Hands up if you employ sales people? Keep your hands up if you have absolutely no problems convincing them to create call reports. Yep, thought so.Every month we hold a customer conference call that all of our customers are invited to join. At the beginning of these conference calls we have a section on what is new in the online marketing world that we believe is worthy of your attention. Below is a video of the introduction of Novembers conference call. This months new and nothworthy information relates to Google Analytics – Universal Analytics and Online and Offline Tracking, Google Webmaster Tools – Disavow Links, Google Adwords – Location Targeting, Google Tag Manager and sending email campaigns at appropriate times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8wbowtFrCg
Hands up if you employ sales people? Keep your hands up if you have absolutely no problems convincing them to create call reports. Yep, thought so.
This was the bane of my life when I was a managing a sales team. Every Monday morning sales meeting I would give the same talk about the importance of completing their reports. All we needed to know was who was spoken to, what was said and the success of the meeting. Nothing too detailed and all in lovely paper form. It should have taken them a max of 10 minutes per call but it still needed policing to make it happen.
Now if you have been reading these notes for a while you will have seen how we frequently refer to your website as having the potential to be your best sales person ever. And thankfully your website has the ability to solve the call reporting problem in a very smart and reliable way. Google Analytics is its secret weapon here. So let’s go through some of the core stats this product reports on and interpret these into call reporting value.
Let’s start with how they “found” people to talk to. This is an interesting one because a website will both find people and get found. For instance there will be those prospects that find the website within their Google search results. Then there are those paid ads a company can place so the website can find prospects. Thankfully Google Analytics shows you each stream of traffic split out so you can see how many came from each and if your web sales person was overly busy last week or just spinning its wheels not talking to many.
Hopefully your site was the busy one of the two. So let’s move into disecting these visitors a bit further. Knowing if these people have been seen before could be a good start. New and Returning visitor counts will help you here. I once had a sales person who hated seeing existing accounts but loved breaking ground with new companies. The only issue being that a whopping 70% of their budget was to be made from current customers. We were extremely lucky to have another sales person on the team who had completely the opposite way of working. So we swapped some accounts around, re-aligned some budgets and kept moving forward making best use of the individual skills involved.
Unfortunately you don’t have that same luxury of flexibility with a website. If your site is receiving a minor smattering of new visitors each month then things need to be fixed. At the top of this list is usually Search Engine Optimisation and/or paid search advertising. And likewise if your business relies on a steady stream of repeat business while your repeat website visitor count is super low then strategies like email marketing are the first things to roll out.
So that’s how your website sales person found its audience. But how did it’s message fair? Your site’s bounce rate is once stat that will help you find this out. A “bounce” is when someone arrives on a page of your website and decides to look no further and leave. They literally bounce in and out of your website using a single page as the trampoline floor. Which is OK if your website sales message is on one page but next to hopeless if like most you tell your sales story over a few.
I see this as someone arriving, looking and then quickly leaving. We have probably done it a hundred times while shopping. The shop window looks appealing so we step in, realise that this is not what you are looking for, complete a very quick sweep around so not to look rude and then make a beeline for the exit. In a shop you can probably do this is 3 minutes, a web visitor can achieve the same in less than 30 seconds. Streams of traffic will have their own bounce rate attributed to them. Ideally you want your paid advertising stream to have a value as low as possible. Individual pages on your site will have their own value too. Some pages will naturally have a high value – for instance your contact us page. Here people look for your phone number or postal address and then leave. Your home page should have one of your lowest bounce rates as it works to move people around the other pages of your site.
When things are going well your bounce rate will be low and two other stats will trend upwards – time on site and pages per visit. Think of these as the questions your website sales person is answering. And just like in the face to face world – the more questions a prospect asks and the longer they spend asking them the greater their perceived interest in what you offer.
This leads us onto the next natural step – closing the sale. For your website this is the same as achieving a conversion. Whether it be someone completing a “Contact Us” request, downloading a “Free Report” or picking up the phone shown on the home page and starting a conversation. All are valid ways for a website to convert an anonymous browser of your web pages into a human wanting another human to talk to them.
I have employed sales people who closed more sales than their peers due to one simple fact. They asked more than the rest. That was it. They all sold the same product to the same type of companies but these winners just asked for the order more often. Naturally these people received more objections which they could then work on carefully answering and then delicately moving the prospect closer to the sale.
The same applies to a website. One with no obvious conversion option for a prospect will struggle compared to those that have a myriad of ways for interested visitors to offer their details to move the discussion ahead. Once these are set up and correctly tracked then you can access details like the % of those presented who said a virtual “yes” and closed the sale.
So there you have it. Website call reporting is available to us all once we have a correctly configured Google Analytics account. Now you will have at the touch of the button answers to a) how many people found us last week, b) how many we managed to find, c) how well our online sales message was received and finally, the bit that matters, what percentage actually said “yes” and agreed to move the discussion forward.
You can find the latest website marketing update here.
Every month we hold a customer conference call that all of our customers are invited to join. At the beginning of these conference calls we have a section on what is new in the online marketing world that we believe is worthy of your attention. Below is a video of the introduction of Octobers conference call. You can access research here on the best time to post on Facebook and the mobile marketing strategy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnZuN1Zz5-k
Imagine this scene. You have just spent the whole day walking up and down Auckland’s Queen Street trying to find those interested in learning more about your product or service. Most said no, but a few were keen to hear more. To these you handed a ticked to free show you had running at the Civic theatre, just up the road. You worked hard and by 3.00pm you had the placed full to capacity. All 2378 seats had an interested person sitting on them. This was looking good.
So come 3.01pm, the lights dim and the curtain rises. Show time. For just 15 minutes the crowd is treated to a interactive presentation on all things good about what you offer. You tell them everything new about what you do, customer videos are presented and a whole range of valuable tips imparted to help those buying for the first time.
You have their attention for the full 15 minutes as the content really hits the mark. The house lights come up and you stride onto the stage and thank everyone for coming. You close by telling group that your sales people are stationed by the exits ready to get the details of those interested in knowing more.
How many business cards would you expect your team to collect?
Now remember this is a qualified group of people. They said before that they were interested in learning more. And they had taken time out of their day to listen to what you had to say. And finally that your sales people weren’t there to take orders – just to collect their details so a conversation could happen later on.
So what would you expect?
100,250,50 or even a measly 10.
I don’t think that 10% wouldn’t be an unreasonable expectation. This would leave your team with a credible 240 prospects to follow up on. (And you with a feeling of some good work done, sore feet and a desperate need of a cup of tea and a sit down.)
But what if you only got 10, or say just 1.
Now that would be a completely different story. All that work, all those interested people and just 10 said yes. You would be left struggling with a whole host of questions. Did we bore them with the wrong message? Perhaps we don’t know our market? Or even, did I mumble my last instruction about cards by the exit rows? No doubt there would be a list of things to fix and a willingness to get them sorted asap.
Which is all very interesting especially when I expect the same result occurs each month to many websites in New Zealand with very little done to fix it.
It doesn’t take a lot to get to 2378 unique visitors each month. And of those that do very few would achieve anywhere near a 10% lead conversion rate. The difference being that a) those that do probably don’t have any analytics running off their website so they are blind to the numbers or b) they know the visitor counts and but for some reason they don’t relate this to a vision of what these figures represent.
For instance a website that attracts 6000 unique visitors seem an OK busy sort of website. That is until you sit in a packed Aotea Centre and realise that this count relates to the amount of people around you – multiplied by three. Or how about you visit Westpac stadium in Wellington on a rugby sevens event when it is also full to the brim. Think of this amount of people times two and you have a close count to the 75k of unique visitors that most medium sized websites receive. And finally my current favourite – a client website that brings in the population of Dunedin each and every month – yep around 115,000 unique.
So job #1 should be to translate these analytics figures into real world counts. Think in terms of packed nights at the Aotea Centre or Eden Park Stadiums filled with your website visitors. Then I want you to do something very simple.
Expect more from this group.
Just as you would feel distraught after presenting to 2378 people and receiving only 10 leads. Ask big searching questions like those I offered at the start. Does our website show that we know our market? Are we presenting what they are looking for? What can we do to turn the 10 into the 240 it should be?
You can find the latest website marketing update here.
“So is email marketing dead?” Not one of the first questions I was expecting from the group in front of me but, nevertheless, one worthy of a deep breath before I hacked out a response.
Here I was co-tutoring a course on email marketing for the University of Auckland and 15 minutes into my first presentation of “Setting the Scene of Email marketing
” when this pearl of enquiry came from the group. On the screen behind me was a barrage of stats that proved that there was still life in email but the question rightly deserved more.
From memory I bumbled back a reasonable effort of an answer. This more considered response comes with the luxury of time – something that was in short supply those two days as we worked through the packed agenda.
So is email marketing dead?
Both “yes” and “no” answers could apply. It depends on the message you want to deliver. For instance, many moons ago I used to work in customer services for an engineering supplies company. This was before computers had taken hold of the desktop and instead I had two phones in front of me. They rang frequently during the day. I spent 80% of my time on one extension or the other talking with customers about what they were looking to buy. Then once they bought, I used the other phone to call the warehouse and arrange its shipping. I talked and talked and talked.
Just imagine how the role would work these days. A well designed website would answer most of the questions people called me for and an e-commerce store or email would replace much of the person-to-person chatter. The act of using the telephone is not “dead” it’s just that this type of phone conversation has been replaced with email and e-commerce as they are better suited.
Print communication – or letters (remember them?) – have been the hardest hit during this digital replacement process. The long distance letter was probably at the top of this list. Like most, after I finished my training I decided to travel. Before I left I remember giving my parents some addresses of post offices to send their mail for me to collect along the way. All was going well until I arrived late into Sydney after spending too long in North America and the post office decided they were not going to hold my mail any longer and promptly returned it all.
As a parent now, I don’t know how my parents coped. I was not the best communicator and there were weeks where I didn’t send them a letter or even a card. Thankfully social media has completely transformed this type of communication. So when my daughters go travelling in the years ahead I’m expecting daily status updates with photos so I can see where they are going and what they are doing.
So where does email fit in here? Where is it best doing the replacing instead of being replaced?
For instance, it would be a poor replacement for the airmail letter. Social media has this nailed. It would also struggle to hold a two-way conversation over a short period between two people online. Chat deals nicely with that. And don’t even think about using it to describe how to use a new piece of software. A 60-second You Tube video will get that across with ease.
But if you want to communicate with someone online to “do something simple” then this is when email comes into its own.
Facebook uses email to let you know what you have missed since you last logged in. Pinterest does exactly the same. My library emails me to tell me my books are due back so I don’t incur any fines. Fly Buys lets me know when my WOF is due so I can get into the Kingsland VTNZ to get it sorted and earn points. Barkers tells me when they have a sale. Amazon reminds me that I left something in their shopping cart when I was interrupted when Karen dropped in last night. And Air New Zealand tells me when the next 48-hour sale to Oz is underway – thanks guys.
Email is not dead – it is alive and kicking and helping audiences worldwide “do” some great stuff online. Add in a fearless tracking process that underpins the validity of commercial email marketing and you can see why it continues to grab a large chunk of online budget spend for marketers worldwide.
The Apple iPhone 5 is coming to NZ and most website owners are missing out on the opportunity this represents as it adds to the rushing tide of Kiwi Smartphone use.
But first let’s just cast our mind back to when it all started. It wasn’t all that long ago. In fact the first iPhone advertising screened in the US on February 25, 2007 during the 79th Academy Awards. Back then it was Nokia this and Erickson Sony that. Phones were getting smaller and my Motorola Razr was black, sleek and fitted nicely into any pocket. It was exactly what I needed in a phone.
Which was fine until the Apple advertising started and things phone related changed forever. Now you didn’t have a phone in your pocket you had an internet connected screen. And let’s not forget the camera that came with it too. (Now I’m told that 90% of the photos taken in 2011 were from Smartphone’s.)
All this meant near commercial death to any phone manufacturers that were all about raised buttons, blurry cameras and postage stamp sized screens. Samsung came along for the connected screen ride, as has HTC – names you probably would have never heard of five years ago in NZ. Thankfully our local mobile networks have managed to keep pace and the cost and speed of mobile web access has broadly kept up to ensure the screen phone manufacturers promise was made good.
So what does that mean for your average website owner?
Firstly there’s probably a lot more people looking at your website, reading your email and clicking on your ads through the view of a mobile screen than ever before. Thankfully the top analytics tracking tools – like Google Analytics – will tell you how many visit your website. And great email tracking tools like Litmus will reveal those reading your email message “a la mobile phone” and Google let’s you target your AdWords advertising to attract just these types of visitors.
The tools are there to find and target this group but how many are using them properly? From our experience very few. (Possibly less than one in ten.) For instance when was the last time you looked at your website via a Smartphone screen to see how it looks? And how about running an AdWords campaign to just this mobile group and sending them through to a site set up for thumbs and not mice?
Which all means for the savvy website marketer there’s an opportunity to be had. Now’s the time to be going after this growing group of mobile prospects while your competitors remain transfixed to their tethered friends. Building a mobile version website isn’t as hard as you think. For a start you need a lot less content and the call to actions can be a lot simpler to produce. Don’t think intricate forms to complete – do think big buttons that fire up a “call now” action. And let’s not forget videos too. With the advent of super clear resolution screens they are a delight full screen on a phone.
Email marketing to a mobile audience is simpler too. Here, like their mobile web browsing cousins, the focus is on providing simple vertical streams of content with easy to follow “thumb sized” click options.
So why not dive into your Google Analytics reports this week to see the percentage of visitors that arrive at your website via a mobile screen? And for the next email sent – why not include a smart little piece of code to tell you who read your latest missive on their phone instead of their PC?
Then if the numbers stack up then why not kick off with a simple but effective mobile website marketing experience?
If this doesn’t get me banned from Face book then I don’t know what will.
Last week I had two good days at a client’s conference in town. They did an exceptionally good job of selecting the presentations; the venue and the catering. The only low point was the obligatory 45 minutes presentation on Social Media.
Please if have to sit through any more Power Point slides that extol me to “be genuine”, “be honest” and “be there” then I’ll no doubt reach down, pull off a sneaker and hurl it towards the stage. I’m truly over it. I must have heard the same or similar message, said in the same earnest way more than a dozen times in a dozen venues by a dozen different speakers. The subject matter just hasn’t moved on.
With my smattering of grey hairs I remember being involved in the launch of professional email marketing solutions in New Zealand back in 1999. There was much of a fanfare then, lots of people spoke about best practices and principles and then we were told to leave the room and do stuff.
The result?
Email marketing campaigns spouted left right and centre. What had been mailed was now emailed and as a result marketers bathed in an absolute glut of measurement data that their printed experience had previously lay hidden. After 18 months there were case studies a plenty from a wide range of industries all doing great things to improve their marketing and as a result their businesses all because of email marketing. Now we were well and truly out of the land of principles and well into the detail stuff of tactical delivery.
I think I heard my first evangelical social media story two years back. Then, like the start of email, we were served a platter of tasty principles and theories and told to get stuck in. And that’s where the story changes. What came next was very, very different. Still we are hearing of the same principles to be applied and the result? Just a minor smattering of local case stories of business success in social medial land.
So what’s wrong? Well basically when it comes to the merit of using social media as a reliable and predictable way to improve your own marketing and therefore your bottom line for a lot of companies the message is a sham. For some it will work, but for the vast majority it won’t.
Think of it this way. Say you removed the reception in your building and in its place you put a nice trendy cafe, complete with barrista, comfy chairs and the latest newspaper. Now don’t get too excited this isn’t for you – it’s for your customers. Here they can come, meet, mingle and chat away with each other. So how many of your customers would drop by?
Now if you were say the NZSO with their passionate and discerning fans the space could be quite cluttered. Likewise if you were Les Mills with their group fitness classes then there could be a bunch of fit and friendly people mixing and mingling in a place like this. (In fact in every Les Mills gym there is a space just like this already.)
But say you were an accountant or a hotel or say a manufacturer of office furniture then things would be different. Enticing people inside would be a challenge. If you were really keen you could bribe them with free stuff just to enter. Which is fine until you realise that to keep them there the bribes need to keep on coming.
Funnily enough both the NZSO and Les Mils have vibrant social media experiences. And bribing (become a fan to go in the draw stuff) is exactly what businesses do when they try to make social media work when naturally it shouldn’t.
Look I know the cafe thing is a weak analogy – but it’s close. And just because it’s easy for some to make a success of social media doesn’t make it a logical strategy for everyone when time spent here would be a waste. But if you can imagine your own cafe full of customers chatting away to one another then I strongly suggest you start to make it happen. Otherwise give social media a pass and try considering another strategy. Maybe something that has broad application across a wide industry group and with a strong chance of success – like email marketing perhaps:)
You can find the latest website marketing update edition here.
So your competitor tells you over a beer that they got 100,000 hits on their website last month. You know that your numbers show just 5000 unique visitors. Should you celebrate or commiserate?
You would be surprised how many times we are asked to help others answer this question. So let’s get stuck into the measurement basics of website analytics especially when it relates to defending your stats at the bar.
Firstly, the concept of a “website hit”, also called a “page hit” is well outdated. It is the count of a retrieval of any item of a graphic or a page from a web server. Build a website containing a ton of small graphics and your “hit count” will skyrocket while your visitor count remains the same.
Some count page views instead of hits. This is marginally better but still not ideal. Page views are exactly that – individual views of the pages your website holds. Own a website with lots of pages and if your navigation is good then your page view count should be higher than those with “skinnier”sites – even though the latter could be receiving more traffic.Nevertheless, tracking page views instead of hits is one step closer to the ideal measurement of measuring the real people who fire up their browsers and visit your site.
This leads us nicely to what Google Analytics (GA) focuses on tracking ̶- real, live, website visitors. Yep, the human biomass who clicks from page to page and hopefully does what you want them to do.It does this by setting a cookie on the person’s browser on their computer when they arrive.
The accuracy of this approach falls down if a) they use more than one browser on the same computer because then they are counted as two visitors; b) two people use the same browser on the same computer because then they are seen as one visitor; and/or c) either group clear their cookies or don’t allow them to be set.
Allowing for all this, once a person arrives they are marked with a cookie that tags them as visiting your website and a counter kicks off to measure the time of their visit. If they come back tomorrow they are seen as a returning visitor. (They have up to two years to come back before they are counted as a new visitor again.) Their visit is finished when a) they leave your site; or b) stay on a page for more than 30 minutes. (If they leave and come back within 30 minutes this is counted as part of the original visit.)
So just to recap, here are some of the core visitor, visit metrics GA reports on and what they mean.
Visitors – real people who visit your website.
New Visitors – those arriving for the first time.
Returning Visitors – those coming back to see more.
Unique Visitors – the total number of unique visitors to your website. I may come to your website three times in a month – the first as a new visitor, the other two as returning visitors.However, I am only counted once as a unique visitor. This last stat is a good one to use to compare site activity.
Visits – the time spent looking through your pages.
% New Visits – the % of visits of your site’s total that were generated by people visiting your site for the first time.
So when someone next tells you they had 100,000 hits on their website, tell them while that’s nice, how many actual people does that represent?
Video Update – What’s new AND worth your attention. Each month we run a customer conference call on online marketing that has at it’s start an intro to what we think is new AND worth commenting on. Below is the video of this part of the call we covered today for August. You can access the research here on the best days to contact a lead.
Five Common Stumbling Blocks to Optimising a High Volume Email Campaign Management Process and How to Avoid Them
We always recommend email marketing to be part of every online marketing plan. Somewhere, in some way, there will be a requirement to talk to either prospects or customers on a reasonably regular basis via email. For most companies this means one campaign being dispatched to one list, most likely once a month. This article is not for them.
Nope, here we are talking about chunky businesses with an email marketing list in the hundreds of thousands with a requirement to talk to these people multiple times each month. In this case, the requirements are rather unique. And having successfully operated in this email marketing services space for many years, here’s our take on the common mistakes people make when trying to optimise a process like this.
Stumbling Block #1: Relying on email to manage your email campaign
It may all start with one email with the campaign brief attached. From there other emails are sent back and forwards as the brief has more details added. Then the creative samples are emailed back as attachments. Then these are moved into the HTML build process with URL links sent for feedback . again via another email. And still another email that communicates that first proofs are on their way.
A barrage of email messages all tied to the one campaign and all hidden in each personfs Inbox for only them to be aware of. This is an environment that is a) hard to manage b) easy for details to be lost along the way and, finally, c) makes auditing the flow of communication responsible for delivering the campaign difficult if not impossible to achieve.
From our experience the best solution for the task at hand is a web-based, job management-style application that allows everyone involved in the campaign to see exactly what has been communicated to whom and when. It needs to be simple to use and easy to manage. Once operating, it incorporates all the communication for the campaign . starting with the initial creative briefing and ending with the message confirming the campaign has been dispatched. Itfs all there in one place. And if someone has to take leave midway through a campaign, then the job can be assigned to others without any campaign communication being lost in the process.
Stumbling Block #2: Not placing enough focus on process and systems
I’m not exactly sure of the average number of discussions that are required to take a campaign brief to a dispatched successful campaign. It would be a lot. Most of our own campaigns show job tickets listing out messages that run to three or four pages long.
Naturally, throughout all this therefs a lot that can go wrong. And email marketing is a cruel task master with the speed at which it makes any errors known. Only a bullet-proof process that is understood and operated by all involved will survive situations like these. A process that has the right people following the right set of tasks the right way for every campaign they touch. It doesnft matter how great the data selection was or how good the creative looked . all this expertise will go to waste without a reliable process to ensure the campaign build and dispatch was managed successfully.
After managing hundreds of successful campaigns we think we have that process nailed. Nevertheless, we still take all new clients through each and every stage piece by piece to ensure it will work as planned when matched to their unique needs. All because we know that solid processes, understood by everyone, produce solid results.
Stumbling Block #3: Thinking that the software vendor must be the software manager too
Most email marketing in this area requires the use of the top end of email marketing software. And the fact is that the world leaders in this space are not based in NZ. So support might come from the nearest location, which may be either Australia or Singapore. This can be a pain when it’s 8:30 am on a Monday morning and you need to launch a campaign in 30 minutes and no one is awake.
But that doesn’t have to be the case. There are companies, like our own, who have expertise in a range of email marketing tools, some of which they sell directly as well as those that they just support. For instance, we promote about four different email marketing tools and support another two.
These last two are high-end North American solutions. They are ideally suited to those with a large list and a desire to dispatch highly relevant email marketing. One in particular we have used on behalf of our clients for many years now. And while we invest our time and money to attend the vendor’s overseas conferences to learn the latest and greatest of their offerings, we will never be involved in the direct selling of their solution.
So, our customers can access the power of a top-end, complex, email marketing software solution with the added benefit of an independent, locally based support partner to help them drive it.
Stumbling Block #4: Not taking the time to test
Funnily enough, when you have an efficient way to manage campaign communication (see #1) coupled with a solid, reliable process to underpin your build process (see #2) the time it takes to send out a campaign seems to decrease. This allows you to either a) sneak off for a quick afternoon coffee or b) schedule in some campaign testing strategies.
So let’s go with b – because without testing you are guessing. But before you can test you need time, which is why the previous stumbling blocks need work first.
Then you can start with your hypothesis (what you hope will happen through the tests you want to run), which you match with your proposed method to follow. Most top-level email marketing tools include features to make the tactical part of this work easier than it used to be.
Now lists can be split into three (10%, 10% and the remaining 80% for the winning option) and set to “auto” to capture the results from the first two campaigns and then to pick a winner to send to the remaining majority.
If you look back over the last 12 months and see campaigns that are really no different to those you are running now then you aren’t testing enough.
Stumbling Block #5: Not monitoring the process as well as the outcomes
When there’s a lot to get done it’s easy to finish one campaign and head straight onto the next with scant regard to what was learnt before. All this tactical activity can leave little time to sit back and review any insights from the last 15 campaigns.
Now there are some obvious and not so obvious areas to include in reviews like these. Naturally, it makes sense to review all the main stats for the send. Opens, click throughs, bounces and, of course, conversions are all there waiting to be placed in a spreadsheet and reviewed. But what about the process that was responsible for delivering these campaigns? Where’s the analysis to be found to deliver gradual improvements here?
Not many take the time to do this work. So they don’t look into areas such as the number of times the briefing document is changed during the creative build and the creative time this wastes. Or the unnecessary mistakes made in the HTML creation. Or even the time wasted by the proofing team to locate test records to deliver emails for all versions of the dynamic content. All these are small, gritty problems that take time to improve but once done can deliver massive gains in process efficiency.
Managing one successful email campaign between two people can be a challenge. Managing 15 campaigns each week across multiple teams all residing in alternative operations – and all with 100% accuracy –̶̶̶ well, that’s a completely different space to operate within.
Here at Permission we have successfully operated in this space since 2004. We believe that by working with us you will optimise the full potential of the campaign management process, which will allow you the time to improve the overall effectiveness of your email marketing. Contact us today at sales@permission.co.nz if this interests you.
Last Thursday I attended a Speed Networking function put on by the local chamber of commerce. I was told to come armed with a stash of cards and a well polished 60 second summary of my business. They were not wrong on both counts.
After a nerve subduing glass of wine we were set up in two circles of fifty all facing each other. So the outer circle faced in and the inner faced out. Allowing for about 20 cms between our knees we sat face to face and waited for instructions.
The rules were quite simple. Once a whistle blew we had 60 seconds to give our introduction before another whistle announced it was the other person’s turn. Then two sharp blows and the outer circle had to get up, move one place to the left and start it all over again. I was in the outer group facing in and after going through one complete revolution I had never met so many people in such a short space of time.
At the end I finished up with a handful of cards, none of my own and a very good idea of how to effectively introduce Permission to people for the first time. Looking back on the experience there’s a number of close similarities between effective Speed Networking and effective Online Marketing.
Firstly in both you only have a few moments to capture your prospects attention. We had 60 seconds but I could see in the faces of the first few I spoke with that those first few sessions of mine were way off the mark. Web optimisation, search engine marketing blah, blah, blah it was all just babble speak that only we really knew what we meant. So I switched out some words, changed my emphasis to focus on the benefits of working with us and by the end heads were nodding and cards were being offered.
Sixty seconds could well be the average amount of time people spend on your website’s home page. You may be surprised how short the average is. (In Google Analytics look for the “Time on Site” and “Time on page” statistic to see what your values are.) Which all goes to show why your home page content needs to gets to the point quickly and outline exactly what makes your business so different from the rest and why you should consider buying from it.
Getting the exact make up of this message right the first time is never an easy task. And as I mentioned before, while working from person to person things did improve as I changed what I said. Thankfully online marketing allows you to achieve the same type of continuous improvement with the use of some clever software that allows you to split test multiple versions of your website’s copy until your reports show you which one is performing the best.
Once correctly set up you can let 50% of your website visitors see the original home page while the remaining 50% see the one you want to test. Then, once an adequate amount of data has been collected on each version, you can pick the winner and write another version to test this against.
Something I also learnt was that a message that includes specifics has greater chance of cutting through. Being introduced to 50 businesses in 50 minutes allows anyone interested in marketing pick up on what made the good ones good and the rest just blend into a mass of sameness.
And as luck would have it this experience was helped by sitting in the inner circle (thankfully a few chairs apart) were two people representing same the mortgage loan business. Both were vying for the same type of customer.
Each made the best use of their 60 seconds but the first told me specifics like the amount of account holders they had (I was impressed how large it was) and then the average amount of time and money they could save off a mortgage (a chunky saving). Agent #2 covered none of this specific detail and as a result their message sounded just like every other mortgage loan discussion – boring, boring, boring.
Others had a message that had some punch through the specifics of exactly who they worked with. For instance I came across a guy called Grant who just services home BBQ’s – that’s it. He works in the Auckland region and goes from house to house ensuring the BBQ is set up, safe and ready to use. He’s a very busy man. In comparison there were at least four website developers in the inner circle and I managed to talk to them all. None stood out. They all offered the same type of service to a similar range of customers.
So there you have it. The human version of Speed Networking was well worth the effort and I recommend it for anyone wanting to grow their business and further hone their marketing message. Contact us today if you would like your website to experience their own version of speed networking and by doing so work that little bit harder for you this week than they did last.
Currently the Price Household is under siege on Wednesday and Thursday evening by a reality TV program. This one has four couples pitched against each other as they all renovate one of four houses along the same street in Auckland’s North Shore. Naturally being “reality TV” there’s a fair bit of drama along the way.
From the comfort of my lounge room It all looks like a lot of hard and stressful work. And while my friends have moved walls, changed roof lines and even created large spaces where once there was grass. For me slapping on some fresh paint is the start and end of my renovating experience. Even so – renovating looks a fair bit easier than starting with a bare piece of landing and building from scratch.
Renovate or re-build– now which one would you prefer? Yep – renovating seems a bit nice now doesn’t it? Well fortunately the same applies to your website.
Nevertheless when most begin a project to improve their own website’s performance they are often convinced that a re-build is their only choice. Well fortunately it isn’t – website renovation is alive and well. You just need to find someone capable to do it for you.
But before you start on your quest here’s a few pointers on why website renovation makes so much sense.
Let’s start with the good old standard Pareto 80/20 principle in which we are told that 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. The classic 80/20 rule. Well it’s alive and well in website marketing too. Here we see it showing that 20% of your site’s content will positively affect 80% of the site’s lead generating performance. So you don’t need to optimise all of your content – just the 20% that makes the most difference.
And of this 20% that needs work; about 80% will be contained within your text and copy. Those niggling bits of content that work their socks off convincing your visitors to fill in the form or submit the page. Usually they don’t take long to update within an existing design. So unless your online brand imagery is completely wrong and therefore desperately needs updating you can leave the images and colours alone. Just renovate the right words the right way and experience some positive change.
Then there’s the overarching requirement to do more for less when it comes to online marketing. Renovating isn’t just so much more time efficient then rebuilding – it’s also a lot less risky. I have seen a number of website development projects in my 12 years of experience. Unfortunately it seem the minority that have been managed well and arrive well within budget and expected time frames. Some are a few weeks late – others a bit longer and then there are those that end up with both parties facing off for a commercial punch up.
So there you go three reasons why website renovation is alive and well and possibly well worth considering for your next web optimisation project. Permission has been in the web renovation space since we started in 2002. We have taken on a whole range of websites across a multitude of content management systems. So far nothing has fazed the team.
Why not contact us today if rebuilding seems like the only option available to achieve your web marketing goals. You never know there could be an easier way ahead.
Each month we invite customers along to our conference call. This month we talked about the use of Video in your Online Marketing. At the start of the call we run through any “new stuff” that we think is worthy of attention. Here’s a clip of the “new stuff” we covered in July.