Last month I finally took the plunge and upgraded my mountain bike. The maintenance bills were starting to add up plus my aging body was struggling to cope with the bike’s rather agricultural suspension system. So after some serious pondering I settled on a Specialised Stumpjumper. A name with some irony because, being a rather conservative rider, I rarely jump tree roots let alone stumps.
Anyway, my new steed is a thing of mountain biking beauty. I opted for some “clown” sized wheels (going from 26 to 29 inch) and decided on a large frame rather than the medium one of its replacement. Oh what a difference this and its other goodies all made.
I won’t bore you with the final details but suffice to say I can now finish a few hours of riding and not hobble around the car park grimacing as I stretch out my suffering back. All I need now is for it to automatically climb hills on its own and I’m sorted. I wished I had done the upgrade years ago – mountain biking hasn’t been this easy before.All this got me thinking about online marketing. Specifically, about how some businesses we consult with just seem to have an easier time making it work than the rest.
These fortunate souls take on Google and win, plus their conversion rates are leaps ahead of others in their market. So what do they do that gives them this advantage?And, like my recent bike purchase, what havethey “upgraded” in their marketing to make this so easy when compared with the rest?
I came up with these three points,in order of priority and starting with possibly the hardest to implement first.
Upgrade #1: Marketing to an obvious and measurable point of difference
Online visitors are a fickle and ruthless bunch. They enter your website, scan your content and promptly leave in mere seconds if there’s nothing of interest.
Just imagine these same people doing this in an actual store – it would seem manic. People rushing in, racing around the isles and then rushing back out. But that’s exactly their behaviour online. Just look at your Google Analytics logs to see the average time they spend and the number of pages they look at. You may be surprised how low both counts are.
Web visitors bolt for the door when a) they can’t find what they are looking for and/or b) what they find is no different from what they have seen before. This is one reason why we delve into a customer’s point of difference during our strategy planning stage.
Earlier this month we had a client who was looking for advice to promote a part of their business that had fallen away over the last few years. For privacy sake I’ll change the category, so let’s say it was in the Party Hire area. They used to sell a lot in this space but priorities had changed and other lines had grabbed more marketing focus, so now it represented less than 20% of what it used to.
Our job was to reverse this trend. So the first question was –what makes your Party Hire service so different from everyone else in Auckland?
That got everyone thinking as nothing immediately sprang to mind, other than the usual statements of “quality product” and “great service”, both of which were plastered across most of their competitor’s websites. After a bit of a group brain storm we settled on two points that were unique to them.
Let’s say they were the types of events that were best suited to the products they had to hire and the speed at which the items were dropped off and picked up. By combining both of these differences together we created a nice marketing niche market that was a) big enough for them to market to, and b) could be found through the keywords prospects used in Google.
Now we had something to work with. The website content could be re-written to explain why this client was so good at servicing this group. Plus we didn’t need to battle it out with the rest of the market who were struggling to attract and convert those using the very generic search term “party hire”.
Upgrade #2: Knowing your website numbers
For many business owners, website marketing is a part of marketing that involves a fair bit of learning. Some find this too daunting, while others dive headlong in and reap the rewards of their new found knowledge later on.
I remember receiving my first set of accounts and having exactly no idea what it all meant. It took me four years and two accountants before I stopped asking what I thought were “dumb” questions just so I knew what had happened last financial year. It took me another two years and one more accountant before I got the answers I needed to predict,with a reasonable level of accuracy, what was likely to happen next year.
Some people struggle through the “dumb question” stage. Claire, my wife, is such a soul. Asking again and again until it is clear in her mind is not fun – it’s just frustrating. Thankfully, running a website is nowhere near as complex as understanding a balance sheet but still it requires some learning time.
All this doesn’t have to take too long. I remember chatting with one prospect who didn’t know any stats of their website. That in itself wasn’t surprising because it had no analytics running on it. Nevertheless,we got that sorted and took them through the tool. Then, after many questions over a two-month period, they had it sorted. Now they know their conversion rate to two decimal places and can tell you how much revenue they make each month from each stream of traffic their website receives. They are in total control.
Upgrade #3: Unleashing a testing mindset
This can be the secret sauce that makes all the difference. That last customer I mentioned – the two decimal place person – went ballistic when we tried to run a test on their home page using an imagethat, in their view, wasn’t part of their brand message.
I went onto explain that while I understood their concerns, if this small change increased their conversion rate by an extra 10% then they would make an extra gazillion dollars in profit. Plus, it’s really not how they think it looks, or even whatour team thinks, it’s how their own prospects think it looks. Now if they like it there, in that colour and written that way, then that’s what matters.
Begrudgingly they let the test run and no, it didn’t bring absolutely super-duper amazing results, but there was enough data to prove it helped conversions – so the change stayed.
This brings me back to my idea of a motorized mountain bike just zooming up hills without any effort on my part. Effort is still required. Yes, even with implementing these three business upgrades I mention here there’s still some focused work ahead. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. It’s just that bit more comfortable with them than without them
Let’s say you’re a large multinational operation with branches spread all over New Zealand and each and every branch manager is keen to get started with their own Google AdWords advertising campaign – all sending traffic to their part of the one website. In a number of ways this is all good news. However in a similar volume of reasons this could be the start of a massive headache for all – unless it is managed properly.
So with the goal of wanting to remove any undue stress from a Branch Managers life –here’s my take on the good – and not so good – parts of the opportunities that lay ahead.
So let’s tackle the good stuff first.
OK by getting this far there’s obviously some widespread belief that online advertising could well do some good. This in itself is a major achievement. I have been involved in situations where half of a national group are keen – a third is not and the rest are have no opinion at all. Unfortunately in most situations like these the default status of doing nothing tends to get the vote. It can be a lot easier to say why something shouldn’t be done than why it should. Fortunately that hurdle has been passed.
Which leaves the final test of actually putting some money behind the idea. And like the saying goes – talk is cheap. Nothing tends to clarify the mind as much as allocating some hard earned marketing budget into an “idea”. Once a group has collectively reached this stage – especially one that spans the country – then they are a few rungs ahead of the competition.
So this leaves what may been seen as the easiest part, getting the job done and buying some Google Advertising. This is where it all could unravel into a complicated and expensive mess.
Some see the next obvious step being for each location to set up their own Google AdWords account and begin to manage their own budget and ads. The Google advertising system would make this a breeze to do. Non technical people will have an account, some keywords, a few ads displaying and a credit card sending money to Google in less than 15 minutes.
And all of it will be the WRONG choice for a situation like this. Here are four reasons why this is the case.
Reason #1. Broad match keywords = Bidding Confusion
Before I start let me tell you that this reason is probably the most complex of the four to get your head around. But the effort is worthwhile. Once you understand this one then you will see why a distributed AdWords Account solution is such a problem.
OK let’s start. Google allows you five different ways to bid on the terms prospects use when using their search engine in. For sake of simplicity I’m just going to cover two here – exact match and broad match. So if you have the exact match keyword of “Auckland Flower Shop” and someone types the search term “Auckland Flower Shop” and then your ad would show. And conversely if you had an exact match keyword of “Flower Shop” without the Auckland part then the ad would not show.
Follow so far?
OK now let’s deal with the second option – broad match. This is the type that Google has you pick by default when setting up a new account. Most newbie AdWords advertisers have accounts full of this match type of keyword.
A broad match keyword of “Flower Shop” will show your ad for these search terms “Flower Shop Auckland”, “Flower Store, “Flower Shop Wellington” and even “Flower and Vegetable Shop”. Think of it as Google’s way of stretching the meaning of your broad keyword to ensure your ad is shown to as many people who are searching.
Now if you are an Auckland Flower store then using this match type in your advertising account then the first two search terms are worth their click cost. The other two – “Flower Shop Wellington” and even “Flower and Vegetable Shop”- are a waste of your money.
Now if you have a dozen flower shops around the country all running their own Google advertising within their own accounts and all using the broad match term of “Flower Shop” then you can just imagine the confusion. The Auckland shop could be displaying advertising for the search term “Wellington Flower Shop” and the Hamilton store could have their advertising showing for those typing in “Auckland Flower Shop”. And every store could have their ads shown for “Flower and Vegetable Shop” when none of them sell vegetables.
Fixing all this mess is made a lot easier by gathering all the keywords together into the one Google advertising account and diligently using the correct keyword match type to ensure the most relevant store’s advertising is shown for each searcher.
Reason #2 You are only allowed to advertise your domain once for each search result.
Google makes available about 10 places for paid advertising next to its search results. The less scrupulous advertiser may think that by setting up 10 different advertising accounts they could place ads in each space and block out their competitors. Not so fast. Google only allows one advert to be shown for each website domain for any one keyword result.
And in situations like I mentioned before – where multiple accounts are trying to bid on the same keyword and sending clicks through to the same web domain – guess which ad Google decides is the best one to show?
The one that makes Google the most money.
So by bidding as separate entities for the same keyword each advertiser from the same domain is effectively bidding against themselves and by doing so increasing their advertising costs. Not so smart.
Reason #3 Negative keywords taking longer to surface
Earlier I told you about the different match types Google lets you use mentioning two of the five that are available. This time I need to cover one of the three left – negative match. This is a keyword that you want to ensure your ads don’t display for.
So using the last example of the flower shop the term “Flower and Vegetable Shop” fits into this category. In this list could also be terms like –“setting up a flower shop”, “flower shop signs”, “flower shop jobs” – all relevant search terms but highly irrelevant to a normal flower shop wanting to sell flowers.
Most new Google AdWords advertising accounts don’t have any negative keywords in them. People just don’t think of them when starting out. Later on – if the advertiser actually takes the time to look into their account to – they are added as they come to surface in the actual click reports Google provides. Which is the issue – they take time to surface. The more clicks you are buying the faster these details come to hand and therefore the quicker the account becomes optimised for the right types of keywords.
Final Reason #4 – Spreading your Google Account Love too thinly
Providing relevant advertising to searchers is a key goal for Google. The more relevant your advertising is in the eyes of Google the greater the benefits they will provide you. (And for “benefits” think “cheaper bid prices”.)
You can find out how “relevant” your advertising is in the eyes of Google by looking at the Quality Score they have allocated to each of your keywords. This is a value between 0-10 that is based on the relevance to the searcher of your ads, keywords and landing page
From what we have been told and seen, Quality Score, is also attributed at a Google Account level too. So if you own an account that delivers a steady stream of high quality (in Google’s eyes) advertising then some Google love in the form of rising Quality Scores for your keywords will come your way. And obviously the more advertising you buy and properly optimise, the greater your chances of building an account like this.
So there you have it. Four reasons why setting up an AdWords account for each and every branch is not the best way ahead and how the one properly managed Google AdWords account by a central source, will do this job so much better for all.
Let’s imagine I had a coin-operated Gumball machine that delivered, in place of sugar-coated balls, a steady supply of OK-quality prospects. How much cash would you place in the machine to get each prospect?Now most would say “as little as possible”. This I understand; that’s normal human nature at work. But what if I told you that you are not the only person who was able to use the machine?
You see, behind you are your competitors eagerly waiting to use it once you are finished. Plus, the rules state that you pass to the person behind you when you choose not to enter any more money. So,knowing this, how much would you enter before you decided to pass it to the competitor behind you?
Got you thinking a bit more now?
Great, because the Google AdWords advertising system is very similar to that Gumball machine.And every time you launch your campaign you are figuratively lining up next to your competitors as you all try to attract the same profile of prospects.
Now,getting back to the Gumball experience, the smart person would have done their sums before their turn came up.And while the others may spend too little and miss their turn or spend too much and market themselves out of a business, the smart ones would know exactly how much to enter before they expected a prospect to arrive, and when to pass if it didn’t eventuate.
So let’s work through the steps they would have taken to make them so smart. Firstly, they would have calculated the likelihood of average quality prospects turning into clients.Then they would have a good indication of the average amount of profit (not margin) that each customer was worth.
Calculating customer worth becomes interesting when customers are retained for a long time. They can end up becoming very, very valuable.In these cases, worth can track profits for not only the first sale but right through to an expected multi-year life span.
In markets like these the Gumball machine is ravenously hungry for cash before it yields a prospect as competitors are willing to load up coin after coin to get that one prospect.The same applies when prospects have a high propensity to convert into a customer coupled with a high transaction value. In both of these cases you’d better get used to shoving in those coins to get the growth you need.
The Gumball machine concept is relatively straightforward but I would suggest that less than 10% of Google AdWords advertisers know the number at which they should buy prospects and, conversely, when they should pass to the person “behind” them. Based on my unscientific research over 10 years of online marketing experience I have only come across two clients of ours who, when asked for their “gumball number”,were able to provide it.
The first was a world leader in a very competitive health and fitness arena;the second was a highly successful one-person business in financial services. Both knew the marketing “numbers” of their business down pat. In each case it was – and still is – a pleasure to work with them. So long as we can provide them OK-quality prospect leads at a cost below their “Gumball” number then all remains well in the land of online marketing.
So why do so few advertisers know this number?
One reason could be that those selling traditional advertising never touted it as an effective way to measure performance. “Investing”$1500 on a newspaper advertisement and not being sure if the 10 leads captured that week were solely due to it makes it either a great purchase or a shocker. Whereas online there’s more measurement than you can shake a stick at and determining the exact cost for each prospect captured is possible with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Secondly,as business owners we may have found the whole financial side of measuring marketing performance a bit daunting. If you are in this camp, then this book may help̶Found Money: Simple Strategies for Uncovering the Hidden Profit and Cash Flow in Your Business by Steve Wilkinghoff. You can find it on Amazon here. As a non-financial person myself, I thought it did a great job of showing you the simple steps necessary to create some lasting financial insight with regards to your marketing spend.
Sorry, there really isn’t any good reason to not know your “Gumball number”.
The giant Gumball machine of online marketing is here to stay. And while I relate it directly to Google AdWords, in reality it signifies the complete online marketing space. Your option is to either stand in the queue armed with the right knowledge or take your chances like the rest of them. Personally I would prefer if it was the former. Why not give us a call today if you think this is a good idea too.
I am reliably told that successful baking is a lot like chemistry. All you need to do is follow the instructions, add in the right ingredients in the right order and you are all set to create the same successful outcome of your “experiment” every time. Somehow, it never seems to work the same way for me. Either I rush things and miss something out or, even worse, mistake one thing (think salt) for another (think sugar) and a disaster is on the way.
Nevertheless, get it right and what you see in the image at the top of the recipe page should be close to what you take out of the oven. And let’s face it, it’s that image we all want. Yep, a nice thick slab of carrot cake with a very non-healthy spread of cream cheese icing. Yum scrummy. The thought of munching through this makes all the hassle of creating it and cleaning up afterwards worthwhile.
E-commerce websites are nothing like carrot cake. That I know. I also know that their owners all have revenue and profit targets they want them to meet. And for me that’s the picture at the top of the recipe – the bit that gets them excited. However, for many, the bit below – the recipe they need to follow to make the image a reality – that bit is missing. What exactly do they need to do to “bake” their way towards these numbers?
All this came up during a recent customer planning session. We were working through the next 12-month target for a very successful e-commerce website. The target – or the yummy picture that got us all excited – was very enticing too. Double digit growth was expected in both top- and bottom-line numbers. But what was the recipe they were going to follow to make this a reality? There were a few blank looks around the room so I started with the carrot cake analogy and then as a group we worked through designing the recipe they would need.
Fortunately, an e-commerce website requires fewer ingredients than your average carrot cake. The four staples are: visitors, customers, purchases and costs. Of these, it’s the customer part that’s the most important to sort first. The outcomes of the work in this area drive the marketing costs you will need to afford and with it an understanding of the visitor counts this expense needs to generate to make it all work.
So how many customers did they need to achieve their goal? Was it, say, 5000 people spending $150 each or 1000 spending $750 each? And of these customers how many would they expect to buy more than once during the year? And of this group what would their average annual spend be? These are very simple questions that can be deceptive in the amount of work required to find credible answers for. In this case, the client had to go away and analyze their previous 12-month sales figures and then spend a few days drilling through this data to reveal the answers they required.
Fortunately for them they had a great business, selling a great product that customers purchased reasonably frequently during the year. And of these three wins it was probably the last one that was the most important. Repeat purchase e-commerce websites are so much easier to make work. Email marketing fits nicely into this space too. So does paid search. You can afford to enter this market and pay high click costs if you have the promise of a repeat purchase customer at the end of it all.
Conversely, businesses built on once-only purchase activity are a challenge. To make these work the margins need to be good, with strong and obvious points of differentiation to make them sustainable. Both of these are hard to create and even harder to protect.
But as I mentioned earlier, thankfully this wasn’t the case here so we mapped out expected sales from repeat purchasing, allowing for some increase. Some of the margin from this work would support our email marketing efforts – a solution ideal for customer retention. The gap we had left over was a new customer revenue line. This was spread over the months ahead – allowing for some demand fluctuations during the year based on seasonal changes that affected their industry.
Then we had traffic to sort. We had a good understanding of the site’s conversion rates for new customers based on the last 12 months so we could work out these figures and calculate the required visitor growth to make the conversions we wanted a reality. We then split this between SEO and paid search, based on the ability of specific keywords to reliably bring us new customers.
After a couple of relatively focused sessions and some deep analytical work at their end we had our recipe. And yes, it had some assumptions that needed validation as the year progressed. Things like “we expect existing customers to spend 15% more this year due to our improved email marketing” and “our product margins will remain the same”. But still, it was there ready to be worked through during the months ahead.
So are you an e-commerce website owner who just stares at that nice revenue and profit number hoping it will eventuate? Well, now’s the time to stop hoping and start creating the ideal recipe for you and your business. Let me know if you need any help with your ingredients.
Have fun.
I would like to say that this new product came from some extensive brain-storming completed by the team, incorporating the latest in mind-melding techniques. But I would be lying. It all started with a customer and a problem.
This customer owned a lead generation website that did an above-average job of taking paid and organic search traffic and converting it into good quality sales leads. Each month they would review their traffic and lead count to match up how their conversion rate was going. And if it needed improving – think every month there is room for improvement – site changes would be tested to edge this rate further upwards. The whole process lived and breathed on hard facts,all underpinned with a strong desire to grow faster.
Things were going well. But still their business needed more leads to achieve the growth they had planned. So my attention turned to their inbound call volumes. Yes, their website had a phone number but it was their general office number, which they used for all their other marketing too. Now we knew that some prospects called using this form while staring at the website – but we didn’t know how many took this option and the effectiveness of turning this traffic into leads.In one meeting I made a strong suggestion that this phone traffic needed tracking with as much rigor as was being used for web tracking. Fortunately, they had a spare number they could use and so we swapped out the website number with this just to see what turned up.
Needless to say, the fact that this whole train of events spawned a new product points to what they found being quite a revelation. For instance, the site was generating as much phone traffic as form submission leads. And let me remind you that the online lead count was at the top end. Everyone was surprised with this one.
But then when they ran the numbers through, it was the conversion rate of this inbound call traffic into quotes by their call centre that was the real issue. The numbers were startling. It was running at under a quarter of the online conversion rate. So that was the real target for achieving fast growth.
All they needed to do was double the effectiveness of how they handled inbound calls to bring it up to about half of the online conversion rate and they would more than double the total number of quotes the company did – without spending any more in marketing cost.
Now, not everyone has a spare telephone number hanging around waiting to run a test like this. Which is why we are launching this new product.
It’s a simple concept. We supply you with a phone number (both regional and 0800 numbers are supported) that sits on your website or perhaps in your Google Ad. Anyone who calls that number is routed directly to where you want them to go. It’s a seamless process for the caller. Each month you receive a tracking report from Permission that shows you how many people used that number, the length of the call, etc. Plus, with some extra magic, we can integrate this into your Google Analytics account so you can see the calls coming off your website as individual events.
And if you want you can turn on call recording and have access to recordings of all the calls that come your way. There’s a very nominal monthly line rental fee, a small minimum term, and even smaller costs per minute for the calls to be routed where you want them. Tracking and measurement are a snip to do for your online marketing activities. Now you can put the same “blow torch” of accountability to your inbound call work to see how you fare in this area. Contact us today on sales@permision.co.nz if this makes sense for your business.
Early this month I did the overseas conference thing with email marketing. It was a couple of years since I last attended and a lot had changed in email land since then. So I decided that it was again time to spend 12 hours in a confined silver tube to experience all there was from our North American email marketing services friends.
The customer conference call this month covered some of the details I found but, nevertheless, here are a few “takeaways” that you can apply with your email marketing this month.
1) Batch and blast email messaging will garner less and less prospect attention. There is only so much online attention to go around. And as social media sucks up its growing share and general email volume increases year on year, a poorly targeted, highly generic offer email will get less opens and even less clicks.
The alternative? Highly targeted and relevant offers or, the subject of a number of sessions I sat through, campaigns automatically driven by a change of behavior of the prospect or customer. For instance: when they subscribe; when they buy for the first time; when they would normally purchase a restocking run or even when they add an item to the cart BUT fail to check out. Yes, most of these are technically a lot more challenging than just loading up a list and firing out a message – but that’s going to be the price you need to pay to get the attention you need to make your promotion work.
2) This was from a presentation on email strategy ̶ three simple questions you should answer BEFORE sending your next email campaign. Is this campaign tied to our overall email campaign and organizational goals? Why should my subscribers care? What are my subscribers to do next? If you can list down some solid answers to these three then all’s looking good.
3) “If you are not testing you are guessing.” A great snippet on an early slide about (surprise, surprise) email testing. We all fall into the busy, busy tactical trap of doing “stuff” to get a campaign out. Nevertheless, it’s the smart ones who can look back over what they used to do three months ago and compare that with what they do now – and see a difference due to the results their tests achieved during this same period.
4) With “relevance” being the catch cry of email marketing improvement, there was some good discussion on the type of content you require to make this a reality. For instance there is “Evergreen Content” that works for everyone and will never change. Then there’s content with a “Long Shelf Life” that works for all but lasts say 3–4 months. Then there’s content just suited to your target segments. By producing content across each of these three areas you can efficiently put together a series of email campaigns without having to create 100% bespoke content for each.
5) And the final point wasn’t really a point – more a realisation that the long-term effectiveness of email marketing will have very little to do with the creative or content of the message itself. It’s more about how well the media integrates with other parts of your online and offline properties. For instance, does your e-commerce tool integrate with your email app so a series of “welcome” messages can be sent to those purchasing for the first time? Or can your room booking engine connect to a tool that allows email messages to be sent to not only confirm a booking but also, five nights before arrival. It’s these nitty gritty points of email integration that will turn what could be a very ineffective batch and blast email strategy into a highly specific and highly profitable behavior-based campaign.
Have fun.
This month’s conference call was all about how to optimize a website for those selling big ticket items. (Customers will be able to access a recording of the call either from the monthly CD they receive or from a link in the customer portal part of our website.)
Selling large, costly and most likely complex products and/or services can be a challenge online. Here prospects don’t decide on a Monday what they want and from whom and by Wednesday have the transaction complete and their solution in their hands. Nope, these decision cycles can take weeks, months or even years to work through. During this time prospects will vacillate from supplier to supplier, option to option, and could well end up not buying off anyone at all.
More often than not the actual decision to buy will NOT be made with a web page and order form in front of your prospect. This might occur over coffee at the dining room table, at the roadside when their car gives up the ghost for the umpteenth time or, with luck, with your salesperson in your office. How and where the sale will end is hard to predict; nevertheless, there’s a very strong chance that it will start online. Here a prospect will kick off some research using trusty Google and a broad category-type keyword like “crm software”.
Hopefully, if you sell CRM software, your website will feature in this list. Now all you need to do is to capture this early level of interest and convert it to actual orders week or months or more later. Up for the challenge? Understandably, there’s a lot to get wrong during this time. But to help you along the way here’s my list of the seven most common mistakes people make, with a short note on how to avoid each of them.
#1 – Failing to include lead nurturing
So they arrive on your website, read your content, perhaps print out a report you offer, and then are gone for another few months as they consider their options. Remembering that these big ticket decisions will take weeks or months to complete, somehow you need to keep in touch as prospects work through their decision. Email marketing is the obvious choice here as long as you have permission to send it. But let’s not forget direct mail or even telemarketing too, or even all three in a neat “mix and match” format.
People lead busy lives and because of that prospects will naturally forget what you told them or what they read on your website. A regular drip feed of content to politely and persistently remind them of all the key facts is required. Do this well and you will have them move from thinking you are just one of many viable alternatives in month one to being convinced you are the best option in month ten.
#2 – A website that talks too much on how you can solve rather than understand a problem
Think of it this way. Say you need a builder to come in and fix a stuck window in your lounge room. It’s a simple job that’s been bugging you for ages and now it’s time to find a builder – any builder really – to get it sorted. Your criteria of who gets the job would probably include things like whether they are local and what their minimum call-out fee is. Simple criteria really to fix what is quite a simple problem.
Compare this with when you need a builder to help you create our ideal home. This requires a completely different list of criteria and there’s a strong chance that the builder that fixed the window is not going to be the one to build the home. Now, the ability for them to understand the problem matters more than where they operate from and even what they charge. (No point in paying less for something you don’t want.)
So home-building builders would be well served by a website that explains the process they follow to listen and understand what their prospects want. Ideally this content would be supported with some testimonial proof from happy customers that say they did exactly that. This leads me nicely onto my next point.
#3 – A website with a paucity of social proof
It’s not that purchasers of big ticket items are less trusting of suppliers than their small ticket cousins. Oh well, let’s face it, they are. Making the wrong decision here is a problem. It’s not that easy to take your recently built home back and ask for a replacement. Or pull out a multi-million dollar CRM system because it doesn’t do exactly what you wanted it to.
So buyers take more care and are naturally pleasantly reassured when they read the successful stories of others who can attest to the process or product doing exactly what they are being told it will do. For instance, if your website says that your $8000 ride-on lawnmower will easily manage long grass on sloping terrain then that’s fine. But if a customer sends in a video of them using the machine doing exactly this AND raves about the finish it leaves behind then this is so much more believable.
#4 – Failing to offer impartial, valuable information for buyers who are interested but not yet ready to buy
Just by the nature of the long sales cycle that big ticket items operate within, more people will arrive at your website interested than those who are ready to buy. The proportions could be 10 to 1, 50 to 1, or even 100 to 1, depending on your business category and the marketing they have received before arriving.
Now I realize that persuading those ready to buy now to contact you is a very big priority. But very close behind this is developing a system to do the same for those interested – the vast majority of your site traffic.
To achieve this you could offer them an impartial buyer’s guide, technically detailed white papers or even complimentary CDs of prior coaching sessions. During the customer conference call I mentioned over 25 different types of content you can offer for this stage. They span all types of media choices and formats but all have the same thing in common – they offer interested prospects something of real value.
This is not the time for product catalogues or a full-on sales pitch in print. Prospects are not ready for this yet. First, you need to win them over with some meaty, valuable and timely content that helps them during the research and information-gathering stage they are in now.
#5 – Failing to answer the top questions prospects have during their buying process
We covered this one at length during the coaching call. The key points are that there will be a list of questions – probably less than 5 – that the majority of prospects will need answering BEFORE they will even consider you as a valid supplier. The first job is to use some effective but relatively easy to run research to find out what these questions are.
The obvious next step is to answer them completely during your sales process. For instance, business owner purchasers of accounting services may have at the top of their list the ability for their supplier to explain complex issues in simple to understand language. So accountants selling services into this space would be wise to own a website that does exactly this.
#6 – Prospects doing the hard work of translating features into benefits
This is sales training 101 but still we can all slip back into old habits – especially when we are writing website content. So let us be clear – it’s not about you and what you do – it’s about them and how their life will be different after using you. For instance, you may run quarterly seminars where all clients are invited to meet and mingle with other business owners like them. That’s a feature. There are a ton of benefits this could flow into. One may be for attendees to learn from others just like them who have experienced the same problems and have gone on to solve them in new and innovative ways.
#7 – Failing to add value to entice people to leap from the online world to the offline one
In most cases for big ticket items you will need to transition your ongoing online lead nurturing communications into real face-to-face sales talk. This is a critical stage. Do it correctly and all your prior online work is worthwhile – make a mess of it and all this was for naught. You can improve your chances of success here by “selling” the act. For instance, why not rev up a simple “call us for a free quote on your payroll processing needs” into something like “call for your 20 point payroll industry benchmark review”. Ideally, this statement would be delivered on its own landing page that explains exactly what will be delivered, by whom and the benefits others have gained by doing the same.
So there you have it, seven mistakes to avoid when selling big ticket items online. I hope you weren’t making all of them? Contact us today if you would like a complimentary assessment of your efforts so far.
Have fun.
Owners of e-commerce websites sites have my deepest sympathy. There’s so much that they need to get right to see some sizable results – technology, product selection / merchandising, pricing, Google and analytics. And even when it does go swimmingly well they’re left with an industry standard measly single digit conversion rate. Where’s the satisfaction in that? All that work for 3 or 5%?
We all know that optimising the shopping cart process can push these rates upwards. But what about actions that occur prior to the cart stage? The bit where people are looking through your products, trying to decide if this is really for them. These are actions that occur further back in the sale process, where the goal is to influence, persuade and motivate the visitor to take action.
Here, the task is to present the right type of message in the best choice of content. Text, images, documents and videos – all of these can work well – if your visitors decide to consume what you offer. So let’s get stuck into how we can set up some kind of conversion tracking for these stages.
Say you sell technical products that cost north of $400 and are struggling to make any sales after months of promotion. Lots of visitors to the product page but no one placing it in the cart and the till just isn’t ringing. To debug the issue you might decide to produce a product manual in PDF format for free download. Or maybe a buyer’s guide for those looking to purchase a product like this for the first time. Both documents could be loaded to sit nicely on the product details page ready for the next interested visitor to come along.
Then with some swanky changes to your Google Analytics code you can now see if either of these documents are being downloaded. It could be that both are being pulled off the site by 50% + of those that visit – or that no one pulled any of them off at all. Unfortunately, if you can’t get anyone to grab a free download on the product then you’ve got a bigger problem to solve than your e-commerce conversion rate.
We saw a similar situation with a customer only the other month. They had been purchasing Google AdWords traffic for a number of months with very little results. Lots of clicks, lots of dollars but no sales. They had a smattering of PDF manual documents around their website but no tracking to see if they were being used. We updated their Google Analytics set up, started tracking downloads and found that for every 100 clicks there were over 30 downloads. The traffic was interested in the products on offer – the first hurdle was overcome. It was just the sales process that needed to
be revamped.
See the image to follow that shows a Google Analytics account modified to show event tracking underway. This can include downloads, email link clicks and clicks to external websites.
Video is another great source of content that, once tracked properly, can become a great conversion value to monitor and improve. Last year we worked with a client who owned a website that sold one product promoted through a 35 minute video of a webinar they had run recently. The content was great. When they ran live webinars the conversion rate of attendees was impressive. Nevertheless we weren’t sure putting all 35 minutes online for visitor consumption was the right plan.
They, of course, thought it was perfect as it was. But were smart enough to know that good Analytics would tell the real story. So again we modified their website tracking, updated the video player and began to track the video play action itself and the length play time per session.
The image to follow shows some of this data that was collected.
And the results? Well, there was a high percentage that arrived on the page and played the video. That was the good news. The bad news was that the average play lasted 10 minutes, and those that played to the end were no more likely to convert than those who watched just some of the content. They all converted the same, and it was at a higher rate than those who didn’t play. So the playing mattered – the content just needed to be re-worked to get all the good stuff at the front end and to make the video more widely promoted around the website.
So there you have it. By tracking your PDF downloads and video plays you can start to see what affect – if any – they are having on your sale process. Usually the more content visitors consume – in whatever form – the greater your chances of closing the sale. Have fun.
I received my first HTML email marketing message in 1999. I had just been hired to establish an email marketing technology start up. It was during the “dotcom” craze – a time flush with cash but funnily enough devoid of any SPAM. The business I worked for was part of a small “stable” of Internet start ups, funded by some very wealthy people.
Our offices were split across two floors of a six storey building overlooking Auckland’s waterfront. A perfectly good lift took us from the ground floor carpark to our office. Nevertheless it was decided that it was too much effort to ferry us between floors. So a brand new architect-designed marble stair case was cut into the two concrete floors. No expense was spared.
How times have changed. I can assure you there are no marble stair cases at Permission HQ! And while there are billions of HTML based emails flying around the planet, SPAM makes up the high percentage. But through all this email continues to hold its own against the other options available.
To do this it has managed to flex and wane to meet the growing demands placed on it by marketers wanting to communicate ever more complex messages. Here’s my take on three core stages of complexity that most marketers work through.
Stage one – let’s get started.
This is where intentions meet actions and the first few email campaigns are the result. It’s the classic “load and blast” stage where one message is sent to the one list. The content is written to appeal to everyone and designed to look both colorful (with HTML formatting) and functional (with a complementary text version). Legally, things are taken care of with the appropriate unsubscribe option and details of who sent it, where they are located and why the subscriber received it in the first place.
All this is usually dispatched using a hosted web service, in such a way that it looks like it has come from the business. Before it’s sent a few test emails are generally dispatched to three or four different email clients, just to ensure it looks OK.
Once the “send” button is pressed the reporting begins. The technology usually shows who opened the message, if they clicked on any of the links and whether they decided to end it there and unsubscribe.
Ideally the list will grow by new subscribers joining via a web form hosted on the website. Those that unsubscribe are automatically removed, as are those that either a) have their email message “bounce” more than a set times per month or b) if they are automatically deemed as having an address that will never work.
It’s all very functional. But still there’s a lot to learn for the newbie email marketer so the first few campaigns take longer than you would think. Then they get into some sort of a rhythm, and the campaigns start to take on a momentum of their own. Dispatching one a month doesn’t seem too hard. The beast has been created. Now all you need to do is produce the content to keep it happy – which is the real time commitment.
Stage two – Let’s become relevant
The bridge from stage one to stage two is usually preceded by someone standing back from the tactical day to day experience to review progress. So they dive into all the stats, costs and time invested to see where’s the room for improvement. Not everyone does this. A fair chunk remain in stage one forever – which is fine. For them this is enough work thank you very much, and the results? Well they’re OK – nothing amazing – but still OK.
Nevertheless, the rest head off into the land of increasing complexity, hunting out higher returns on their email marketing time and money. Most start by altering how they define who gets what message. In stage one just being a subscriber counted you in. This is changed so that age, gender and perhaps location are used to define who gets what. No longer is it one message for everyone – improving message relevance is the goal here.
Sometimes an upgrade in email sending technology is required to work in this stage. Not every tool can send out different types of message within the one send. This makes proofing the message a bit harder too, so a seed list is created that ensures all the different variations are seen during the testing phase. Tests are now sent to 30 or 40 different email clients to ensure that a high proportion of the list can see what they should.
The web form on the website gets a remodel too. Now it is placed in a more prominent position and perhaps a subscription offer is run to drive list growth. And while previously a new subscription was met with just a simple “Thank You” page on the website, in stage two an automated “welcome” email message is dispatched. (As an aside, this type of message usually has a 25%– 50% increase in open rate from any campaign message you send them, the simple reason being because it’s expected.)
Knowing if all this extra work is worthwhile requires an upgrade in message tracking also. All the traffic generated by these stage two campaigns is configured to sit nicely within their own analytics “bucket”. Now the marketer can correctly match up sales or conversions to the email campaign responsible for them. So simple sums like campaign sales less campaign costs become a breeze to run.
It’s a more complex space to work within, but usually the rewards are there to make it worthwhile – with higher opens, clicks and conversions than stage one.
Stage Three – the death of the campaign
This is not the stage for those wanting the easy life. There’s more technology and marketing headaches in here than you can shake a stick at. And I realize this contradicts what most email tech vendors will tell you. But after living in this place for a small selection of clients for a few years I have seen what it requires to make it work well.
The critical difference between this stage and the two prior is that your campaigns are no longer driven by what you do, but by what your subscriber does. You set up the rules, define the messages, make the technology “talk” amongst itself and then sit back and let the subscriber experience it all in its wonderful form.
So for instance you could set up a campaign that welcomes new customers to your business via a series of five email messages which begins when they make the first transaction on your website. Or if they haven’t purchased for three months, when they used to regularly, they are sent a special offer to get them purchasing again. Another stage three message could be sent out to those e-commerce customers who placed a product in their shopping cart but didn’t make it all the way to complete the transaction. You could have a myriad of fully automated campaigns working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A complete “lights out” marketing operation that runs with no manual involvement. Sound attractive?
Well before you get too excited, do realize that there’s a jungle of technology to work through to make these operate properly. Email tools need to talk to billing systems and possibly e-commerce applications. Yes, it’s set and forget, but with a fair amount of time spent on the setting.
Still, once you get there your campaign statistics can soar upwards. A 2x increase in open rates when compared to normal load and blast strategies is not unheard of. Click through and end conversion rates can also leave the earlier stages for dead. There is work involved, but there are also results.
So there you have it. Your three stages of email marketing complexity. Some marketers will live at stage one – others will operate campaigns across all three levels. Very few will not do any. Why not start exploring the merits of the stage ahead of you this month?
Checklists are powerful things. I’m reliably informed that pilots use them a fair bit – especially during that all-important phase when they are readying their plane for takeoff. Probably not a good time for human memory to be the only thing relied upon to ensure every step is taken correctly. Apparently,checklists began their life after a pilot forgot something critical. For those interested, you can find more about it here – tinyurl.com/checklist-win
Now, I know that practicing effective online marketing is nowhere near as complex as flying a plane. And likewise if you miss a step or two there’s no chance of anything fatal occurring. But nevertheless it’s a complex space to work within and there’s a lot to miss. So here’s my checklist on the basics of online marketing. Think of it as a companion document to the recent customer conference call on the same subject.
HTML Tables
Who thought you could sell water? Or charge more than $4 for a coffee? And how about offer an airline seat without any baggage allowance? For many years these products, price points and packages just didn’t exist. Everyone assumed they just would not work. That was until someone decided to test the assumption and found out that it wasn’t so – and markets were created and millions of revenue made.
Assumptions versus Facts. In what camp does your market knowledge reside? And within the assumption list, do any require the blow torch of fact-finding applied to them to discover some breakthrough outcomes for you this year?
Unfortunately, as marketers a lot of the space we deal with is cluttered with assumption after assumption. We live day-to-day, trying to understand and predict human behaviour – so there’s always a fair dollop of assumption to achieve in these spaces. Nevertheless, the good news is that the online space is littered with ways to challenge even the most hardened assumptions and turn them into facts. We just need to know how to go about it.
But before I delve into how, it’s worthwhile to spend a few moments on the reasons why only a few follow this path, because without knowing this you will fall into the common trap of dressing up a few assumptions as hardened facts.
So let’s start with a biggie – the truth could be just too hard to handle. We had an experience of this late last year. It all started with an overseas customer wanting to improve their lead conversion. We kicked off with a survey to learn more about the top problems their prospects wanted to solve when they started looking online for the product on offer. We collected over 500 responses, categorised them into sections and presented the client with the top five reasons.
They listened very politely to our presentation and then promptly went on to initially ignore the research, because it didn’t accurately reflect their thoughts on what prospects were thinking. They had operated within the market for many years and had a “feel” for what their prospects wanted. We had presented the “facts” but the “assumptions” were still living. Fortunately for both of us, we convinced them to run a split test of two versions of their landing page. The first included content that spoke to their “feel” of what prospects wanted to know about. The second used the factual research to determine which content should be presented in what order. The facts beat the assumptions by a sizable amount. This meant extra dollars in their pocket and it never ceases to amaze me how more money can change even a long-held assumption in record time!
Another reason why assumptions live on for years and years is because in some cases finding facts can take time. Something that people in a hurry don’t have much of. But then I suppose it’s not that easy to realise that you could be toiling away within a marketing strategy that is built on the shaky ground of incorrect assumptions.
Here’s an example of how the time and energy spent fact finding can bring with it many rewards. Over the recent holidays I read the story of James Dyson and his quest to build a better vacuum cleaner. He had an assumption that a cyclone design would do a much better job than the traditional option of a quick-clogging bag in front of a sucking motor. Now I forget the exact number of cyclone versions he went through to prove this assumption but it was over 2500, and took many years of pain-staking refinement to get it working. But he did and his machines now represent a multi-million dollar industry.
For my last example I head off into the land of financial services – particularly the darker side of the neighbourhood. This is where assumptions are supported by the actions of such a large proportion of the market that they make you believe they are facts. Prior to reading about James and his amazing cyclone, I had just finished a book on a certain Mr Bernie Madoff. Some of you may remember him. He was the New York financier who ran the world’s biggest Ponzi investment scheme. (That’s when you think you are investing with him but in reality he takes your money to pay the interest he owes to others and dips into what’s left of your money for himself.) He was quite a successful chap. All up they estimate he was responsible for misappropriating around USD 20 billion of actual hard cash and around 64 billion of fake profits. Just to help you put that into perspective, the last figure is roughly half of New Zealand’s total GDP for 2005. He was quite a busy boy.
Anyway, everyone “assumed” their money was being invested into legitimate stocks and bonds. And by everyone I mean huge international banks, large fund managers and even those in industry review organisations whose job it was to police the industry for such fraud. The assumption ran very deep. But because he was a man of considerable wealth and standing in the financial community no one bothered to look further for any facts to prove the investments had actually been made.
Now I hope that there is no Mr Madoff in your life but sit back and take a look at your market. Are there any assumptions that are rife that you haven’t yourself seen the facts to prove yet?
How about social media? The assumption here is that Facebook is a “must do” for nearly all marketers, and that any time spent here will be richly rewarded. Well, will it? Do the facts tell you this? If they do, then all well and good. And look – before I receive any hate email from the social media ravers – yes, there are some instances where it works. But from what I see this is not true in every case so don’t assume it will be for you. Challenge the assumption.
So by now you should be ready and willing to slay any assumptions that cross your desk. Next, let’s dig into the ways in which online marketers can make some progress in 2012. Here’s three to get your teeth into:
1) Look for facts that prove both the positive and opposite states occur.
Realise that data can be used and manipulated to support even the most wonky of assumptions. So to really challenge them look for hard data that reveals both the assumption is working and that the counter assumption is not. If you assume that the best way to deliver AdWords traffic is to a landing page rather than your home page (and let’s face it, 8/10 times it is), then do this BUT also spend some dollars sending traffic to your home page just to prove for yourself that this market assumption is a fact for you.
2) When it comes to humans, ask, watch, but still test.
Earlier I mentioned that as marketers each day we deal with human behaviour, which comes filled to the brim with assumptions that need testing. Remembering my earlier example, somehow you need to put aside your own personal opinion and dig into some fact-finding work. Research is a good way to start. It doesn’t have to be of the same ilk as the airlines that ask you for a novella of information after you have flown – just answers to a couple of well worded questions can be enough. And why not look as well as listen? I’ve covered before the tools we use each day to help our customers look over the shoulder of their website visitors to see the paths they follow as they walk through their website. Whatever tactic you follow you are looking for hard facts about what people have done or said. Collect enough of this to make it statistically significant and you are ready for my final strategy.
3) Testing.
Yep, even though you have 500 survey responses and have looked at hundreds of recordings you are still going to test what all this tells you against what is there now. Once this reveals some good news, e.g. an improved conversion rate or reduced bounce count, you factually know that what you thought would work actually did.
And that’s what it’s all about – striking off one assumption and replacing it with a fact. Think of it as laying one more brick in the solid foundation of fact that supports your business. The more you lay, the stronger your business will be.
Cast your mind back to a time before cell phones, iThis and iThat, and even the Internet. Yep we are talking ancient history in technology land or approximately 20 human years. This is where the story starts, with Chris Price as a freshfaced new recruit ready to sell up a storm hawking commercial printing to those unsuspecting souls in East Tamaki.
Anyway, during my early days doing this, I was shown a strategy that I’m now going to renovate and present back to you as something super smart to apply to your online lead generating efforts. Think of it as a matt, dull object from the past that is probably a bit more valuable than its usually shiny, bright cousin we come across each and every week.
Anyway, this business had a rather crude but effective way of generating leads. It involved sitting its sales force down at their desks, arming them with phones and phone books and then yelling at them repeatedly to cold call prospects in their chosen territory to make sales appointments.
OK, so perhaps the yelling part is overstating the fact a bit. But still you were expected to be at your desk from 8:00am until 10:00am calling up purchasing managers (remember that role) and convincing them to see you either that day or sometime soon over the week. It was a soul-destroying task but, surprisingly, a reasonably effective one.
Printing was a fickle business then as it probably is now. Printers came and went, service levels were up and down, and staff churned away. So if you were fortunate your call could coincide with someone who was so annoyed with their current supplier that you got a hearing. If you were lucky.
I really hated this cold calling part of the sales process. So I would arm myself with as much coffee as my body could contain and then work through my call list as fast as I could. I repeated my sales script in a jabbering caffeine-fueled way – in what was probably so much of a blabber that no one could tell what I said and as such any chance of success was quickly snuffed out.
So as the clock struck 10:00am I was evicted with the rest of the sales force. They bounced off to their first call. I drove down the southern motorway just knowing what was coming up next. Now as sales people we were only allowed back in the office after 4:00 pm and then only to write up our orders from the day’s calling. So if my phone cold calling drew a blank then I had a day ahead of an even worse experience – door knocking.
Yep, picking some unsuspecting street in industrial East Tamaki and working from one end to the other asking to see the person in charge of printing. I hated this even more than the phone. After the first month, it was obvious to everyone that I was not the company’s best hire. So it was no surprise when my boss called me into his office and sat me down “for a chat about my future.”
Clyde told me he could see some promise but things had to change – and fast. He then pulled out a pen and paper and began to map out my progress to date. Their sales process required us to complete daily call reports that showed exactly who we had phoned or visited, what was discussed and a nice space to list down the orders we had achieved.My reports had a bunch of stuff in the activity areas, but very little in the place left for orders. Between us we tallied up the orders made – that didn’t take too long – then the number of phone calls and sales presentations I had made.
The numbers for the two weeks just gone were something like – 200 agonizing phone calls made – 10 appointments made – 9 sales presentations delivered resulting in 3 orders collected with sales worth $6,000. As a rookie sales person I was on a very small base salary, which was topped up with a commission on gross sales – so I knew the dollars but the activity numbers were new to me.
Clyde then broke down each step of the sales process and assigned a dollar value to it. So the orders were worth $2000 each and on average I needed 3 presentations to make an order – which means each presentation was worth $667, while each appointment was worth $600 and each phone call – hold on – was worth an amazing $30.
This changed everything. Now, whenever I picked up the phone I didn’t just think fear, doubt and extreme worry – I also thought three nice and shiny $10 notes – just waiting for me to grab them. And when I was presenting to a prospect, while I thought features vs benefits – features vs benefits – features vs benefits, I also thought $667 is very close now so listen hard and don’t blow this.
I would have liked to say that this epiphany changed everything and overnight I went from a cold calling disaster to become king of the phones. But it didn’t. Nevertheless, it made things a bit easier – the phone wasn’t so scary; the appointments were not so haphazard.
So how does this apply to your lead generation website?
First, let’s kick off with the general agreement that there’s a multi-stage process people follow before they buy. For printing it involved me calling and convincing them to let me in their office for an appointment. That was all I was told to present. Nothing about what I could offer – just the benefits of sitting in a room with me to discuss their printing needs. That was step one. Some agreed and booked a time. Others fobbed me off and asked me to send a brochure in the mail (sort of like a step 1.5). Anyway, I did what was asked of me and then called back politely but persistently to get that appointment.
If all went well then step two had me placed eyeball to eyeball across their desk – pitching them what I could offer. And all going well, one in three would buy.
Let’s now apply this to lead generation on the Internet. Some prospects will come by your website, immediately like what you offer, and complete your “Contact Us” page form. Now, this “some” could be between 2% and 5% of your total visitor traffic depending on your industry, the content you offer, and your standing in the market. Think of these as the purchasing officers who were absolutely fuming about their printing supplier and were very happy I called that day.
But there are not a lot in this group, so you have the remaining 95% to 98% of your website visitors who do nothing. Some of this group will be mildly interested. But how do you entice them to linger a bit longer and eventually transform themselves into a lead?
Before we talk about some options, it’s worth remembering that the Internet is a cruel, harsh environment when it comes to prospecting. As a rookie sales person, very rarely did I have people slam down the phone on me within the first 30 seconds of my phone pitch. Nevertheless, prospects visiting your website could arrive, not like what they see and read, and be off in half this time. They are truly a fickle and demanding bunch that needs a selection of enticing “stuff” to capture and hold their attention.
So for “stuff” you could offer blog posts, free reports, newsletter subscriptions, pre-recorded seminars, and teleseminars – all containing content that your prospect would deem as being very valuable. For example, you may offer a PDF report they could download without registration, a recording of a webinar they can stream off your website and an information-packed Free Report they could register for. Now some prospects will grab all three options, while others will pick just one that suits them. And by reading, listing or viewing it they will become a bit more likely to contact you rather than your competitors.
Once you have these available on your website you can sit yourself down and calculate the relative values for each content piece that prospects consume just as Clyde did with me. As an example, your figures could tell you that out of 10 web contacts you will make 6 appointments, which produce 3 sales worth $1750 each. So your appointment sessions are worth $875 ($5250 / 6) and your web contact requests are worth $525 ($5250/10).
Now working back through your analytics data you can see that out of the 80 visitors that decide to take up the option of your PDF download only 2 go on to make a web contact, so that action is worth $6.50 ($525/80). Delving further into your Analytics data you find that of the 130 visitors that look at your webinar, 1 makes a web contact – so that action is worth $4.00. Meanwhile, of the 30 that register for the free report, 4 have gone onto make contact, which makes this action worth a whopping $70 ($2100/30). Now I realize that the numbers are rough and there is room for some double counting BUT you can start to see how all this helps to prioritize your efforts so you spend time optimizing your website for more prospects to register for that free report before you try and get them to watch the webinar. There’s gold in that there strategy.
Plus, if you are content to live with the “rough edges” of the relative amounts of these action values you can then include them in your Google Analytics account so the totals are tallied up each day. For instance, seeing that your website produced a relative $2500 worth of lead generating actions (PDF downloads, free report registrations, etc.) during the week just gone – all without you having to make a single cold call yourself – should be something to smile about.
“Buying Google clicks is just too expensive for us so what other online marketing options do you have for us to consider? How about renting an email list – can you guys help with that?”
There I was sitting in a prospect’s office in Auckland’s central city, listening to the story of why they were looking for Google AdWords Campaign Management services from someone like us. It was just a few minutes into our discussion when – Bam – out came this bombshell. A failed AdWords experiment was there sitting across the table from me.
Now, some would miss the opportunity a comment like this can bring. They may jump into the many reasons why buying an email list was probably the least favourable of all options worth pursuing. But not me. Nope, this was just gold. So I started to question exactly what they had experienced with AdWords and how their failure here could reveal some startling truths about the overall health of their online marketing.
I asked some more questions and my prospect shared all he could, in all its tragic detail. How their cost per click was in dollars not cents. The AdWords budget was in thousands not hundreds and after all this there were pitifully few leads produced at what ended up to be an abhorrent individual cost per lead. The first two parts of the story were actually good news of what could lie ahead – that I will expand on later. But losing money with Google is never fun to experience for anyone, so I took my time to explain what this all meant and how it was worthwhile to take on Google again – but perhaps with a few tweaks to their methods of engagement.
I began with why the strategy was worth pursuing. You see, your ability to run a successful on-going Google AdWords campaign is a real-world gauge of the lead generation effectiveness of your website compared with all those of your bidding competitors. Yep, your ability to purchase clicks at a profit can reveal how effective your website is at turning traffic into leads – compared with everyone else in your market who tries to do the same. This in itself is some quite cool live data with which to benchmark your business against others.
I followed this with a few words on why expensive keywords are a good thing to find when you enter a bidding market like the one AdWords operates. Let’s not think cents here, nope we are really looking for those keywords that are worth dollars per click. For instance, Google and its Keyword Tool can tell me that for the keyword “cash loans nz” I should be prepared to pay around $4.00 per click. This is an amount that would make most online marketers think twice before paying. Nevertheless, trust me, it’s a good sign. Prices like these reflect what competitors are prepared to pay day in and day out because for them the investment is worth the return. And in most cases, large dollar clicks are there because for the majority of bidders they are producing large dollar returns.
The prospects behind those clicks have a strong need that they want met AND they are prepared to take action online to help them find a solution. In comparison, super-low click costs – say sub 10 cents – are warning signs that you are possibly entering a troublesome market. Here you may find clickers but those willing to take some action – and a profitable one at that – may be a bit more elusive.
As an aside, for those interested in knowing their keywords bid price but who are not yet running an AdWords campaign, fortunately Google makes it relatively easy to get a guide on this value. Just head over to the Google keyword tool, then login to your AdWords account (you don’t need any campaigns running – just an account set up) and search the keywords of your market in your region. You should see something like the image to follow.
So by now we had discussed how his keywords were in the costly part of the market and how this was a good thing. And just by looking at who was bidding on these words we could also assume that others in his market were living with these costs. This left the simple question of whether he wanted to make the necessary changes to enter the market and survive.
Well, with 90% of NZ searchers using Google as their tool, he really didn’t have a lot of options. That left the task of finding out the areas he needed to focus on to make these dollar clicks start to pay. Here’s a short overview of just four of the points we covered.
Conversion rate was the starter. Yep, the hard truth could be that your bidding competitors may own an e-commerce website that converts at 4% while yours struggles to get above 2% for exactly the same items. Or for those of you in lead generation land, your competitor’s offline sales process could be twice as effective as yours. It could be their lead follow-up, their phone script or even their face-to-face presentation. Any one or all of these could be a good rung or two above your own, which ensures they convert twice as many leads into customers as you do. Even though their lead quality is, once again, exactly the same as yours.
Next up was the method by which his competitors were valuing the total of each sale or lead and then allocating a proportion of this to marketing. For instance, they could be valuing each sale just on its initial amount. So when a typical first-time customer may spend just $100 then a proportion of this amount would go towards their AdWords costs. Now it could be that over the next 11 months these “typical” customers will purchase another nine times. And if all goes well after this they will do the same for an average of three years, moving their lifetime value to $3000 rather than the paltry $100 of the first sale.
Those who are super-confident in their customer retention strategies can afford to invest with the $3000 value in mind, leaving the rest to struggle, trying to compete in a world where their sale begins and ends at $100. With work, they could look at each lead not as $100 coming in the door but as $3000 of long-term value. Strategies to move your world beyond the first sale include an email newsletter, a rewards program, or whatever it takes to transform single-purchase customers into multiple-purchasing machines.
Following on from the economic power that comes to those with a strong customer retention plan there’s also the hard fact that your competitor could make more money per sale than you do. So while you may both bid on and sell item A, your bidding competitor could then go on and sell to the same customer items B, C and D, none of which you offer. This pushes up their average revenue and therefore profit per transaction. Maybe even to a value that allows them to sell item A at a loss, knowing that the other products will make this up and then some. Not such good news for those who only sell A :((.
Unfortunately, it may well be one or all of these strategies at play with your high-bidding competitors. It would be so much easier if you could wave a magic wand and have revealed exactly what they are doing to make it work for them when it doesn’t for you. Nevertheless, there are some very crude maths you can run to help reveal how far you have to go to get things back on track.
So to follow on from my cash loans example – here we have an average $4 per click amount. Allowing for a fictional goal application conversion rate of 5%, the cost per application would be $80. The first question is, if you operate in this business, could you live with this cost? And if not on your first sale, could it work if your looked further down the lifetime of your customer? If the answer is still no, then what conversion rate would it work with and is this realistic?
We answer questions like these during our Online Marketing Review process. It’s the first step we take new customers through when they are looking to join Permission. Yes, it’s a paid service but comes with some performance outcomes that ensure you only pay for what you want. Call us today if you would like to learn more about this first step.
It all started with Tom Cruise yelling it in his office in the movie “Jerry Maguire” as he played a struggling sports agent trying to make a mark and convince an athlete to join his sports marketing business. Recently “Show me the money” arrived on our screens again – this time as as one political leader asked it of his opposition to highlight a perceived weakness in his financial calculations.
Four simple words that in both instances did a great job of cutting to the nub of the issue.
So how about we ask the same question of your website?
We all know the costs are easy for everyone to see. There’s hosting, web development, and even optimisation services from people like us. But what about the other part – the revenue side – where can you find these parts hidden inside your web pages?
Most people think that e-commerce websites are the only ones that can produce the necessary answers. Of course they’re wrong. Lead generation sites can do the same – you just need to know how to set up their analytics tools to do the job. Then all you need to do is know which reports “show you the money” and you are underway.
Nevertheless, I’m going to tackle how to find the answers for all those e-commerce website owners first. So Mr and Mrs e-commerce website using Google Analytics its now your turn to “Show me the money”.
OK – let me start with the bad news. Out of the box, the Google Analytics code you add to every page of your e-commerce website WILL NOT gather the “money” data you need. So while you may be able to correctly set up some goal completion actions to see each sale roll through your website, none of these will have any revenue data attributed to them.
The good news is that Google spells out clearly what needs to happen to make this work. All you need to do is amend the Google Analytics tracking code so that the final page of your shopping cart includes the revenue and order details for each converted sale. This will then be swallowed up by Google Analytics account and reported back to you later on.
Yes, it is a bit techie to set up. But fortunately there’s a ton of content inside the Google Analytics help centre to make the changes relatively straightforward. And finally, yes, you will need to test the bejeevers out of it to ensure it works exactly as you want it to.
Once done you are well on the way to seeing the money in your website. The first obvious place to look is the overview e-commerce report that shows the large bucket of all the revenue your site has generated. All going well it should marry up reasonably closely with what your bank tells you your Internet sales deposits were for the same period.
This is nice to know but not necessarily very useful when deciding what needs changing. So sales are up 20% – now what?
Finding out what traffic source is responsible for what % of revenue is quite handy to know. The image to follow shows this. Down the left-hand side are some of the traffic streams this website receives – Organic Google, Google AdWords, Direct, Yahoo and Bing. On the far right there’s a per visit value for each stream.
So now we can see that when someone arrives onto the website from typing the URL into their address bar – as direct traffic – they represent $13.14 in revenue. That’s quite cool. Just imagine a bell set up to ring in your office every time it occurs – with you smiling, knowing that this means another $13 dollars is very likely to be heading towards the bank account. Nice.
So why is it so high? Repeat business. Yep, these are customers coming back again and again and it reveals a very strong operation that does a great job of keeping its customers informed and very happy.
However, now look at Google AdWords – here the revenue per visit is a miserly 98 cents. This traffic is dominated by prospects so the sales values are much smaller. There needs to be some careful work done here to ensure that the click cost doesn’t chew through all this possible revenue.
Per visit value reports are a great way for your website to “Show you the money”. Here’s another report that uses the same metric but this time relative to the organic keywords customers have used to find your website. Data privacy concerns means that this looks like just a big box of hidden data but look to the right and those values relate to keywords listed – but hidden – on the left-hand side. And yes, there’s a keyword in there with a per visit value of $80.96. That would be the big bell that rang when someone arrived from Google using that keyword 🙂
How much optimisation work would you embark on to improve your listing for an $80 keyword compared with a $10 one? Reports like these make the decision of where to focus your search engine optimisation efforts so much easier to make.
There is one last report for those interested in optimising their pages for sales rather than just for search terms. This one shows the per visit value for the top landing pages of your site. (Remember that Google Analytics defines a landing page as the first page your visitor lands on when accessing your website.) This site is well optimised for Google so while their home page receives a ton of traffic so does a long list of other pages – all responsible for making that great first impression for a new visitor.
Cast your eyes across to the right and you will see Per Visit Value data here too. Yes, the home page is the top value of $11.65, but there’s a $6 page that looks to be doing well also. Conversely, there’s a $0.00 for a page that attracts a fair bit of traffic – trust me on that one – this page needs a bit of work.
OK, so that should get a few e-commerce website owners diving for their Analytics accounts to “Show themselves the money”. But what about our lead generation friends? Are they completely left out? Fortunately not – BUT they do need to make a small change to see reports like these in their accounts. To do this they need to amend their goal tracking details to include an approximate revenue per lead.
The process of working out what this should be can stop people in their tracks and ensure they go no further. So lets make it a simple thing for everyone. How much is an average quality lead worth for your business? Now, you don’t have to be exact but is it $250, $100, $75, $50 or $20? Either pick one that “feels” right for your business or work out some sums including the average conversion rate of your sales process, lifetime value of your average customer and the cost of marketing you can attribute to your profit and still have an ongoing business.
Work through the simple maths and you should end up with a value. You can then attribute a percentage of this value across the various goals you have running on your website. For instance, a goal registering a quote request could get 100% of the value, while a person subscribing to your email newsletter would be only 20%.
To follow is an image of where to add in this value in your goal set-up area.
Once you have done this, all those “per visit value” reports you thought were just the domain of owners of e-commerce websites are now available to you and your lead generation website. For instance, to follow is an image of the landing page report for a lead generation website with per visit values for each page – handy stuff when it comes to optimising these pages to push this value northwards.
So why not sit down this month and ask your website to “show you the money”? Some may want to shout out the request at the screen, others will suffice with the little dance that Cuba Gooding Jr does as he asks Jerry the same question – whatever fits for you – just ensure you get the answers you need.
http://tinyurl.com/Jerry-Show-Me-The-Money
The New Year is usually the ideal time to stop and plan the next 12 months and list any changes we want to make. Change can be a difficult “thing” to deliver. We start with the enthusiasm of a recharged soul in early January and by March the business is back doing exactly what it did 12 months ago.
Earlier in 2011, I wrote about how to improve your chances of success when I took a very generic model I had stumbled upon and applied it to online marketing. You can read more about it here.
http://www.websitemarketing.co.nz/blog/simple-way-create-powerful-website-marketing-plan-2012
While writing this I had an epiphany moment. When I looked deeper I could see one part of the model that, when followed, would act as a reliable predictor of whether a particular change was going to be relatively easy or difficult to deliver. Recent events have underscored this point even more.
And the piece of the model? What’s at stake.
Yep, after you have spent all the time describing what the current situation is and followed this with the nice blue sky of what the future should look like, then you should sit down and write down what’s at stake if nothing changes. What you write here will be a very strong predictor of whether anything changes at all.
Here are a few examples of this in action.
I start with one from my own history. I can’t remember for how many years I told others I wanted to run my own business. It must have been at least 10. But still I did nothing about it. Then in mid November 2002 I was called into a meeting room and told my position was being made redundant and I was expected to leave the office in a week. Young family, young mortgage and a recruitment market that was winding down for Christmas. There was a lot at stake so I purchased some business cards from a local quick printer, borrowed a laptop from a friend and within two days the name Permission was born and I was calling on prospective customers.
Now something closer to home. There was a lot of discussion prior to the election on the suitability of Phil Goff as the Labour Party leader. Personally, I thought he did an OK job but the knives were apparently out looking for a replacement before the election campaign began. As we know nothing changed until after the result was in. I seriously doubt that the person who got the job after the election would have achieved it before.
Now something too close for comfort. I ride with a friend who has recently gone through prostate cancer and survived. He’s had one hell of a year. He rides with a bunch of us that bash our way around Woodhill Forest on our mountain bikes most Sunday mornings. Our ages range from late thirties to mid sixties. Prior to finding out about Nick, how many of us do you think had been to the doctor and inquired about checking on the health of our prostate? None. And now – all of us.
If there’s nothing or very little “at stake” then there’s very little chance the change you want will take place. So thinking back to your possible list of New Year’s resolutions – how about becoming fitter, losing weight or owning a new Ferrari. What really happens if none of these are achieved? Best way to get fit? Register yourself and your friends for an event – be it cycling or running – 6 months out and start training. Now there’s something at stake.
This is a great example of you having to actively create the “at stake” part to ensure the change occurs. Goal setting is another way to do this. Publicly stating your goals takes this one step further and is proven to increase your chances of success. All you have done is raised the “stake” one level higher.
The unfortunate thing is that sometimes life can create the “at stake” part for you if you don’t. For instance, a competitor opens up nearby and starts to entice your customers their way. A health scare makes you realise that exercise is really important or the act of having a doctor’s check-up is worthwhile.
So this January please take the time to plan where you are and where you want to go but also think through what really happens if nothing changes. Really? If there’s not a lot AND you really want the change to occur then start creating some serious down and gritty “at stake” issues.
Have fun.
Last month’s article on email marketing and the conference call on the same subject area achieved the desired result.Afew more customers have launched their first email marketing campaign and are now starting to reap some of the many rewards this strategy can produce.All good news.
Nevertheless, there are a few customers out there – we know who you are 🙂 – who are stubbornly refusing to move forward into the land of email.So for them I present these six online marketing myths all busted with an explanation on how an effective email marketing strategy can come to their aid.
Myth #1: Everyone visiting your website is ready to buy
A good e-commerce website will covert at 5% – leaving 95% able to visit and leave, hopefully to return at some time in the near future.Hope is nice but how about you replace this with a persuasive email subscription form to cajole them into joining your email newsletter list? A credible 15% may take you up on this option, moving your total conversion rate up to a very respectable 20%.But, more importantly, you can message them on a friendly frequency in the hope that this time they are more likely to buy than they were when they subscribed.
Myth #2: All prospects will say yes to your proposal
Similar to Myth #1 but more suited to those who sell face-to-face.Now I must admit that some timeshare salespeople of old may have come close to a 100% conversion rate but legislation has now sorted out that way of selling.So normal people selling normal products may close 25-50% and even 75% of sales but there will still be those that need to be nurtured after the presentation.That’s where a permission-compliant email newsletter can work its magic to move people along the buying process, gradually nudging them closer towards the line of commitment.
Myth #3: Your customers will remember you and your company
They won’t.There’s too much going on in their lives to make what you do that important for them.Somehow you need to drop effortlessly into their Inbox life every month or so and share something of interest.Email is easy for them to “consume”, simple for you to construct and a short click away from something that can sell. (Yes, that’s your “salesperson” website.)
Myth #4: Offers are only to be sent to those who are focused on buying a bargain
Walk around any Warehouse store and look at the people filling the aisles.There’s every demographic you can imagine.And all are there because they want to be where “Everyone gets a bargain”.So take care before dismissing that offers always bring in the wrong type of customer.Many a retail fortune has been made by those who understood the value of an offer to bring in the right type of customer, who then decides to purchase the right high-margin product.
Myth #5: People will bookmark your website URL
When was the last time you bookmarked a supplier’s website?Probably a long time ago.Your customers and prospects are the same.So you need to actively work on strategies to bring them back again and again.Yes, you can support Google’s growing fleet of jets by using the AdWords system but email marketing is a much more cost-effective strategy to bring them back.
Myth #6: Customers will decide when they are ready to buy and NOTHING you can do will influence when this occurs
Customers need convincing.And yes, it could start with deciding that it is time to buy something in your category and then work its way all the way down to the finer details of the sale such as the colour of the seat leather. Short, direct messages of persuasion sent via email can add some strength to your argument that moves them closer to you and not your competitors.
So there you have it.If you don’t already have email marketing as part of your online marketing mix then please write down the answer to these questions.
Send your answers to chris@permission.co.nz and let’s get this thing started.