Each month we invite customers along to our conference call. This month we talked about the use of Video in your Online Marketing. At the start of the call we run through any “new stuff” that we think is worthy of attention. Here’s a clip of the “new stuff” we covered in July.
Last month I finally took the plunge and upgraded my mountain bike. The maintenance bills were starting to add up plus my aging body was struggling to cope with the bike’s rather agricultural suspension system. So after some serious pondering I settled on a Specialised Stumpjumper. A name with some irony because, being a rather conservative rider, I rarely jump tree roots let alone stumps.
Anyway, my new steed is a thing of mountain biking beauty. I opted for some “clown” sized wheels (going from 26 to 29 inch) and decided on a large frame rather than the medium one of its replacement. Oh what a difference this and its other goodies all made.
I won’t bore you with the final details but suffice to say I can now finish a few hours of riding and not hobble around the car park grimacing as I stretch out my suffering back. All I need now is for it to automatically climb hills on its own and I’m sorted. I wished I had done the upgrade years ago – mountain biking hasn’t been this easy before.All this got me thinking about online marketing. Specifically, about how some businesses we consult with just seem to have an easier time making it work than the rest.
These fortunate souls take on Google and win, plus their conversion rates are leaps ahead of others in their market. So what do they do that gives them this advantage?And, like my recent bike purchase, what havethey “upgraded” in their marketing to make this so easy when compared with the rest?
I came up with these three points,in order of priority and starting with possibly the hardest to implement first.
Upgrade #1: Marketing to an obvious and measurable point of difference
Online visitors are a fickle and ruthless bunch. They enter your website, scan your content and promptly leave in mere seconds if there’s nothing of interest.
Just imagine these same people doing this in an actual store – it would seem manic. People rushing in, racing around the isles and then rushing back out. But that’s exactly their behaviour online. Just look at your Google Analytics logs to see the average time they spend and the number of pages they look at. You may be surprised how low both counts are.
Web visitors bolt for the door when a) they can’t find what they are looking for and/or b) what they find is no different from what they have seen before. This is one reason why we delve into a customer’s point of difference during our strategy planning stage.
Earlier this month we had a client who was looking for advice to promote a part of their business that had fallen away over the last few years. For privacy sake I’ll change the category, so let’s say it was in the Party Hire area. They used to sell a lot in this space but priorities had changed and other lines had grabbed more marketing focus, so now it represented less than 20% of what it used to.
Our job was to reverse this trend. So the first question was –what makes your Party Hire service so different from everyone else in Auckland?
That got everyone thinking as nothing immediately sprang to mind, other than the usual statements of “quality product” and “great service”, both of which were plastered across most of their competitor’s websites. After a bit of a group brain storm we settled on two points that were unique to them.
Let’s say they were the types of events that were best suited to the products they had to hire and the speed at which the items were dropped off and picked up. By combining both of these differences together we created a nice marketing niche market that was a) big enough for them to market to, and b) could be found through the keywords prospects used in Google.
Now we had something to work with. The website content could be re-written to explain why this client was so good at servicing this group. Plus we didn’t need to battle it out with the rest of the market who were struggling to attract and convert those using the very generic search term “party hire”.
Upgrade #2: Knowing your website numbers
For many business owners, website marketing is a part of marketing that involves a fair bit of learning. Some find this too daunting, while others dive headlong in and reap the rewards of their new found knowledge later on.
I remember receiving my first set of accounts and having exactly no idea what it all meant. It took me four years and two accountants before I stopped asking what I thought were “dumb” questions just so I knew what had happened last financial year. It took me another two years and one more accountant before I got the answers I needed to predict,with a reasonable level of accuracy, what was likely to happen next year.
Some people struggle through the “dumb question” stage. Claire, my wife, is such a soul. Asking again and again until it is clear in her mind is not fun – it’s just frustrating. Thankfully, running a website is nowhere near as complex as understanding a balance sheet but still it requires some learning time.
All this doesn’t have to take too long. I remember chatting with one prospect who didn’t know any stats of their website. That in itself wasn’t surprising because it had no analytics running on it. Nevertheless,we got that sorted and took them through the tool. Then, after many questions over a two-month period, they had it sorted. Now they know their conversion rate to two decimal places and can tell you how much revenue they make each month from each stream of traffic their website receives. They are in total control.
Upgrade #3: Unleashing a testing mindset
This can be the secret sauce that makes all the difference. That last customer I mentioned – the two decimal place person – went ballistic when we tried to run a test on their home page using an imagethat, in their view, wasn’t part of their brand message.
I went onto explain that while I understood their concerns, if this small change increased their conversion rate by an extra 10% then they would make an extra gazillion dollars in profit. Plus, it’s really not how they think it looks, or even whatour team thinks, it’s how their own prospects think it looks. Now if they like it there, in that colour and written that way, then that’s what matters.
Begrudgingly they let the test run and no, it didn’t bring absolutely super-duper amazing results, but there was enough data to prove it helped conversions – so the change stayed.
This brings me back to my idea of a motorized mountain bike just zooming up hills without any effort on my part. Effort is still required. Yes, even with implementing these three business upgrades I mention here there’s still some focused work ahead. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. It’s just that bit more comfortable with them than without them
Let’s imagine I had a coin-operated Gumball machine that delivered, in place of sugar-coated balls, a steady supply of OK-quality prospects. How much cash would you place in the machine to get each prospect?Now most would say “as little as possible”. This I understand; that’s normal human nature at work. But what if I told you that you are not the only person who was able to use the machine?
You see, behind you are your competitors eagerly waiting to use it once you are finished. Plus, the rules state that you pass to the person behind you when you choose not to enter any more money. So,knowing this, how much would you enter before you decided to pass it to the competitor behind you?
Got you thinking a bit more now?
Great, because the Google AdWords advertising system is very similar to that Gumball machine.And every time you launch your campaign you are figuratively lining up next to your competitors as you all try to attract the same profile of prospects.
Now,getting back to the Gumball experience, the smart person would have done their sums before their turn came up.And while the others may spend too little and miss their turn or spend too much and market themselves out of a business, the smart ones would know exactly how much to enter before they expected a prospect to arrive, and when to pass if it didn’t eventuate.
So let’s work through the steps they would have taken to make them so smart. Firstly, they would have calculated the likelihood of average quality prospects turning into clients.Then they would have a good indication of the average amount of profit (not margin) that each customer was worth.
Calculating customer worth becomes interesting when customers are retained for a long time. They can end up becoming very, very valuable.In these cases, worth can track profits for not only the first sale but right through to an expected multi-year life span.
In markets like these the Gumball machine is ravenously hungry for cash before it yields a prospect as competitors are willing to load up coin after coin to get that one prospect.The same applies when prospects have a high propensity to convert into a customer coupled with a high transaction value. In both of these cases you’d better get used to shoving in those coins to get the growth you need.
The Gumball machine concept is relatively straightforward but I would suggest that less than 10% of Google AdWords advertisers know the number at which they should buy prospects and, conversely, when they should pass to the person “behind” them. Based on my unscientific research over 10 years of online marketing experience I have only come across two clients of ours who, when asked for their “gumball number”,were able to provide it.
The first was a world leader in a very competitive health and fitness arena;the second was a highly successful one-person business in financial services. Both knew the marketing “numbers” of their business down pat. In each case it was – and still is – a pleasure to work with them. So long as we can provide them OK-quality prospect leads at a cost below their “Gumball” number then all remains well in the land of online marketing.
So why do so few advertisers know this number?
One reason could be that those selling traditional advertising never touted it as an effective way to measure performance. “Investing”$1500 on a newspaper advertisement and not being sure if the 10 leads captured that week were solely due to it makes it either a great purchase or a shocker. Whereas online there’s more measurement than you can shake a stick at and determining the exact cost for each prospect captured is possible with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Secondly,as business owners we may have found the whole financial side of measuring marketing performance a bit daunting. If you are in this camp, then this book may help̶Found Money: Simple Strategies for Uncovering the Hidden Profit and Cash Flow in Your Business by Steve Wilkinghoff. You can find it on Amazon here. As a non-financial person myself, I thought it did a great job of showing you the simple steps necessary to create some lasting financial insight with regards to your marketing spend.
Sorry, there really isn’t any good reason to not know your “Gumball number”.
The giant Gumball machine of online marketing is here to stay. And while I relate it directly to Google AdWords, in reality it signifies the complete online marketing space. Your option is to either stand in the queue armed with the right knowledge or take your chances like the rest of them. Personally I would prefer if it was the former. Why not give us a call today if you think this is a good idea too.
I am reliably told that successful baking is a lot like chemistry. All you need to do is follow the instructions, add in the right ingredients in the right order and you are all set to create the same successful outcome of your “experiment” every time. Somehow, it never seems to work the same way for me. Either I rush things and miss something out or, even worse, mistake one thing (think salt) for another (think sugar) and a disaster is on the way.
Nevertheless, get it right and what you see in the image at the top of the recipe page should be close to what you take out of the oven. And let’s face it, it’s that image we all want. Yep, a nice thick slab of carrot cake with a very non-healthy spread of cream cheese icing. Yum scrummy. The thought of munching through this makes all the hassle of creating it and cleaning up afterwards worthwhile.
E-commerce websites are nothing like carrot cake. That I know. I also know that their owners all have revenue and profit targets they want them to meet. And for me that’s the picture at the top of the recipe – the bit that gets them excited. However, for many, the bit below – the recipe they need to follow to make the image a reality – that bit is missing. What exactly do they need to do to “bake” their way towards these numbers?
All this came up during a recent customer planning session. We were working through the next 12-month target for a very successful e-commerce website. The target – or the yummy picture that got us all excited – was very enticing too. Double digit growth was expected in both top- and bottom-line numbers. But what was the recipe they were going to follow to make this a reality? There were a few blank looks around the room so I started with the carrot cake analogy and then as a group we worked through designing the recipe they would need.
Fortunately, an e-commerce website requires fewer ingredients than your average carrot cake. The four staples are: visitors, customers, purchases and costs. Of these, it’s the customer part that’s the most important to sort first. The outcomes of the work in this area drive the marketing costs you will need to afford and with it an understanding of the visitor counts this expense needs to generate to make it all work.
So how many customers did they need to achieve their goal? Was it, say, 5000 people spending $150 each or 1000 spending $750 each? And of these customers how many would they expect to buy more than once during the year? And of this group what would their average annual spend be? These are very simple questions that can be deceptive in the amount of work required to find credible answers for. In this case, the client had to go away and analyze their previous 12-month sales figures and then spend a few days drilling through this data to reveal the answers they required.
Fortunately for them they had a great business, selling a great product that customers purchased reasonably frequently during the year. And of these three wins it was probably the last one that was the most important. Repeat purchase e-commerce websites are so much easier to make work. Email marketing fits nicely into this space too. So does paid search. You can afford to enter this market and pay high click costs if you have the promise of a repeat purchase customer at the end of it all.
Conversely, businesses built on once-only purchase activity are a challenge. To make these work the margins need to be good, with strong and obvious points of differentiation to make them sustainable. Both of these are hard to create and even harder to protect.
But as I mentioned earlier, thankfully this wasn’t the case here so we mapped out expected sales from repeat purchasing, allowing for some increase. Some of the margin from this work would support our email marketing efforts – a solution ideal for customer retention. The gap we had left over was a new customer revenue line. This was spread over the months ahead – allowing for some demand fluctuations during the year based on seasonal changes that affected their industry.
Then we had traffic to sort. We had a good understanding of the site’s conversion rates for new customers based on the last 12 months so we could work out these figures and calculate the required visitor growth to make the conversions we wanted a reality. We then split this between SEO and paid search, based on the ability of specific keywords to reliably bring us new customers.
After a couple of relatively focused sessions and some deep analytical work at their end we had our recipe. And yes, it had some assumptions that needed validation as the year progressed. Things like “we expect existing customers to spend 15% more this year due to our improved email marketing” and “our product margins will remain the same”. But still, it was there ready to be worked through during the months ahead.
So are you an e-commerce website owner who just stares at that nice revenue and profit number hoping it will eventuate? Well, now’s the time to stop hoping and start creating the ideal recipe for you and your business. Let me know if you need any help with your ingredients.
Have fun.
This month’s conference call was all about how to optimize a website for those selling big ticket items. (Customers will be able to access a recording of the call either from the monthly CD they receive or from a link in the customer portal part of our website.)
Selling large, costly and most likely complex products and/or services can be a challenge online. Here prospects don’t decide on a Monday what they want and from whom and by Wednesday have the transaction complete and their solution in their hands. Nope, these decision cycles can take weeks, months or even years to work through. During this time prospects will vacillate from supplier to supplier, option to option, and could well end up not buying off anyone at all.
More often than not the actual decision to buy will NOT be made with a web page and order form in front of your prospect. This might occur over coffee at the dining room table, at the roadside when their car gives up the ghost for the umpteenth time or, with luck, with your salesperson in your office. How and where the sale will end is hard to predict; nevertheless, there’s a very strong chance that it will start online. Here a prospect will kick off some research using trusty Google and a broad category-type keyword like “crm software”.
Hopefully, if you sell CRM software, your website will feature in this list. Now all you need to do is to capture this early level of interest and convert it to actual orders week or months or more later. Up for the challenge? Understandably, there’s a lot to get wrong during this time. But to help you along the way here’s my list of the seven most common mistakes people make, with a short note on how to avoid each of them.
#1 – Failing to include lead nurturing
So they arrive on your website, read your content, perhaps print out a report you offer, and then are gone for another few months as they consider their options. Remembering that these big ticket decisions will take weeks or months to complete, somehow you need to keep in touch as prospects work through their decision. Email marketing is the obvious choice here as long as you have permission to send it. But let’s not forget direct mail or even telemarketing too, or even all three in a neat “mix and match” format.
People lead busy lives and because of that prospects will naturally forget what you told them or what they read on your website. A regular drip feed of content to politely and persistently remind them of all the key facts is required. Do this well and you will have them move from thinking you are just one of many viable alternatives in month one to being convinced you are the best option in month ten.
#2 – A website that talks too much on how you can solve rather than understand a problem
Think of it this way. Say you need a builder to come in and fix a stuck window in your lounge room. It’s a simple job that’s been bugging you for ages and now it’s time to find a builder – any builder really – to get it sorted. Your criteria of who gets the job would probably include things like whether they are local and what their minimum call-out fee is. Simple criteria really to fix what is quite a simple problem.
Compare this with when you need a builder to help you create our ideal home. This requires a completely different list of criteria and there’s a strong chance that the builder that fixed the window is not going to be the one to build the home. Now, the ability for them to understand the problem matters more than where they operate from and even what they charge. (No point in paying less for something you don’t want.)
So home-building builders would be well served by a website that explains the process they follow to listen and understand what their prospects want. Ideally this content would be supported with some testimonial proof from happy customers that say they did exactly that. This leads me nicely onto my next point.
#3 – A website with a paucity of social proof
It’s not that purchasers of big ticket items are less trusting of suppliers than their small ticket cousins. Oh well, let’s face it, they are. Making the wrong decision here is a problem. It’s not that easy to take your recently built home back and ask for a replacement. Or pull out a multi-million dollar CRM system because it doesn’t do exactly what you wanted it to.
So buyers take more care and are naturally pleasantly reassured when they read the successful stories of others who can attest to the process or product doing exactly what they are being told it will do. For instance, if your website says that your $8000 ride-on lawnmower will easily manage long grass on sloping terrain then that’s fine. But if a customer sends in a video of them using the machine doing exactly this AND raves about the finish it leaves behind then this is so much more believable.
#4 – Failing to offer impartial, valuable information for buyers who are interested but not yet ready to buy
Just by the nature of the long sales cycle that big ticket items operate within, more people will arrive at your website interested than those who are ready to buy. The proportions could be 10 to 1, 50 to 1, or even 100 to 1, depending on your business category and the marketing they have received before arriving.
Now I realize that persuading those ready to buy now to contact you is a very big priority. But very close behind this is developing a system to do the same for those interested – the vast majority of your site traffic.
To achieve this you could offer them an impartial buyer’s guide, technically detailed white papers or even complimentary CDs of prior coaching sessions. During the customer conference call I mentioned over 25 different types of content you can offer for this stage. They span all types of media choices and formats but all have the same thing in common – they offer interested prospects something of real value.
This is not the time for product catalogues or a full-on sales pitch in print. Prospects are not ready for this yet. First, you need to win them over with some meaty, valuable and timely content that helps them during the research and information-gathering stage they are in now.
#5 – Failing to answer the top questions prospects have during their buying process
We covered this one at length during the coaching call. The key points are that there will be a list of questions – probably less than 5 – that the majority of prospects will need answering BEFORE they will even consider you as a valid supplier. The first job is to use some effective but relatively easy to run research to find out what these questions are.
The obvious next step is to answer them completely during your sales process. For instance, business owner purchasers of accounting services may have at the top of their list the ability for their supplier to explain complex issues in simple to understand language. So accountants selling services into this space would be wise to own a website that does exactly this.
#6 – Prospects doing the hard work of translating features into benefits
This is sales training 101 but still we can all slip back into old habits – especially when we are writing website content. So let us be clear – it’s not about you and what you do – it’s about them and how their life will be different after using you. For instance, you may run quarterly seminars where all clients are invited to meet and mingle with other business owners like them. That’s a feature. There are a ton of benefits this could flow into. One may be for attendees to learn from others just like them who have experienced the same problems and have gone on to solve them in new and innovative ways.
#7 – Failing to add value to entice people to leap from the online world to the offline one
In most cases for big ticket items you will need to transition your ongoing online lead nurturing communications into real face-to-face sales talk. This is a critical stage. Do it correctly and all your prior online work is worthwhile – make a mess of it and all this was for naught. You can improve your chances of success here by “selling” the act. For instance, why not rev up a simple “call us for a free quote on your payroll processing needs” into something like “call for your 20 point payroll industry benchmark review”. Ideally, this statement would be delivered on its own landing page that explains exactly what will be delivered, by whom and the benefits others have gained by doing the same.
So there you have it, seven mistakes to avoid when selling big ticket items online. I hope you weren’t making all of them? Contact us today if you would like a complimentary assessment of your efforts so far.
Have fun.
Owners of e-commerce websites sites have my deepest sympathy. There’s so much that they need to get right to see some sizable results – technology, product selection / merchandising, pricing, Google and analytics. And even when it does go swimmingly well they’re left with an industry standard measly single digit conversion rate. Where’s the satisfaction in that? All that work for 3 or 5%?
We all know that optimising the shopping cart process can push these rates upwards. But what about actions that occur prior to the cart stage? The bit where people are looking through your products, trying to decide if this is really for them. These are actions that occur further back in the sale process, where the goal is to influence, persuade and motivate the visitor to take action.
Here, the task is to present the right type of message in the best choice of content. Text, images, documents and videos – all of these can work well – if your visitors decide to consume what you offer. So let’s get stuck into how we can set up some kind of conversion tracking for these stages.
Say you sell technical products that cost north of $400 and are struggling to make any sales after months of promotion. Lots of visitors to the product page but no one placing it in the cart and the till just isn’t ringing. To debug the issue you might decide to produce a product manual in PDF format for free download. Or maybe a buyer’s guide for those looking to purchase a product like this for the first time. Both documents could be loaded to sit nicely on the product details page ready for the next interested visitor to come along.
Then with some swanky changes to your Google Analytics code you can now see if either of these documents are being downloaded. It could be that both are being pulled off the site by 50% + of those that visit – or that no one pulled any of them off at all. Unfortunately, if you can’t get anyone to grab a free download on the product then you’ve got a bigger problem to solve than your e-commerce conversion rate.
We saw a similar situation with a customer only the other month. They had been purchasing Google AdWords traffic for a number of months with very little results. Lots of clicks, lots of dollars but no sales. They had a smattering of PDF manual documents around their website but no tracking to see if they were being used. We updated their Google Analytics set up, started tracking downloads and found that for every 100 clicks there were over 30 downloads. The traffic was interested in the products on offer – the first hurdle was overcome. It was just the sales process that needed to
be revamped.
See the image to follow that shows a Google Analytics account modified to show event tracking underway. This can include downloads, email link clicks and clicks to external websites.
Video is another great source of content that, once tracked properly, can become a great conversion value to monitor and improve. Last year we worked with a client who owned a website that sold one product promoted through a 35 minute video of a webinar they had run recently. The content was great. When they ran live webinars the conversion rate of attendees was impressive. Nevertheless we weren’t sure putting all 35 minutes online for visitor consumption was the right plan.
They, of course, thought it was perfect as it was. But were smart enough to know that good Analytics would tell the real story. So again we modified their website tracking, updated the video player and began to track the video play action itself and the length play time per session.
The image to follow shows some of this data that was collected.
And the results? Well, there was a high percentage that arrived on the page and played the video. That was the good news. The bad news was that the average play lasted 10 minutes, and those that played to the end were no more likely to convert than those who watched just some of the content. They all converted the same, and it was at a higher rate than those who didn’t play. So the playing mattered – the content just needed to be re-worked to get all the good stuff at the front end and to make the video more widely promoted around the website.
So there you have it. By tracking your PDF downloads and video plays you can start to see what affect – if any – they are having on your sale process. Usually the more content visitors consume – in whatever form – the greater your chances of closing the sale. Have fun.
Cast your mind back to a time before cell phones, iThis and iThat, and even the Internet. Yep we are talking ancient history in technology land or approximately 20 human years. This is where the story starts, with Chris Price as a freshfaced new recruit ready to sell up a storm hawking commercial printing to those unsuspecting souls in East Tamaki.
Anyway, during my early days doing this, I was shown a strategy that I’m now going to renovate and present back to you as something super smart to apply to your online lead generating efforts. Think of it as a matt, dull object from the past that is probably a bit more valuable than its usually shiny, bright cousin we come across each and every week.
Anyway, this business had a rather crude but effective way of generating leads. It involved sitting its sales force down at their desks, arming them with phones and phone books and then yelling at them repeatedly to cold call prospects in their chosen territory to make sales appointments.
OK, so perhaps the yelling part is overstating the fact a bit. But still you were expected to be at your desk from 8:00am until 10:00am calling up purchasing managers (remember that role) and convincing them to see you either that day or sometime soon over the week. It was a soul-destroying task but, surprisingly, a reasonably effective one.
Printing was a fickle business then as it probably is now. Printers came and went, service levels were up and down, and staff churned away. So if you were fortunate your call could coincide with someone who was so annoyed with their current supplier that you got a hearing. If you were lucky.
I really hated this cold calling part of the sales process. So I would arm myself with as much coffee as my body could contain and then work through my call list as fast as I could. I repeated my sales script in a jabbering caffeine-fueled way – in what was probably so much of a blabber that no one could tell what I said and as such any chance of success was quickly snuffed out.
So as the clock struck 10:00am I was evicted with the rest of the sales force. They bounced off to their first call. I drove down the southern motorway just knowing what was coming up next. Now as sales people we were only allowed back in the office after 4:00 pm and then only to write up our orders from the day’s calling. So if my phone cold calling drew a blank then I had a day ahead of an even worse experience – door knocking.
Yep, picking some unsuspecting street in industrial East Tamaki and working from one end to the other asking to see the person in charge of printing. I hated this even more than the phone. After the first month, it was obvious to everyone that I was not the company’s best hire. So it was no surprise when my boss called me into his office and sat me down “for a chat about my future.”
Clyde told me he could see some promise but things had to change – and fast. He then pulled out a pen and paper and began to map out my progress to date. Their sales process required us to complete daily call reports that showed exactly who we had phoned or visited, what was discussed and a nice space to list down the orders we had achieved.My reports had a bunch of stuff in the activity areas, but very little in the place left for orders. Between us we tallied up the orders made – that didn’t take too long – then the number of phone calls and sales presentations I had made.
The numbers for the two weeks just gone were something like – 200 agonizing phone calls made – 10 appointments made – 9 sales presentations delivered resulting in 3 orders collected with sales worth $6,000. As a rookie sales person I was on a very small base salary, which was topped up with a commission on gross sales – so I knew the dollars but the activity numbers were new to me.
Clyde then broke down each step of the sales process and assigned a dollar value to it. So the orders were worth $2000 each and on average I needed 3 presentations to make an order – which means each presentation was worth $667, while each appointment was worth $600 and each phone call – hold on – was worth an amazing $30.
This changed everything. Now, whenever I picked up the phone I didn’t just think fear, doubt and extreme worry – I also thought three nice and shiny $10 notes – just waiting for me to grab them. And when I was presenting to a prospect, while I thought features vs benefits – features vs benefits – features vs benefits, I also thought $667 is very close now so listen hard and don’t blow this.
I would have liked to say that this epiphany changed everything and overnight I went from a cold calling disaster to become king of the phones. But it didn’t. Nevertheless, it made things a bit easier – the phone wasn’t so scary; the appointments were not so haphazard.
So how does this apply to your lead generation website?
First, let’s kick off with the general agreement that there’s a multi-stage process people follow before they buy. For printing it involved me calling and convincing them to let me in their office for an appointment. That was all I was told to present. Nothing about what I could offer – just the benefits of sitting in a room with me to discuss their printing needs. That was step one. Some agreed and booked a time. Others fobbed me off and asked me to send a brochure in the mail (sort of like a step 1.5). Anyway, I did what was asked of me and then called back politely but persistently to get that appointment.
If all went well then step two had me placed eyeball to eyeball across their desk – pitching them what I could offer. And all going well, one in three would buy.
Let’s now apply this to lead generation on the Internet. Some prospects will come by your website, immediately like what you offer, and complete your “Contact Us” page form. Now, this “some” could be between 2% and 5% of your total visitor traffic depending on your industry, the content you offer, and your standing in the market. Think of these as the purchasing officers who were absolutely fuming about their printing supplier and were very happy I called that day.
But there are not a lot in this group, so you have the remaining 95% to 98% of your website visitors who do nothing. Some of this group will be mildly interested. But how do you entice them to linger a bit longer and eventually transform themselves into a lead?
Before we talk about some options, it’s worth remembering that the Internet is a cruel, harsh environment when it comes to prospecting. As a rookie sales person, very rarely did I have people slam down the phone on me within the first 30 seconds of my phone pitch. Nevertheless, prospects visiting your website could arrive, not like what they see and read, and be off in half this time. They are truly a fickle and demanding bunch that needs a selection of enticing “stuff” to capture and hold their attention.
So for “stuff” you could offer blog posts, free reports, newsletter subscriptions, pre-recorded seminars, and teleseminars – all containing content that your prospect would deem as being very valuable. For example, you may offer a PDF report they could download without registration, a recording of a webinar they can stream off your website and an information-packed Free Report they could register for. Now some prospects will grab all three options, while others will pick just one that suits them. And by reading, listing or viewing it they will become a bit more likely to contact you rather than your competitors.
Once you have these available on your website you can sit yourself down and calculate the relative values for each content piece that prospects consume just as Clyde did with me. As an example, your figures could tell you that out of 10 web contacts you will make 6 appointments, which produce 3 sales worth $1750 each. So your appointment sessions are worth $875 ($5250 / 6) and your web contact requests are worth $525 ($5250/10).
Now working back through your analytics data you can see that out of the 80 visitors that decide to take up the option of your PDF download only 2 go on to make a web contact, so that action is worth $6.50 ($525/80). Delving further into your Analytics data you find that of the 130 visitors that look at your webinar, 1 makes a web contact – so that action is worth $4.00. Meanwhile, of the 30 that register for the free report, 4 have gone onto make contact, which makes this action worth a whopping $70 ($2100/30). Now I realize that the numbers are rough and there is room for some double counting BUT you can start to see how all this helps to prioritize your efforts so you spend time optimizing your website for more prospects to register for that free report before you try and get them to watch the webinar. There’s gold in that there strategy.
Plus, if you are content to live with the “rough edges” of the relative amounts of these action values you can then include them in your Google Analytics account so the totals are tallied up each day. For instance, seeing that your website produced a relative $2500 worth of lead generating actions (PDF downloads, free report registrations, etc.) during the week just gone – all without you having to make a single cold call yourself – should be something to smile about.
“Buying Google clicks is just too expensive for us so what other online marketing options do you have for us to consider? How about renting an email list – can you guys help with that?”
There I was sitting in a prospect’s office in Auckland’s central city, listening to the story of why they were looking for Google AdWords Campaign Management services from someone like us. It was just a few minutes into our discussion when – Bam – out came this bombshell. A failed AdWords experiment was there sitting across the table from me.
Now, some would miss the opportunity a comment like this can bring. They may jump into the many reasons why buying an email list was probably the least favourable of all options worth pursuing. But not me. Nope, this was just gold. So I started to question exactly what they had experienced with AdWords and how their failure here could reveal some startling truths about the overall health of their online marketing.
I asked some more questions and my prospect shared all he could, in all its tragic detail. How their cost per click was in dollars not cents. The AdWords budget was in thousands not hundreds and after all this there were pitifully few leads produced at what ended up to be an abhorrent individual cost per lead. The first two parts of the story were actually good news of what could lie ahead – that I will expand on later. But losing money with Google is never fun to experience for anyone, so I took my time to explain what this all meant and how it was worthwhile to take on Google again – but perhaps with a few tweaks to their methods of engagement.
I began with why the strategy was worth pursuing. You see, your ability to run a successful on-going Google AdWords campaign is a real-world gauge of the lead generation effectiveness of your website compared with all those of your bidding competitors. Yep, your ability to purchase clicks at a profit can reveal how effective your website is at turning traffic into leads – compared with everyone else in your market who tries to do the same. This in itself is some quite cool live data with which to benchmark your business against others.
I followed this with a few words on why expensive keywords are a good thing to find when you enter a bidding market like the one AdWords operates. Let’s not think cents here, nope we are really looking for those keywords that are worth dollars per click. For instance, Google and its Keyword Tool can tell me that for the keyword “cash loans nz” I should be prepared to pay around $4.00 per click. This is an amount that would make most online marketers think twice before paying. Nevertheless, trust me, it’s a good sign. Prices like these reflect what competitors are prepared to pay day in and day out because for them the investment is worth the return. And in most cases, large dollar clicks are there because for the majority of bidders they are producing large dollar returns.
The prospects behind those clicks have a strong need that they want met AND they are prepared to take action online to help them find a solution. In comparison, super-low click costs – say sub 10 cents – are warning signs that you are possibly entering a troublesome market. Here you may find clickers but those willing to take some action – and a profitable one at that – may be a bit more elusive.
As an aside, for those interested in knowing their keywords bid price but who are not yet running an AdWords campaign, fortunately Google makes it relatively easy to get a guide on this value. Just head over to the Google keyword tool, then login to your AdWords account (you don’t need any campaigns running – just an account set up) and search the keywords of your market in your region. You should see something like the image to follow.
So by now we had discussed how his keywords were in the costly part of the market and how this was a good thing. And just by looking at who was bidding on these words we could also assume that others in his market were living with these costs. This left the simple question of whether he wanted to make the necessary changes to enter the market and survive.
Well, with 90% of NZ searchers using Google as their tool, he really didn’t have a lot of options. That left the task of finding out the areas he needed to focus on to make these dollar clicks start to pay. Here’s a short overview of just four of the points we covered.
Conversion rate was the starter. Yep, the hard truth could be that your bidding competitors may own an e-commerce website that converts at 4% while yours struggles to get above 2% for exactly the same items. Or for those of you in lead generation land, your competitor’s offline sales process could be twice as effective as yours. It could be their lead follow-up, their phone script or even their face-to-face presentation. Any one or all of these could be a good rung or two above your own, which ensures they convert twice as many leads into customers as you do. Even though their lead quality is, once again, exactly the same as yours.
Next up was the method by which his competitors were valuing the total of each sale or lead and then allocating a proportion of this to marketing. For instance, they could be valuing each sale just on its initial amount. So when a typical first-time customer may spend just $100 then a proportion of this amount would go towards their AdWords costs. Now it could be that over the next 11 months these “typical” customers will purchase another nine times. And if all goes well after this they will do the same for an average of three years, moving their lifetime value to $3000 rather than the paltry $100 of the first sale.
Those who are super-confident in their customer retention strategies can afford to invest with the $3000 value in mind, leaving the rest to struggle, trying to compete in a world where their sale begins and ends at $100. With work, they could look at each lead not as $100 coming in the door but as $3000 of long-term value. Strategies to move your world beyond the first sale include an email newsletter, a rewards program, or whatever it takes to transform single-purchase customers into multiple-purchasing machines.
Following on from the economic power that comes to those with a strong customer retention plan there’s also the hard fact that your competitor could make more money per sale than you do. So while you may both bid on and sell item A, your bidding competitor could then go on and sell to the same customer items B, C and D, none of which you offer. This pushes up their average revenue and therefore profit per transaction. Maybe even to a value that allows them to sell item A at a loss, knowing that the other products will make this up and then some. Not such good news for those who only sell A :((.
Unfortunately, it may well be one or all of these strategies at play with your high-bidding competitors. It would be so much easier if you could wave a magic wand and have revealed exactly what they are doing to make it work for them when it doesn’t for you. Nevertheless, there are some very crude maths you can run to help reveal how far you have to go to get things back on track.
So to follow on from my cash loans example – here we have an average $4 per click amount. Allowing for a fictional goal application conversion rate of 5%, the cost per application would be $80. The first question is, if you operate in this business, could you live with this cost? And if not on your first sale, could it work if your looked further down the lifetime of your customer? If the answer is still no, then what conversion rate would it work with and is this realistic?
We answer questions like these during our Online Marketing Review process. It’s the first step we take new customers through when they are looking to join Permission. Yes, it’s a paid service but comes with some performance outcomes that ensure you only pay for what you want. Call us today if you would like to learn more about this first step.
It all started with Tom Cruise yelling it in his office in the movie “Jerry Maguire” as he played a struggling sports agent trying to make a mark and convince an athlete to join his sports marketing business. Recently “Show me the money” arrived on our screens again – this time as as one political leader asked it of his opposition to highlight a perceived weakness in his financial calculations.
Four simple words that in both instances did a great job of cutting to the nub of the issue.
So how about we ask the same question of your website?
We all know the costs are easy for everyone to see. There’s hosting, web development, and even optimisation services from people like us. But what about the other part – the revenue side – where can you find these parts hidden inside your web pages?
Most people think that e-commerce websites are the only ones that can produce the necessary answers. Of course they’re wrong. Lead generation sites can do the same – you just need to know how to set up their analytics tools to do the job. Then all you need to do is know which reports “show you the money” and you are underway.
Nevertheless, I’m going to tackle how to find the answers for all those e-commerce website owners first. So Mr and Mrs e-commerce website using Google Analytics its now your turn to “Show me the money”.
OK – let me start with the bad news. Out of the box, the Google Analytics code you add to every page of your e-commerce website WILL NOT gather the “money” data you need. So while you may be able to correctly set up some goal completion actions to see each sale roll through your website, none of these will have any revenue data attributed to them.
The good news is that Google spells out clearly what needs to happen to make this work. All you need to do is amend the Google Analytics tracking code so that the final page of your shopping cart includes the revenue and order details for each converted sale. This will then be swallowed up by Google Analytics account and reported back to you later on.
Yes, it is a bit techie to set up. But fortunately there’s a ton of content inside the Google Analytics help centre to make the changes relatively straightforward. And finally, yes, you will need to test the bejeevers out of it to ensure it works exactly as you want it to.
Once done you are well on the way to seeing the money in your website. The first obvious place to look is the overview e-commerce report that shows the large bucket of all the revenue your site has generated. All going well it should marry up reasonably closely with what your bank tells you your Internet sales deposits were for the same period.
This is nice to know but not necessarily very useful when deciding what needs changing. So sales are up 20% – now what?
Finding out what traffic source is responsible for what % of revenue is quite handy to know. The image to follow shows this. Down the left-hand side are some of the traffic streams this website receives – Organic Google, Google AdWords, Direct, Yahoo and Bing. On the far right there’s a per visit value for each stream.
So now we can see that when someone arrives onto the website from typing the URL into their address bar – as direct traffic – they represent $13.14 in revenue. That’s quite cool. Just imagine a bell set up to ring in your office every time it occurs – with you smiling, knowing that this means another $13 dollars is very likely to be heading towards the bank account. Nice.
So why is it so high? Repeat business. Yep, these are customers coming back again and again and it reveals a very strong operation that does a great job of keeping its customers informed and very happy.
However, now look at Google AdWords – here the revenue per visit is a miserly 98 cents. This traffic is dominated by prospects so the sales values are much smaller. There needs to be some careful work done here to ensure that the click cost doesn’t chew through all this possible revenue.
Per visit value reports are a great way for your website to “Show you the money”. Here’s another report that uses the same metric but this time relative to the organic keywords customers have used to find your website. Data privacy concerns means that this looks like just a big box of hidden data but look to the right and those values relate to keywords listed – but hidden – on the left-hand side. And yes, there’s a keyword in there with a per visit value of $80.96. That would be the big bell that rang when someone arrived from Google using that keyword 🙂
How much optimisation work would you embark on to improve your listing for an $80 keyword compared with a $10 one? Reports like these make the decision of where to focus your search engine optimisation efforts so much easier to make.
There is one last report for those interested in optimising their pages for sales rather than just for search terms. This one shows the per visit value for the top landing pages of your site. (Remember that Google Analytics defines a landing page as the first page your visitor lands on when accessing your website.) This site is well optimised for Google so while their home page receives a ton of traffic so does a long list of other pages – all responsible for making that great first impression for a new visitor.
Cast your eyes across to the right and you will see Per Visit Value data here too. Yes, the home page is the top value of $11.65, but there’s a $6 page that looks to be doing well also. Conversely, there’s a $0.00 for a page that attracts a fair bit of traffic – trust me on that one – this page needs a bit of work.
OK, so that should get a few e-commerce website owners diving for their Analytics accounts to “Show themselves the money”. But what about our lead generation friends? Are they completely left out? Fortunately not – BUT they do need to make a small change to see reports like these in their accounts. To do this they need to amend their goal tracking details to include an approximate revenue per lead.
The process of working out what this should be can stop people in their tracks and ensure they go no further. So lets make it a simple thing for everyone. How much is an average quality lead worth for your business? Now, you don’t have to be exact but is it $250, $100, $75, $50 or $20? Either pick one that “feels” right for your business or work out some sums including the average conversion rate of your sales process, lifetime value of your average customer and the cost of marketing you can attribute to your profit and still have an ongoing business.
Work through the simple maths and you should end up with a value. You can then attribute a percentage of this value across the various goals you have running on your website. For instance, a goal registering a quote request could get 100% of the value, while a person subscribing to your email newsletter would be only 20%.
To follow is an image of where to add in this value in your goal set-up area.
Once you have done this, all those “per visit value” reports you thought were just the domain of owners of e-commerce websites are now available to you and your lead generation website. For instance, to follow is an image of the landing page report for a lead generation website with per visit values for each page – handy stuff when it comes to optimising these pages to push this value northwards.
So why not sit down this month and ask your website to “show you the money”? Some may want to shout out the request at the screen, others will suffice with the little dance that Cuba Gooding Jr does as he asks Jerry the same question – whatever fits for you – just ensure you get the answers you need.
http://tinyurl.com/Jerry-Show-Me-The-Money
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?
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.
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.
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.
For some strange reason, memories of my old physics classes seem to crop up on a regular basis within these pages. I’ve prattled on about how explosive the experiments were and how all this work was underpinned with some solid ‘problem busting’ scientific thought. Both of which I have then gone on to apply as possible solutions to the problems businesses may be facing in a down economy.
From all this you could assume – quite incorrectly I might add – that I was a bit of swot when it came to science. But I wasn’t. I struggled like the rest of them and just managed to scrape through with a B pass for my Cambridge O Level end-of-year exams. Nevertheless, I fall back to this time for content because of the most basic of reasons – I enjoyed it. You see, as a lad I was probably the same weight I am now but a good half the height. A bit of a porker was I. So sports were never my thing, English was a struggle, languages were even worse, so science was for me.
So while I found it hard work it was the certainty of the results that really appealed. Complete the experiment in the right way – mix blue powder with hot water and ba boom – one large bright and very messy explosion for all to see. Follow the same steps and the same results occurred – every time for everyone that followed the same process. Repeatable results – yep, that seemed quite cool to me.
I thought engineering contained the same type of thinking, so on leaving school I joined up to be an apprentice technician engineer at a local factory. Then, after a fair bit of travel, a few career changes and a dabble with redundancy, I started this company in 2002. There’s been quite a bit of change along the way but the theme that underpins Permission – delivering repeatable results – is the same one that interested me as student while I worked through those experiments. Thankfully, there are no unexpected explosions this time.
Nevertheless, there are some areas we work within that create a bigger economic ‘bang’ for our client’s buck than others. However, ensuring our clients allow us to focus their efforts in this space can be a challenge. For example, while our customers come in various personality styles, they all seem to have a core desire to want more traffic to their website. It’s like an obsession for some. These people pour over their Google Analytics reports each Monday morning to see how far their traffic has risen since the week before. And if it hasn’t, then in comes an email to ask what is happening. We answer all these politely, but at the same time try to avert their laser-like focus onto another part of their site that could return them more for their consulting spend.
And what is that ideal focus point?
Yes, I have talked about this before in the newsletter but this time I’m going back to one of my old physics lectures to illustrate my point about how improvements in this space can be so lucrative. Remember fulcrums and levers?
I think it was Archimedes who said “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth with a lever”. Well, I don’t think we need to move a planet, just a website’s performance, so this should be a doddle in comparison.
To help me out here, please find to follow a simple image of a classic lever / fulcrum set-up – it has a rather skinny guy trying to lift a very heavy rock.
I’m going to add in two ingredients of any website – traffic and conversions – and then a nice expected outcome – cash. Now things are getting a bit more interesting.
Hopefully, most of you have your eyes transfixed on the rock, which represents a nice heavy pile of cash. This is good. If nothing else, it has distracted you from the hard work of the person with the cap – forcing down on the pole (creating website traffic). Things are a bit blurry but I’m sure he is grimacing as he struggles away. Now the amount of swearing that is going on with Mr Lifter will depend on how effective his fulcrum is – which in my little diagram is the conversion rate of the site.
This basic physics principle highlights a few very important things. Firstly, for those obsessed with just generating traffic to their website, you will notice that without any fulcrum in place no cash will be raised. Yep, absolutely nothing – nadda. Send progressively more traffic to a website that doesn’t convert and your results remain the same – zilch.
Secondly, the work of Mr Lifter would be a lot easier if he had a better fulcrum. He could in fact use less force (need less traffic) and still lift more (generate more cash) when compared with someone who had more traffic BUT a weaker fulcrum (poorer conversion rate). Hmm, do less work and achieve more. Sound like a plan?
So how does all this semi-theoretical physics mumbo jumbo translate into tasks you can put on your to-do list next week? Well, here’s a few to consider.
First off, let’s get stuck into the hard one – changing your mindset from focusing on traffic to driving up conversions. With some luck the image of the pile of cash being lifted upwards by Mr Lifter with relative ease should help. However, I realise that making the right changes to your website to improve conversion rates is anything but easy.
It takes time to set up experiments, even with Google’s free Website Optimiser product, and then patience to let enough conversions pile up so the results are valid. All this relies on a bit of methodical thinking and a strong self-image to know that, even with all this work, your changes could be proven to either have no positive impact or to actually reduce the conversion rate of your site.
But there is always a bright side. Doesn’t knowing what doesn’t work take you one step closer to knowing what does? (I think it was Thomas Edison who mentioned this after conducting thousands of failed experiments before he settled on the winning one.) And, like Edison, once you know what works well you can mine this success for ages. More on the economic power these results can provide you later.
Nevertheless, there is sometimes a short cut to conversion rate improvement. This has you looking out for other conversion choices – think other fulcrums – for your website to lever more cash from your visitors. For instance, an e-commerce website that achieves a credible 3.5% conversion rate still has 96.5% of its visitors leaving without buying. Now, I would guess that not all of this group are totally disinterested in what the website offers – it’s just that they weren’t ready to buy just when they visited.
But 15% could be keen enough to join a newsletter list. And a further 5% may well be in love with the brand so much that they would join the site’s fan page on Facebook. So to 3.5% of core sales conversions we can now add another 20% of additional ‘contact conversions’, realising that not all of those will buy now, but a high percentage could be persuaded to buy later.
A recent conversation I had with a prospect during one of our introductory online marketing performance review sessions highlighted this exact same issue. Their website offered a small range of products via a very simple e-commerce offer. Buying these items and contacting them for assistance were the only two conversion options the site offered. What’s more, their target market was proven to devour any information they were offered on the subject area. Add to this the fact that their product offered a novel twist to solve this very common problem, coupled with a great story behind it – and there were opportunities abound to offer an email newsletter of sorts and gather many more conversions from the traffic that was currently leaving the site.
Offering information is a great option to backfill a website’s conversion choices. Some industries / products make this strategy an easy one to exploit. But even for those that may struggle there are occasionally opportunities that arise to turn a relatively dry subject into something that many are keen to learn more about. For instance, if you run an accountancy practice, the latest changes to New Zealand’s GST and PAYE rates are an actual goldmine of opportunity. Used properly, information on these subject areas is an ideal way to engage with both prospects and existing clients. I recently sat in on a presentation from one practice that took us through the GST changes from start to end in a very practical and informative manner. I had never heard of this business before I was invited, but now if I was looking for a new accountant then they would be close to the top of my list. But have I seen dozens of accountants offering complimentary courses on the changes to reap the value of this opportunity? Nope – hardly any.
Which leads me nicely back to the subject of seizing every opportunity to make your conversion rate fulcrum work as hard as it can. The numbers can be very compelling – e-commerce websites especially can reap huge gains from relatively small improvements. For instance, say you own an e-commerce website that receives 8000 unique visitors per month and converts 2.5% of this traffic with an average sale value of $80. All you need to do is move this up 0.5% and your revenue per month increases by over $3000 – for every month going forward. That’s over $100,000 in extra revenue over three years.
Getting to grips with numbers like these can be a good way to help galvanise yourself into action. This month’s customer conference call included a section where I presented an interactive PDF document that should help many. By using this you can manipulate your own visitor numbers and conversion rates to see how sensitive each of them is to your overall financial results. As a customer you would have received a copy of this document.
I suggest you spend a few moments plugging in your own details to see what they show. You should be pleasantly surprised how much extra cash your website can raise just by applying some small changes to your fulcrum of conversion. Now that should replace any grimace with a nice smile.