I would like to say that this new product came from some extensive brain-storming completed by the team, incorporating the latest in mind-melding techniques. But I would be lying. It all started with a customer and a problem.

This customer owned a lead generation website that did an above-average job of taking paid and organic search traffic and converting it into good quality sales leads. Each month they would review their traffic and lead count to match up how their conversion rate was going. And if it needed improving – think every month there is room for improvement – site changes would be tested to edge this rate further upwards. The whole process lived and breathed on hard facts,all underpinned with a strong desire to grow faster.

Things were going well. But still their business needed more leads to achieve the growth they had planned. So my attention turned to their inbound call volumes. Yes, their website had a phone number but it was their general office number, which they used for all their other marketing too. Now we knew that some prospects called using this form while staring at the website – but we didn’t know how many took this option and the effectiveness of turning this traffic into leads.In one meeting I made a strong suggestion that this phone traffic needed tracking with as much rigor as was being used for web tracking. Fortunately, they had a spare number they could use and so we swapped out the website number with this just to see what turned up.

Needless to say, the fact that this whole train of events spawned a new product points to what they found being quite a revelation. For instance, the site was generating as much phone traffic as form submission leads. And let me remind you that the online lead count was at the top end. Everyone was surprised with this one.

But then when they ran the numbers through, it was the conversion rate of this inbound call traffic into quotes by their call centre that was the real issue. The numbers were startling. It was running at under a quarter of the online conversion rate. So that was the real target for achieving fast growth.

All they needed to do was double the effectiveness of how they handled inbound calls to bring it up to about half of the online conversion rate and they would more than double the total number of quotes the company did – without spending any more in marketing cost.
Now, not everyone has a spare telephone number hanging around waiting to run a test like this. Which is why we are launching this new product.

It’s a simple concept. We supply you with a phone number (both regional and 0800 numbers are supported) that sits on your website or perhaps in your Google Ad. Anyone who calls that number is routed directly to where you want them to go. It’s a seamless process for the caller. Each month you receive a tracking report from Permission that shows you how many people used that number, the length of the call, etc. Plus, with some extra magic, we can integrate this into your Google Analytics account so you can see the calls coming off your website as individual events.

And if you want you can turn on call recording and have access to recordings of all the calls that come your way. There’s a very nominal monthly line rental fee, a small minimum term, and even smaller costs per minute for the calls to be routed where you want them.  Tracking and measurement are a snip to do for your online marketing activities. Now you can put the same “blow torch” of accountability to your inbound call work to see how you fare in this area. Contact us today on sales@permision.co.nz if this makes sense for your business.

Who thought you could sell water? Or charge more than $4 for a coffee? And how about offer an airline seat without any baggage allowance? For many years these products, price points and packages just didn’t exist. Everyone assumed they just would not work. That was until someone decided to test the assumption and found out that it wasn’t so – and markets were created and millions of revenue made.

Assumptions versus Facts. In what camp does your market knowledge reside? And within the assumption list, do any require the blow torch of fact-finding applied to them to discover some breakthrough outcomes for you this year?

Unfortunately, as marketers a lot of the space we deal with is cluttered with assumption after assumption. We live day-to-day, trying to understand and predict human behaviour – so there’s always a fair dollop of assumption to achieve in these spaces. Nevertheless, the good news is that the online space is littered with ways to challenge even the most hardened assumptions and turn them into facts. We just need to know how to go about it.

But before I delve into how, it’s worthwhile to spend a few moments on the reasons why only a few follow this path, because without knowing this you will fall into the common trap of dressing up a few assumptions as hardened facts.

So let’s start with a biggie – the truth could be just too hard to handle. We had an experience of this late last year. It all started with an overseas customer wanting to improve their lead conversion. We kicked off with a survey to learn more about the top problems their prospects wanted to solve when they started looking online for the product on offer. We collected over 500 responses, categorised them into sections and presented the client with the top five reasons.

They listened very politely to our presentation and then promptly went on to initially ignore the research, because it didn’t accurately reflect their thoughts on what prospects were thinking. They had operated within the market for many years and had a “feel” for what their prospects wanted. We had presented the “facts” but the “assumptions” were still living. Fortunately for both of us, we convinced them to run a split test of two versions of their landing page. The first included content that spoke to their “feel” of what prospects wanted to know about. The second used the factual research to determine which content should be presented in what order. The facts beat the assumptions by a sizable amount. This meant extra dollars in their pocket and it never ceases to amaze me how more money can change even a long-held assumption in record time!

Another reason why assumptions live on for years and years is because in some cases finding facts can take time. Something that people in a hurry don’t have much of. But then I suppose it’s not that easy to realise that you could be toiling away within a marketing strategy that is built on the shaky ground of incorrect assumptions.

Here’s an example of how the time and energy spent fact finding can bring with it many rewards. Over the recent holidays I read the story of James Dyson and his quest to build a better vacuum cleaner. He had an assumption that a cyclone design would do a much better job than the traditional option of a quick-clogging bag in front of a sucking motor. Now I forget the exact number of cyclone versions he went through to prove this assumption but it was over 2500, and took many years of pain-staking refinement to get it working. But he did and his machines now represent a multi-million dollar industry.

For my last example I head off into the land of financial services – particularly the darker side of the neighbourhood. This is where assumptions are supported by the actions of such a large proportion of the market that they make you believe they are facts. Prior to reading about James and his amazing cyclone, I had just finished a book on a certain Mr Bernie Madoff. Some of you may remember him. He was the New York financier who ran the world’s biggest Ponzi investment scheme. (That’s when you think you are investing with him but in reality he takes your money to pay the interest he owes to others and dips into what’s left of your money for himself.) He was quite a successful chap. All up they estimate he was responsible for misappropriating around USD 20 billion of actual hard cash and around 64 billion of fake profits. Just to help you put that into perspective, the last figure is roughly half of New Zealand’s total GDP for 2005. He was quite a busy boy.

Anyway, everyone “assumed” their money was being invested into legitimate stocks and bonds. And by everyone I mean huge international banks, large fund managers and even those in industry review organisations whose job it was to police the industry for such fraud. The assumption ran very deep. But because he was a man of considerable wealth and standing in the financial community no one bothered to look further for any facts to prove the investments had actually been made.

Now I hope that there is no Mr Madoff in your life but sit back and take a look at your market. Are there any assumptions that are rife that you haven’t yourself seen the facts to prove yet?

How about social media? The assumption here is that Facebook is a “must do” for nearly all marketers, and that any time spent here will be richly rewarded. Well, will it? Do the facts tell you this? If they do, then all well and good. And look – before I receive any hate email from the social media ravers – yes, there are some instances where it works. But from what I see this is not true in every case so don’t assume it will be for you. Challenge the assumption.

So by now you should be ready and willing to slay any assumptions that cross your desk. Next, let’s dig into the ways in which online marketers can make some progress in 2012. Here’s three to get your teeth into:

1) Look for facts that prove both the positive and opposite states occur.
Realise that data can be used and manipulated to support even the most wonky of assumptions. So to really challenge them look for hard data that reveals both the assumption is working and that the counter assumption is not. If you assume that the best way to deliver AdWords traffic is to a landing page rather than your home page (and let’s face it, 8/10 times it is), then do this BUT also spend some dollars sending traffic to your home page just to prove for yourself that this market assumption is a fact for you.

2) When it comes to humans, ask, watch, but still test.
Earlier I mentioned that as marketers each day we deal with human behaviour, which comes filled to the brim with assumptions that need testing. Remembering my earlier example, somehow you need to put aside your own personal opinion and dig into some fact-finding work. Research is a good way to start. It doesn’t have to be of the same ilk as the airlines that ask you for a novella of information after you have flown – just answers to a couple of well worded questions can be enough. And why not look as well as listen? I’ve covered before the tools we use each day to help our customers look over the shoulder of their website visitors to see the paths they follow as they walk through their website. Whatever tactic you follow you are looking for hard facts about what people have done or said. Collect enough of this to make it statistically significant and you are ready for my final strategy.

3) Testing.
Yep, even though you have 500 survey responses and have looked at hundreds of recordings you are still going to test what all this tells you against what is there now. Once this reveals some good news, e.g. an improved conversion rate or reduced bounce count, you factually know that what you thought would work actually did.

And that’s what it’s all about – striking off one assumption and replacing it with a fact. Think of it as laying one more brick in the solid foundation of fact that supports your business. The more you lay, the stronger your business will be.

My client said this as he slid the sales statistics for the previous month and the last year across the table to me. It made for impressive reading. Their e-commerce website was leaping forward in double digit growth in what looked like a monthly sequence. They had sold more in the last month than most Kiwi companies would aspire to do in a year. But in reality, for me, it was a sign of bad news ahead.

Bad because we had failed to explain to him how our management efforts had translated into the surge in sales he was now experiencing. Personally, I hate mysteries like this. I would much rather know exactly why something is or isn’t working. Then, once understood, I can repeat the good stuff and alter the bad.

The old adage of knowing that 50% of your marketing spend is working but not knowing which 50% it is may sit well with offline marketing. But, as anyone with experience in this sector will know, any work in online marketing brings with it the opportunity to easily track and analyze its results – both good and bad.

While we had been very efficient at emailing him his monthly reports that told him where these nuggets of success lay, we had been remiss in ensuring he had taken the time to review them and see for himself the parts that were making the most gains.

So we cranked up the projector, put his Google Analytics account on the wall in front of us and I took him through the story of why his sales spreadsheet was growing each month. There is always a reason, once you know where to look for it.

Human nature is such that a website’s poor performance is usually more of a motivator for website owners to start digging into their analytics. When business is good, however, there doesn’t seem to be the same desire. So, whereas our reports get pored over during the early stages of working with a client, once things get under way and results start to flow through, then the attention they receive tends to slide.

Anyway, back to this client’s situation. Usually there are a few things that are working in unison that together provide a strong lift in performance. This case was no different.

The Google AdWords account we had inherited when we started managing the account had received some updates, which pointed to some of the success. AdGroups that contained twenty plus keywords had been broken down into ones that now had one or two keyword phrases. This had allowed the ads we used to now better reflect the search term the prospect was using – the result – a bump in click-through rate. But this wasn’t the only benefit.

Each ad could now point directly to the exact product page in their e-commerce , unlike before when the clicker was taken to the category page and then tasked with finding the product in the text navigation options. I always imagine that we have a finite amount of prospect attention to use and while before we used some up as they navigated to the correct page, now this was saved and allowed to focus on the product itself, which translated in a good lift in sales conversions.

Fortunately, their website had been built by a developer who knew some things about search engine optimization. Each product page was set up to allow Google and the like to trawl through it and have a strong chance of correctly indexing it. The only issue was that, while the site’s good navigation structure had helped the search engines find some of the site’s pages, there were not enough inbound links to give them reason enough to index all that was available. So, while they should have had say 10,000 pages in the index, they were sitting on a low figure of 6000.

A recent piece of work we had completed to grow the number of good inbound links to the site had prompted the search engines to come visiting again, bite a bit more off and index another 1250 pages. Since these pages were already content optimized, this allowed products that were previously hidden from the search results to start to appear and get clicked and be bought.

Both of these factors were made apparent when we compared the site’s traffic, month on month, and looked at the gains that were coming through. Google AdWords was pushing gradually forward as our ad group dissection started to create some momentum and warrant its effort. Likewise, our organic search volumes from Google were also increasing as keywords started to show for results where they had once remained hidden – all resulting in a nice flow-on effect of raising sales from this channel.

So, it was all there in their Google Analytics account ready to be revealed to those who wanted to go looking. But I realise that as parts of a business start to perform well the natural reaction is to take the focus off these areas and reapply it to business areas that are still struggling. However, it’s something I wouldn’t recommend. The data is all there to tell you why things are happening as they are – go get it and take the mystery away from your success.

One of the email marketing “silver bullet” questions I frequently get asked is – “When is the best day and time of day to send my next email campaign?” It’s a good one to ask. Just imagine all the wasted time and energy if a campaign bombs just because it was launched at the wrong time.

The common “consultant speak” answer to this is “when your audience are the most motivated to take the action you want”. No real insight there. The practical answer is “you will need to test – but it usually pays to steer clear of the very start and the very end of the week”. A better response; however, for one sizable market segment, this is still bad advice.

Want to know if you’re in this market segment? Just take a peek at your website stats.

Have a look at the visitor count graph below.

Now look at this one.

And if you are still with me – the last.

As you can see, the first two have very similar shapes even though they are from completely different companies – in even more different markets. However, the third graph has an entirely different shape from the first two. The only similarity between the three is that they are all from businesses based in Auckland – and they all work with Permission.

So what makes shape one and shape two look so similar? Well, before I answer this, have a look at this final graph to follow. (I promise there’s no more after this.)

As you can see, this is not from a website but from part of a research document from McGill University researcher, Debbie Moskowitz. This one tracks the energy levels individuals have during the week.

From her research, she has found that Monday is a great day for setting goals, organising and planning. Your energy levels are not fully back from a weekend off and these tasks are a nice fit for this space as you start to pick up speed. Whereas on Tuesday you are back into action at full steam. This is a day for taking on all those tough tasks that you have been putting off for too long. The head of steam of Tuesday carries across to Wednesday, another good day to crank into things that are really hard to do. By the time you hit Thursday, things start to slow down and energy levels begin to fade. Friday carries on this trend and after lunch is not the time to try anything too taxing.

Now, lets go back to those earlier website visitor charts and the question of why the first two are similar. Both businesses have one thing in common – they each sell their products direct to consumers and have predominantly female buyers. I’m not yet convinced that the gender skew is pushing these shapes to look the way they do. Nevertheless, in both, the early part of the week – especially Monday – is when things really start to happen.

This matches nicely with Debbie’s research. I’m taking a massive leap in logic by connecting the two but there could be a natural sequence of events playing out online. This is how it could run. During the last part of the weekend you think about what’s still on your to-do list. Perhaps you discuss it with your partner and both plan to get things underway on Monday. So you head to work and hit Google as your energy levels are still too low to do any serious work. You find what you are searching for and start browsing and picking. If time gets away on you then perhaps on Tuesday you could spare some extra time to tick this task off your list. But after that, well, then the week gets away on you and all the normal “stuff” that fills the days just takes over. That is until the weekend comes around and that “to-do” list rears its ugly head again.

The website traffic maps this behaviour. It rises sharply at the start of the week, then drops like a stone – only to come up again the following week. It’s a very choppy wave pattern. But what about the third graph? Why the stark difference between this one and the first two?

Well, this graph is from a business-to-business operation that sells a technical product that requires some careful consideration prior to purchase. This is normally a work-focused “to do” that has the whole week to be ticked off. Which means that demand rises slowly on Monday then sits up there at a relatively flat status – almost like a “table top” shape – before it gradually falls for the weekend.

So how does all this apply to your business?

Well, best you check out your website visitor graphs and see what shapes they are. Are your waves choppy or rolling with flat mid sections? If it’s the first of the two then it may pay to add these few things to your action list. (Best to nail them on Monday or Tuesday…)

Firstly, just realising that your website traffic does come in ragged weekly cycles and not flat, even streams is a good step in itself. Now you can see the need to grab as much early week traffic as you can. So if you are buying advertising – say from Google with their AdWords program – it may pay to front load your ad spend so that you free up as much budget as you can to capture the rise in early week traffic that your market presents.

Secondly, your copy may need a tweak or two. One of the great copy writers – Robert Collier – talked about entering the “conversations in their mind” of your prospects. Part of this conversation could include thoughts like “removing the task from my to-do list” or “taking the first step to getting this nailed” or maybe even ”finally making time to…” And, if you want to be really smart, you could split-test your website page so that the copy changes for those early weekdays to include text about “Starting the week with one less thing to do.”

Thirdly, don’t forget how this affects your other advertising channels too. So, placing radio advertising early on in the week rather than later would be well worth a test. The same would apply to any print media you may be running.

And finally, there’s the overall sales importance of those early days of the week. It’s a time when there’s a heightened chance that prospects are in a decision-making mindset. So releasing your email marketing on a Monday afternoon or a Tuesday morning to capture the energy here could be a good idea. And sales follow-up calls should be scheduled into this space.

It really all boils down to understanding and then capitalising on the changing energy levels of your prospect audience and how this affects your chance to present your wares online. Your website visitor graphs provide an insight into how yours operate. Why not check them out today and see what your shapes look like?