Every quarter we ask our customers the same two questions:
· Firstly “how likely are you to refer us” on a scale of 1 to 10 ( 10 being every opportunity I have )
· And next, please add any other non-compulsory comment in the free text field.
We then put the answers through a formula derived from Net Promoter Score. You may already use this in your business; if not, here’s a link that tells you how it works. You calculate your final score by adding up all those who give you a 9 or 10 as a percentage of your total respondents. From this you then deduct – as a percentage – those who scored you 6 or below. So if 40% gave you either 9 or 10 and 10% gave you 6 or below, your Net Promoter Score would be 30%.
The theory is that a wide range of businesses ask the same “how likely are you to refer” question, so you can benchmark your results against those of others. For instance, for New Zealand businesses – courtesy of Customer Monitor – we see:
· University of Auckland +18%
· Total Professional Services +11%
· Dentist / Doctor +14%
· Banking +12%
· Insurance -10%
This quarter we achieved +60%. It’s a great score, and your comments provided an interesting list of ideas for how we can improve even further. Thank you to everyone who took part.
Winner of the $200 restaurant voucher: Alan Singam from Les Mills New Zealand. The next survey will be in June.
This report splits your traffic based on three device types – desktop, mobile and tablet. It then shows how your website interacts with each of the three across your measures for:
– core engagement (how many visitors you have to the site via each device)
– conversion tracking metrics (how many visits become sales)
It’s important to track these trends over time, so pick a date range that extends 6 or 12 months – especially for your mobile results.
Visit any cafe and notice especially patrons who are on their own. A fair proportion will have their heads bowed, peering into their screens. Even couples do the same – no time for conversation – nope there’s stuff to be checked online that’s more important than their face-to-face relationship. So this is the report that shows you whether they are looking at your website while they sup their soy latte.
What kind of results can you expect to see? You may be surprised by a recent uptick in mobile traffic. Then you’ll wonder why their engagement is relatively low. Possibly they’re struggling to operate your desktop-centric website through their teeny tiny screens. Perhaps now is the time to look for a layout that plays well across all formats. The things we usually see in this report are:
– Mobile growth curves that have gone all steep on you over the last three months
– Lots of mobile visitors, good engagement but very few mobile conversions
– Unsustainable cost per lead values from mobile Google advertising sending traffic to a non-mobile website
– The percentage of desktop traffic a website is experiencing – sometimes as low as 20%. (Perhaps time for an app?)
Unfortunately it takes more than a few weeks to deliver a fully featured mobile website. Use this report to help get the timing right. So when all is finished you have a good chunk of tiny screen viewers ready to engage with.
And for those with more mobile and tablet traffic than desktop, perhaps it’s time to set up some Google Analytics dashboards – to pick out this traffic source and display how it engages in easy-to-read charts for your monthly reports.
Give us a call today if you would like more details on how this could work.
It’s not a nice feeling being lost alone in the New Zealand bush. I first experienced it many years ago when hiking around Mt Tongariro. I had just arrived from the UK and was keen to experience the New Zealand outdoors. I joined the trail at 1pm midway up the ski road, hoping to walk around the mountain in two days.
No map, no compass – just a desire to follow the poles. You guessed it. In about five hours I was lost. And for the first time I experienced that deep-seated panicky feeling – what had I got myself into? Fortunately, I managed to walk out the next day after a very cold night in my tent. The sound of cars driving up the mountain guided me back to civilisation. It put me off tramping for a long time.
That was until a couple of years ago when I decided to take just me and my mountain bike out to Riverhead Forest just west of Auckland. I had a small scrap of a map and the hope that if all else failed my phone and Google Maps would be my back up.
Fail again – no road signs, no cell phone signal and back to that terrible lost feeling of panic. I was riding up and down deserted forest roads in the late evening hoping to find my way out. A one hour ride took four – I was so pleased to get back to the car.
Which would make my heading back to Riverhead a second time only last week sound totally crazy. But this time things were different. Now I had swapped a bike for some running shoes – for a slow plodding trail run – but more importantly, the scrappy map was replaced with a Garmin handheld GPS.
I had loaded the Garmin with some New Zealand maps and created my own track. The plan was that it would all guide me and my spaniel for all of the planned 14 kms. I’d designed a trek involving one big loop back to the car. All going well I hoped to experience a panic-free mix of forest road and trail.
I set out from the car park just a bit nervous. I had packed spare batteries for the Garmin. The manual said it would last for 16 hours but to be honest my confidence was not that high. Water was sloshing around by the litre in my pack and there was enough food for a small family gathering. You never know.
Well it worked.
I followed that small Garmin track pointer up and down roads, through gorse-lined paths and even down the occasional mountain bike trail, which had me questioning its thinking. But Mello and I kept going. We crossed rivers, splattered through some mud – yes even in February – and returned to the spot where we’d started. All with just one bar of the battery used and food hardly touched. Success!
Buoyed up, the following week I plotted another trail and headed off exploring again. This time into the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ space that had confused me proper a while back on a mountain bike. Now the triangle was no match for my super satellite technology, and I made it back safe and sound. Technology had tamed the beast.
For the business owner, improving your website’s performance is like navigating my ‘Riverhead maze’. Each month we help business owners who have become “lost” in their web marketing reports. It seems you receive the information but don’t know where to look and what to follow.
I hope none of you have a feeling of dread quite like mine, lost in the bush. But you do mention being frustrated, confused or simply intimidated.
Most of you do what I did after my first experience at Tongariro. You avoid the issue as much as you can. There’s not much to lose when you head out into the bush alone. However if your company is avoiding online marketing while your competitors are lapping up the openings – the strategy comes with sizable lost opportunities.
Thankfully there is a ’business Garmin’ you can use to guide you through the online marketing maze.
Your guide through the maze? Google Analytics.
Unfortunately, just like the Garmin GPS I bought, Google Analytics comes with a relatively steep learning curve. To make my Garmin do what I wanted I trawled through numerous how-to’ videos on YouTube. I sent a few support request emails to Garmin. And I created some test “tracks” around my neighbourhood to ensure it worked. All up I probably sank a good 10 hours into the thing before it became useful.
Google Analytics is not as difficult to drive as that but there is still a learning curve. Unfortunately, for some business owners this curve is too steep and they give up. That’s a shame. Persevere, because once properly configured, our Google analytics account will be your true north. It will guide you along the right path to online marketing success.
For instance, it will uncover gems like how much your Google Advertising is really worth compared to what it costs. The pages of your website that perform and those that fail. If your email marketing raises or lowers the engagement of those on your list. Whether the time you spend on social media translates into sales or is just “noise”.
For the business owner, these are bigger problems to solve than “can you get me back to my car before the light fades and my water runs out?” (That is unless you are stuck in the New Zealand bush at 8pm with the light fading, no food or water and no idea where you are!)
Call us today to learn how to make sure your business marketing doesn’t get that desperate. We help business owners like you navigate to their own online marketing success using Google Analytics.
Last month I turned 50. It’s a scary number and a time when I can see why others head into their own personal crisis. You definitely get the feeling the clock is counting down rather than counting up.
Anyway, to soften the blow I decided to feed my passion for mountain biking and head off to the Redwood Forests of Rotorua. This time for a change, and as a birthday present to myself, I thought I would invest in three hours of coaching from Annika – a local guide and expert rider.
The way things panned out illustrated how all good coaching experiences work.
First up, a bit on me and my riding style. I am not the fastest nor bravest of riders. I ride for the benefit of long term health rather than short term excitement. So if there’s a jump or a steep drop ahead I’ll scoot around the edges just to be on the safe side.
However, on saying all that, with the clock counting down I thought it was time to scoot a bit less and push the excitement levels up a little notch.
I got onto Annika from her website via a Google search (surprise, surprise!) Annika is about half my age and rides a bike worth twice as much as mine. She enters the same type of events I do. The key differences being she ends up on the podium and has had a good few hours of rest before I turn up at the finish.
We met in the carpark and I told her I wanted to learn how to ride faster around corners and dare to do the occasional drop off. (Think of a drop off as a step down between 30 cm to a scary 300cm.) She listened and then followed me as we rode to the trails from the carpark.
After 20 minutes of following me she pulled us to a stop. Apparently, learning how to corner would have to wait – there were more urgent matters to work on.
First up, there was a problem with how my bike was set up. My seat was too far back and my handlebars were too high. By riding alongside she could see how my back was the wrong shape and my knees were not above the pedals properly. So while I waited, she got out her trusty tools and in 10 minutes the adjustments were made.
We continued on. Riding felt weird, but in a nice way.
Then we came to our first hill and she chatted away while I panted and struggled to keep up. We stopped, and again she adjusted the seat to move me forward as the adjustments were still not right. However, now I was pushing down with the proper amount of force with my legs and things became a bit easier.
Nevertheless, the hill became steeper, my breathing harder and frustration was growing. When were we going to do the cornering thing? Fortunately, things flattened out and she rode behind me as the trails moved into the classic winding, well-groomed state they are in Rotorua. Annika stopped us again and explained how my legs needed to be straight and my ankles fixed with my heels down. (Apparently, I have bendy legs and even bendier ankles.)
Onwards we pedalled with Annika yelling in her lovely Swiss accent, “straight legs”, “keep those ankles fixed”, “straight legs”. After 30 minutes of this I was starting to get it right. Just.
So an hour in and no cornering. But things were OK. We were making progress and I could feel a bit more confidence growing in my riding. Another hour of the same, with lots of yelling from Annika, and progress was being made.
We finished with her explaining how to ride down drop offs so deep that they would have easily classified themselves in the “ride around at all costs” group. And no, I couldn’t have attempted them without mastering the bits we covered way back at the start of the session.
So how does this experience relate to a success experience with an online marketing coach? 
Firstly, the process your coach follows can be more important than the actual knowledge they impart. Annika had her way which started with ensuring the bike was set up properly AFTER watching me ride it on live trails. Once this was completed then she could move on. Without this, I couldn’t have attempted the things I did later on in the day.
We start out our online coaching process in a set way too. With us, it starts with a focus on Google Analytics. If we can’t get past this stage then we can’t proceed any further. It’s a methodology that has been used successfully dozens of times before.
Secondly, what you want may not be what you need. An astute coach should be confident enough to tell you this and ensure you get the most from your time with them. Customers come to us wanting to drive more traffic to their website. Frequently, we find out that’s not the problem. There can be tons of traffic but few conversions – and improving the site’s conversion rate is where we need to invest their money.
I booked Annika wanting to corner faster. I couldn’t do this without changing bike fit and my overall stance by straightening my legs and locking my ankles.
Thirdly, a good coach will see failure as signposts to more learning ahead, not reasons to hit the panic button. My first attempts at riding down some steep drop offs with Annika were quite comical. I was either too fast or too slow, or both. Luckily it wasn’t too deep so I just picked myself and my bike up from the floor and walked back to try it again. We didn’t give up – Annika just took out her iPhone, shot a video of my next attempt, and showed me what I was doing wrong so we could fix it.
Failing to get Google’s Paid Advertising to work is not uncommon. Good clean traffic being placed on exactly the right landing page, but still no conversions coming through. With my riding I stopped falling over by leaning forward more. With AdWords it could be about re-working the landing page copy to better match the desires of the visitor.
And finally it’s a lot easier if you have fun along the way. Seeing me disappear into the blackberry bushes for the umpteenth time in my failed attempts kept a smile on both Annika’s face and mine.
Here at Ark we enjoy what we do. Sometimes it’s tricky work that requires a sizable amount of left brain thinking but we still try to make progress something to smile about.
Why not contact us today and see if our coaching style suits your online marketing needs.
After many checks and proofs, your latest email newsletter has been sent. But did it work? Good news for most involves finding that your subscribers clicked from the message through to your website, either buying more product or contacting a sales person.
So how does Google Analytics report on this? Unfortunately, it doesn’t, unless your email marketing application has been configured correctly. In the unconfigured state traffic from your newsletter is hidden inside traffic sources like Direct Traffic or referred traffic from the web mail domains like Yahoo.
For email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp this configuration is a few clicks away. Once completed, all the links to your website used in your email messages will come with special codes on their end. These codes mean something to Google Analytics so that it takes all the traffic it receives and places them in their own separate campaign. The name of the campaign is usually linked to the name of the newsletter – so you can see how January’s newsletter results differed from December’s.
Just remember the cookie that is set to link them to the campaign remains by default for six months. (This can be configured by altering your Google Analytics tracking code.) They move from one campaign to another as they click on links from other newsletters. Plus, if they click on a paid advert they then hop across to the Paid Advertising campaign.
So just so you know, if they click on a newsletter and a month later visit you by typing your domain name into their browser – normally showing as direct traffic – then instead they will still be attributed to the initial campaign.
Once you understand that little cookie life ‘gotcha’, then all is fine. You can use the Traffic Sources report to find the email campaign and see how well it performed compared to all your other traffic.
You should expect to see some good news. Higher engagement rates and improved conversion rates are all ideal outcomes of an email marketing strategy that is working well.
Contact us today if you would like to get your Traffic Sources report configured correctly to show your email marketing efforts.
How much time does your website need to convert its next visitor into a sale? A minute? Two – perhaps three or even six? What are we dealing with here? Now how much time does your visitor have? And what happens if they have less time than you need to convert them?
I know – lots of questions for this early in the year. Nevertheless, I believe that most websites need to offer their visitors more time in order to make the essential visitor conversion. This is in part due to some fundamental errors made in online marketing that end up chewing through valuable visitor time.
This short article will guide you through making the best use of all the time you have. I’ll also share some ways to actually create more time – so giving your next visitor a greater chance of converting than ever before.
Sound good? OK – let’s get started.
So how much time do you actually have to make that conversion? Dig into your Google Analytics account and:
For instance if the average session is 1.5 minutes and those converting take 6.5 minutes then we have a sizable 5 minute gap to work with. Figuring out what they are doing or thinking for those extra five minutes it takes them to convert is the first job.
Are you asking them to take too big a step to become a conversion?
For instance, the website may require them to fill in a detailed quotation request form which asks for a myriad of details, some of which they may have no idea of. Perhaps a simple contact form that just asks for their phone and email may be super easy for them and just enough info for you to start the process off.
Or perhaps your e-commerce website is gobbling up too much time for first time shoppers. It may not allow for guest-only purchasing. So they HAVE to go through the new user registration phase – including perhaps coming up with a dastardly complex password that only your system requires.
Aarrgghh – all too much and too hard and taking way too long to make purchasing that nice little Art Deco lamp from your site just a distant memory.
Your website copy could be a problem too. Maybe you take an age to get to the point, describing exactly what you do and why you are so much better than the rest in your market. Technology service companies can struggle here. Distilling all that clever stuff into a headline and top of page body copy is never going to be easy. But it could pay big dividends.
Video can be a lifesaver here. A well-written and well-produced 60 second video can get very complex theories across with total clarity. We added another 30 seconds to ours to get our Pay Per Click advertising and Search Engine Optimisation services across in a “hefty” 90 seconds. It works – results show that those who play the videos are far more likely to buy.
Misconfigured advertising can chew through valuable visitor time too. For instance let’s say you are using Pay Per Click advertising and your ad places the person looking for a new set
of dress shoes on the homepage of your shoe website. Time would have been saved if they’d gone straight to the dress shoe section of the site. Hopefully, they will navigate from the home page to the right page – but as they do they will chew their through valuable session time which could be spent picking the colour and style they want, falling in love with the
shoes, and ensuring they complete the purchase.
Which leads me nicely onto the concept that the visitor time you have to work with is relatively fixed.
We only expect to spend so much time to buy or make contact with your sales team. And the more we all get used to searching and shopping online, the more I believe this time will dwindle. Super-fast and slick websites like Amazon make owning an electronic book something you can do in seconds, not minutes. And closer to home, websites like MightyApe make the whole e-commerce experience super quick and easy.
So what can you do this year to keep up with players like these and slash the time it takes for a visitor to convert?
Firstly, see how large your gap is between the average session times and those that convert. Track this gap each month as you roll out some of the strategies below.
There you go. Your time may be fixed and possibly falling during the year – nevertheless apply some of the ideas I list here and you will make the most of the time you have.
Give us a call today or complete our speedy contact form if you would like to chat through how these strategies could be tailored to work with your business.
There you go. Your time may be fixed and possibly falling during the year – nevertheless apply some of the ideas I list here and you will make the most of the time you have.
Give us a call today or complete our speedy contact form if you would like to chat through how these strategies could be tailored to work with your business.
Someone once told me that there are two things that will drive change in your life – the people you meet and the books you read. I freely admit that when it comes to running a business after 12 years there are still a lot of questions I am looking for answers to. These six books I read in 2014 helped make this list a bit shorter. They are all available on Kindle.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Ben Horowitz
This book was a quick, fast and enthralling read. Ben tells the raw story of his time as a CEO of a tech startup that ended up a success but diced with disaster many, many times along the way. Ben is now a partner in one of Silicon Valley’s prime venture capital businesses. It ended well. But his honest description on what worked well and what didn’t make for great reading.
Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love
Richard Sheridan
Who doesn’t want a business people love to work in? Richard Sheridan explains how this seemed like an impossible task for his Software Development Company at the start and the steps he took to make it work in the end. Now people come from around the US to tour his company to learn what worked and why.
Problem Solving 101: A simple book for smart people
Ken Watanabe
How do you go about solving problems? Or do you hide from them, hoping they will go away? This book is ideal for those who hide or those without a reliable method to solve whatever comes their way. Originally written for Japanese children, it has gone on to become a business book classic.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Greg McKeown
This book challenged my belief that everything in business carried the same level of importance. That belief was replaced with the concept of the “The Vital Few” – those limited pieces of work that produce the maximum amount of difference. I wrote a review that digs into more detail. You can find it here.
Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future
Blake Masters, Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel was a founder of PayPal who cashed up when the business was sold and then decided to back a relatively young company called Facebook. He is worth squillions. His writing is deep, clear and worth the time to work through. This book covers some interesting theories on the merits of competition and what the business owner can do to avoid it at all costs.
Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less (Revised third edition, 4th printing, September 1, 2014)
Sam Carpenter
Yes, I admit the title is not short of hype. Add to this a structure that seems at times to meander and things are not looking good. However, cut through all that and you’ll find gold in here. First you need to believe that a successful business is a series of successful systems, rather than a magical mix of good intentions with staff who take action based on gut instinct. Get the system correct, and the rest falls into place. Not an easy read, not that compelling, BUT apply what he suggests and the title could become a reality.
Conversion Attribution Model Comparison Tool
Conversions > Attribution > Model Comparison Tool
Credit should be given where credit is due. This report ensures you can achieve exactly this when it comes to allocating Goals / Revenue with the right traffic sources.
First, let’s step back a bit. Most people think their visitors convert in a linear fashion. They see your paid search ad, click it, read your website’s content, and either become a lead or purchase a product.
For sure, there will be some websites and website visitors that do operate like this. But many other visitors take a very different pathway to conversion.
For instance, they may click on paid ads, leave the site, then come back by clicking on an organic listing, then leave the site again, and – finally – convert to a sale after visiting the site by typing its name directly into their browser address bar.
By default, Google Analytics attributes the desired action to the last channel of traffic. This is called Last Click Attribution.
There are a few attribution models you can pick from. This report makes it easy to swap between them and see how each changes the appeal of your traffic streams. To make it simple, the illustration below shows the difference between Last and First Click Attribution (in other words, the channels responsible for starting the sale compared to those responsible for closing it).
Here you can see that organic traffic was by far the largest traffic stream that started the sales process – the leader in the First Interaction list, and direct traffic was the largest stream that completed the sale. Paid search and social media also started more than they finished, which could make them more appealing than if you just viewed them through the Last Click model.
These models are just two of the many that Google Analytics makes available. Picking the right model to suit the way your prospects may decide to purchase is part of the challenge ahead. Let us know how you get on.
The approach required to successfully sell services online is vastly different from that needed to sell products. Since we started in 2002 we have helped dozens of service-based organisations achieve more online.
These seven tips are a selection of strategies and tactics that we apply through our standard implementation process. By following any or (ideally) all of these points you will be well on the way to transforming your website into the lead generating machine it can be.
Tip 1: Pick your ideal audience(s) and produce your content to suit just them
Let’s get the hardest task nailed first. Whilst your website’s images set the scene, it is your words (through either text or video) that move people to make a decision. Writing them with a specific person or group of people in mind is much easier than writing for a broad, nebulous group of web users.
You have probably visited websites that do this well. They may have talked about the exact problem you were experiencing or the ideal goal you were looking to achieve. The more you read, the more it felt like the service was crafted for people just like you.
Compare this to content that totally misses the mark. Then, you switched off after the first paragraph. It contained a list of features which were applied to a wide range of possible applications – all to produce nonspecific improvements. Boring, boring and more boring.
But what if your service is relevant to a wide range of customer groups? No problem – just avoid slamming them all together with the one boring, nebulous message. Do the harder work and split them into separate pages, each one written with a specific group in mind.
Let’s say you’re a smart accountant. You might write three separates pages on how your services can be customised to suit businesses in Auckland who are: 1) a small tech service start up; 2) a medium-sized manufacturing company, and 3) a company in either group who wants to trade in Australia.
Each group would have a page of 800-1000 words, say, talking about the love and attention your accountancy practice provide to solve its specific problems and opportunities.
Conversely, your not-so-smart competitor, who wants to take the easy road to website creation, produces just one page of generic copy which lists the needs all three in a page of boring, non specific “grey suit talk”. Yawn.
Do the hard work and write for each of the audiences you want to appeal to.
Tip 2: Ensure all your “content prerequisites are met” – but then go further and highlight what makes you different
People come to your website with an existing expectation of what they’re about to or should experience. For instance, if you’re an architect, people expect your website to show beautiful pictures of finished houses complete with glowing words from happy clients. The more the merrier.
If you’re a web design company, they are looking for links to sites you have created and, again, paragraphs of praise on how delightful you are to work with.
A branding company? The natural thing would be plenty of “before and after” shots of shocking brands that have been transformed into sexy logos and type faces. A business coach? Words from happy clients and a simple way to “try before you buy” your service (more on this later).
All these I call “content prerequisites” – content that will count against you if they’re missing, and ensure you are part of the “consideration group” if they are present.
All well and good. But what moves you from mere consideration to that happy state of confirmation is content that shows how you stand out from the rest.
So what does make you different? Imagine you and your competitors are all sitting on one side of a table and the prospect is facing you all on the other – what would you say to ensure they pick you and not the rest?
Let’s tackle a short list of differences that you may think differentiate your company: great customer service, super product knowledge, excellent post-sale follow up. Unfortunately, all fall flat as bullet points on a page. All are subjective and a challenge for prospects to actually experience.
And do they really differentiate you? If I was engaging an architect, I wouldn’t want one who had great customer service skills but produced designs that left me cold. I’d be more tempted by someone who spent their life focusing on producing great design for tiny spaces of land – just like I have.
Your challenge is certainly to deliver the prerequisite content but then quickly present a point of difference that appeals to a sizeable part of the market and can be easily described and proven.
Tip 3: Make it easy for people to “experience” your knowledge
Let’s say you are looking for a lawyer to help you set up a family trust. The last time you used one was when you purchased the family home a few years back and it seems trusts is not one of their specialties. So you head over to Google and start searching.
Imagine you find three possible choices. The first two include a few pages on their trust services with nice shiny pictures of the partners who specialise in the space. They look OK. The third, however, has this stuff too but also a page of free PDF resources available for download.
You click on a PDF that catches your eye, open it up and are pleasantly surprised by its easy-to-read plain English style. This informative but short document explains what you need to do (and why) in order to set up your trust. It doesn’t solve the complete problem but it does answer many of your initial questions.
It all ends with a picture of the partner responsible, their email address and a reason to call (more on this later). “Why not?” you think, and the email is sent and the two companies that made it too hard are quickly forgotten.
See how it works? I’m not advocating you provide a complete “step by step plan on how to solve the problem that people are dealing with. Just a tidbit of advice that provides enough value to make you seem as smart as you really are. 🙂
Tip 4: Provide social proof of your abilities
So your website says you provide excellent customer service – that’s the easy part. Going ahead and proving it – now that’s a different matter!
Maybe you survey your customers each quarter on this exact metric and share the results on your site. Or your customers write in and talk about how great your staff are in dealing with them. You may even mention how smart your team is. All of that’s good stuff – but even better would be to prove what you’re saying with links to partner programs they belong to or awards they have won.
Any opportunity you have to back up your story with social proof is well worth taking. The more the merrier.
Tip 5: Make your service super easy to buy by focusing on outcomes and transforming them into products
Let’s get one thing clear: your customers are not buying the service that you provide, but the outcomes your work delivers for them. I don’t buy legal services; I buy peace of mind that my assets are properly protected. And while buying accountancy services could well put me to sleep, receiving advice on the best way to grow my business while staying onside with the IRD – now that has me hanging on the edge of my seat.
So we need to describe our services based on the great outcomes they deliver. However, this can can be a challenge (especially compared with selling products).
For instance, let’s say you want to splurge out on a new large screen LED TV for Christmas. First stop could be a local retailer to see what looks good and what makes one model better than another. Perhaps this trip is followed by a visit online to check some reviews. Then it’s back to the store and, with your masterful negotiation skills, within a few minutes you’re done and dusted.
Let’s compare this with buying legal conveyancing work to help with the purchase of a new home. You hop straight online this time, look at the websites of a few local firms that come up in Google, and start comparing.
Some make it hard by just listing the service and the name of the relevant partner and recommending you contact him or her for more information. Others tell you exactly what you get for the service – even offering three levels of cost (bronze, silver and gold) – tell you how long it will all take, and let you know what documents you need to kick the process off.
Which ones make it super easy to engage with them?
And that’s the benefit you offer – you do all the hard work by “productising”, thereby making it easy for buyers to compare and decide.
Tip 6: Sell the act of picking up the phone
So you have the right audience defined, the content is tuned just for them, and it’s littered with nice social proof of your super-talented team. Services are addressed as outcomes and packaged up as handy products that anyone in this industrial segment would be a fool not to own.
All you want them to do is pick up the phone and call you. Which is exactly what they are not doing. So what gives?
Well, my friend, you need to “sell” the act of calling you. Remember, prospects have to take their hands off the keyboard or mouse, place it on their smartphone or office phone and dial those numbers. This takes effort. Seriously.
So why should they? What’s going to happen to make their effort worthwhile? Perhaps a bribe? Like a complimentary 30 minutes of consulting. Or a chance to share their problem with an expert willing to listen.
Think what you can provide to them to make placing that single call a win in itself. Just placing the phone number at the top of the page and expecting them to call will not be effective.
Tip 7: Know what happens when they call – it’s time to script the experience!
All going well all the last six tips have been implemented (clever you!) and the phone decides to ring (good phone!).
But uh oh! You are out of the office and someone else picks it up. Then what happens? What’s that first conversation like? What questions do you or your team ask and, more importantly, which ones do you leave for later? And how do you ensure the customer’s called back anyway?
How many times have you been in this customer’s shoes and had no one call you back – or call back weeks later after you have already made a decision?
Don’t let this happen. Put a system in place to reliably manage the process from that first call through to the sale. Ideally, it should also be a system that is followed by everyone who is part of your customer-facing operation.
A good system will include somewhere for all leads to be stored, some way to track what has been said or sent to whom, and a way to define what should be said and when. It could be a simple spreadsheet or it may be one of the many sophisticated CRM applications available to small businesses.
Bonus Tip 8: Record your success
Think of all this, Grasshopper, as a journey, not a destination. At the start, you know you will be a mess across many stages of the service sales process. That’s why you are starting. But still, you will record how many people visit your site, and how of those become leads, and who then end up as clients.
The percentages could be scary at first – few conversions from prospect to client. But over time things change – perhaps on the content creation side – so the conversion rate starts to lift, little by little.
Customer testimonials are then added to your website at the same time as you productise some of your popular services. Suddenly, a big bump in lead conversion rate takes place. Then you write down the script for that first phone call, practice it, and start using it instead of your previous “wing it” non-script Sales conversion takes another lift.
On and on you go – adding a few tweaks here and there to make things even smoother than before. Until you reach that Zen like phase of having so much new business coming across your desk that you can pick and choose the projects that appeal the most.
Sound like a plan?
If you would like to learn how Ark Advance helps companies achieve such heightened states of enlightenment, contact us today here.
You will find this report here: Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.
First impressions count, and this report answers the question “What was the first page people came to when entering my website”?
The ideal would be for the first page to either solve the visitor’s problem or show them which page does. Pages that struggle here have a high bounce rate, something you don’t want (with the exception of your “contact us” page), especially for your first-impression landing pages.
Most people incorrectly assume the homepage would be the only page in this report. However, if Google has understood and indexed your content well, or you have a paid advertising account that sends visitors to exactly the right page for the keywords they use, then you should see a long list of pages in this report..
When looking down this list for the first time, I’m on the hunt for poor performers, especially when I segment the traffic by paid advertising efforts. A high bounce rate on visits you have paid for is a sign that trouble is brewing. Your keywords may be wrong, or your ads may be sending visitors to the wrong place, or the content may be struggling to meet the intentions of the visitor – or all three.
Time spent tuning the performance of your landing pages is always time well spent. Creating the best possible impression brings those next steps of the sales a bit closer.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – By Greg McKeown
I loaded this book up on my Kindle two hours before stepping onto NZ 245 for a nine-hour flight to Bali. Little did I know that my 15 year old daughter would fall ill during the flight so Claire and I would spend most of the flight helping her. Not a lot was read until we were settled in our villa in Ubud.
Heading away on leave is never easy for me. It takes me a good three to four days to start to relax. Thankfully, this book was a real help in speeding things up. Here are a few points that stood out for me.
The lie that “you can do it all”.
The book starts by shattering the illusion that what you believe you can do is actually possible. “You can do it all” is the first that gets a serve. You can’t – and thinking you can is a trap that many, me included, fall into.
Greg expands on this with theory about the “trivial many” compared to the “vital few”. I think we all live in a world where it’s hard to determine which task fits in what group. It’s not helped with a task list that grows each day, every task seemingly as important as the next. Finding your “vital few” is a key message of the book.
Understanding tradeoffs.
This concept hit home for me while I was stressing about what was happening back at base. There I was, away from work in a timezone that didn’t make it easy for the team to contact me while a large volume of work was going through the studio.
So what was the tradeoff for my stress? Well, Claire and my two teenage daughters were experiencing a new culture following a challenging home renovation project that pushed us all to the max. When I was a kid, my father took our family on regular holidays, and a lot of my fondest memories are linked to these experiences.
When I looked at it this way, the tradeoff was well worth it.
If you don’t set your priorities, someone else will.
So who has priorities? I guarantee all who read this newsletter do – but who sets them? If you are not actively setting them then someone else is. Perhaps this is not necessarily the right way for you?
Sleep – protect the asset
I left Auckland absolutely knackered and with a chest infection that was starting to gain an edge. We were all tired and slept a lot over the next few days. By day six I was coming right and I felt fresher than I had in a while. I read a lot. The Kindle got a serious workout and the ideas started to flow again; ideas that would never have arrived if we had not taken the break.
I finished the book with my personal list of the vital few and some strategies to manage the rest. For me it was the right book arriving at the right time. Funny how this happens sometimes.
Last month I wrote that in order to improve your site’s conversion rate you need to avoid the illusion that there’s just one type of prospect visiting your website, and they are looking to fulfill just one set of needs. This illusion has many website owners create only one advertising message that pushes people to one landing page.
In reality, multiple groups want to solve a range of problems. Your best opportunity to serve them is via a range of marketing messages leading to a range of targeted landing pages.
This month I’m going to take a crack at another illusion of simplicity: the journey the customer takes to reach your front door.
Let’s say a hypothetical someone wants to buy a sofa for their living room. They start their hypothetical journey by walking into a furniture store near their home. They then meander about, sitting on everything on display (sofas, that is). A very helpful salesperson helps them choose a delightfully retro model in leather and chrome (and talks them into a faux leopard rug while he’s at it) and in a matter of minutes they walk out $2500 poorer but excited about the extra comfort and style coming their way when their sofa and rug arrive the following weekend.
Enough hypothesising – let’s do a reality check now. Would you buy a sofa this way? Probably not.In fact, few people would. To emphasise the point, here’s a picture from a 2011 Monash University study that shows the journey through different advertising channels that a purchase like this can typically entail.
At first, I was surprised by this model’s complexity. However, when I look back over some of my recent purchases I can see this “dance of channels” clearly.
For instance, a few weeks back I needed to find a place to stay in Melbourne for a couple of nights. It had to be within walking distance of the conference centre, clean and with good WiFi access. In this case, I didn’t use Google or Tripadvisor. Nope, I texted my mate Martin who visits Melbourne a lot and asked for his recommendation. In a few minutes I had a message with three options. I then visited the website of each. One I liked, and set up a live chat session to ask about the WiFi. They answered my question and the booking was done and dusted in 10 minutes. Channels used: SMS, web, chat, and then the sale.
Then there’s my little portable GPS thingy. I bought this a year ago to counteract my directionally challenged nature – ie, it’s easy for me to get lost :). So when I decided to take up trail running – well, you can see the problem, right? So I needed a relatively inexpensive way to find my way back to civilisation (ie, coffee) from places with no cellphone signal.
A quick internet search helped me gather a list of options. Then I walked into a shop to see how big these things actually were. Then I spent the next few weeks watching umpteen Youtube videos of Americans explaining the pros and cons of each option. Only then did I find the one for me, upon which I walked into PB Tech in Penrose and made the purchase. The person behind the counter had no idea what I was buying and didn’t really need to. I had used a price comparison website and knew the price was good.
So how do you think your customers find their way to your door?
Is it as simple as typing in a search term into Google, ending up on your site and making a purchase or requesting a quote? I would hazard a guess that it may not.
Here’s another slide from the Monash study that helps connect various channels with different stages of the purchase cycle. Knowing that mobile, for example, is commonly used about a month before purchase, how might that affect your thinking about the messaging you deliver through the mobile channel?
The more you understand the journey your customer takes, the more you can influence them along the way. To get started, this month why not ask a few customers about their journey? Then start to map the typical customer journey – or journeys – that you see emerging. Good luck – and do share with us what you discover along the way.
Last month we took the plunge and set Sky up at the office while the Price family were in residence. No television during our 14 week stay was too much to ask. So I rang the call centre, took up the no-contract offer, and next day we were up and running.
I never realised how much choice we had bought. We passed on Sport but added Rialto and Soho. This gave us what seemed like hundreds of channels to pass away the winter evenings. Add this to the My Sky box that we rented, and the entertainment opportunities seemed limitless.
And that was the problem.
We had gone from having just four channels of normal TV to now having a cluttered list of many. The Sky magazine was supposed to help us pick out the gold. But have you seen the thing? It’s chocka with content that makes choosing even harder, not easier.
To get us going I navigated through a few channels and created a few “series link“ things to record. But I still think there’s more in there – I just need to find a way to find exactly what we want without it all becoming too hard.
Making the most of your online marketing can be like that. Just switch channels for keyword choices and you move from say a hundred options to thousands. How do you navigate through this?
Creating a Zappos moment
Thankfully there is a way. It’s called focusing or, as I prefer to call it, creating your own Zappos moment.
Let me tell you why.
This brilliant e-commerce site was bought by Amazon five years ago for over a billion dollars. And they achieved it by starting small – in this case selling shoes.
Only later did they expand into a wider apparel range. And when they expanded, they expanded at a feverish pace.
At the start they set out to answer a very simple question – would people buy shoes online? To do this they created a website that advertised a small range and advertised it on Google’s paid advertising network. When the first orders came in, they purchased the shoes from normal store shoe retailers, had them delivered to their factory, then forwarded them to the client.
Yes, they lost money on every order. But that wasn’t the point. They quickly learnt that people were fine with measuring their feet at home, matching it with the online sizing chart and purchasing shoes they’d never tried on from a store they have never been to.
If the strategy worked for Zappos it can work for you.
Let’s say, for example, that you sell mortgage advice in Auckland. This is a cluttered market, as you can see from the search results below.
Now there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of keywords that you could use to market this service. Mortgage Advice, Finance Broker, Mortgage Services, and many more. But that doesn’t fit with the plan of focus. So let’s pick one – Mortgage Broker Auckland. The task is to now create an ad based on this term and get prospects clicking on it.
While this sounds simple, Google’s default bidding method will have your ad shown for a whole range of terms – for instance Mortgage Broker Advice Auckland, Mortgage Advice Brokers and even Mortgage Broker Courses Auckland. Which is great for Google – but for that last keyword option – not so good in this instance.
So we would use an option that has our ad show just for the term we want. Notice the lack of plural – we are bidding on one term and one term only. Then we would put two ads on perfect rotation (that is, 50% for each) and wait.
Is the ad clicked?
Write a boring ad, and no one will click. That’s a problem, so we write more, and more, until we tune our copy to suit the market and clicks appear.
Now we need to worry about how much action these clicks this generate? Do the clickers arrive, spend a few seconds on our page, then disappear? Or do they meander around the site for above average times then contact us for more information.
Turning clickers into leads is all about serving up the right content in the correct way. Rarely is it about writing better ad copy or choosing different keywords hoping they will convert.
This is the optimisation part – few websites are built with visitors in mind.
Most websites are “tuned” to traffic from a limited range of keywords, but rarely do they address the wide range of keywords people actually use. As a result, after spending $500 on Mortgage Broker Auckland and generating no leads, our business owner may conclude she has just blown $3500 on a website that does a rotten job of converting a highly popular and lucrative* search term.
Not so fast! Let’s tune the website so that those visitors do become leads (yes, it can be done!). Assuming the cost per conversion is palatable, this, my friends, is a Zappos moment. You have proved you can attract visitors with good ad copy, and turn those visitors into leads. The growth of your business is now linked to the growth of that keyword search term.
Let that last sentence sink in. The growth of your business is now linked to the growth of that search term.
Doesn’t that feel nice?
It should. And you can also begin to see the effort needed to get that one keyword working? Ad copy had to be written again and again.So did the web copy – in fact, it needed multiple iterations. But the outcome made the effort well worthwhile.
Each month we help dozens of clients achieve victories like this. Contact us today if you would like to join them.
* How do you know a search term is lucrative? Let’s say the average cost-per-click is a relatively high $4.00. This amount is not set by Google but by those bidding on the search term. People don’t bid that amount for long unless they can convert it into a lead at a favourable cost. If you can’t, then your conversion rate is well below the industry standard.
Wouldn’t it be great if you were able to peer into the future and see exactly how your business could operate IF the one thing you are looking to solve was fixed. Finally, you will be able to see if it did solve all the problems you hoped it would.
So if your sales staff were transformed from OK to super duper – what affect would that have on the amount of new business you would sign up? Or how about if you won that large corporate account you have been chasing for 18 months. Would it really take all the pressure off and make your life as a business owner much more relaxing?
A very capable crystal ball is all most of us ask for; something to let us look into the future and see what life would be like with the solutions we crave for. Fortunately, Google has something similar in their paid advertising solution – Google AdWords.
Applied correctly this service answers the question: How much busier would my business be if my website had more traffic from Google? A derivative of this would be: Once my natural search rankings improve, what will this extra traffic mean for me?
Now I realise that some would argue that a visitor from paid advertising may come with a different view of your business than those finding you within the middle or organic part of Google. But I don’t necessarily agree. Someone looking for a new iPhone is still looking for an iPhone, whatever type of link they click. So if you want to see how much extra business your proposed search engine optimisation efforts are going to produce then start bidding on these search terms in AdWords and see what happens. Your “crystal ball” will present you with one of three outcomes. Firstly the bad news – no lift in sales at all – then slightly better – more sales but a cost per sale that is too expensive to continue and, finally, the good news of extra sales at a cost that makes ongoing investment well worthwhile.
I will deal with the two bad news cases. Both point to issues with poor website conversion compared to your competitors.
Google prices clicks using the open auction method. Companies bid for keywords based on what they are prepared to pay. So if your competitors can buy the clicks at roughly the same cost as you AND make this traffic pay, then all things being equal (products sold, margins achieved, etc) their website must convert at a higher percentage than yours.
Now I know that neither are good news stories; however, finding this out in January after spending $500 with paid advertising is a lot better than the same becoming apparent in May. Especially after spending $600 in content creation per month all to see a top 4 ranking with all the extra traffic this brings but with NO lift in sales as a result.
Failing fast can have its merits. So if you have your heart set on improving your web marketing this year just through the improvement in your natural search rankings, then why not test your theory. Go ahead and buy some of the future and see what it looks like next week.
This month our group customer conference call was all about planning. I took the group through the three levels we suggest people pass through on their way towards online marketing mastery. Mastery should never be an easy thing to achieve. And the last level requires a shift from measuring pageviews to measuring people as they move through your website. It’s a fundamental shift in mindset that requires some super smart website analytics to enable.
For instance, a few months back, as a level 2 online marketer you may have seen your Google Analytics account report on 4568 visitors arriving at your website. Now at level 3 you see 3200 prospects, 1200 first time customers and maybe just 168 repeat purchase customers. It’s a simple task to pick which of these two views gives you the most information. But how do you see customers in your Google Analytics data where you used to see visitors?
I’ll answer this and help you find three other groups of people within your raw visitor Google Analytics stats.
For e-commerce websites this is a relatively easy solution. In these situations customers usually see every page that prospects do except the thank you page of the order transaction process. Therefore, by using the revised Google Analytics segment module, you can build a segment based on this, then look back (currently limited to 120 days) and see how this group performs compared to those that haven’t.
Lead generation websites have a bit more of a challenge to overcome. I’ll make a few random assumptions to help me provide a solution. Firstly, I’ll pick that you are using email marketing to keep in touch with this group and that you can send them to your website from links contained in yourmessages. Therefore, everyone that arrives using one of these links is probably going to be a customer.
My second assumption has you promoting an online portal of sorts set up just for customers. So everyone that logs in here and visits these secure pages can be tagged as a customer in a similar way we picked for e-commerce websites.
A simple selection, this one, but commonly missed when analysing a website’s results. Say you are only able to sell your products to people in New Zealand. Your Analytics data in its raw state counts everyone, whether they are from Masterton or Mumbai. Fortunately, Google Analytics can tell you the geographical region everyone resides in when browsing your website, so it’s a simple step to create a segment or a even a new Google Analytics profile to filter out all those who are outside New Zealand.
I’ll admit upfront that this solution requires some leaps of logic. Nevertheless, once you are happy with this, you can start to slice your visitor data roughly into these two groups. Variables that will help here include time of day coupled with day of week. So all those that arrived before, say, 6pm on Monday to Friday could be classed as business people. Add to this filter the requirement that they need to be from behind a business network domain and you are getting closer still to locating your business customers.
For e-commerce customers, the difference between these two and the growth of the latter is a critical predictor of future success. Basically, without a growing band of repeat customers things are looking dour. But how do you find them? Fortunately, the revised Google Analytics segment building tool makes this a relative breeze.
Under the “Behavior” area you can pick the number of transactions achieved per user, then look back (currently limited to just 120 days) to see how this group performs. Plus, if you pick the “E-commerce” section of this segment tool you can set up segments based on the amount each spent and on what products. There’s enough in here to satisfy even the most data demanding e-commerce website owner.
Why not take time this month to look beyond the totals of visits and visitors, and slice your data down further to see people and the relative groups they can fit within? Numbers are so much more appealing when they represent people rather than just their actions.
The last time I looked, I could see over 75 different reporting options within Google Analytics. 75! All generated from just the one itty-bitty piece of javascript placed on every web page of your site. With so much to choose from, it can make life confusing – where do you find the actual information you need within this mass of data?
One option would be to start at the top of the navigation list and work your way down, keeping an eye out for anything interesting. But I predict a definite glaze will come over your eyes after 10 minutes. You could always head off to Google to see what reports others suggest as being worth your time. This could be an interesting exercise – but possibly also a real time-waster and completely irrelevant for your situation.
So how do you determine the reporting areas that matter the most to you and your situation? Thankfully there’s a simple answer. It all boils down to defining a “conversion use case” for your website and then wrapping an “analytics net” around it to track its performance. Below are two very basic examples of this approach to illustrate how this can work for you. For each, I have detailed the basics of the use case and then shown the ideal analytics net required e.g. what reports from the 75-pluswould need the most attention.
It all starts with prospects using Google to look for what we offer. From there they click on our ranking or paid advertisement and visit our website. Once there they spend 2-3 minutes reading about who we are and what we do. This leads them to fill in our quote request form, which generates an email to our sales team. One of our team will contact them within one business day and make a time to visit them at their home. Job done.
Webmaster tools will tell us if our rankings within Google’s organic listings are being seen first and then – once seen – clicked. Our Google AdWords account will be linked to ensure any paid advertising is correctly separated out so we can correctly track individual keywords responsible for visitors arriving.
All the usual great engagement website stats such as bounce rate, time on site and pages per visit will tell us what people do when they arrive. For example, do they visit one page and leave? If they stay, where they go and how long do they spend on each page?
Setting up a goal in Google Analytics will help us follow the trail from visitor arrival to the quote request being completed. Plus it will give us a percentage take on those that visit and convert compared to the total visitors.
We also need to capture all the leads into an online tool of sorts – even a basic spreadsheet will work – so we can track the difference between those who complete the quote request and those who our sales team are able to
contact (Just in case there are those who don’t answer their phone or return left messages) And finally, of those who were contacted, we can tell which ones became clients, which leaves us with an overall lead-to-customer conversion rate.
And that’s the simple one!
Prospects looking for the products we offer will find us on Google. They will see our search listing or our search ad and visit our website. Here they’ll browse the product they’re interested in and possibly the category it sits within. They’ll do this for between 2-3 minutes. They’ll then either choose to purchase this product now – or decide to visit the site again and buy it later.
Once they’ve purchased their desired item, they’ll opt in to receive our email campaigns/offers. These messages are enticing enough to ensure they visit our website more often and spend longer on it each time compared to those who decide not to buy. All this translates into them purchasing more than twice a year.
The first part of the process is very similar to the situation before. Webmaster tools and a properly linked Google AdWords account will enable us to track all we need at the
start of the journey.
The engagement reports from the last use case will help us here too. Plus, establishing e-commerce tracking within Google Analytics will ensure we can match actual sale values to the orders coming through. So we can see not only the customers but also the products they purchased. We can then build a segment within the updated Google Analytics custom segment application to track visitors who arrive and decide to purchase
after either a single or multiple visits. Another segment will split out customers from prospects so we can see how their onsite behaviour differs.
Our email marketing campaigns will need some extra work too. By directing the links they contain back to the shopping site, we can then split this traffic out as a separate stream for further analysis. So segment #3 will show us
how our email subscribers differ in behaviour from the rest. (We could further categorise these people: segment #3a for email subscribers who are customers and segment #3b for those subscribers who are still just prospects.) This leaves it up to our ordering system to tell us how the purchase frequency changes for those who are opted into our email campaigns compared to those that aren’t. One should be bigger than the other.
As you can see, there are a lot more behaviours required to make a successful e-commerce site work well compared to its lead-generated cousin. Who said it was as simple as placing a shop online then sitting back to count all the money flowing in?! Nevertheless, once the correct analytics net is placed around either site, it will soon be obvious what’s working well and conversely what needs work.
So why not take some time this month to start the process off for your own site? Write out the conversion use case you want your website to achieve. Go ahead and include all the steps that are required – both on-and offline – to create the results you want. Then have a go at creating the right analytics net to wrap around the process. Contact us if you need help.