Time to Conversion Calculator Overview

One of the most useful pieces of data that you can collect, related to your sales and conversions is the average time to conversion.

And so essentially this is approximately how long it takes from the time somebody discovers you to the time that they actually sign up to work with you.

And there's a bunch of ways that we can look at this and we're going to get into this in this playbook, but essentially what this allows us to do is make smarter long term marketing decisions and then zoom in on, on specific aspects of our kind of nurture process, our content strategy and all these things to be able to structure the process, to be more, efficient in getting people from that discovery phase, through the consideration phase and to the potential conversion phase.

And so, before we get into some of the ways that we can track this and analyze this and some of the insights we can glean, one thing to know is that typically, and this is like, if you've really bought into the worlds of like Facebook ads kind of conversions and things like that, where we're looking at funnels and trying to get people convert immediately.

There's actually a lot of science that has shown.

There's been some studies that have been done that only 15% of people who ever buy, you look at all the people who buy a product or service, only 15% of those buy within the first 90 days or so.

And so a very small number of people actually converts in the short term immediately.

The vast majority of people convert in the long term after the initial three months.

And so what we want to be doing is optimizing our content to, you know, capture the people who are interested in our product or service and would convert short term, but then not just entirely neglecting and abandoning those people.

That 85% of people who ultimately will buy, those are going to come after three months.

And when you think about it, this is one of those huge, kind of pieces of data that if we knew that, we would probably behave differently.

If we knew that it took, let's say 18 months on average for a customer to sign, up to work with us from the moment they discovered us, we would know that, okay, I put out a new offer.

Nobody signed up in the first two months.

Is it a failure?

Does is nobody interested in this?

We might say, actually it just takes a long time.

If I Knew it took 18 months, I have to wait, there's an 18 month lag period before knowing if my content is working.

So obviously this is a super long feedback cycle.

but hopefully you've already Been in business long enough that we can start to look at this.

We don't need to wait now 18 months or 12 months or 6 months or whatever your time to conversion is in order to figure out, you know, how, how is this working right now and then how can we establish a benchmark to try and shrink that down?

through our podcast, through our email marketing and through everything else that we're doing here.

So as we pull up the playbook here, understanding your time to conversion, we've got a bunch of action items here.

And so I've got a conversion, calculator here, time to conversion calculator in Google sheets.

And essentially what we're going to be doing is pulling some data from our email service provider.

And so in my case I'm pulling this stuff From Kit, formerly ConvertKit and and then your payment processor, which for me is ThriveCart, you might be using something like WooCommerce or some people even use kits, payment, processing software.

There's a whole bunch of other tools you could be using PayPal.

But thinking about, you know, where do people, what is the checkout procedure, what is the payment processor?

We want to collect some customer information from that and correlate that with email service, provider contact info.

So typically how I would structure this is depending on the level of organization that you have in your existing email service provider.

Hopefully you have customers tagged in some way and so that you know that these are people who bought this product.

And I would start with one product and you can look into additional products over time.

But I would start by thinking about what is my main offer that I'm trying to get people towards.

And so for me these are my like high ticket coaching offers.

It's like the one on one work.

It's the group programs, it's the podcast marketing academy membership.

I care less about the low priced gateway offer, kind of workshops and things like that.

I'm looking at, you know, somebody who's going to spend significant money with me over time.

These are the people and the customers that will really move the needle with the business.

I'm not trying to get, you know, a maximum number of hundred dollar purchases.

I'm looking to like, who are the people who are going to spend you know, $10,000 with me, or more over the course of their, their lifetime and our relationship together and, and how long does it take those people to convert after the time that they discover me?

So if you already have all of those people, in your email service provider tagged, then you're going to want to create a list of those people and export them into a CSV.

You're going to want to then export a list of all the people who have signed up, through your payment processor and you'll have those two CSVs that we're going to draw some data from both of those.

we're going to copy and paste both of those into the conversion time to conversion calculator, which I'll open up in a second and then we'll look at some of the additional fields that, that you might choose to, if you want to go further down the data rabbit hole, which if you're a data nerd like me, you probably will want to do.

If you're not, feel free to ignore many of these things.

we've got the optional inclusions here, which are totally up to you.

If you want to do it, I would highly recommend you do these ones.

regardless of where you're at.

The one other note here is if you don't have your people already tagged in your email service provider of who your customers are for the specific offer we're going to be looking at, you know, you'll then need to start by going into your payment processor, exporting that list and then trying your best to find those people in your email service provider.

And so normally what I would do, I would take the email address that they signed up with and just copy and paste that into in my case kit, search my subscribers and see does where does this show up?

Does this show up anywhere in my in my email service provider?

The other thing is like sometimes people sign up for two different or sign up with two different email addresses.

And so often if I can't find the email address that somebody signed up for the product with in my esp, then I'll look for their like first and last name and I'll try and find that and see, okay, maybe they signed up for my email list with, you know, something else, a different address and then I can correlate that with and make their time to conversion around those things.

Otherwise you'll get people where sometimes even they might have signed up with their personal address two years ago and then they signed up for the product with their business address.

And so if you match the business address, it's like a zero day time to conversion.

They signed up, it was the same day that they entered your email ecosystem, they signed, bought the product where actually they'd been following you for two years under a different address.

And so personally I like to try and find those things.

especially because I'm not dealing with thousands of customers.

It's like several dozen a year that I'm working with.

And so I can actually go back through all of those.

And the more accurate data is worth it to me.

Now one other thing to address here up front is that we are looking at email addresses like when they entered your ESP to when they bought, because that's really the most accurate thing that we can find.

With people.

It's really hard to say, when did they start following me on social media or when did they start listening to my podcast.

We can collect some of that anecdotally through conversations with them.

But often people's, you know, memory is unreliable.

And so the most kind of hard, accurate data that we have is when did they enter the email system, ecosystem, and when did they ultimately sign up to work with us?

Those are kind of hard and fast dates that generally we can do a pretty good job of finding.

but we do want to keep in mind that often it took some time for people to discover us or even convert to our email list before that.

And so you might want to think that, okay, this is, we know what the average time to conversion is from when they entered the email list, but actually from somebody discovering me from getting, you know, doing my exposure activities, whatever that might be, it's going to take even longer unless most people, when they discover me, the call to action is very clear to the, lead magnet or newsletter or whatever that might be.

And so there's a strong correlation between discovery and entering the email ecosystem.

Okay, so opening up the calculator here, we've essentially got a number of tabs.

And so on this first tab, this is kind of an aggregator tab that pulls data from all of these subsequent tabs down here.

So we're going to ignore this for now.

We don't really need to do anything with this.

This will just show us what the average time, or average time to conversion, actually is where I would recommend you start is either with the offer, just one of the offers, or one of the campaigns.

And so I've made space for three different offers and three different campaigns.

if you sell an evergreen offer, I would start with this offer one here and you can just type in, you know, whatever that, that offer is for you.

For me maybe it's podcast growth engine.

So I'd say pge and then I might just put all the customers here over the past six months or a year or whatever time frame, it takes to get, you know, a significant amount of data.

And so I would probably aim for like at least 10 people if you have them.

Even like 2025 is better, to be able to get a stronger sample size.

And then I would look at that here over that time span, if you run more promotional like launch style campaigns and things like that, or I would actually probably lead with campaigns.

And one of the reasons, and going forward, one of the things that's going to be really valuable about this is this breaks it really nicely into distinct cohorts.

And so you can then compare what changes to my marketing did I do in between campaigns that led to a different, either greater or shorter, time to conversion.

And so let's say you ran a campaign in November.

You would then put all the customers that came from that campaign here.

And then let's say you ran one in April earlier, the same year.

You could then put your April campaign people in here and you could track and compare the time, to conversion between those two kind of cohorts of people.

And then of course, you could duplicate these and go forward in the future with subsequent campaigns as well.

now with the offers generally here, we're looking at, this is going to be one offer of one product and you could set these up to be different.

If you have other offers that you want to track as well, you could put those in here.

again, I would recommend just starting with one, just starting with one offer, or one campaign which is going to be two, one offer and and filling in, you know, 10 to 20, 25 customers, if you have them, to give us a decent sense of what the time to conversion is.

So as we're thinking through this, what we're going to do here, we've got the examples here.

We've got the person's name, we've got their email address.

Again, you might, they might have signed up with two different email addresses.

So just pick whichever one is going to be more helpful for you, for referencing in the future.

So if you find yourself using this data to look up things in your email service provider, maybe you want to use the email address that they provided there.

If you're more looking at your customer database, you, through your payment processor, you might want to use that email address that they use there to purchase.

We then want to find what is the date that they joined the list.

And so in the CSB that you've exported from your email service provider, your esp, there should be some like, date joined, date, subscribed, something like that.

That's the date we want to put in here.

And then this date will come from your, payment processor, which is the date they purchased.

Now one distinction here.

There's some more advanced stuff we're going to get to in a second.

What this date of purchase here is the date they purchased this specific offer.

So if I'm tracking podcast, growth engine, this is the date they purchased, they signed up for the podcast growth engine, not the first date they purchased anything whatsoever.

We actually have another field to track that if we want to see how long does it take for them to sign up for their first kind of gateway product or something like that.

We've got that accounted for later in the spreadsheet here.

We're looking at date of purchase that Is for this offer of this tab, we want to put in the price here.

How much did that person pay?

And then this is a formula that will calculate the amount of days between these, these two dates.

And then we get that, spit out in a number of months as well.

Now the thing that I like to add here for most customers as well is looking at on a scale of 1 to 10, what is their customer alignment with me.

And so we're all going to have a range of customers who sign up to work with us.

Some of those people are going to be absolute 10 out of 10 most aligned.

They've already got all the things that will in place that will help them be successful clients.

And we just need to give them a little bit of a nudge and they're going to just be off and running.

And there's other people who we need to do more work with.

And then you've got really problematic clients who just like suck your time and attention and are a real energetic drain on you.

This can be helpful to put in because we might see that the best fit clients take longer or shorter or other.

We might notice other trends, that we can pull from some of this data here.

So I like to put in scale of 1 to 10, how aligned is this customer with my ideal client, or customer here?

Now the next field here is the initial landing page.

And so I like to track this.

This is basically if you, the basic version of this worksheet, you can fill out everything that we filled in so far here.

If you want to get more advanced, feel free to go beyond this, but it is not necessary for being useful.

Personally I like to see, okay, what was the landing page people signed up through?

So maybe it's through the scrappy podcasting newsletter inline landing page.

So they went to the scrappy podcasting landing page and they signed up there versus people signed up on the homepage for Scrappy podcasting or a certain lead magnet or whatever else.

So I like to track this and just see where did they come from.

And this can be interesting to correlate with customer alignment.

And you see, man, all of my best customers came through a certain lead magnet that's now I know the one that I want to be using in cross promotions and things like that, or maybe running ads to or whatever we want to be looking at the source.

Is this organic, is this paid, is this collaboration?

what however else you might be coming across people, it could be podcast, guesting, things like that.

Especially if you're running to A specific landing page that you can track that you only share that landing page through on your podcast.

Guesting, appearances.

If they purchased an initial product before signing up for the main, the main product that we're on here, you might want to put that in here.

So maybe in this case as an example, they signed up for the first 500 course.

and that date when they first made their very first purchase was on this date here.

And so this was only 92 days.

And so this was three months before making their first purchase.

and it was eight and a half months before making the big purchase.

and then did they, purchase any additional products?

So we've got the first one, we've got the main one, and then we've got any additional products.

So maybe they purchased Episode Engineering as well.

And then here I like to put in.

Are there any other notable touch points?

And so at least in Kit, you can often see if they've signed up for other landing pages or lead magnets or things like that.

And I might say, yeah, it looks like they attended the PGE Masterclass as well.

And they also did the EARS audit.

And so now I know, okay, this person, I've got a bunch of information.

They're a 10 out of 10.

It took them eight months to sign up for the big product.

And along the way they signed up first for the scrappy podcasting newsletter.

Then they signed up for first 500.

They also bought Episode Engineering at some point.

And they also, went through these other two free assets, the PGE Masterclass and the EARS audit.

And so here I've got the, the total lifetime, value of the customer so far is seven, thousand 450.

and then I can put the date I updated this here.

So basically once we filled out this information, for more people, it's going to calculate the averages and spit it out on this page.

And we'll be able to compare across all of our different offers, different campaigns, what the different, you know, numbers of sales, average months to conversion, initial purchase revenue on average, and and then the long term average, lifetime value of the customers as well, and the average customer alignment.

And this can be really interesting if we see that, you know, some of our offers tend to be getting higher, more highly aligned customers or some of our campaigns.

And we might look at like, what was our messaging in that campaign that got so many people to sign up?

And maybe it also shrank the time to conversion here.

So this is some super useful data to be able to go through and collect on your customers and get a better sense of how long does it take for people to sign up to work with you.

And once we have this as our kind of baselines, we then we're able to start playing with this and saying, okay, right now we're seeing that it's taking a typical customer 18 months.

What can we put in place at these strategic touch points to shrink that amount of time?

And podcasting is going to play a huge role, in this.

And so for me, as you might have heard me say already before, my, belief is that the best role, the most useful role of a podcast for most, especially like, coaching, consulting, service provider, educator type businesses, the best use of podcasting is as a conversion accelerator.

So that's more mid to bottom of funnel where it's, we're presenting, we're creating and presenting shows to people where the goal is not to get them to listen to hundreds of episodes, it's actually to get them to listen to as few episodes as possible as it takes for them to make up their mind that we are the person that they want to work with.

They may continue listening after that, but it actually doesn't matter.

We're trying to get them compress the time that they learn everything they need to know about us and our methodology and our approach and our point of view and then make a decision hopefully to go down the rabbit hole and sign up to work with us.

So, this going through, understanding your time to conversion is a huge, hugely, important part of that.

personally I was shocked and surprised to see that when I first did this that the typical time to conversion was, over a year.

It was 12 to 18 months for most of my customers.

That was actually really reassuring because I realized like, this is a long game.

Like I'm trying all these short term things and nothing seems to work.

It's like, yeah, it just takes a long time for these people to convert.

So partly it allows me to relax a little bit, but then also look at how do I add other things to speed up this process.

And funnily enough, when I got more serious about podcasting again for this version of the business, a lot of people now, they binge through the podcast, listen to 12 episodes and they're like, yep, I'm sold, I'm ready to sign up.

And we see a lot more people who are very new to me and to the business signing up to work with me for high ticket products than, it used to be.

So, your next steps are to complete, this time to conversion calculator based on your own customers.

Again, I would start off with either one product or one campaign.

Choose whichever is most relevant to you based on how you sell your product, whether it's evergreen or campaign launch, oriented.

And then we'll look at those, baselines and start to build out a plan from there.