(As published in the Sunday Star Times, June 21,2015)
From the response I have been receiving to these articles, it seems that a growing number of business owners would love a website that did its job well and delivered a steady stream of high quality leads. Unfortunately, what’s more common is that business owners spend time building a new website and then tear out their hair wondering why it’s not made a jot of difference to their business. Alas, with websites, it’s not a simple case of build it and they will come but Google Analytics (GA) does a good job in helping you understand what areas you can improve or tweak your site in order to improve its performance.
Time is a good metric to keep an eye on. It needs to be optimised in two ways: firstly, by increasing the amount of time your visitors spend on your website and, secondly, by reducing the days between their – hopefully – multiple visits. It’s a bit like making sure those in your bricks-and-mortar shop keep walking around and browsing instead of dashing for the door. In the real world, you’d perhaps achieve this by adding nice couches for their partners to sit while they wait or installing an in-store cafe to keep them there and highly caffeinated.
To tune the time spent on your website, there are a number of strategies you can employ:
Content renovation.
Number one on your list should be improving your content. Last week we talked about how to use GA to find the 20 percent of your website pages that are shown to 80 percent of your visitors. Start with that 20 percent when upgrading your content – you want to make sure the pages that most of your visitors see are at their most captivating. Be aware that your content may need more of a renovation than a cosmetic makeover: think beyond tweaking words and look at your images, design and overall content.
If one of your pages is word-heavy and hard to digest (read: daunting and boring), consider using a well-designed infographic or an embedded video to share that content instead.
Email marketing.
Enticed your visitors to sign up for your newsletter? High five! Your ability to get their attention has just sky-rocketed. Now they no longer have to return to your site to see what’s changed and you have a direct line of contact. Deliver a value-packed newsletter and each edition will move them closer forward to becoming a customer.
Use remarketing to bring them back.
This is a nifty type of advertising that helps reduce the time gap between visits. Remarketing is a Google product that allows you to show banner-style advertising on sites other than your own. The brilliant thing is that your advertising is only shown to those who visited your website. You can set these ads to reach visitors who didn’t convert (ie buy), encouraging them to come back and have another look at your site, as well as those who have purchased from you before, reminding them to come back and purchase again.
So there you have it – three good ways to improve your GA time metric.
Speaking of time, there’s another time issue we should mention: pages that take an age to load.
Don’t expect your visitors to wait too long for that next page to appear. The faster your pages load, the more likely your visitors are to stick around. Look at the “Behavior” part of your Google Analytics account to see the current selection of “Site Speed” reports available. Not only does GA tell you which pages have the most room for improvement, it also tells you what to suggest to your web developer to get the problem solved. How thoughtful is that?!
Chris Price owns Ark Advance, a web optimisation business that specialises in online marketing. Ark Advance also offer a free monthly email newsletter focused on helping business owners grow their services online – sign up for free at www.arkadvance.com.
This month I’m swapping the word “Report” for “Feature” to highlight the Intelligence Event option available in your Google Analytics account. This allows you to configure your account to send you an email when certain predefined events occur on your website.
What kind of events? For example, if your Social Media traffic delivers traffic above a certain threshold. Or your site receives traffic from a certain geographic region. You can define what’s important for you during configuration and then sit back and let Google email you when it has to.
(As published in the Sunday Star Times, May 10,2015: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/68319798/counter-your-bounce-rate)
How about a bit of audience participation to explain how the “bounce rate” works in Google Analytics? Imagine you’ve printed off the pages of your website (your home page, About Us, Contact Us etc) and laid them out on the floor in front of you. Now sit back, look skyward and imagine your website visitors falling onto these pages.
For most websites, you’ll find people stacking up on your home page – their first port of call. Those with a highly optimised website will see people falling on a more even spread of pages. (If no one falls from the sky at all, your website is a write-off – start again.)
The pages these visitors are landing on are what Google Analytics terms – guess what – your “landing pages”.
If your home page does its job well, you should see your visitors stand up and jump from this page to another. And another. And another, as they move around your site. If they stand up and walk away from the scene, never to be seen again, your home page has problems. Those people who fall onto your home page and then walk away forever is what Google Analytics calls the “home page bounce rate”. GA shows this in a percentage form.
It’s vital to track the home page bounce rate because the home page so important to the performance of your website as a whole.
The main role of your home page is to welcome and help your visitors find what they are looking for. It’s kind of like a salesperson in a shop, meeting and greeting new customers and letting them know where things are.
A bad home page is like having a nose-picking, talking-to-their-friend-on-the-phone, swearing like a sailor salesperson – a terrible first impression that will make any new customer swiftly exit the store, never to return.
With the home page bounce rate stat, the lower, the better. Our best clients have home page bounce rates below ten percent, while others struggle with 50 per cent or higher.
Your website’s “bounce rate” is the percentage of people who leave after only viewing one page ie the page they landed on. A target value here is between 20-40 per cent.
Some visitors will fall onto one page, stand up and walk around a few other pages before they walk away. The page that they stand on before they walk away is called the “exit page”. If you look at your Google Analytics and see your Contact Us page has a very high Exit Rate, don’t worry about it: your visitor has probably found your phone details, email address or shop address before they’ve left your website.
Have a look at your Google Analytics for the month. What’s your home page bounce rate like? How does it fare when compared to your site’s average bounce rate? Too high? Focus on improving it – perhaps move some content around, add to what’s there to entice people to move deeper into your site or even look at a redesign so that it is attractive as well as easy to understand and navigate.
(As published in the Sunday Star Times, May 17, 2015: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/68483238/track-your-websites-performance)
Hopefully you now view your website as a salesperson rather than a brochure and you realise you can use Google Analytics to improve how your website is working for you. This week I want to show you how to configure your Google Analytics to track the bits that really matter. How would you measure the performance of a salesperson if you didn’t keep track of the sales they made? With a great deal of difficulty. Same goes for your website. Keep its performance on track by putting some goals in place.
Unfortunately, your Google Analytics account isn’t automatically set up to measure the sales made by your website – this is something you have to sit down and do. But it’s most definitely worth your while. How can you measure performance if you don’t track it?
Let’s cover what you may want to track.
For those with an e-commerce website, the outcomes you’ll want to track are quite straightforward. You’ll want to track how many online sales you’ve made, how many people signed up online to your newsletter (or for other bait, such as a “Cheat Sheet” or “Helpful Guide to”) and possibly how many viewed your website videos.
If your business sells services (such as accounting or cleaning), it’s a bit different. Your website is probably there to generate leads – it tells potential customers who you are and what you do, before prompting them to get in touch with one of your salespeople, who will then (hopefully) convert it into a sale. While we can’t track sales on service-focused websites, we can track interest. This includes visitors who viewed videos, downloaded PDF documents, completed quote request forms or filled in Contact Us pages. Visitors doing some or all of these actions are obviously more engaged than those that don’t – they’re showing interest.
So you want to track all the website actions that show engagement (as we’ve outlined above). To do this, head over to the “Goals” section of your Google Analytics account and work through setting them up.
Once this is completed, Google Analytics will help you create the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that will let you know if you need to make any website changes to improve each goal. For instance, your reporting may tell you that 2% of your website visitors complete your Contact Us page. Or that just 3% of visitors to your homepage play the video that’s there. Or only 0.5% of visitors buy something from your e-commerce website. All of these results are on the low end – but at least you’ve started tracking them and are now aware they need work. I’ll share how to do that next week.
The main thing is now you know where you stand. Well done for getting this far and having some Google Analytics goals set up – based on my experience of reviewing hundreds of Google Analytics accounts, just doing this puts yourself in the top 35% of website owners.
Thank you to all those who turned up for our inaugural event last month. During this session I covered “Growing your business through Google without buying them a new plane”. The content for our July 23rd session is now finalised (see below) and you can register for the event here. Customers and prospects of Ark Advance should have received a voucher code by now.
5:10pm – Understanding The Fundamentals of Online Marketing
6:20pm – How to complete a web development project and still talk to your web developer
This month I kicked off our first “Thursday” by presenting on “Growing your business through Google without buying them a new plane”. Customers who couldn’t make it will receive a pre-recorded version of this presentation. Here’s a brief synopsis.
First, I reviewed how many small businesses in New Zealand have staff (approx 97,000), and then surmised that they could also afford to advertise at approx $300 per month with Google. And allowing for 50% of this spend being wasted through poor advertising choices led to a calculation – 97,000 x $150 per month – which comes to $174 million. With a new Airbus A320a costing a piddling $123 million, I had to allow for a few “modifications” to soak up the remaining $51m. Airforce One, anybody?
Now if you design your advertising to help Google achieve the ideal user experience, you are heading along the right track and probably not helping Google fund that new Airbus. The question is, what is this supposed ideal experience? Think back to when you’ve been googling something and Google, bless its heart, did exactly the right job for you. You found just what you were after, spent a happy few minutes or more splashing about the website Google pointed you to, and didn’t go back to Google until you were ready to search for something else.
And when it fails? That’s when you search, click onto a site, realise it’s not what you’re looking for, quickly click back for another look at the search results, and then click away. Think of it as bouncing between the search results and the sites you find – hunting for that elusive prey.
Advertising that is costly and ineffective will have all the attributes of this scenario – attracting few clicks for the number of times it is shown. What’s more, those who do click bounce off the site in droves – most likely to head back to Google to continue their quest. There’s an Airbus armrest paid for, right there.
Applying poor measurement practices is another armrest – with maybe a seat belt thrown in too. Although you can’t manage what you can’t measure, it’s still common to see people buying Google Advertising with no way to determine what value they gained from it.
It’s easy to see why. Setting up a Google Adwords account is easy peasy – all you need is 20 minutes and a credit card. Just follow the prompts Google provides and your ads will be online, with money being sucked from your account, in mere moments.
Now compare that with the effort required to set up and configure your Google Analytics account. Yes you can get the code in minutes – then someone needs to add it to EVERY page of your website. What’s more, the account needs configuring to track the actions (think sales or contact form requests) that you want your advertising to drive. All going well, and with someone who knows exactly what they need, this work can done in under an hour. But ask the business owner to take on the task and it could be weeks before a web developer has done their job, leaving the marketing assistant to figure out exactly what part of Google Analytics needs customising for the goals to work properly.
So think yourself lucky if your goal tracking is working as it should, allowing you to see exactly how much each lead from your paid advertising channels is costing you. You may also notice that each month the per lead cost moves gradually northwards.
Why is that? Well, Google is the place to be for you AND your competitors. And that drives the bid price up – and with it your cost per lead. Which leaves me with the last part of this presentation summary – nurturing your leads with the care and attention they deserve.
Let’s think about the polar opposite way this could work: Aging sticky notes on computer screens containing the details of prospects who called in for help last week and still haven’t been called back yet.
Then, when they are called back, it’s from salespeople who treat them depending on how they feel that particular day. No method to track who has said what to whom. Appointments get set and people fail to turn up. Quotes are given but never followed up. And so on, and so on.
I know this happens because – as I’m sure you have – I’ve been on the receiving end of nearly all these behaviours. And while businesses can survive in the short term with systems like this, I predict they will soon find themselves priced out of online advertising because their effective cost per sale from online leads will be too high. The smart people who see selling as a “system” will bid up their advertising to grab as much traffic as they can.
Customers will have received a recording of this full presentation. If you are interested in working with us then give us a call or complete a contact request here and let’s start.
So who is on your website NOW? No need to guess – just head over to this report and all will be revealed. This is a great way to while away a few moments and look transfixed as people arrive and wander amongst your pages.
Some of the cool ways to use a report like this would be:
To validate that your tracking is working properly. Today I opened this report and picked up that a client’s mobile website wasn’t being tracked at all. I just opened up my smartphone, turned on my mobile data connection, browsed to their homepage and waited for me to turn up. I didnt.
Sit back and skite about how well your radio advertising worked as you “see” hundreds of new direct visitors arrive in abundance just minutes after your ad ran.
Double check that your Goal Tracking or Event Tracking is correctly configured. Just turn off any filters that could ignore your traffic (if, for example, you were on your work network) and then go ahead and register or complete a sale and see that the necessary Google Analytics goals are working.
Or sit back and while away the Friday afternoon as people take in all your great content.
Enjoy.
“No thanks I’m just looking.”
How many times have you said this when wandering around the shops of your favourite shopping mall? You were probably not alone. Walk around any mall and notice those holding shopping bags compared to those not, and the majority will be looking. Well, it’s the same online.
In fact the web is the first place many go when starting the research stage of any complex purchase. Knowing this, the savvy service marketer knows she needs to create a clever system to a) attract those who are just looking; and then b) nurture them gently but purposefully towards the sale. The key parts that make up this system are the subject of this article.
There are five main stages to follow when creating a “looking-to-buy” nurturing system. Let’s go through each of these in the sequence that I see them deployed.
#1 Converting Anonymous Lookers into Known Lookers
Lookers are reasonably useless in their anonymous state. Somehow you need to stop those “just looking” and convince them to raise their hand and identify themselves. Until they do this all bets are off. There’s very little you can do to nurture them.
Now I realise you can unleash some re-marketing smarts and try to promote yourself to them as they browse other sites. That’s a step further forward than doing nothing. Nevertheless, you really need their email address to start to move ahead.
Content that makes the anonymous known is the magic ingredient behind content marketing. Producing the right content and delivering it in a way that makes someone willing to give up their anonymity (ie, give you their email address) is is not easy. You will trip up along the way as you fine tune your content to make it persuasive enough make the conversion work.
Because you can’t go any further forward until this part is working, stick at it. And once these “just looking” email address leads start to arrive, it’s time to ….
#2 House them in a system that tracks what has been said to whom
You will need a CRM of sorts to hold all these new prospects, remembering that they are not ready to buy just yet. So they don’t need a salesperson calling them to take the order. Instead, they need to receive small pieces of content that slowly, but gradually, move them through the decision making process.
Life is so much easier if the system that houses leads also keeps track of what communication was sent to whom and when. Ideally, it will manage both digital and non-digital channels. So if someone receives a few emails, a direct mail piece and perhaps a check-in call from a call centre, then each and every communication is captured against the prospect’s record.
Once you have a system ready to house and monitor prospects, you can focus on what to say to them and when. Or to stage 3 where you get started on….
#3 Crafting messages that move them further along the buying process
I’m not thinking here of “are you ready to buy now?” reworked multiple ways but all with same intent.
Nope, the plan is to deliver answers to the questions people have as they work through the buying process. Questions like “who else has used your service to solve the same problems I am facing?” or “how do I compare you with others?” or even “why should I consider the premium service when the standard may do the job?”
Customer testimonials, buyer guides and product infographics could deliver answers to questions like these.
Every service business will need to answer its own set of prospect questions. Start by identifying what the common questions are and crafting initial content to answer them.
Then, once you start matching your content to your prospect audience you can begin to….
#4 Take notice of those who take notice
Once again, ideally this will be a feature of your CRM system. Here your leads are stored and your campaigns crafted. And all going well, the system will track emails that are opened, the links clicked inside them, and perhaps even the website pages browsed. All this interaction will then be neatly stored against each prospect record.
Then it will be a simple case of sorting your leads by those who interacted the most with your digital content. The more they open, click and browse, the more likely they are to be ready for the next step where you….
#5 Give people a chance to raise their hand
Those engaging most with your content could require a carefully scripted phone call from a “gently gently” salesperson. Or, if this is too much, perhaps a visit to a group event hosted at your company. Something that moves them off the digital channel into the physical space where the sale can be completed. Nurturing content that has done its job well will make this “bridging content” part of a natural next step.
There you go – my five steps to convert “those looking” to “those buying”. Yes, I admit they are very high level overviews BUT they should give you a starting template to work towards. GIve us a call today if you want help installing them into your online marketing box of tricks.
Don’t get fooled by the techie sounding name – this is a report that delivers on quite a simple need.
Let’s say you ran a marketing PR campaign that delivered 2000 visitors to your website last Monday. Fresh from reading about in you in the newspaper they came a-visiting and did stuff. Some fortunate souls would have become a lead, others perhaps bought something, and the rest meandered in and then left hopefully a lot wiser.
So what do they do next week? Or the week after? Did they just arrive for the day and never come back again or did that PR do a great job and warm them up enough to entice them to return later and turn into great customers? This report helps you answer that question.
A cohort is a group of people defined by the date they arrived at your website. Cohort Analysis allows you to see how they perform after their arrival date based on criteria like website engagement, goal completions or session duration. You can view their performance individually, as a group and also in comparison with others in the group.
Handy stuff.
This report splits your traffic based on three device types – desktop, mobile and tablet. It then shows how your website interacts with each of the three across your measures for:
– core engagement (how many visitors you have to the site via each device)
– conversion tracking metrics (how many visits become sales)
It’s important to track these trends over time, so pick a date range that extends 6 or 12 months – especially for your mobile results.
Visit any cafe and notice especially patrons who are on their own. A fair proportion will have their heads bowed, peering into their screens. Even couples do the same – no time for conversation – nope there’s stuff to be checked online that’s more important than their face-to-face relationship. So this is the report that shows you whether they are looking at your website while they sup their soy latte.
What kind of results can you expect to see? You may be surprised by a recent uptick in mobile traffic. Then you’ll wonder why their engagement is relatively low. Possibly they’re struggling to operate your desktop-centric website through their teeny tiny screens. Perhaps now is the time to look for a layout that plays well across all formats. The things we usually see in this report are:
– Mobile growth curves that have gone all steep on you over the last three months
– Lots of mobile visitors, good engagement but very few mobile conversions
– Unsustainable cost per lead values from mobile Google advertising sending traffic to a non-mobile website
– The percentage of desktop traffic a website is experiencing – sometimes as low as 20%. (Perhaps time for an app?)
Unfortunately it takes more than a few weeks to deliver a fully featured mobile website. Use this report to help get the timing right. So when all is finished you have a good chunk of tiny screen viewers ready to engage with.
And for those with more mobile and tablet traffic than desktop, perhaps it’s time to set up some Google Analytics dashboards – to pick out this traffic source and display how it engages in easy-to-read charts for your monthly reports.
Give us a call today if you would like more details on how this could work.
After many checks and proofs, your latest email newsletter has been sent. But did it work? Good news for most involves finding that your subscribers clicked from the message through to your website, either buying more product or contacting a sales person.
So how does Google Analytics report on this? Unfortunately, it doesn’t, unless your email marketing application has been configured correctly. In the unconfigured state traffic from your newsletter is hidden inside traffic sources like Direct Traffic or referred traffic from the web mail domains like Yahoo.
For email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp this configuration is a few clicks away. Once completed, all the links to your website used in your email messages will come with special codes on their end. These codes mean something to Google Analytics so that it takes all the traffic it receives and places them in their own separate campaign. The name of the campaign is usually linked to the name of the newsletter – so you can see how January’s newsletter results differed from December’s.
Just remember the cookie that is set to link them to the campaign remains by default for six months. (This can be configured by altering your Google Analytics tracking code.) They move from one campaign to another as they click on links from other newsletters. Plus, if they click on a paid advert they then hop across to the Paid Advertising campaign.
So just so you know, if they click on a newsletter and a month later visit you by typing your domain name into their browser – normally showing as direct traffic – then instead they will still be attributed to the initial campaign.
Once you understand that little cookie life ‘gotcha’, then all is fine. You can use the Traffic Sources report to find the email campaign and see how well it performed compared to all your other traffic.
You should expect to see some good news. Higher engagement rates and improved conversion rates are all ideal outcomes of an email marketing strategy that is working well.
Contact us today if you would like to get your Traffic Sources report configured correctly to show your email marketing efforts.
There are few shortcuts in online marketing. Despite what others may say – like “just do this one thing to your website and you WILL appear on page one of Google”. Or “just pass us your Google AdWords account and we’ll apply these technologically enhanced tools that enable us to alter your account every second so your cost per clicks plummet and your conversion rates soar”.
But right now, I am going to present a strategy that will help you do more with less effort than you would expect.
Think of it as email marketing on autopilot – although the correct term is “email autoresponders”. Most email marketing tools that send “load and blast” campaigns have an autoresponder feature. Some let you decide what time of day and day of the week the sequence follows. Others allow you to even move people between sequences depending on the interaction the person has with the first series of messages. Think for example – if the lead clicks on a certain case study link then the current sequence ends and a new sequence begins.
Unfortunately it doesn’t take all the work away. You still need to a) write the content you want to send and b) decide who you want to send it to and even c) plan out what message is sent after what sequence of time. However, do all these things right and then you are left with the relatively simple job of loading up all this work into the technology required and letting it decide who receives what message and when.
Here are three examples of how this technology could be applied.
1. Welcoming a new client to your business.
Usually there’s a bunch of information you need to send to new customers. For instance, the hours of your support, the account manager responsible for their account, how invoicing works and what to do if they need to contact someone in a hurry.
Depending on what you sell this could be a sizable list. By breaking it up into a series of email messages that you drip feed out, say over a two week period, you increase your chances of it being read, binding the customer to the account manager, and ensuring they feel valued. A triple whammy.
2. Nurturing a prospect towards becoming a customer
Earlier this year we ran a customer conference call with a focus on online marketing for those extended sales cycles. One message: Thinking in months instead of days helps you deliver relevant and valuable content, keeping you top of mind when customers could be considering others or fighting other priorities.
3. Delivering a follow-up course of content after someone attends a live training event.
I am “borrowing” this one from a successful client of mine, Ken Grace. Ken runs a business (www.departmentofwriting.co.nz) that delivers coaching for those who want to improve how their business communicates in written form. Ken runs in-person training events that are then followed up with a series of podcasts and tests, all delivered through his autoresponder.
As you can see, in each situation there’s no magic bullet and the time consuming matter of writing content still needs to happen. But once you are over this hurdle you can sit back and let the autoresponder manage who gets sent what and when.
Sound interesting? Why not brainstorm this month all the situations where the same pieces of content need to be sent to the same types of people. Then pick the one that would benefit the most and start along the content creation piece.
Call us at the start of this process. We have helped dozens of companies set up autoresponders for their clients and can advise on the content, sequence design and technology required to make it work for you.
My experience in online marketing started with email marketing. I saw my first HTML email message in late 1999 thinking it was a thing of beauty that could transform direct communications. I was not alone.
Back then, all of the marketing managers I presented to in my previous role had the same opinion and the company’s client list grew at speed. Email marketing was a very popular subject area at the time. The company I worked for did a good job at captilizing on this with a very effective (think pushy) PR company shoving me in front of reporters at every opportunity.
Moving forward 14 years and a few things have changed. Email marketing is now seen as an “old school” form of online marketing – being at the opposite scale of it’s “uber cool” social media cousin. Nevertheless from the results that I see our clients achieve with this channel, there are still some amazing results available for those willing to invest the time.
With email there’s no hype, no complex buzz words, no promise of large societal change – just straightforward campaign tactics that make sense. These are campaigns that every business should have running as they apply to problems that most businesses need to solve. Thirteen years of experience supports its use. So what are you waiting for?
Here are four of these problems that suit email so well:
The humble email newsletter. This was the first strategy people began with back in 1999 and to this day it is probably the one that applies to most businesses today. For those who want to know – it makes sense to keep in touch and let them know what has changed.
So if you sell capital equipment across New Zealand and Australia, your purchasers may not be the right audience for a message each month – they may not need to buy again for another 10 years. However the dealers who represent you are ideal. What tips and tricks can you provide to help them sell more or know more about your product?
Sending an email newsletter is a strategy that should fit in every business or else there’s a bigger problem that needs work. If you can’t think of anyone who would value what you will say, or you have nothing to say, then things are quite dire.
In this month’s customer conference call we talked about delivering online marketing to help close sales that take time. In these situations the lead may arrive in mid February but the purchase order isn’t confirmed until say the end of July. Many businesses have either some or all of their products / services fitting within this category.
What you say and how you say it between these extended periods can make all the difference to the likelihood of success. Generally a mix of communication styles – face to face, phone, direct mail and even email are required to all work seamlessly together to move things along.
The smart marketers – those who want to manage the sales process as much as they can – employ each and every one, and within this some good old email marketing can work wonders.
It could be a simple monthly email message that introduces new features of the product that the prospect is not aware of. Perhaps one note that lists out some recent case studies that apply to their particular needs. Small, simple messages that ideally are run on auto pilot to help build some rolling momentum of sales activity.
It could be another batch of office supplies, or maybe replacing their Revlon foundation using you instead of a local pharmacy. Whatever it is, usually you are trying to influence a decision that is made frequently and for which there are a few alternative buying options.
All of this is an ideal place for a humble piece of email marketing to fit. By sending on a frequency that makes sense to those that receive it and including a few relevant tempting offers, these types of messages make great commercial sense. That’s why the bond between e-commerce and email marketing is so strong. Working together they are a winning team.
How much they achieve is something that ideally you will be able to track inside your website analytics application with the traffic driven from your newsletter correctly tagged as its own individual stream.
Customers make many decisions that frequently go unacknowledged by those who benefit from them. Here are a few that initially come to mind from my own experience – leaving a hotel after staying three days over a long weekend, subscribing to an email newsletter, ordering my umpteenth piece of computer gear for the office from a supplier we have used for at least 5 years now, and agreeing to an appointment with someone from Telecom to talk about upgrading to the super fast Fibre Internet connection that is now available in Grey Lynn (they didn’t turn up :0).
All of these could have done with a short email of thanks that would have been greatly received and possibly even automatically generated. Not surprisingly, messages that are triggered by a customer’s behaviour are naturally better received than those which are triggered by a marketers desire to make money. It just makes sense.
So there you are. Four very basic problems each with a very basic form of online marketing that is ready and able to solve it. I would be very surprised to find a business that does not experience at least one of these four problems.
Next month why not think about how you can look at email marketing in another light with a specific focus on any of these four areas. And of course, do give us a call if you would like a chat about how we could help you out along the way.
It would seem that fishing has now gone all hi-tech. The other day, while wandering along a stretch of Coromandel beach with my ageing and mad Spaniel, I noticed a couple on their quad bike carrying what look like to be a orange torpedo down to the water’s edge. Mello, my Spaniel, was as interested as I and did her best to get in the way as they bent down and fussed away to get the thing started.
Within a few minutes a power of froth was coming from the propeller. While he slowly guided it into the surf she walked back holding a line that joined it to their bike. In a few moments the orange flash was tunnelling out through the surf towing a fishing line of 25 baited hooks behind it. Minutes later all you could see was the golden flash of the light as it buzzed through the surf far, far off in the distance.
I sauntered up to learn more. Apparently the “thing” would cover 1Km in 10 minutes and only needed to be out there for 45 minutes at the right time of day. So all you needed to do was invest an hour each day (and the $2750 for the torpedo thingy”) and there was a good chance you would be hauling your fancy gear back with some additional weight of fresh fish. Great for those short on both time and something for tea.
Not such a good plan if you like to fish the way I do.
Needless to say, the fish are safe when I turn up on the beach. My surfcaster is ageing, the reel is even older and you can smell my tackle box before you see it. The ideal evening fishing for me involves lots of casting, lots of still, and very little chance of taking anything back home. A perfect way to spend 3 hours alone on the beach.
I don’t think I’m too dissimilar to others I see lined up next to me. For us it’s more about the time of peace and quiet with the occasional flurry of excitement thrown in occasionally. The appeal of pulling out 25 snapper in 45 minutes is mildly appealing, that is until I think through the logistics of gutting all that flesh and then finding something else to do instead of heading back too early.
The world of online marketing is a space filled with a mass of technology and services all claiming to do more things in less time, just like our friendly orange torpedo example. Very rarely does it all turn out exactly as sold. (Just as an aside while we were at the beach I spotted a notice in the local store posted by someone who was looking for help as their fishing torpedo had come off its line and hopefully was going to wash up on the beach rather than reach landfall in Argentina.)
This month our newsletter talks to the point of mixing up your online marketing tactics to make good use of those delivered in both a “slow” and “fast” way. The theory being that the best long term competitive advantage comes from applying tactics that take the most time to deliver.
The same can apply when influencing the speed at which people purchase online. A small proportion of your purchasers will dive into their wallets immediately on arriving on your site. Others will need time to ruminate about their decision. Most online marketers spend time influencing those that buy quickly when there’s a larger group who need time to make a decision.
Email marketing comes to mind as a key strategy to achieve success here. By now everyone should be familiar with its use, but rarely is its effectiveness measured in the right way. While most track who opened the message and what links were clicked within it, very few look back and see if by receiving these messages customers were more or less likely to buy again or for the first time. These are the real outcomes which the tactic needs to be measured against.
Paid advertising can be a star here too. Here you can set up campaigns to re-market to those that bought from your website before to entice them back as they trawl the Internet. Likewise, if they came but didn’t purchase then your re-marketing could convince them to come back and make that first purchase.
Direct mail, and dare I say telemarketing, are other strategies that can be deployed successfully here too. Just because you created the lead online doesn’t mean you have to always use the same channel to market to them in the same way. Mix up any of these tactics with to help you achieve the most influence where you can.
And that’s the true illusion here. Whilst technology can present the appeal of achieving more in less time, when it comes to making buying decisions the majority still need time to think things through. That will never change.
So this month think about those who have contacted you and are still thinking about the services or products you offer. What can you send to these who have expressed an interest but haven’t purchased yet? And how about those that have bought before but haven’t for a while? What can you do to entice them back?
Every month we hold a customer conference call that all of our customers are invited to join. At the beginning of these conference calls we have a section on what is new in the online marketing world that we believe is worthy of your attention. Below is a video of the introduction of Novembers conference call. This months new and nothworthy information relates to Google Analytics – Universal Analytics and Online and Offline Tracking, Google Webmaster Tools – Disavow Links, Google Adwords – Location Targeting, Google Tag Manager and sending email campaigns at appropriate times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8wbowtFrCg
“So is email marketing dead?” Not one of the first questions I was expecting from the group in front of me but, nevertheless, one worthy of a deep breath before I hacked out a response.
Here I was co-tutoring a course on email marketing for the University of Auckland and 15 minutes into my first presentation of “Setting the Scene of Email marketing
” when this pearl of enquiry came from the group. On the screen behind me was a barrage of stats that proved that there was still life in email but the question rightly deserved more.
From memory I bumbled back a reasonable effort of an answer. This more considered response comes with the luxury of time – something that was in short supply those two days as we worked through the packed agenda.
So is email marketing dead?
Both “yes” and “no” answers could apply. It depends on the message you want to deliver. For instance, many moons ago I used to work in customer services for an engineering supplies company. This was before computers had taken hold of the desktop and instead I had two phones in front of me. They rang frequently during the day. I spent 80% of my time on one extension or the other talking with customers about what they were looking to buy. Then once they bought, I used the other phone to call the warehouse and arrange its shipping. I talked and talked and talked.
Just imagine how the role would work these days. A well designed website would answer most of the questions people called me for and an e-commerce store or email would replace much of the person-to-person chatter. The act of using the telephone is not “dead” it’s just that this type of phone conversation has been replaced with email and e-commerce as they are better suited.
Print communication – or letters (remember them?) – have been the hardest hit during this digital replacement process. The long distance letter was probably at the top of this list. Like most, after I finished my training I decided to travel. Before I left I remember giving my parents some addresses of post offices to send their mail for me to collect along the way. All was going well until I arrived late into Sydney after spending too long in North America and the post office decided they were not going to hold my mail any longer and promptly returned it all.
As a parent now, I don’t know how my parents coped. I was not the best communicator and there were weeks where I didn’t send them a letter or even a card. Thankfully social media has completely transformed this type of communication. So when my daughters go travelling in the years ahead I’m expecting daily status updates with photos so I can see where they are going and what they are doing.
So where does email fit in here? Where is it best doing the replacing instead of being replaced?
For instance, it would be a poor replacement for the airmail letter. Social media has this nailed. It would also struggle to hold a two-way conversation over a short period between two people online. Chat deals nicely with that. And don’t even think about using it to describe how to use a new piece of software. A 60-second You Tube video will get that across with ease.
But if you want to communicate with someone online to “do something simple” then this is when email comes into its own.
Facebook uses email to let you know what you have missed since you last logged in. Pinterest does exactly the same. My library emails me to tell me my books are due back so I don’t incur any fines. Fly Buys lets me know when my WOF is due so I can get into the Kingsland VTNZ to get it sorted and earn points. Barkers tells me when they have a sale. Amazon reminds me that I left something in their shopping cart when I was interrupted when Karen dropped in last night. And Air New Zealand tells me when the next 48-hour sale to Oz is underway – thanks guys.
Email is not dead – it is alive and kicking and helping audiences worldwide “do” some great stuff online. Add in a fearless tracking process that underpins the validity of commercial email marketing and you can see why it continues to grab a large chunk of online budget spend for marketers worldwide.