A few months back I was involved in an online client campaign that generated over a million dollars in new revenue over a three-week period. It was such a success that I’m not allowed to mention who they are or what the campaign was but suffice to say it went off.
The startling thing for me was how the simple things the team did made such a big difference to the overall success of the campaign. I can’t share them all but here are the four that are for public consumption – check them out.
Firstly, time was properly allocated into producing a clear plan that everyone could follow. This process involved everyone it needed to – and had as its output a very simple MS Word document that everyone could understand (not a convoluted MS Project document). There were regular meetings as the campaign progressed and this same document was updated for all to see and follow. No fancy technology here – just a commitment to document the start and ongoing activities.
Secondly, the time allocated for planning was well spent. Instead of focusing on the technology to choose or the creative angles to follow, we dissected in detail the key decision points – or stages – the prospect had to pass through to become a customer. In this case there were a few – it wasn’t a simple case of visiting a web page and handing over a credit card. Each decision stage was thrashed out with regards to understanding how best to convince the prospect to move along to the next part of the sales process.
Then the group matched the message for each stage to the media most likely to succeed at delivering it. In the end we had five media choices running – web, email, direct mail, phone and direct sales. The personal touch was not lost. As not all prospects were expected to complete all the stages to become a customer online, outbound calling was performed by experienced sales people who were: a) briefed on the campaign and its goals; b) provided with full details of the prospects they were calling; and c) told the exact stage the prospect was at.
Finally, a strong website analytics tool allowed us to make decisions on how to further tune the campaign to boost results. For instance, knowing actual conversion statistics linked to inbound traffic streams allowed us to pick and choose which additional promotional channels gave us the best cost per conversion to allocate further promotional budget as the campaign progressed. Plus, by using tools like this, we ensured that there were enough data collected about the campaign to make its second incarnation even better.
It may all sound quite a complex affair but I can assure you that if allowed I could map out the process with all its sales stages on a whiteboard in less than three minutes. So why not take these same four stages as a guide to what you should cover with your next campaign – I can’t guarantee a seven figure response but your chances of success will improve.
I want to show you a simple way to improve both your website and your email marketing. It will take just a few minutes, involves no new technology and is free to implement. In fact it is so basic most people will laugh it off as a joke and leave it alone. However, I know that there are a few souls who are more committed to online marketing success who read this newsletter. For them, here’s a tip they can implement and then go back to their coffee while it’s still warm.
So are you ready? Great – let’s start with your website.
Firstly, bring it up in your browser. Now take a screen grab of the home page and print it out on in portrait orientation on an A4 page. Go grab the paper from the printer and bring it back to your desk. Now for some marketing origami. I want you to fold it neatly into thirds with the fold lines running parallel to the shortest edge of the paper. Then unfold it and lay it face up in front of you. You should be left with a picture of your home page with two lines crossing through it – one a third down from the top, the other a third up from the bottom.
All OK? Take a slurp of coffee for making it this far.
Now look at the top third of the page and tick off the points from the list below that appear in this section. (The list is not complete, but includes most of the key ones.)
It’s a short list so you should have ticked them all. Well, some of them at least. Locate all five in the top third of the page and you can skip the rest of this short article and get back to following up the mass of prospect leads you no doubt have.
For those finding less than five, well, why don’t you peek into the second third of the page to see if the missing components are there. I wouldn’t bother to look at the bottom third in hope of finding any still missing – anything placed here might as well not be on the page for the amount of attention it receives. And this, my online marketing friend, is the true reason behind the task.
Depending on your online marketing activities, first-time visitors should make up between 30% and 60% of your total visitor traffic. (See the note later on in this newsletter on Benchmarking to see what the norm is for your industry category.) While each visitor will have their own reasons for arriving they will all a) be skipping through your pages at speed; b) have very little knowledge of what you do; and finally, c) have a very limited amount of attention to spare.
It’s almost like they arrive with a stop watch in hand and the seconds start counting down as soon as your first page loads. (As a guide to how long they have before the alarm sounds, look in your Analytics logs for average time on site for New Visitors.) Content placed higher up the page receives the most attention. And, just like the old Direct Mail term of placing all the key information ‘above the fold’, the same principle applies online.
We can also take this concept and apply it to your direct mail online equivalent – email marketing. Best grab another slurp of coffee for making it this far.
In this case you could argue that the audience already knows you well enough to be on your list so there is more attention on offer. Not so fast. Spam has put pay to that idea and the rising volume of day-to-day email is forcing downwards the Inbox attention on offer.
So, just as you did with your website home page, take your last prospect-based email message (these subscribers have the least amount of attention for your messages), convert it to paper and fold it into thirds as before. Now look at the top third and from the list below see what you find:
Images that carry any of these messages don’t count. As you probably know and just needed me to remind you, a growing proportion of subscribers read their emails with applications that suppress images.
Again, if the top panel doesn’t contain all of these three components, then look down into the one below. Were your results an improvement on your home page? From my experience, all high-performing email campaigns use these top two panels to get their message across – with more in the top than the middle.
So there you have it – you can go back to your coffee now. If you are a quick reader and folder then it should be still be hot enough to enjoy while you consider how you fared.
For those who own a website that has the primary task of new visitor lead generation then the results of these tests will be quite important. If this is you, then I suggest filling in the gaps as quickly as possible and then monitoring your home page bounce rate to see it track downwards as these changes come into play. For the rest – well, it only took you a few minutes and managed to get you out of your seat and walking around the office!
I’m convinced that you can achieve some big improvements with your website marketing just by spending an hour a week – for say a couple of months – completing the right tasks required for your situation. This is great news for those of you who have limited time to spare – but not so hot for those not knowing what to put on their list. If both of these points accurately describe your situation then this article should get you started.
But first, it may help to realise that you are not alone in your plight. This month I met a number of people struggling with the understanding of what website marketing task they should start off with. All this made me think of a simple way to guide their planning. Ideally, it needed to be short and succinct – something that could be described, say, on a restaurant napkin – but nevertheless, a handy guide that would accurately point them in the right direction.
Here’s what I came up with. To begin, let’s help all those troubled marketers with e-commerce aspirations. Here’s a simple financial model to kick things along. An online shopping site should expect to convert between 2% and 4% of its total visits into orders. So if you own a site like this first take a look at your monthly visit count, reduce this down to 3% of its total and then multiply this by a conservative average order value. This should give you a budget gross sales value for your site.
How does this differ from what you already achieve? If the budget gross amount is above your normal monthly value by a reasonable amount (i.e. your figures reveal your own site has a conversion rate of below 2%) then most of your problems are inside your website. You can double check this theory by locating the search terms people are using to find your site. If these keywords match the ones you would expect ideal prospects to use then your problem is not in attracting the right people – you seem to be doing this already – it’s all about doing more with those prospects you already have.
Shopping cart design, product selection and general online merchandising work (and I realise the last one is a large catch-all) are areas in which you need to spend your time. Who said it was going to be easy? It’s just like opening a physical shop, laying out your wares and then expecting all the customers that arrive to buy what’s on offer. At least when you have some physical walls you can corner your visitors and not let them leave before they purchase something! Online visitors, however, can effortlessly flit from yours to a competitor’s website in seconds. Nope, get used to it – owning a successful e-commerce site is one of the hardest things to achieve online. OK, the rant is over for those who expect success here to be easy – now let’s talk about those who are doing well.
If the budget gross amount you have on your napkin is below your existing site sales value by a good margin then things are looking up. For you, the task is to bring more traffic to your site to make this ‘shopping engine’ crank even faster.
But how fast can it go? Here’s a quick tip on how to find out. By running a Google AdWords campaign you can see how often your main keywords are searched on (impressions) within Google. As a rough rule of thumb for a business category of medium competitiveness and after you have completed some solid Search Engine Optimisation, I would suggest you can allow for up to 10% of this total traffic to arrive on your website.
Now take these revised figures and run them through your conversion model to see what top-end revenue figures your site could achieve. If it all looks very promising then push on and start along the optimising route. At least now you have some way of coming up with a cost justification argument for the consultancy work required. Call if you need more help defining this justification model for your website.
So what about those owning lead-generation websites? Well, compared to their e-commerce cousins, they require fewer tasks to be achieved to ensure their success. But, like them, your work begins with some percentage point comparison. Just as I did for e-commerce, I want you to take your monthly visit count and reduce it to just 6% of its total. Roughly speaking, this should represent the total number of leads your site should be delivering you. Some sites we manage achieve 5%, others a whopping 36%, but to start go with 6% and see how you fare.
If you are way down and your search keywords match those of ideal prospects then, as mentioned before, your work lies within your own pages. If you are way down – say sub 2% – then you are not offering the right content to tempt people enough to become a lead. Not everyone visiting will want to make a purchase decision when they arrive on your site – many will be interested in learning more before they buy. Offer up the right content to these folks and see your lead conversion rates rocket through the 10%, 20% and 30% mark. Yes, they will need some further nurturing to convince them to make a purchase decision but at least you now have their details to work with.
There you go – that should fill up the napkin for now.
Remember, our monthly coaching group includes owners of both e-commerce and lead-generation websites who are just like you. Each of them faces the same time challenges you have when it comes to improving their website marketing. The difference is that, now that they are coaching members, they have both me and the group to call on to guide them through their task list. Why not join us for a trial month and see how we can help?
Serving nice coffee is one of the many benefits that bricks and mortar shops have over their web cousins. One other less obvious are the roads and pathways that line their front door.
From these roads, malls and neighbourhoods people have no option but to drive, walk and ride past their shop. For customers these nearby excursions serve as a gentle reminder to drop in and pick up something. For prospects it could be the chance to peer through the window to check things out. All this “foot traffic” helps make the mantra for many a successful physical store be location, location, location.
But what about those same stores online?
Some mistakenly call the Internet the information superhighway. But I see no ordered way in which people traverse from website to website. To me it’s more a spider’s web of individual paths than an group treck across well worn roads.
So if there are no highways or malls to help bring people back to the front of a web store what can store owners use in their place?
Well for those online retailers that are well funded there is always traditional media advertising. Billboards seem to be the flavour of the month at the moment for those owners with deep pockets. The ads look good in whatever form they take – the agency is your best friend but you need a storehouse of cash to keep this strategy going to create ongoing traffic.
Then there’s online advertising. Here you can take those billboards, face them towards the web and see what happens. Banners of all shapes and sizes can be wrapped around high traffic sites to hook people back. Yes banners, remember those squares of advertising that you mentally block out when bouncing from website to website?
Paid search advertising is another tool to entice new and repeat visitors – especially if your site is hard to find in the generic search options. But those keywords are rising in both popularity and cost.
So all of these options will bring first time visitors to your site for a varying amount of cost per visit but having to continue to invest in any of them to make visitors return is too costly for most to achieve.
This is where effective email marketing can be rather handy.
Email is by far the cheapest and most effective way to call people back to your website. Asking, cajouling, begging and bribing all website visitors to subcribe to your email list has to be high up on your website goals.
Well written email newsletters create their own virtual “foot traffic” by enticing visitors to return to your website pages through the links contained in your copy.
But while this logic is sound and the Internet is abound with successful case studies of email marketing being used this way it still amazes me how many website fail to entice their visitors to join any email newsletter of sorts.
Yes they have billboards extolling their website, some even tell their story with television but when you visit there is no “hard to say no” option to join a newsletter so they can bring you back for cents when they brought you there with dollars.
It doesn’t take much to design an email communication that has strong appeal and set up a web form to capture subscriptions.
Please make sure it’s part of your website strategy – and failing that make mine a flat white when I drop by your bricks and mortar store next time.
Are you putting off your next email newsletter? Has it been a long time since your team hit “send”? And, was your last edition less news and more letter ?
It’s a common occurrence to see motivations wane when the tasks of turning out edition after edition of email newsletter dawn on those responsible. Plus this is especially the case when these publishing tasks are usually appended to rather than instead of other monthly actions.
So to help lighten the load here is a few tips to help those editions remain rolling out.
Firstly keep in check your expectations of how much content you actually require for each newsletter edition. It is better to have three news items of merit then a total of nine with six that are just there to make up the space. As subscribers we all welcome a newsletter that quickly gets to the point while bringing us information we value.
Secondly take a lead from the success of previous email newsletter editions. Most email deployment tools worth their salt will be able to tell you how many subscribers decided to click your links to “read more” on previous articles. Use this information work out what content areas are being well received and then plan out more along the same vein of interest.
Thirdly create some “electronic buckets” to snaffle away prospective newsletter content in as it comes your way during the month. I keep a “read and review” folder in my email folders list so I can copy messages across that are worth using in my next edition. And my web browser has a similar folder where I can store away pages that are worth considering at content creation time.
And finally if all else fails try planning.
Now I know for some this will be the first on the list but for others that are more tactical than strategic a good content plan can help get some direction on what content is worth producing. Take one whiteboard add some chocolate include a jug of strong coffee – let marinate for 30 minutes with a keen crowd and you should turn out a cunning content plan of your own.
In its basic form this will have a content area for each edition and some initial suggestions on who will create what to fill the three spaces on offer.
Have fun and do keep publishing again, it’s not that scary once you get stuck in.
Are you putting off your next edition? Has it been a long time since hit “send”? And, was your last edition less news and more letter ?
It’s a common occurrence to see motivations wane when the tasks of turning out edition after edition of email newsletter dawn on those responsible. Plus this is especially the case when these publishing tasks are usually appended to rather than instead of other monthly actions.
So to help lighten the load here is a few tips to help those editions remain rolling out.
Firstly keep in check your expectations of how much content you actually require for each newsletter edition. It is better to have three news items of merit then a total of nine with six that are just there to make up the space. As subscribers we all welcome a newsletter that quickly gets to the point while bringing us information we value.
Secondly take a lead from the success of previous email newsletter editions. Most email deployment tools worth their salt will be able to tell you how many subscribers decided to click your links to “read more” on previous articles. Use this information work out what content areas are being well received and then plan out more along the same vein of interest.
Thirdly create some “electronic buckets” to snaffle away prospective newsletter content in as it comes your way during the month. I keep a “read and review” folder in my email folders list so I can copy messages across that are worth using in my next edition. And my web browser has a similar folder where I can store away pages that are worth considering at content creation time.
And finally if all else fails try planning.
Now I know for some this will be the first on the list but for others that are more tactical than strategic a good content plan can help get some direction on what content is worth producing. Take one whiteboard add some chocolate include a jug of strong coffee – let marinate for 30 minutes with a keen crowd and you should turn out a cunning content plan of your own.
In its basic form this will have a content area for each edition and some initial suggestions on who will create what to fill the three spaces on offer.
Have fun and do keep publishing again, it’s not that scary once you get stuck in.
This article from MarketingSherpa is a good one about content testing – read more here.
Here’s my top areas of email newsletter testing: –
All these drive stong open rates- without an “open” any content testing is dead in the water.
But with a growing concern about the unreliablity of the measurement of opens you need to track click throughs to gauge your success.
Hence you now need to add in any content testing to this list to help you see what is working while remembering the golden rule of testing to test just one thing at a time.
(Those with a monthly newsletter cycle could take some time to uncover the gold.)