Do you remember your first website? I can. For me it was a renegade solution that lacked any design aspirations at all but achieved the task of finally getting the company I worked for online. The site was built in Microsoft Front Page but really more in frustration and boy was it an ugly thing. But after waiting months for the technology department to first agree that we needed one and then allocate some resource to create it, I decided to take matters into my own hands and finally get “something” online.
My creation lasted a month, maybe two. Just enough time for word to get out about how bad it looked and how it needed to be replaced asap. This led to a Wellington design agency being appointed to create a replacement and kaboom, we had a shiny, new, what was then called a “brochure style” website. I quickly took my version down – it had achieved its goal.
These days there should be very few people who experience the frustration I did of having to justify the existence of a website let alone wait months for one to be built. Having a website is just part and parcel of doing business and if you want something simple then it’s a short step to get something reasonably credible online.
What form this takes depends on who you talk to. Unfortunately, most web developers still persist in presenting business owners with the limited choice of just two options – a brochure or an e-commerce website. Both names reflect the limited vision they have of their craft. One talks to the act of converting what was printed into something online – just as it was done back in 1997 with my experience. The other to the rather bland, nebulous description of selling something / anything really through mouse clicks and page views. You would think that things would have moved on from there – and fortunately they have.
This month I want to replace these two very boring and very limiting web categories with five that go a lot further to reflect the true range of possibilities that a new website can reveal. Here they are:
I have purposefully made them all sound like people because that’s how a good website should be. It is not just a bland collection of text and words – there needs to be a good dollop of human personality to ensure the message gets through.
Now, some websites will pull from the pot of more than one category. So the “local artisan retailer” could well incorporate a section delivered by the “story teller” part of the site – more on this later. But to start let’s work our way through each of them, describing how they operate and how similar they are to their real world namesakes.
A Salesperson
Now this sounds a lot more accountable for results than a “brochure” website doesn’t it? Yep, you can hand out expensive brochures willy nilly hoping they may do some good but from a salesperson you should expect call reports, the use of scripted presentations and, all going well, some consistent results.
In the real world, good salespeople build rapport, listen to what prospects want and then explain what they offer in carefully crafted benefit-laden words. Then it’s about having the gumption to ask for the order, handle any objections / questions and, hopefully, close the sale.
Now I realise that in the majority of instances a website will struggle to perform all of these tasks. The steps at the end of the sales process (handling objections / closing the sale) are usually best done by people talking to people. Nevertheless, a well tuned website can do a great job in those early parts, paving the way for humans to take over once the rapport has been built and the early benefit-laden “conversations” have occurred.
By conducting some online research through your “salesperson” website you can discover the “hot” questions prospects need answering. It could be the level of experience of your staff, the technology being used, the price of the solution and even the speed with which it can be implemented. Somewhere within this there are a few points that matter most to most prospects. These are primers for rich content areas for a “salesperson” website to cover in words, pictures, audio and video. Then credibility-building case studies or customer testimonials can be included to gradually move the prospect along the persuasive process.
This usually ends up with the “salesperson” website asking for a commitment to continue this discussion in the “real world” of people talking to people. This could be an appointment request form, a contact us page or a simple report download page. Each requires the prospect to complete their details and move from being an unknown website visitor to a fully formed and named sales prospect. That simple act of conversion is the core role of a “salesperson” website – converting anonymous website browsers into known website prospects.
Sales “stars” in this category will convert at a rate of 25% plus, i.e. over a quarter of those visiting will be turned into quality prospects for humans to talk to. Other sites will struggle to get into double figures. The good news is that the process of doubling and even tripling the performance of these struggling sales sites is possible. You simply need to employ the services of a website salesperson trainer – just like us :).
A Mega Mall Shop
Wander aimlessly through any mall and you will come across shops like these. Bright lights, stocked shelves, loud announcements and usually very few people available to help you decide what you want. Prices are easy to find for each product and, due to the competitive nature of these shops, are probably the reason why you ended up here in the first place.
Here the experience is all about items being in stock, a full range and being able to quickly get in, put it in your cart and get out. Very fast, very reasonable and very easy. (Man shopping at its best.)
The simplicity of the real world mega mall shop experience does a very good job at hiding the super smarts that the retail geniuses have applied to make this system work so well. They have figured out what products to place where in the shop and at what height on the shelves. The lighting is the type that best suits a shopper experience. The colours of the walls and the shelves are too. So are the signage, the width of the aisles, the shape of the checkout and what else is presented at the checkout. And even those announcements are there because they are proven to move sales further ahead. The mega mall shop retail experience is a science experiment from start to finish, all carefully tuned to extract the maximum amount of profit from the minimum amount of space. And you thought it was just about keeping the shelves well stocked by teenagers and counting the money at the end of the day!
So the novice e-commerce store owner thinks it’s as simple as this and buys a cheap web store that will stock thousands of products but provide little if any ability for them to analyse accurately how their pages are being used. They load up images, content and prices and hope all will go well. And when it doesn’t they find it a struggle to locate where the real problem lies. Is it product selection, product price, lack of product content or a shopping cart that wants your life story before accepting your money? Maybe that last button should be blue and not red? It could be all or some of these but without any ability to track and test their visitor pathways through their site there’s no way to find out.
The smart ones realise that the “forever learning – forever testing” mantra of retail managers transfers very nicely to the e-commerce world and have picked a platform that suits this style of ongoing work. So product navigation is tested, the home page layout is constantly reviewed, and the shape and style of the shopping cart is pored over in painstaking detail.
A Local Artisan Retailer
With all its magic there’s one thing a mega mall shop struggles to provide its shoppers – informed advice. Yep, you will see a wide range of what you want in all shapes and colours but just try to get someone to explain which of these is best suited to your needs and why – well, frequently, you are plum out of luck.
Your best choice is to leave the mall and walk across the road and down the local suburban high street to find a specialist artisan retailer who sells products in the same category. The range will probably be half the size, the price probably a good 20% more but the advice will be there for the asking and lots of it too.
This is a place where you can “learn” about your purchase. What makes it work. How to get the most out of your investment and if there are any bits that, when bought with it, make the whole solution so much easier. This is the place where you will walk in looking for A and leave with A,B,C and possibly D. Not because these were forced onto you but because you now know that without them A would have never worked properly for your situation.
And that’s the core difference. In this retail environment the owner takes the time to learn what you want to do and then translates this to what they offer. A process that is forever missing from the mega mall shop due to the inability to scale this system reliably across a national retail footprint.
A website operating in this space works in a very similar way. It organises its product selection based on what people want to do rather than on what the company supplies. Knowledge is scattered around the site to make the buying process easier. This could be in the form of articles, videos or customer reviews. Anything and everything that helps to translate what the product does to what exactly the prospect wants to do with it.
A Story Teller
This is a style of website that fits well within some of the other categories I have mentioned before. Both the local artisan retailer and the salesperson can do well with a section like this. Here they can expand on areas such as the history of the business and its people. Or the views that define how the company operates, what it believes in and what it finds important.
Blog content management systems are a great way to present this type of content. There are millions of websites that are just ongoing stories in the form of a blog growing by a few inches of content each day. Someone’s life being progressively documented each and every month for everyone to pore over.
Stories are powerful things. All the great story tellers have achieved their success by presenting narratives that their audience finds compelling because somehow it reflects part of who they are or who they see themselves as.
This part is getting a bit deep but bear with me – I think its going to be worth it.
Most of the successful business people I have met have a great story behind their achievements. It could be their deep desire to give their customers an experience they never had. Or to carry on the legacy that their father started. Or to break up an industry that created too much wealth for too many doing too little – and by doing so providing the consumer with so much more. Stories like these can be shared and hence provide context to the reason why the business exists.
Don’t discount the value of sharing the story behind your business – used well it can become an extremely potent part of the reason why people choose you over your competitors.
A News Reader
Like the “story teller” category mentioned above, the “news reader” option can be used in conjunction with other types. Yes, a picture can tell a thousand words but a one minute, properly crafted video can triple this level of comprehension when compared with plain text and pictures. Artisan retail shops, with all their personality, can use video with great benefit.
Perhaps it’s the story they can add to that set of pans that would take pages to explain but can be covered in mere minutes of video, which is enough to convince you that they are worth the 20% extra on top of what you were willing to pay. A few minutes of video explaining how a complicated product works could be enough for a prospect to gain sufficient trust to complete a $500 online sale from a company they have never shopped with before.
Fortunately, the You Tube experience has helped make the “news reader” option viable for many more websites than it used to be. First, it offers a very simple and very cost-effective place (free) to store video content without clogging up a website’s hosting package. And secondly, it has reset our expectation of the balance between production quality versus content quality. We now don’t mind if the camera is a bit shaky or that the presenters are not actors – that doesn’t matter. It’s the way they take apart the product and show us exactly how it all works that makes this 2 minute video segment really rock.
Here are three tasks to work on this month to apply this content to improve your website:
Have fun.
The impending end of 2011 brings with it the opportunity to plan your website marketing for 2012. So how do you create a plan for something that works in an environment that seems to change on a weekly basis? Yes, it’s a challenge but not an insurmountable one. This month I offer a dead simple framework to guide you through the steps necessary to create a plan that has a strong chance of being implemented.
My suggested format is straight out of a recent read I finished last month – “The Primes” – written by Chris McGoff, founder of The Clearing Inc, a Washington DC-based strategic management consulting firm. It’s a book that, on first glance, looks rather light on content but delivers some solid practical punch with the concepts it covers. I’m going to borrow one of these for the task of website planning.
But first, a few words on the concepts themselves and the reason why they ended up in the book. Chris describes them all as “Primes”. These are proven consulting theories that need to be followed exactly as described to deliver the required outcome they promise. Personally, I really love things that do this. Here at Permission we have a number of processes we follow to help deliver email campaigns, improve search rankings and optimise websites. Each of them relies on a standard approach that, when followed, does exactly like Chris’s Primes do – produce reliable results.
The “Prime” we are going to use today covers the required process to effect change through effective strategic planning. Here’s a picture of it.
I’m going to summarise the key points of this graphic and then apply it to your website planning process for 2012. There’s much more detail in the book, so best you either get along to your local library and grab one or here’s the non-affiliate link to find it on Amazon.
Here’s how the graphic reads.
This is the state your website is in now. So, for a web plan that would be the number of visitors your website receives, its existing conversion rate, bounce rate and, say, the % of traffic from organic and paid searches. All the key stats that reflect how well or poorly you currently market your website. Then include some bits on how easy/hard it is to add new content, and the frequency new content is added. Add how testing is run across the key web pages, the suitability of the technology you use, and even how the site compares with your competitors, etc. Everything that matters about your current situation that you and your team can agree on.
These are the things that you have no control over but that can affect your plans. The economy for instance, or your competitors’ activities. Maybe how social media may grow or wane. Or even the speed at which the roll out of super-fast broadband occurs. Or perhaps closer to home – how much budget a parent company may make available to subsidiaries for marketing. All are out of your control but in their own way affect what you do to creatively capitalize on them.
This is the vision thing. The good part where most love to sit back and dream away about what could happen in 2012 if everything fell into place. Compared with the ugly reality of the “As Is” stage this is nice, comforting and comes with a paucity of facts to challenge your ideas. It’s exciting, safe and therefore where the majority of time is spent when the task of “planning” raises its head.
Now a website “To Be” plan could well do with some stats to hang our vision on. So, your future numbers could include the % change in conversion rate your site will achieve or the rise in visitor numbers or page views due to your search rankings improving. A simple spreadsheet could be produced that showed by tweaking just a few variables – such as visitor count and conversion rate – how many more leads the business could bring in. Oh, it’s a great space to be in.
This links the harsh reality of “As Is” to the glowing blue sky visions of the “To Be”. Some may write in here one line that says something like “engage a proficient business to help us” :). But while it’s an opportunity for us it’s not the full story of what really needs to be done.
Just refer to the “Simple Conversion Principles” article mentioned earlier in this newsletter. It would be no surprise to learn that nearly all great conversion rate changes occur once web managers know more about their web visitors’ desires and their methods of traversing their website. So a strategy of research and website tracking should be somewhere in your plan. Likewise, growing traffic is all about giving Google what it wants so it can’t help but improve the website’s ranking. Creating this “stuff” takes time but it’s just work not super-technical uber-geek stuff. So, an ongoing content creation strategy should be in the plan somewhere.
This is the last and probably most important piece of the whole process. It’s the part that many miss out from their plans – me included – but contains the core driving force that decides if all your work remains stuck in a folder gathering e-dust or if it gets reviewed and applied on a regular basis.
Stake = what happens if none of this is completed?
Never underestimate the pull of remaining in the “As Is” environment – it’s very strong. To break these bonds the Stake needs to be clearly articulated and agreed on by those involved in the plan. Writing this point reminds me of a stage in our initial customer review process that we take people new to Permission through.
When I look at it, this review is really a very detailed “As Is” discovery process. We detail a ton of facts – the website’s current conversion rate, how well it performs in Google and if any advertising channels are optimised properly. After this process, I get to a stage where I’m supposed to ask the question “So what does it all mean if none of this changes?”
To be honest I’ve always felt it was a bit too slick and “salesperson-like” to ask this question every time so it hasn’t seen the light of day in every session. (Based on reading this book I can assure you this will now change.) Anyway I’ve had a mixed bag of responses. But in every case, those who have a real problem they need to solve are the ones that get stuck into their site changes with gusto and work quickly with us to achieve some fast and dramatic change. The ones who face a slight annoyance if nothing alters, well, we can spend more time motivating for change to occur than actually delivering it.
So if the stake is weak – then so is the chance that the strategy will be applied.
Now I don’t want to scare people but here are just a few items at stake in most markets advertising online. These may help start you thinking about what’s really at stake if your plan doesn’t get implemented.
Your competitors improve their search engine optimisation faster than you do so your search rankings slide downwards at a rapid pace, which in turn dramatically shrinks your visitor counts.
The cost of offline media that drives your website volume increases and with it the resulting cost per lead, so much so that the economics of your business just don’t work anymore. Meanwhile, your competitors are fine as they own websites that convert at a greater percentage than yours.
And likewise, smarter competitors drive up the cost of Google AdWords bids to a level that’s sustainable for them – as their website converts so well – whilst in the process forcing you out of the online marketing market.
Through the lack of advertiser support the local newspaper market dies a gradual death, leaving you only the online space to advertise in but, due to the previous point, you can’t afford to enter the market.
Now we see some of these changes occurring at different levels across all of the industries we work in. You will probably have more you can add to your “Stake” part of your plan. My recommendation is to get stuck in and spend as much time here as you did with your “As Is” and “To Be” stages – they all deserve the same amount of attention.
When I look back at my own experience with business planning – both on the creating and implementing side – a lot of what Chris’s diagram and his additional commentary covers seems to ring true.
For instance, I once worked for a firm that had as its goal to achieve a specific turnover value – I forget the exact amount they were shooting for but say it was $200 million, up from the $50 million in revenue they were already at. It was a sizable step upwards. We were all told that for some reason $200 million was the magic number and we all had to work hard to aspire to reach it.
Now, producing a four-fold improvement in top line revenue is never going to be easy. And while they purchased some companies along the way to get closer to the goal, there were never any transformational changes made in their product selection and sales approach. The pull of doing what had always been done was just too inviting not to keep doing it.
So what was really at stake here? Now when I look back I can never remember the discussion of what would happen if we missed this number. And likewise, there wasn’t much comment on how things worked currently – the good and the bad (As Is) and what it would look like when we got to where we needed to get to (To Be), other than a line item on a set of financial accounts. Needless to say, the strategy failed to shift peoples’ behaviour and, other than a few blips of revenue through the consolidation of purchased businesses, the company stalled and ended up going backwards.
Then there was the opposite situation I was involved in when things really fired. This goes back to my experience selling business forms printing for a company that had just purchased a bright, shiny Japanese printing press that sat idle waiting for work. Our sales office was on the second floor, looking down at the very quiet machine.
The owners of the business sat down and spelled out the Stake part of the strategy while we all sat looking down through a window at a very quiet, very inactive and very expensive printing press. They told the whole company that if the press wasn’t kept busy through both the day and most of the night then this business would fail and with it so would our jobs. You couldn’t get much clearer than that.
With that simple but powerful statement we had the “As Is”, “To Be” and “Stake” parts our process nailed – all we needed was the strategy. We bumped away refining this part over the next 3-4 months but always motivated by the view of the rather sedentary machine below. Well it worked. The sales began to take shape and the revenue started rolling, as did that Japanese machine.
Funnily enough once the stake is clear, motivating and agreed by everyone then the rest just starts to follow. Perhaps that’s the secret right there for you on how to end 2012 so much further ahead than 2011?
With the interest in this month’s coaching call, here’s an article on email marketing I wrote earlier that may help those looking to improve their efforts.
Another twelve months of email marketing lie ahead but should you carry on in January just as you ended in December? Planning for the year ahead is a great time to take stock of the last 12 months of email marketing statistics to determine what trends, if any, signify the need for an email marketing strategy review.
To start this process I suggest you tabulate the key email messaging statistics for last year’s campaigns including invalids, bounces, opens, clicks and unsubscribes. Firstly, let’s start with invalids and opens. Any trends you see in these two values should match any changes you have made in your data collection and management methods.
For instance, if you collected a large number of new email addresses through a trade show in June by asking prospects to write their details onto a card then, when you emailed them with July’s newsletter, both invalid and bounce percentages should have risen due to this quick but notoriously unreliable method of data collection. Likewise, if you started to collect permission for your email newsletter online by asking subscribers to fill in a form on which they confirmed their email address twice then your invalid and bounce rates should have been seen to slowly fall.
If the values of both invalids and bounces have remained relatively flat, with your bounce rate being below 2.5% and your invalid rate below 2% then all is fine. Your work here may be on finding new methods to re-activate those already in these two groups.
Managing the re-activation of bounced email addresses is not the easiest of tasks in which to achieve and as such is frequently missed. Perhaps this is the year that you instigate a process that helps to find these lost subscribers?
When tracking your open rates you may see a slow decline. Don’t be too concerned – as I mentioned on our coaching call this month, this is due to an increasing percentage of subscribers using email clients that suppress images by default. (The open rate statistic is gathered by tracking a subscriber’s ability to download an image that is specific to them but otherwise hidden in the email content.)
However, if the last 12 months’ figures show a falling open rate that is greater than a 5% change then your issues may lie with your content rather than any industry-wide issue and further investigation will be required. For those with a relatively consistent email list, e.g. a monthly newsletter, I would advise reviewing each email send with a view to splitting subscribers who have opened the message into two groups – new and existing subscribers. (New being those who see this month’s edition as their first.)
The data may show a disproportionate number of new subscribers opening the message compared with those already on the list. This reveals content that appeals the first few times it is received but then quickly wanes as editions continue to roll out. If there is no conclusive evidence based on splitting the open rate by the recency of subscription, try to look further into the make up of those opening across multiple editions to see if there is some sort of common ‘opener subscriber’ profile.
Conversely, for those not opening – are there any specific characteristics in this group, e.g. high value customers, low value customers? For some reason the communication is not continuing to resonate with a specific audience segment(s). If one of the common components of your ‘non-opener profile’ is the ISP they are using to collect their email through then you could be having issues with successful deliverability to this audience.
Check to ensure that you have a number of seed addresses for this ISP and run some of your own tests using the content of prior editions to see if this is the problem. For those newsletters that rely on a website to hold most of their content, click-through rates are strong gauges of content comprehension. These statistics are not artificially deflated by any outside technology trends and as such can be viewed as a true reflection on the success of your email communication methods.
A twelve-month review of what content generates the most click throughs will help to further cement your understanding of the content your email audience finds the most appealing. Likewise, the converse statistic will guide you on what not to include in your next edition. Falling click-through rates are a concern. As for falling open rates, it helps to find any common subscriber profiles among those doing more or less clicking.
To help you, some email dispatch tools automatically show the percentage of existing and new clickers as individual tools for each campaign. In this case editions that show an even split between new and old clickers reveal content that is appealing to both subscriber groups. Other tools just bundle your clickers into the one aggregate group for you to split out yourself.
I see the unsubscribe action as being somewhat like the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff of inattention. Falling open and click-through rates are the precursor to people taking up this option. A high proportion of those not opening or clicking will have mentally unsubscribed to your communications well before they choose to click on your link to confirm their status.
That said, after plotting your twelve-month unsubscribe trend you should see a relatively steady set of unsubscribe figures – any sharp increases are strong cause for concern.
So there you go – just a few quick ways to ensure your email marketing efforts for 2012 are built on your learning from 2011 allowing for any tweaks, where required, to your overall communication strategy.
To start, just take some time and review the image below. It’s a screen capture from a client’s recently completed split test experiment from their Google Website Optimiser account. If you look closely you will see Variation 1 of their home page achieved a 50% improvement in conversion compared with the original. Google’s tool is quite confident this experiment reflects the new page’s long-term ability, giving it a 96% chance to beat the original.
Hands up who else would like to implement a revised home page that could produce gains like this.
There are numerous detail “things” that were done by both the client and us to get to this stage. However, when I look back on the sequence these followed, I see some very simple principles that anyone can work through. Neither time nor space allows me to share them all; nevertheless, here’s five principles that, when applied, can deliver an unfair share of their responsibility for the probable success you will achieve.
We were fortunate to engage a client who valued their website not on how it looked but how it performed. They also had a technology partner who, whilst they were responsible for the existing website, were client focused enough to want to provide any assistance they could. So, when we floated the idea of split testing home page versions to improve the overall website’s performance, both the client and their technology partner were all for it. Without this approval, none of the gains from these changes would have been realised.
I’ve written before on the power of knowing what you don’t know – here’s the prior article for those that missed it. This client wasn’t afraid to freely admit that there were some gaps in their understanding of the profile of their ideal prospect.
So we worked with them to bridge this gap by surveying their prospect audience with two very simple but nevertheless very powerful questions. (We have asked these same questions before to achieve the same goal for customers from a wide range of divergent industries from home cleaning to wardrobe manufacture to immigration consultancy.)
Once over 500 responses to these questions had been collated we went to work classifying and prioritising them. Then we re-wrote the key messages of their home page to better match the desires of their audience. We probably changed about 125 words of a 1250-word homepage. The images needed work too – but again not many, there were less than 10 that had some re-design efforts by Ben here.
This client operates with an online sales process that spans four pages. As per usual the amount of traffic drops as visitors work through the stages. Nevertheless, the faster we could run each test the more we could fit into a month. So we applied the reworked copy and images of our initial tests to the first two stages of the sales process where the visitor count was at its highest. This reduced the cycle time between tests and helped us deliver improvements quickly.
The results shown in the image above were actually taken from the second test we ran on this page. The first gave a sizable improvement when compared with their original page – from memory the gains were similar again – but we could see there was more to be squeezed out.
On a review call, the client shared with us some new content that was ideal to use to create our second variation. There’s always more to achieve. As I’m writing this, one of the guys is working with the client on version 3, which we hope will push them through the 20% conversion barrier for this stage of their sales process.
So there you have it. Just five simple principles that you can apply when deciding which tactics to implement. These relatively simple steps, when followed, can produce some relatively sizable improvements.
“Conversions, Conversions, Conversions – don’t give me more traffic, Permission – I need more Conversions.”
How often do you think we hear this line? Well, nowhere near as often as this one: “My traffic has dropped off and I’m worried.” Or perhaps, “whatever you can do to increase our traffic then do it quite quickly please.”
Now, we are not alone here. It’s an industry wide-issue. For example, just go to Google and type in “SEO” (Search Engine Optimisation) and you will see a whole bunch of advertised results. It’s a high volume search term. Now try again with the keyword “website conversion optimisation” and the results are very different, as is the search volume – it’s a lot lower.
I don’t want to get all meta-physical here but perhaps this is just a simple reflection of our desire to favour solutions to our problems that rely on changes outside rather than inside our business. So we look to places like Google for the opportunity of more traffic, when the real long-term change needs to occur with what we do with the traffic we already get. Then we can be in the situation that this happy customer is faced with in the images that follow. Site visits are down 10% but conversions are up 48% and the overall site conversion rate is rocketing up by 81%. That’s quite a big smile.
You see, online traffic will wax and wane in tune with the changing desires of the market. But steady improvements in conversions will add sustainable strength to your business.
So what are the fundamentals of success in the website conversion process? Well, here are just five to ponder when heading off into this area.
Fundamental #1: The more you tell – the more you sell
Imagine you are walking through a sports goods store on the hunt for some new running shoes. It’s been a while since you purchased a pair and you need help. It’s a mammoth store, so now you are hunting not for some shoes but some help. Eventually you find someone. Unfortunately, they started yesterday and are very little help. So you leave. In a huff. Shopping was never your favourite pastime. It ranks just above jogging.
Nevertheless, just by luck you find another store close by and in it someone who is also a “leisure” runner like you. Now things are very different. They tell you what to avoid and what to pay attention to. You spend a good few minutes chatting and end up walking out with your ideal pair. They probably cost more than at the first store but that didn’t matter. The job is done.
Most people would love to replicate every part of this happy shopping experience in their own e-commerce store. But that’s a bit hard to achieve. Nevertheless, the theory of telling more and more through the content you provide is one you can follow. So lots of great pictures please, from all angles in as high a quality as possible. Even short videos presenting the product could be an idea, too. (Refer to my previous article on Zappos and their use of quick fire product intro video notes.)
Tell, tell and more tell – load it up and see how this improves your site’s ability to sell.
Fundamental #2: Shopping carts need obvious directions
Online shopping is a fickle environment. A good website will covert 4% of its traffic into orders – leaving 96% to visit, look and leave. Any real-world store would quickly go bust with conversion rates like this. Therefore, any visitor that packs their shopping cart with product and then heads to your online check-out process deserves a slick and easy process to complete the sale. This is not the place for forms that confuse rather than clarify or pages that distract rather than focus attention.
And we are not talking about large, wholesale alterations here to fix a clunky check-out process. Just small tweaks can make a very large difference. For example, the conversion rate increases we delivered for the customer whose data was in the earlier graphic were achieved by us re-writing just two pages of a shopping cart process. Less than 35 words were changed.
Fundamental #3 : Even “Contact us” forms need some selling
When you are next in your Google Analytics account go and look at the number of unique visits your “Contact us” page receives. Now think back to the number of actual contacts – both phone and form – that came from your website. Even allowing for a few just wanting your contact details, I’m sure there will be a reasonably large discrepancy.
A month or so ago we had a client who lived with a sub 2% conversion rate for this type of page. In other words, of the 100 people who visited their “Contact us” page, only two actually did. Not good.
There were a number of issues at fault here. Firstly, they were asking for too much detail – from memory the form requested up to 8 fields to be completed. And secondly, there were no words of “selling” on the page to convince visitors to part with their information.
Again, it doesn’t have to be much. Just a few words on what occurs for those interested in learning more. Your business may offer a complimentary consulting session, a free “measure and quote” or perhaps a short phone review. Whatever it is, it will no doubt be packed full of benefits to make the first engagement a good one.
You don’t offer anything for the first time contact? Well, perhaps it’s time you did. Permission offers a comprehensive online marketing review for all new clients. Now, this is a paid-for service but comes with a rebate for a sizable chunk of the cost for those who decide to proceed further. For some businesses, a “paid-for” introduction service wouldn’t work, but there needs to be something that can be sold from your “Contact us” page.
Fundamental #4: Both the top and bottom of the sales funnel need attention
In very general terms, there are usually two types of prospects that your website will attract. There will be those that have a problem and need to solve it quite quickly – and then there are the visitors who are interested but not ready to decide just yet. The latter is the larger sized group.
Nearly all websites have a “Contact us” page with our without any selling on it, whereas very few also offer content to those who are interested but not yet decided. This is a problem. These people are ripe for influencing. They are in the early stages of gathering information together and are hungry for content to make their job easier.
Buying guides, free reports, and any prospect education content pieces all go a long way to correctly position your company during this early research phase. Yes, it will need some focused email follow-up, but done properly it is a powerful conversion improving strategy.
Fundamental #5: The website visitor chooses the winner
I’ve mentioned this before in previous newsletters but it deserves repeating here again. It is nigh on impossible to deliver a website that achieves the maximum conversion rate for your prospect audience. There’s always room for improvement. Therefore, split-testing your pages against test versions is a process that should be part of every month’s work. The person who decides what test will or will not work is not you, your boss or your marketing advisor – it’s your website visitor. After a statistically valid series of events have passed they will let you know which of the three outcomes your test has achieved – no change, improved change or, possibly, worsening change.
So there you have it. These five short points make up some of the fundamental parts of improving a website’s ability to convert the traffic it receives. Traffic will go up and down but positive conversion choices will live with your website forever more.
Permission delivers a Website Conversion service module that runs for 6 months and is focused on exactly this type of work. It comes with a guaranteed conversion rate improvement. Contact us today if you would like to learn more.
Google AdWords – Speed isn’t always your Friend
Google makes starting a new AdWords campaign a very easy task indeed. Within minutes you can gather together a selection of keywords, write an small text ad, load up your credit card details, and “baboom” – start sending them money and your website traffic. Most should achieve this in 30 minutes or less. At first this seems like good news for the time-starved executive. You are now advertising online on the country’s most visited search engine. Time to sit back, relax and just wait for the phone to ring or the email inbox to fill up with contact requests. Ideally both.
This must happen for a few. Otherwise, those happy images of satisfied customers Google portrays on its AdWords home page would be false. Nevertheless, the Google advertisers who walk through our doors for the first time rarely share stories of drowning under a torrent of leads as a result of their 20 minutes of campaign set-up.
A few turned up at Permission with different stories last month. Well established and successful business people who were spending hundreds of dollars a day with Google and were a) not seeing much benefit from it, and b) not sure if this was typical of the experience of others.
Fortunately, each of them had agreed to complete our initial online marketing review process and because of this we had the necessary time to take them through their AdWords account, pointing out the good and not so good parts. The bits that were great for them and Google and likewise the bits that were not so friendly to their wallet.
Now, I firmly believe that Google has the interests of the advertiser at heart when they designed their account set-up process. They had to allow for a time-starved user with limited attention and, based on the complexity involved, the process does a great job. So all the big things – like keywords, budgets and ads – decisions the advertiser HAS TO INCLUDE to get going are covered in an easy to understand way. Meanwhile, what seem to be relatively small things – like keyword match types, choice of advertising networks and optimal account structure – well, Gooogle decided that these are best done AFTER the account was live.
Unfortunately, it’s these AFTER bits that can make all the difference. Which was why I found myself and my client peering into a web browser at an AdWords campaign, picking over a campaign that had been removing thousands of dollars from his bank account each week and providing very, very little in return. Fortunately, we had this under control after a days work, but still, the money that was already spent was wasted.
So, in the interests of ensuring readers of this newsletter avoid such a situation, here are some of the fundamental AdWords Campaign Set-Up basics that apply to any campaign that is successful (for both Google and the advertiser).
Fundamental basic #1: Take control of your keywords
The underlying resource of any AdWords campaign is the keywords you chose to bid on. The Google Keyword tool is a free resource (just Google it) that will help you see which keywords attract the highest search volume for the regions you want to advertise within. So if you are an Auckland-based mortgage broker, after you have used this tool you may find that “Mortgage Brokers Auckland” is a keyword worth bidding on.
Google enables you to bid on this keyword in four different ways. These are called match types. There is broad match, modified broad match, phrase match and exact match. (For the sake of accuracy there’s a fifth type called negative match that I’ll cover later on.)
When you set up your account for the first time, broad match is the default option. Remember the set-up process is all about speed. So the time taken to educate you on the other match options and then let you pick which suits is put in the AFTER bucket. This is a shame because the default option can cause a lot of problems.
You see, broad match allows Google to present your ad for terms like these:
Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Home Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Mortgage Refinance Brokers
Finance Brokers
Reviews Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Mortgage Brokers Auckland Business Set Up
Some of these are good, a few not so. The other three match types help you refine the way in which your keywords match against what the searcher types in. It starts with the highly refined exact match. Then it gradually becomes more flexible – as each match type is used – until you arrive at the last option, the broad match choice, which opens your keyword up to a mass of terms that may or may not suit your business.
To follow is an image from Google that helps to show you all this in a friendly graphic for the search term formal shoes.
Fundamental basic #2: Know your negatives
The fifth keyword match type is a negative match. This is for keywords that people may use within the phrases you want to bid on but by doing so automatically discount them from being valid search terms. So in the previous graphic from Google, perhaps you didn’t sell any black shoes, or your shoes were just for men. In these cases, the terms “black” and “women” would be in your list of negative keywords.
These types of keywords can be applied to your whole campaign or to just one Ad Group. So when we see a campaign that only uses broad match terms and has no negative keywords then there are problems ahead.
Fundamental basic #3: Don’t mix networks or regions
Google can place your advertising next to their search results and also on websites that host their advertising. One key difference between the two is that one audience is actively searching for what you offer, while the other is passively reading about it. These are two very different environments to advertise within.
Nevertheless, when setting up your account (again, in the interests of time) your Google AdWords campaign is set up to run in both. This is usually not the best option for those starting. Our recommendation is to always focus on searchers first and then, once you have figured out how to make this traffic stream work, begin work on convincing passive readers to click your ads. Trying to do both will muddy your results and make what is already a hard task even harder.
Fundamental basic #4: Carry on the conversation, deliver people to the optimal page
This brings me nicely into how the underlying structure of your account can either work for or against you. Think of it like the commonly used “house foundation” analogy – build on solid foundations and you improve your chances of future success. The foundation for an AdWords campaign is the ease with which it allows you to carry on the question raised by the searcher.
For instance, say they type in the keyword “black formal shoes male”. Just by chance they see your text ad that includes text like their keyword term. And, when they click on it, they are taken to the page on your website that presents them with your full range of black formal shoes for guys. So easy for them – a bit of work for you.
To achieve this experience your campaign needs to contain a lot of Ad Groups. An Ad Group is a Google term for a distinct collection of keywords and the text ads that work for them. Most new campaigns set up at speed have just the one. This will be filled with lots of keywords and perhaps only one or, if we are lucky, maybe two ads. When clicked, these will most likely take you to the home page.
If you run this type of campaign and the searcher types in “black formal shoes male” or even “brown formal shoes female” or possibly “white formal dance shoes male”, they are shown the one ad that talks generically about formal shoes. If they click this ad they will arrive on the home page of the website and have to find the right shoes for themselves. People rarely do.
Fundamental basic #5: Track how well your money is being spent
My final fundamental basic. The online marketing space is littered with opportunities to track and measure. The problem is usually the vast amount of data available, not the lack of it. The Google AdWords system is no different. And while, once again, setting up “conversion tracking” is something missing during the speedy sign-up process, it’s in your account waiting to be turned on.
Once engaged you will be able to see how much money you spent to achieve whatever conversion you want to measure. This could be newsletter sign-ups, e-commerce sales or contact requests – they can all be counted. Some of the data may make you smile, others may not – but at least you will know what does and doesn’t work.
So there you have it. Five fundamentals that are missed during any super speedy new account set-up. Yes, it will take you time to do all five BUT, once done, your account will work so much harder for you. Speed isn’t always your friend. Look here for more on our Google AdWords Campaign Management Services.
The World Cup Finally Arrives – My New Zealand Rugby Experience Returns
I had never seen a top-level rugby game before I came to New Zealand. Fortunately, this all changed for the better after just a few weeks of arriving and getting a job in Auckland. I was the enthusiastic new sales engineer who was given a bright red Nissan Bluebird and probably the hardest territory in South Auckland to see what he could achieve.
But before I was let loose, my boss at the time handed me a small envelope and told me to take the afternoon off. So this was different. A nice new car, a great boss and the chance to take the afternoon off – now I could get used to working in New Zealand.
I looked into the brown envelope, thinking it was some spending money and all I saw was a single ticket to a game of rugby.
“Take yourself to see some real rugby,” Glenn said.
Then I looked closely at the ticket to see who I was going to watch – the All Blacks against Italy. The opening game of the Rugby World Cup 1987. At the time this meant very little to me, as it apparently also did to the Auckland region at the time. So, while I remember a packed stand, I now read that the stadium was only half full. That’s how much enthusiasm there was for the cup when it last came to Auckland.
My seat was way at the back of what was then a rickety old wooden stand resting in the same place we now have the concrete gargantuan ASB Stand. There was some yelling and screaming from those around, and a fair bit of forceful encouragement but nothing really much of note.
This all changed when a young, tall, blond-haired All Black winger was given the ball way back in his own half and he began to race towards the Italian try line. He darted left and right and managed to work his way through those diving to snare him to the ground. You could feel the excitement build and the yelling with it. We were all standing up and shouting at the top of our lungs as he managed to carve through the lot of them and touch down just to the right of the goal posts. The sound, the excitement, the whole experience was all new to me and something that I will never forget.
This was my introduction to rugby in New Zealand that Friday on May 22nd as John Kirwan ran nearly the length of the field and scored against Italy to help the All Blacks win their opening Rugby World Cup game 70 – 6. Of course, John and the rest of the All Blacks went on to do further great things during the tournament and, as we all know, eventually succeeded in winning it for New Zealand.
Since that time I have yelled for every All Black team. Now, some of my English friends see this as nothing short of treason – but that doesn’t bother me. Here I was introduced to a style of rugby that was both exciting to watch and, more importantly, available for all to play well.
So what will this Wold Cup tournament bring New Zealand? Well, this time I hope it will be a realistic expectation of what it takes to win and a mature attitude whatever result we achieve. Remember how bad the country reacted when John Hart and his team failed to deliver in 1995 after the final with South Africa? That wasn’t pretty.
Nevertheless, 2011 has been a year that should put any result into some context. It has been a year with an unfair proportion of natural disasters and workplace tragedies. We’ve experienced those going through life and death experiences. We’ve seen how these are raw, hard, emotional, life-changing events that had us all looking at our TV screens and shaking our heads in disbelief as fires burnt deep underground and people covered in the dust of shattered Christchurch buildings were led towards help. Any loss on a rugby field shouldn’t really matter that much after going through all this.
So, it must be time to have some fun and let loose to enjoy ourselves for the next two months. Yell for your team. Welcome those new to the country. And it would be nice to have us all on our feet at the one time shouting as an All Black winger runs the length of the field, swatting opposition players in their path.
Have fun.
“So Chris, any ideas on how important video is going to be for online marketing?”
This question was raised during the Practical Email Marketing course last month. It had me scurrying for a quick response. From memory I came back with a comment that I think was valuable but afterwards it got me thinking. So, how have our expectations changed regarding when video should be used? And where are the hot spot places for it to to be used to help you achieve more online? These are two reasonably chunky questions that I’ll try to begin to answer with these four points.
Point 1 – Video doesn’t have to be a “talking head” to work well.
It can sometimes be a struggle to explain complex products or services by words alone. Adding some pictures can help but still it could take way more time to consume this content than the average “time-starved” prospect is willing to offer.
You could replace all this with a person speaking to the camera – but still that will take too long. All they are doing is reading the mass of words you wrote previously. That’s where some cool animation can work wonders.
Here are some examples. First, look at the way Dropbox explain the features and benefits of their cloud-based storage solution. Visit them here: www.dropbox.com. The picture below of their home page shows their reliance on the animation.
It’s the only way they choose to get their message across. It must work – tens of millions of customers use Dropbox. Google is a great fan of this method of communication, too. Look how they decided to introduce a recent addition to Google Analytics – Advanced Funnel Tracking – see here for this animation clip: http://www.google.com/analytics/analytics-funnels.html
Both examples use animation in a way that is smart, fast flowing and packed with information that quickly imparts the message they need delivered. We have developed similar solutions for a few clients in some of the Adobe Flash game work we have created. Let me know if you would like to see some examples.
Point 2 – If a talking face is required you don’t need CNN production values to make it work.
Zappos is a reasonably sizable North American e-commerce store owned by Amazon that sells clothes, bags, beauty products, in fact a whole lot of stuff catering to the shopping desires of men, women and even those buying for their children.
Browse through their products and you start to see that most now include a short video description. This is hosted by a Zappos staff member, takes just a few minutes and comes across as the ideal conversation you would get from a super-knowledgable staff member in any competing “bricks and mortar” store. Which is quite a challenge to find. Not the competing bit – the knowledgeable staff part!
As an example, here’s a link to some “Ocean Minded Dune Rider Shoes”: http://tinyurl.com/dune-raider. Look just down the screen and there’s the link to the video Zappos have done on them. It’s just 51 seconds long but boy does this guy get through the content in a professional way: http://tinyurl.com/dune-raider-preview.
I read recently that each year Zappos are loading up tens of thousands of videos just like this one onto their e-commerce website. There’s only one reason why they would go to all the hassle of producing, editing and then loading them onto the site – they must improve conversion rates.
Point 3 – Don’t forget your mobile audience – video works well there.
Recently, I co-presented a 50-minute workshop at a customer’s two-day conference on the subject of the growing smart phone market in New Zealand and its relevance for email marketers. We kicked off the talk with an open admission that neither of us had all the answers. But one thing we did know was that times were a-changing – faster for some in the room than for others – and with it their email formats will need to change as well.
This brings me back to smart phones and their ease of consuming video. Just by the nature of full-screen playback on a screen that fits into your palm, video content is a great fit for this market. So, while text and image content struggles with the restrictions of a single-column width format, full-screen video could be a winner.
Whether the mobile space is an urgent or a long-term decision is something your Google Analytics account can help you determine. Just peek into the special “Mobile” section of Version 5 (we covered it during our conference call this month) and there you will see the percentage of visitors that use mobiles and the top-line stats – bounce rate, time on site – on how your existing site serves them.
Point 4 – If you go long with your content, go long with your tracking too.
While on the subject of Google Analytics, why not call on its event-tracking abilities in Version 5 to see if people are really watching the full 40 minutes of the video you may put up? One of our clients uses video really well in their selling process. Nevertheless, a 45-minute video for an area of their website that targets prospects – well, I thought that could be a bit long. So we set up some tracking to let Google Analytics tell us a) if the video was being played and b) if so, how long people were looking at it.
The results were interesting. Yes, there were some people who did look at the whole video, and they did go on to convert quite well for the next steps of the sales process. Nevertheless, there was a larger group that quit after just 10 minutes of video and never went back to see more. So the video’s content was re-sorted to make it more engaging and to do a better job of “selling” them on the next stage.
There you go – four points that I hope make you want to reconsider how video content can be used in your online marketing.
Have fun.
Practical Email Marketing – August 2011
For the last five years I have been involved as co-tutor for the Practical Email Marketing Course put on by the Marketing Association and the University of Auckland Shortcourses department. It’s always a fun two days. Fitting it all in is always a challenge. Amanda and I start the day with a proposed agenda packed full of content and what is really just a guide to how long each session should take.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t take us long to get out of control and by our first coffee break we are always behind. How much behind depends on the amount and type of questions we get asked. This month’s session was no different. Most in the group were already email marketing and had come eager to find an edge in their market. So from the first 15 minutes onwards we were both peppered with a myriad of really smart questions.
As luck would have it we managed to cover all the content. And, based on the workshop presentations we had to judge, the large bulk of what was covered was quickly applied by each group. So what were some of the “edge sharpening” points for those who read this newsletter to also use in their email marketing?
Well here’s five. These comprise just a smidgen of the content covered in the full two-day course. (Contact the Marketing Association for a schedule to get the whole serving by joining us next time.)
Two factors that work in partnership – increasing message relevance and growing production difficulty.
“So what’s the one part of email marketing that has the greatest effect on the success of the campaign?” I asked the group at the start of day two when reviewing what we had covered during day one.
“Relevance” was the reply – followed by the clarifying statement “Being as relevant as you can”.
This is correct – email marketing that is relevant gets opened, gets clicked and gets results. The only issue is that achieving this comes at a cost – the most relevant campaigns are usually the hardest to build and take the longest to implement.
For example, say you are a men’s clothing retailer with a 10,000 customer email marketing list and within this you have three very different segments of buyers based on their spending amounts and product choices. The ideal option would be to run three alternative promotions with different creatives and offer types – each ideally matched to its customer segment. That’s the most relevant option. However, what happens in the majority of cases is that one offer is cast across the whole list. Frequently, the easy option is taken because it saves time, costs less and is easier to manage. But what some people fail to realise is that all this time-saving work at the campaign build end translates into more work later on.
Less relevant campaigns result in reduced conversion rates and therefore additional marketing is required to ensure future sales targets are met. Sorry, there are no short cuts to producing highly relevant email campaigns – they take hard work.
There is a fixed and limited amount of subscriber attention you have to work with.
Everyone would love their subscribers to pore over their email newsletters, having them read every word, click on every link and generally devour it with the same level of care that was taken preparing it. Well sorry – this just ain’t going to happen.
Firstly, people will skim over your copy, picking out the bits that capture their eye and convince them to read more. I always imagine them having a ticking stopwatch counting down while this is happening. For some that could be 5 seconds, others may spare you 15 seconds – but it’s not going to be minutes.
Design and create your campaigns with this in mind so your subscribers can read the main parts of your messages with or without the images turned on. Forcing them to take the time to open the images to replace red crosses with something of meaning just burns through valuable message-reading attention.
Make it easy to do the easy tasks.
One of the group commented on something that I thought was interesting. She had recently changed jobs so during her last few days of work she had to go through and update her email address in the newsletters she was subscribed to.
Some made this relatively straightforward task easy to achieve, others made it a nightmare – so hard in fact that, rather than change her details, she chose to unsubscribe and be done with them. Moving jobs is not an uncommon action, so how hard do you make updating an email address for your subscribers? Is there an “Update Your Details” link at the top of your message that takes people to a form where they can quickly advise you of the change?
Capitalise on those messages that are more expected than others.
There are very few email newsletters I expect to receive on a certain day at a certain time. The vast majority arrive with a surprise – some welcome, others not so. Nevertheless, there is one email campaign that every subscriber does expect to receive – the “welcome campaign”.
These are messages sent to you as a direct result of you subscribing. Perhaps you opted in by completing a form or by checking a box during the order process. Whatever the action, what you usually expect next is a response of sorts just so you know something did actually happen after you clicked “submit”.
It doesn’t have to be wordy to put you at ease. Just a short “Thanks for registering“ could be enough to reassure you that everything ended up in the right spot. Now, the smart email marketers will capitalise on this heightened attention and will not squander this with a short message. Oh no, they would supply a steady series of well written email messages that not only welcome the person onto the list but also introduce them “around” the website they have subscribed to and the places where the most juicy bits of content are found.
Behaviour-based email sequences or “triggers” like these welcome messages can produce some amazing uplifts in open and click-through rates when compared with normal campaigns. If you are on any North American email lists you would have recently experienced a definite increase in these types of messages coming your way. Yes, they take a bit longer to develop and deploy – but like my earlier note on improving your relevance being something that comes with increased workload – all this extra effort has some subsequent rewards.
Extract your email traffic from your normal direct and referring domain website traffic.
Knowing how big any email marketing rewards will be depends on your ability to identify and measure the effectiveness of all this extra website traffic. So where does your email traffic show up in your web analytics reports?
For those who don’t properly “tag” their links it can either be found in the “direct traffic” or “referring domains” area. Both of these contain lots of other bits of traffic, which really makes it impossible to isolate which visits are from your last email campaign.
Fortunately, Google has a tool that makes it relatively easy to fix this and edit all your website links contained in your email messages so that when they are clicked they are tracked and shown as separate campaigns in your reports. Visit http://bit.ly/oQlqG7 to find out more.
Yes, it takes some extra time to add the extra parts to each link but once it is done you have a reliable way to see how much better or poorer your email traffic is when compared with the other streams of traffic that your website gets.
It should be better – conversion rates on their own should be at least 1.5 or 2 times better. Otherwise, your email messaging is doing a very poor job of “warming up” your prospects.
So there you have it. Just five simple points that could be worth reviewing with your own email marketing during the months ahead. When used properly it can be a powerful part of any online marketing strategy.
Good luck.
The allure of all that social media online attention was way too much for Google so it’s back again with another social media play (anyone remember Google Wave?), this time with Google+. So in one corner there’s the Gorilla of Facebook with its 750 million users and now, in the other corner, we have Google+ with a quickly growing base, but still way below 10% of its competitor’s membership.
So here’s a quick summary of the Chris Price take on what all this means.
Firstly, I think Google has a way to go before it offers a viable alternative to the big F. There are two areas in which it needs work – simplicity and community. Facebook is so simple to use that even the most technologically challenged person can write a status note and find a friend to connect with. There’s not a lot that can go wrong. This is probably why there are so many millions of people using it across so many age groups and demographics. Keep it simple and it seems the crowds will follow – as they have.
Google, however, has only got part of the simplicity message. Writing a post in Google+ is a breeze. You just start writing away and you are done.
Here’s an image of what my Google+ page looks like.
Google even extends the way you can interact with your friends by allowing you to use group video and group chat. But when it comes to finding and connecting to others in Google+, then things become a bit more tricky. Part of the reason for this is Google’s ability to let you cluster your friends into “circles” and then to share certain types of content with each of these.
Here’s what my circle area looks like – leaving me the job of picking people from my contacts and then dragging them down into the circle I want them to be in.
Everyone needs to be in their own circle but some can be in more than one at a time. You can configure your own profile to have alternative privacy settings for each circle. Getting confused yet? Well it’s all a lot easier once you get a Google+ account and watch the videos they offer to see what you need to do.
Which is of course the issue – you need to watch a video to figure it all out. It’s the true dilemma I suppose Google faced. Do they make their tool so basic to use that it attracts and engages as many people as possible, knowing that by doing so they risk being seen as no different to Facebook? Or should they increase the number of features available in Google+ to set them apart from the alternative but, by doing so, also increase the likelihood that people will find the tool too hard to use and therefore limit its growth?
So they took the latter option and, while millions are seemingly joining every week, none include those who are in my rather small but perfectly formed Facebook friends list. Which means I’m not moving soon. Social media websites are the ultimate example of the “network effect” in action – the value of the website is directly linked to the number of people using it. So, while having 750 million users is a nice thing to present, the real value to me as a user is that my siblings in the UK use Facebook, as do my cousins in Denmark and, closer to home, some ex work chums in Wellington. It’s probably a collection of only 25 people but for me those 25 are very important.
A few of these work in IT so are super-techno-literate, while others probably use a computer just to check their own personal email once or twice a month. And somehow Facebook, with its very basic interface, allows them all to connect with each other in a very simple but very valuable way.
So what was really broken in all this to make Google go out and produce a replacement?
Some would argue that it was the way that Facebook allowed limited control of how your content was shared amongst your connections through some quite basic privacy settings. Personally, I’ve never had an issue with it – and neither have any of my Facebook friends. But nevertheless, there’s no doubt that Google+ with its “circles” of contacts allows you a lot more control here.
However, improving the privacy options available to users is not the real strategy here. It’s all about capturing as much online attention as possible. Last year Facebook kicked Google off its perch as the most visited website in the US. That would have hurt those at Google. There’s only so much “attention” you and I have and one more hour spent inside Facebook chatting with our friends is one less hour you could use searching Google for a product or reading other websites, where in both cases you may end up clicking on a Google ad or two along the way.
Whether Google will achieve its goal of winning the “attention war” between it and Facebook I’m not sure. However, I am picking that there are buildings full of very smart computer engineers in Google Land trying their hardest to ensure they do. What we see now in Google+ could well be very different to what ends up on our screens in the months ahead. The drive to simplify the interface while still retaining some edge over Facebook must be a constant challenge.
My take is that Google will have a year to gain the membership volumes they need to make the network effect work for instead of against them. That is unless Facebook makes a privacy blunder of massive proportions, which convinces masses of people to migrate to Google sooner than they expected.
Attracting a thousand visitors during a month is a reasonable target for most company websites. This allows for a fair dollop of traffic from Google’s search engine, perhaps a smattering from paid advertising and the rest made up from those who know the businesses’ url and arrive as direct traffic. A thousand visits breaks down to approximately 50 each working day – or an even more approximately one every 10 minutes.
Just imagine that amount of real person traffic walking around your offices. Six every hour moving around you and your team, wandering from room to room. It would be quite a fast “wander“ though. Expect some speed in their steps as they take less than a few minutes for their visit, before leaving through the nearest window. Then there will be those who just “bounce” into the first room they find and then leave – never to be seen again.
Very occasionally you may have one who will raise his/her hand and ask for some help. Perhaps they might complete a form or even use their mobile phone to ring your office. Nevertheless, the vast majority will just hang around, look, read and then move on. A silent ongoing procession of reasonably inactive people.
Just image if you owned a retail store and your actual shop visitors acted in this way. Lines of them entering your store, looking around, picking up product – not asking any questions – and then promptly leaving without saying a word. Now there would be some who would purchase and, if we use some standard credible online e-commerce conversion rates, they should represent between 3 and 4% of the total crowd.
Online these percentages work but offline – in the world of real leases and staffing costs – these figures are a fast track to financial ruin. Here, a retail operator needs to hit conversion rates of 5 to 6 times these figures to make things pay.
Anyway, back to the hoards of people walking around and doing very little. So what would the smart retailers do in a situation like this? Well, the last thing I would expect is for them to sit back and do nothing and let all their hard work just fail in front of them. Nope, they would go through a long list of things to try and entice these visitors to release the grip on their wallets. Ideas like a) laying out the store differently to make some stock easier to get to, or b) reworking their range to better appeal to their visitors, and perhaps even c) improving the lighting so the darker areas at the back of the store are now a breeze to fossick around in.
I’ll give you an example of the smarts that can be applied in the retail space to extract as much money as possible from your wallet. A friend of mine owns the local pharmacy. He is a very smart operator and recently decided to grow his business by taking over the shop next door. This meant he had the opportunity to completely re-design the shelving and stock layout for the whole store. So because he knows what he doesn’t know, instead of sitting down with a piece of A4 paper and a cup of coffee and figuring it all out over a lunch break he spent the money and brought in a retail expert.
This person analysed the floor area and the types of products shown and then drew up a complete map of where to place what product – even down to the height they were to be placed on the shelving. For instance, the more profitable lines were placed at eye level in easy-to-spot locations. The spacing between the shelves was fixed too – just so two people could bend over and look at each shelf and not touch bums. Yep, making people go bum to bum is a definite no no. Anyway, the upshot of all this work was that his business grew in floor area by say 20% but his sales grew by an even larger amount.
Here’s another example – this one is from my history of selling business form printing way back in time. I joined the company the same week they had taken delivery of a new fandangled printing press from Japan. This was able to produce very specialised business forms – think invoices and packing slips – that combined a piece of paper on one side and an adhesive label on the other. Now it was possible to print both a packing slip and the delivery label all in the one place.
My job was to visit businesses in Auckland promoting this solution. It was a job that the directors of the company told me in the interview was the easiest in the whole company. Such was the obvious and immediate value this solution offered.
The only problem was that no one wanted to hear my story. They all thought it was too hard to alter what they were doing and, what’s more, nobody wanted to be the first to tackle this new technology. I probably presented my story to over 50 companies and they all said NO. Some quite forcibly.
I was a reasonably thick-skinned sales person but still, once I reached a month with no sales after 50 presentations under my belt, things were looking grim. Even the directors were starting to question the merits of the expensive piece of Japanese Iron they had sitting idle in their warehouse. So we all sat down and, in a caffeine-induced haze, decided that the sales message needed some serious changes and with it the inclusion of just one happy customer to give it some credibility.
So my job changed to finding not a list of customers but just one who would take this product on for FREE for two months and only continue to use it if it cost them less than their existing product. Fortunately for me, Kodak Auckland were keen to take the “no risk” option and within two months they were happily churning through their own forms with no desire to let them go. Once we had one well known customer, then doors started to open and the product started to take off.
Both of these examples support the case that when problems or opportunities are right in front of our faces we generally do the right thing and a) call on help to fix it, or b) get together as a group and find a way to wade through the mess to find a solution.
However, when it comes to matters online the story is very, very different. Here, where the action is hidden, any such failings in the vast majority of cases are left to fester away, causing a steady stream of harm.
So how do you avoid this occurring for your website?
Well, first you need to correctly configure your website tracking to make what lays hidden more obvious, so that you too can “see web people” and the problems they are having. One of our customer coaching calls a few months ago discussed the selection of tools you can pick from. Google’s Analytics product is a good one to start with. Once set up, this will allow you to see the web pages (think aisles of your shop or parts of your sales message) that either assist or inhibit your sales process. For instance, problems may occur when visitors are unable to find the product they want or perhaps locate the answer to a question they may have. Or your website navigation could be so poor that visitors arrive and leave after just seeing a very small number of the pages you would like them to.
Some smart tools even allow you to virtually follow your visitors as they click through your pages and skip from page to page. I talked about this in last month’s newsletter. By using these tools you really do feel like you are wandering the halls of your website with your prospects.
Secondly, once you have all the recordings you want and more Google Analytics data than you know what to do with, then you will need to call on some independent advice to tell you what is and isn’t working. This requires some specialised skills and there are a few companies that offer this service. You should be able to find a business that can sell you a small “tasting plate” of consultancy to point out a few good and not so good parts of your online presence.
For instance, here at Permission we offer an Online Marketing Business Opportunity Review. This costs less than $500 and includes some service guarantees that should make even the most tentative of buyers feel comfortable to proceed.
After this short engagement you should have a better feel for the size of the challenge ahead. For instance, do 100% of your visitors fail to engage with your online sales presentation – as was the case with my printing story? Or are your e-commerce sales so bad because visitors are struggling to navigate through your virtual aisles – as could have been the case with my retail friend if he didn’t call in the experts when setting out his new space.
Fortunately, every website will have its own collection of problems to work on. Its just that some are more severe than others. Knowing which ones you have to battle with all depends on your desire and willingness to “see your web people”.
I have a friend who has been going through a rough patch these last few months. Nothing financial, nothing tragic, just a general and overriding feeling of not being the happy type of guy he once was. Fortunately, by sharing this change with a few close friends, he found himself referred to an elderly, grey-haired guy at a beachside residence just out of Auckland.
Anyway, last week, over a few beers, my mate shared with me a recent insight the “greyer one” had proffered during his latest session. It would seem life comes with the biggest illusion of them all –namely the belief that we can affect some control over the experiences that come our way. So our health changes, with little regard for our plans; family members do what they want; and then, for those in business, there’s more lack of control than many of us are willing to accept.
But it’s not all bad news. Well, not totally. You see, the grey-haired man from the sea told my mate that all is not totally lost – there was one thing he could control and that was the way he reacted to everything that came his way. Now this person is a bit of a control freak anyway, so being told this news didn’t go down too well. But after some solid debating between himself and his aged advisor he gradually accepted the logic supporting it. And once he had, he admitted to feeling that he had moved one step further away from where he was and, consequently, one step closer to where he wanted to get back to.
All this is good news for him but not so good news for those of us tasked with managing a business. Knowing that we will never really have complete control over our operation is not something most of us want to accept. The appeal of achieving this state of total control sounds so inviting. Just imagine what it would be like. Revenue lines would climb upwards, perfectly mirroring the inclines of our budget graphs, staff would do exactly as their job description said they should and, last but not least, customers would send us a steady stream of the exact type of work we wrote about receiving 12 months prior in the marketing section of our business plans.
But of course it doesn’t work like this. It could be said that all these documents, when viewed in the wrong light, just support the fallacy that they can on their own magically control the business. The true reality is that all they represent are guide posts to help us steer our resources in the correct direction to help us better manage the uncontrolled nature of business. But they are not alone. There are other tactics we can employ to help us along the way.
It would be fair to say that marketing a business contains more ‘un-controllable’ aspects than most. Changing markets and fickle customer needs are just two big problems that should make only the very optimistic among us (some would say foolhardy) think they had complete control over their marketing outcomes. Nevertheless, there is a marketing task that, once completed, will help you capture a smidgen more control over the marketing outcomes you desire, and that’s running an active email marketing strategy.
From my 12 years’ experience in online marketing, I can confidently state that the vast majority of businesses would benefit from adding email marketing to their communications plans. However, of the prospects that come our way, it’s the minority that has something underway. And, I am sorry to say, that when I look through the list of our customers I only see a few who are actively using email in any part of their business.
So what’s wrong?
Well, to help me answer that big question I’ll call on an experience I had only the other week. I was meeting with a business owner who was an email marketing non-practitioner. Over coffee, she was doing a very good job of recounting each and every reason why she hadn’t begun email marketing – even after I had told her to do so a few months prior. Her list was a comprehensive one so I thought I would work through them here – with my answers included – just in case your situation is similar to hers (yes, Rebecca, John, Ray, Claire, Chris, Joanne and Sneha – this part is for you).
To start, she hit with me with the classic, “I don’t know what to write.” She had a consulting business so I told her to take a deep breath, calm down and write some simple stories of the work she had done – protecting people’s privacy along the way. Nothing too involved, nothing too complicated and probably less than 1000 words to start with. She could then finish this with either an offer or some call to action at the end to wrap things up. Short, simple and something that shouldn’t take her days to produce.
Next up I had, “But I don’t know when to send it.” I told her to keep clear of Monday at 9:00am and Friday at 4:30pm and between these to pick a time that best suited her. And yes, when she started out her list would probably be so small that she could possibly hand deliver each edition. But I told her not to worry about this, just to focus on getting that first edition out and about.
“But what should it look like? It needs to look professional.” Well yes, but it doesn’t need to be a work of art either. For instance, when I first started my own printed newsletter I bravely asked for feedback from a few close by clients and was told by one that it reminded him of something his local PTA would send him. Ouch!! For the next edition, I had our designer Ben take control of the look and layout and things improved markedly. But at least I was underway.
I also mentioned to her not to worry about the software she may need to make it all happen. There are more email marketing tools out there now for a list of her size than she would ever hope to imagine. And, fortunately, these tools don’t need a tech guru to drive them for low send volumes and so there was no need to worry about the costs – they are very affordable. Using an existing template with her logo and the finished content shouldn’t cause too much of a headache. It may be a bit minimalist in style but it would look OK to get going with.
“But who should I send it to?” My very short answer – anyone who has given you permission to. If you want to be really clever you could have two different sends, one for your customers and the other for your prospects. But please don’t let clever get in the way of you sending something out.
Take a leaf out of Google’s book and give yourself permission to put the development of your own email marketing strategy into a Beta stage of development. Google’s email client, Gmail, was in Beta for five years and now has over 193 million users monthly. Now personally, I think that five years is a bit long for most but do allow yourself at least the first year to be a work in progress. Try not to be too hard on yourself with those first few editions. Yes, you will look back and possibly cringe but at least you will be able to look back.
And while at this stage you can capitalize on your freshly learned insights by optimizing your efforts further. For example, you could improve your subscription rates – say, by asking more people to join and / or offering more benefits for membership. Or you could improve your production methods, which might include you scheduling one morning a month to sit down and write the darn thing in one go. Maybe use a small notebook (either electronic or physical) during the month to collect items of interest to make the production process even faster (my Evernote account does this for me).
All going well, after a few editions you will start to experience some positive changes to balance out all the extra work you’ve put in. Perhaps a client who hasn’t called for a while may do so after being prompted by reading a recent article. Or it could be that a prospect decides to buy sooner than you would expect – again because they have read and liked what you recently wrote. And perhaps even you will start to look at your business and the solutions you provide in a completely different light all because you have to write about it each month.
When you boil it all down to the underlying basics, email marketing is really just an easy way for you to communicate via email with your customers and prospects. It’s nothing more. And starting a short conversation with them each month, every month, on a subject that interests both you and them is quite handy, and a smart thing to control.
So once that first edition is out and about just do two more things. First – get a coffee, sit back and give yourself a “pat on the back” for a job well done. And secondly, send me a copy to have a look at – don’t worry I’ll be gentle – the fact that you have reached this first edition milestone is the real achievement.
For some reason, this would seem to be the month for prospects to contact Permission seeking help with their Google AdWords Campaign Management. In nearly all cases they have arrived after having had someone manage it before and do a less than perfect job. So much so that they are quite motivated to make a change.
Usually these motivations are driven by things going bad financially. Either they have ended up paying too much per click or their monthly budget has been sucked up with high management fees that they struggle to see the value in.
There’s a strong element of trust when you engage someone to take on the management of a solution you may know little about. It’s like dropping your car in for its annual service and not understanding a jot of what the mechanic tells you has been done – except that it cost you a lot more than you thought and took longer than expected.
Fortunately, there are some attributes of the poor set up of a Google AdWords account that are easy to spot for the new marketer. Here are a few that should be easy for the business owner to pick out and see if things are going awry.
Firstly, all the ‘optimizing’ work should be done on Your Google AdWords account. This is something I thought was pretty obvious until I realized that some management companies used their own Google AdWords account to manage campaigns for their clients. This may suit them but is a big problem for you.
Your account contains all your advertising history with Google. Do things properly by them and this history can help you reap some strong rewards in how Google treats your advertising spend, which would be hidden from those competitors who open their account years or even months after you.
Plus there are the benefits that accrue when you link your own Google AdWords account with your Google Analytics account (assuming you use this as your website’s analytics tool). Once the two accounts are linked you can receive click cost data, which makes it a relative breeze to produce your AdWords ROI down to a single keyword level.
Following on from the theme of tracking, I for one never like spending money without knowing what I will receive in return. Therefore, setting up your AdWords account without spending the 5 to 10 minutes to install its built-in Conversion tags on your website is as bad as sending Google a cheque each month with no idea what they are providing for your money. You should know how much Google ‘charges’ you per sale, newsletter registration, or webinar download – whatever the conversion options your AdWords traffic can deliver on.
The likelihood of you receiving any conversions is usually predicated on your account being established with the view of the searcher in mind. For example, let’s say you sold widgets. Blue, green, white and black were all available. As were fast, slow and medium speeds. Big and small were options you carried, too. Then along comes a Google searcher looking for a Big, Fast Black one. They type in that term and are met with your advertisement that says “Widgets for Sale” and a link that takes them to the home page of your website.
Now selling widgets is a competitive market. So with this ad they also see around it other ads – some say “Black Widgets for Sale” – then there is a “Big Widgets for Sale” ad. And then, near the top, is the one that captures their attention – “Big Fast Black Widgets” – exactly what they are looking for and ‘click’, they are gone from the page and directly onto the exact page that sells Big Fast Black Widgets. Bingo! Moments later a new widget is purchased.
A well set up Google AdWords account ‘wins’ this click by offering the advertiser the most relevant ad for the keyword they type in (Big Fast Black Widget). It achieves this by containing just the right number of AdGroups that in themselves contain the smallest number of keywords for the ad text(s) they can. This could be as simple as one keyword phrase (Big Fast Black Widget) per each ad text.
In contrast, a poorly established account has one AdGroup containing all possible keyword choices and just the one ad text. This single ad text has to account for all the different keywords being used to ‘fire it up’ so it does what it can and sends the visitor to the home page. On the other hand, the targeted ad text only has to allow for one keyword option so it can send the visitor to the most relevant page for that keyword.
Therefore, if you look at your account and see just one AdGroup chocker block with keywords then you have problems. But that’s nothing new – you probably already knew this from the low click volumes and high costs that this account structure frequently delivers.
So if you are not sure if your Google AdWords account is being managed the right way, then ask yourself these questions:
A ‘No’ answer to any of these questions points to some problems that warrant a bit more digging.
Before I started Permission I was the general manager of a smallsoft ware company whose website was in desperate need of some search engine optimization. We were nowhere to be seen in any of the results we should have been.
This was in late 1999, a time when there were only a few companies that provided search engine optimization services but somehow I managed to locate a company keen to help us out. I told them what I wanted to achieve and enquired how all this SEO ‘stuff ’ worked. Just the normal nosey Chris Price way of doing business as well as me being interested in knowing exactly what work was going to occur in exchange for my money.
Well, the salesperson then decided to throw every piece of technical web-like jargon they could muster at me, achieving their desired goal of making me feel totally confused. They then went on to tell me it was indeed a very complex area of specialization and way beyond the scope of being explained within this meeting and, anyway, I shouldn’t worry about the detail – they would manage this for me – and all for a very ‘reasonable’ fee of $2500 – per quarter over two years.
Back then I had no idea what was what, so I signed on and for two years we were ranked reasonably well for our brand name. Yep that’s all – no ranking for the generic term for the service we provided – just the brand name (which, I might add, was in the URL of our domain name). Now I know that this was something that should have taken someone about 5-10 hours to achieve. And for this I paid about $20,000 all up. Not good, and something that to this day still makes me angry.
Personally, I find the business ethics behind ensuring the prospect remains in the dark so as to ruthlessly maximize your gain to be abhorrent but, unfortunately, it is still quite apparent in the online optimization marketplace. It’s one of the reasons why we have a strategy of educating all those customers (who want to learn) on what will be done and why to achieve their goals online. And so I personally spend over 15 hours each month producing both this newsletter and the content for our monthly customer conference call.
To push this education theme even more for search optimization, I thought this month I would slay some of the many myths from this area of online marketing. I have settled on the top five I come across most often.
Myth No 1 – Search engine optimization is a mish mash of ‘black box’ techniques that only a highly skilled and technical
person can understand.
Rubbish. While Google must be one of the world’s most complex software applications to do what it does, the theory behind helping it index and rank your site for the keywords you want it to are relatively straightforward and what’s more can be explained in a few pages. Google does a good job itself on this page here:
Search Engine Optimisation by Google
There are no complex formulas or new pieces of jargon to learn. Just follow the steps and you will see results. And, as I have mentioned before, as a business owner if you can understand how New Zealand’s provisional and terminal tax works then I’m sure you can master all of the complexity that online marketing has to offer – including search engine work. But, that said, it still requires work. (Now that part you may not want to do yourself.) And the amount of work required will depend on the competitive nature of your market and style and size of your website.
Myth No 2 – Your rank is determined by the volume of traffic your website receives.
Nope – not true either. There is no correlation between your visitor count going up and your rankings moving in the same direction. It would be nice but if this was the case then all the top rankings would be filled with high-traffic brand name sites – which is definitely not the case and therein lays the opportunity for the small business wanting to level the marketing playing field online.
I see Google’s goal being to deliver highly relevant results to its searchers. And relevance is all about content and its apparent reputation online – definitely not visitor volume.
Myth No 3 – If you advertise with Google your search rankings will rise.
Sorry, a ‘no’ again. And I’m thankful this is the case, too. Now, I admit that your site may get indexed quite soon after your ads start appearing but unless something has changed since the last indexing run then this shouldn’t alter your ranking. The separation between paid and organic advertising is similar to that you experience between the editorial and advertising content in a hard copy magazine.
Myth No 4 – Every place in the search rankings has the ability to attract a similar volume of traffic.
So, if you rank No 3, then the clicks your ranking could achieve are close (but perhaps a smidgen down) on those that would come if you achieved a ranking of No 1. While this sounds like a highly logical supposition, it’s not true. That first ranking can collect an obscenely unfair amount of traffic. See the graphic to follow from Seobook.com. Notice the super slice of traffic a top No 1 ranking achieves and how it quickly drops down for ranking 2 and again for 3 as the law of diminishing returns carries on as the rankings drop down the page.
Now knowing this you can see that optimization eff orts need to be focused on achieving No 1 rankings for as many keywords as you can sustain. Like most areas of online marketing there are limited resources to apply so trade-offs have to happen. Therefore, it may be better to apply your efforts to achieve a No 1 ranking on a lesser searched term for which you are currently recording a No 3 rank than to move your ranking up from No 11 (top of page 2) to the bottom of page one for a higher volume and more competitive term.
Likewise, if you are already No 1 for a keyword it would make sense to see if you can get another page ranked below it by moving it into the first page results, which can let Google automatically bring it up below your No 1 rank – so now you have both a No 1 and No 2 presence. See the pic to follow that shows this in action for one of our clients, Boston Wardrobes.
Myth No 5 – The content in the Keyword META tag on your web pages positively affects how they are ranked.
I once had a client call me up in a very annoyed state because he had been told (apparently by a friend of his brother) that this was the case. He promptly demanded to know why we hadn’t entered much detail in this field on his site. This told me two things. First, I hadn’t done a good enough job of telling him what did and didn’t work – so my education was off the mark. Second, that I was charging him too little as he thought his friend (who was not in the industry, I might add) knew more than me. I provided a fix for both problems and everyone was happy – eventually.
Anyway, it didn’t take long for me to show him that top-ranking pages on his site were there with absolutely no content in this field, which supported the theory that Google, and most other search engines, ignored this field when deciding who should rank where.
So there you have it, my top five search engine optimization myths debunked with a short comment on why, for you to ponder. I hope that this has gone some way to dispel any confusion you may have had about this fascinating area. It’s one we certainly enjoy working in. The challenge of facing off against your competitor in the search results is something we relish. Let us know if you would like to know more and I, or one of our team, will help out.
One of my early roles in direct selling had me selling business form printing. Back then, it was all dot matrix, tractor-fed invoices with holes either side, all with multiple copies that were ‘bash printed’ on loud machines that sat inside noise-proofed rooms. Remember that? Well, selling boxes and boxes of that type of printing was my life for nearly 3 years.
The business I worked for was based in South Auckland. It was a reasonably sized operation, with three equal-share directors, half a dozen production staff, the same number of sales and customer services staff, and a new Japanese printer that had an insatiable appetite for printing that us sales people had to ‘feed’ with new work.
The owners’ ideas of marketing weren’t that complex. Give them a golf course, a new prospect and half a day walking the greens and they usually ended up with a nice, fat, juicy, new order. They schmoozed their way into owning nice new Daimlers and were very comfortably off, thank you very much. However, for us lowly ranked sales people, our marketing process was somewhat different.
We didn’t have the freedom of an expense account. No, we were tossed out of the office each morning at 8.30am sharp and told to “bring in some orders – fast.” Our prior sales training was equally succinct – “Go knock on some doors.”
So, being the young and enthusiastic sales people that we were, that’s what we did. We would park ourselves in the middle of our part of Auckland, grab our binder of samples and walk the streets looking for someone willing to listen to us. Occasionally luck would have it and we would meet with the actual person responsible for purchasing business forms. Then we had a couple of minutes to put forward our case before being turfed back onto the street. Very, very occasionally we found someone who had just run out of forms and needed an urgent quote. And there were the ‘blue moon’ experiences when all the planets aligned and you actually walked away with an order.
Once one of the directors back at base learnt of your success you were usually met with them beaming by our desk telling you “See – I told you it works – just knock on enough doors and the orders will flow in.” Well, Clive was right – sort of.
It was just that there wasn’t enough time in the working week for me to knock on all the doors I needed to make the sales budget they had set to keep that Ninja printing machine fully satiated. But I was not lacking in enthusiasm, so out I would go again. It took me a few years before I sat down, did the numbers and realized the hopelessness of the situation.
Looking back, it was all a lesson in having unrealistic expectations of your market. Our methods of targeting were not that bad. Back then, nearly all the businesses that we approached would have had a printer in the back room somewhere churning through the forms we provided. Nevertheless, expecting to talk to the purchasing person and convince them to place an order at the exact time we turned up unannounced was asking too much.
You would imagine that most businesses would have moved on from such door-to-door, cold-marketing promotion like this. Those ‘No Hawkers’ signs you see pasted on the windows of offices must have put paid to this a long time ago. However, while it may have become a thing of the past for direct selling, it is still a method we frequently see people use when looking at ways of promoting their website.
For instance, their web pages may be full of great content on their product or service. There may even be the occasional case study or two and details of the type of customers they work best with. But the only way prospects can register their interest in learning more is the regular form hiding on the Contact Us page, just sitting there ready for what the website owner hopes will be a multitude of visitors filling it in. But they don’t.
Again, it’s another example of an unrealistic expectation. Yes, there may be the very occasional person who completes the form – just like that purchasing person who needed business forms at exactly the same time I walked into their reception. But, as a proportion of the total number of valid prospects visiting your website, the amount will be very low. That’s why a website set up for optimal lead generation activities will have a multitude of ways prospects can show their interest – reports, newsletters, free reviews – all built to match whichever stage of interest the prospect may be in.
Deciding what to offer can be a challenge. However, reviewing the information requirements a prospect may have as they track through your sales funnel can provide a few prompts. For instance, it is useful to understand the core problems that drive prospects to start their search for your service and then the factors they consider when reviewing any competing alternatives.
Being able to capture their attention and then successfully influence prospects at the early stages of the buying process can prove to be a real competitive advantage for any business. Obviously there are more buyers at this stage and, by enticing them to join your lead nurturing system instead of your competitors and if you can create a close bond with them, then they can effectively be ‘removed’ from the market.
Recently, I have been working with a few clients who want to increase their marketing focus here. And, just by chance, in each case our ability to attract prospects into the top of their lead generation funnel relies on our ability to persuade prospects to change their point of view. This is never an easy task.
Most marketing material will point you towards growing and emphasizing an existing view a prospect has rather than taking the hard road of trying to get them to change their view. However, while it is hard, it is not impossible. And if you are successful and end up being the one who ‘helped’ them realise the advantages that come from this change of view then you can be well positioned to capitalize on the commercial benefits that may flow on.
Just to prove a point that it is not an impossible task, here are a few situations where I see a prospect viewpoint either in the process of altering or having already been altered. Take the purchase of domestic airline travel in New Zealand for example. I would hazard a guess that a year ago the key parameters people used to establish value when purchasing domestic flights were the cost of the ticket and the convenience of the flight time. I for one used to load up both the Air New Zealand and Qantas websites within my web browser and see which met the sweet spot to get me down and back for my next trip to Wellington. Frequently, I would fly down with one airline and back with the other – or, if I was fortunate, one took me on the complete journey. It was a simple method that I used for years. Then Jetstar came along.
I flew with them for the first time this month. Before I flew, I did the usual and brought their site up with Air New Zealand’s and used the same parameters. This time Air New Zealand’s pricing made the difference between the two just too big for me NOT to try the new airline.
So, other than having to drive to the airport in the dark of the early morning to get the flight, all was fine and I made it to my first early meeting in a less than tropical capital. Then I arrived back at Wellington airport an hour before my 6.45pm departure time to see on the screens that my flight was delayed to 8.00pm.
They had sent me four text messages to ensure I made it to the gate on time going down and coming back but nothing to tell me of the delay. I was not a happy camper.
So I walked up to the Pacific Blue counter, whose flight was leaving at 6.40pm, and asked if they could get me back to Auckland before my children went to sleep. Yes, they could, for a price that was probably twice what Jetstar was going to charge – but I went. On the way, I handed in my ticket to the Jetstar counter just to help them out; there were no apologies for the late flight, I might add.
Now, I really want Jetstar to succeed – more competition on the Auckland-Wellington service can only be a good thing. So, being the good consumer I am, I filled in a complaint form on the website to see what they had to say. An email came back a week later telling me they had received my note. Nothing else since.
This has now meant that my (and I imagine a few other domestic travelers) buying parameters have changed. Yes there’s price and there’s also schedule timing, but now it’s about making that schedule too. The problem is that there is no ‘information’ that I can find that will help me gauge whether this will happen. So what do I do? Well, because I don’t like random events I can’t control – see the later article on pancake making – I will pay the premium and fly Air New Zealand.
The advent of Jetstar is obviously recent and the ramifications of them entering the market and possibly altering people’s buying thinking in the process are just early suppositions by me. But what about a multimillion dollar market that was created – and by chance is now in slow decline – just by prospects changing their views on how to buy a service? I think the home mortgage market is a good example of this.
It used to be that you went to your Bank Manager and asked for a home loan – please. I remember doing this exact thing at the Countrywide Bank branch (remember them?) in Remuera when Claire and I were looking to buy our first house. Interest rates were in the mid twenties and we had just managed to get together our 20% deposit to fund our $107,000 unit – and they still turned us down!
Back then nobody talked about the interest cost of the loan – it was something hidden away in those big, scary loan documents you had to sign. So while Countrywide said no, ASB Bank said yes (we’ve been with them ever since) and we took the advice of the Bank Manager on what type of mortgage we needed and how long the loan should go for.
Then Mortgage Brokers came along. They told us that it perhaps wasn’t a good idea to have as your only source of advice the person who would lose the most from any reduction you made to the rather massive interest costs associated with your loan. And that maybe there were more options available to you than the two or fewer mortgage structures that the Bank Manager had told you were available. Hey – and even this very complicated fix – perhaps you could save tens of thousands of dollars simply by PAYING THIS LOAN OFF EVERY OTHER WEEK INSTEAD OF MONTHLY.
All that made people change their thinking on who was best to manage their mortgage purchase and the Mortgage Broker industry was started and made many a person very wealthy. That was while the banks allowed reasonably sizable loan commissions to flow through and the lending market remained quite liquid.
As I mentioned before, we have a few ‘prospect mind-changing’ projects we are working with customers on, too. One of them relates to the commonly held belief that the Best Before dates printed on foodstuffs are an accurate gauge of the quality degradation the food will go through over time. Now, some food product does decline quite quickly after a certain date – but that’s usually shown with a Use By date on the product – something quite different from a Best Before date. In a lot of cases, product that has passed its Best Before date is still good enough for consumption. But people still look at the Best Before date on the foods in their pantry shelves and throw it out, thinking it is not in a fit state for consumption. But that is changing.
The promotion of foodstuffs that have passed their Best Before date is a multi-million dollar industry in the UK and US markets. Our recent new client, Reduced to Clear, is the local leader in this space (www.reducedtoclear.co.nz) . We started working together last month. Just visit either of their shops in Auckland or Wellington and you will see they are full of dated product as well as people of all demographics enjoying the savings this brings.
Another example is the work we are doing with a long-standing client (they have the claim to fame of being Permission’s first ever client) Assess Systems (www.assess.co.nz). Rob and his team help companies put in place a reliable method of hiring the best people from all those looking during the timeframe the vacancy is open. Part of their work hinges on the need to run personality style assessments to ensure that candidates are the best fit for the job on offer.
Talk to any employer who has hired a ‘horror’ employee and they are usually already pre-sold on any pre-screening methods just so they don’t experience it all again. Unfortunately, the rest believe that they are good enough managers to be able to pick the duds from the stars. Well, it’s a clinically proven fact that this is impossible to do with any level of reliability. So Rob’s task is to gently persuade prospects through the adept use of information that there are a bundle of character traits that they will NEVER pick up with the usual ‘across the desk’ discussion.
How Rob does this is by showing the prospect ‘new information’. It’s a nice way to help people give themselves a reason to change their view without feeling too threatened in the process. That’s why any mortgage broker worth their salt would present a range of colourful graphs that exposed the massive interest savings their clients had made through using them for the better buying of mortgage debt. And for Reduced to Clear, once you have tasted a Best Before dated piece of Cadbury’s chocolate and realized there is no difference – well, your pantry will be forever stocked with all the nice but nutritionally wrong types of food.
Now, while samples of chocolate are quite difficult to distribute from a collection of HTML web pages, new information in the form of reports, interviews and case studies is a breeze. Have them all sitting behind a prospect registration form that allows you to ‘drip nurture’ them with a sequence of email messages and you are set.
So, to wrap this up. Walking the streets of East Tamaki looking for new business form printing work was a great example of having unrealistic expectations of promotional activity. Likewise, owning a website that comes with just a Contact Us page is also a problem. Yes, it will get the occasional person filling it in who wants exactly what you offer when they arrive. But it misses out on those who are interested but not yet ready to buy.
By adding a selection of information pieces for prospects to register for, or even just download, you broaden out your prospect audience. If this is done properly then you are able to ‘remove’ prospects from the buying market. However, in some more complex buying situations the prospect has to change their previous thinking before you can get them to move down your sales funnel. This requires some subtle manoeuvring to keep all egos intact. If this is the case, then being the provider of ‘new information’ is a good way to gently nurture this change in thinking and to get the prospect to move forward all without having you leave your office and go door knocking.
My client said this as he slid the sales statistics for the previous month and the last year across the table to me. It made for impressive reading. Their e-commerce website was leaping forward in double digit growth in what looked like a monthly sequence. They had sold more in the last month than most Kiwi companies would aspire to do in a year. But in reality, for me, it was a sign of bad news ahead.
Bad because we had failed to explain to him how our management efforts had translated into the surge in sales he was now experiencing. Personally, I hate mysteries like this. I would much rather know exactly why something is or isn’t working. Then, once understood, I can repeat the good stuff and alter the bad.
The old adage of knowing that 50% of your marketing spend is working but not knowing which 50% it is may sit well with offline marketing. But, as anyone with experience in this sector will know, any work in online marketing brings with it the opportunity to easily track and analyze its results – both good and bad.
While we had been very efficient at emailing him his monthly reports that told him where these nuggets of success lay, we had been remiss in ensuring he had taken the time to review them and see for himself the parts that were making the most gains.
So we cranked up the projector, put his Google Analytics account on the wall in front of us and I took him through the story of why his sales spreadsheet was growing each month. There is always a reason, once you know where to look for it.
Human nature is such that a website’s poor performance is usually more of a motivator for website owners to start digging into their analytics. When business is good, however, there doesn’t seem to be the same desire. So, whereas our reports get pored over during the early stages of working with a client, once things get under way and results start to flow through, then the attention they receive tends to slide.
Anyway, back to this client’s situation. Usually there are a few things that are working in unison that together provide a strong lift in performance. This case was no different.
The Google AdWords account we had inherited when we started managing the account had received some updates, which pointed to some of the success. AdGroups that contained twenty plus keywords had been broken down into ones that now had one or two keyword phrases. This had allowed the ads we used to now better reflect the search term the prospect was using – the result – a bump in click-through rate. But this wasn’t the only benefit.
Each ad could now point directly to the exact product page in their e-commerce , unlike before when the clicker was taken to the category page and then tasked with finding the product in the text navigation options. I always imagine that we have a finite amount of prospect attention to use and while before we used some up as they navigated to the correct page, now this was saved and allowed to focus on the product itself, which translated in a good lift in sales conversions.
Fortunately, their website had been built by a developer who knew some things about search engine optimization. Each product page was set up to allow Google and the like to trawl through it and have a strong chance of correctly indexing it. The only issue was that, while the site’s good navigation structure had helped the search engines find some of the site’s pages, there were not enough inbound links to give them reason enough to index all that was available. So, while they should have had say 10,000 pages in the index, they were sitting on a low figure of 6000.
A recent piece of work we had completed to grow the number of good inbound links to the site had prompted the search engines to come visiting again, bite a bit more off and index another 1250 pages. Since these pages were already content optimized, this allowed products that were previously hidden from the search results to start to appear and get clicked and be bought.
Both of these factors were made apparent when we compared the site’s traffic, month on month, and looked at the gains that were coming through. Google AdWords was pushing gradually forward as our ad group dissection started to create some momentum and warrant its effort. Likewise, our organic search volumes from Google were also increasing as keywords started to show for results where they had once remained hidden – all resulting in a nice flow-on effect of raising sales from this channel.
So, it was all there in their Google Analytics account ready to be revealed to those who wanted to go looking. But I realise that as parts of a business start to perform well the natural reaction is to take the focus off these areas and reapply it to business areas that are still struggling. However, it’s something I wouldn’t recommend. The data is all there to tell you why things are happening as they are – go get it and take the mystery away from your success.