? Many experts would say it is because of ‘top of mind bias’.

Now, you can argue all day about why the numbers say what they say… but you can’t deny what they say. And this suggests that we should be developing systems that play on this ‘five-minute rule’.

So, are most businesses playing on this five-minute rule? Let’s take a look at the most widely-used process for this kind of lead nurturing activity:

• Data is collected in a .CSV
• .CSV is sent to validator
• .CSV is sent back

Now, this looks fast, but don’t let the simplicity fool you – the time it takes to go from one to three can sometimes be longer than completing the Gumball Rally on a tractor! Yet many large advertisers still choose to do it this way, despite the fact that a slight tweak in their strategy could be a really quick fix to super-fast conversions.

Critical Metric #2: How Simple is Your System?

Once you know what you need to do, you’ll want to do it in a way that requires as little thought-power from the end user as possible. This is a harder metric to measure, but one that can seriously improve your efficiency. Why? Because the longer you have to spend thinking about the process you’re doing, the longer that process will be taking. But in the famous words of Steve Jobs, “simple can be harder than complex”.

So many systems are developed in such a wiz storm to impress, that their powerful functionality gets lost in a messy web of complexity. You only need to look at a marketing stack like this one to understand what many marketing managers have to deal with if they are to understand the platforms they’re using!

If you add a system that is too complicated, it may be slowing you down. Look for something that does “exactly what it says on the tin” (as the old Sheffield saying goes), and nothing more.

Did I Lose Your Attention? Fine, Have a Summary:

If you want to increase your conversions this year, you’ll need to do two things:

• Make sure you contact your prospects within 5 minutes of them opting in
• When looking for new systems, choose no-frills simplicity over impressive complexity

Do you have any ground-breaking ways to speed up your marketing processes and boost your conversions? Share them in the comments below.