We pride ourselves on offering a service that cuts through the electronic payment jargon and delivers results in the simplest way possible. Working with Permission has been a very similar experience for us. They deliver an easy-to-understand methodology that cleverly bypasses the confusion so common in online marketing. It’s a comprehensive end-to-end solution. I’d recommend anyone who is looking for a simple way to solve the complex problem that is online marketing to give them a call.

Roger Yibo Wang
Managing Director – Flo2Cash Limited

Flo2Cash is a credit card and direct debit electronic payment provider based in Albany on Auckland’s North Shore. It operates within an industry category littered with technical jargon and convoluted processes. Thankfully, due to some locally developed nimble technology, the Flo2Cash team is able to slash through all this and enable their clients to enjoy a very simple ‘one-stop shop’ approach to using electronic payment methods.

They contacted Permission in early 2010 with a desire to substantially increase the number of sales leads coming from their website. Up to then things had been going reasonably well, but the lead volume was low and needed work. This, coupled with the growing amount of positive customer feedback the business was receiving, convinced them that it was time to break out of any ‘best kept secret’ category they may be in.

To start things off, Permission took the Flo2Cash team through a comprehensive website review process. The outcomes of this work highlighted their relative strengths, ripe for further leverage, and conversely the gaps that needed additional work. A series of programs was suggested and subsequently agreed upon to enable them to gain and eventually surpass their competitors in the online space.

The first job off the rank was to improve the level of reporting from the analytics tools running across the Flo2Cash website. Once complete, this allowed the team to accurately track the effectiveness of any alterations Permission would roll out later.

Google was the next point of focus, specifically improving its ability to rank Flo2Cash website pages for keywords specific to their industry. Researching which keywords were worth ranking for was the first job. These choices were then matched against the existing pages on the Flo2Cash website and, where there were none, new pages were created. These were then optimised to improve their keyword relevance. Permission then embarked on a comprehensive article writing and distribution strategy to help improve the quality and volume of inbound links to the site.

Within a month the results started to flow through. The custom-built Google ranking and traffic volume reports revealed traffic gains of over 50% as the site was re-indexed and the rankings moved upwards.

Increasing numbers of searchers were now seeing the business listed in their Google results screen and were clicking through, wanting to start a conversation with a prospective electronic payment supplier. And so, with this traffic-building work well underway, the attention of the two teams moved to the website and to improving its ability to convert all this new traffic into new leads.

As it would happen, the start of this stage coincided with Permission becoming a customer of Flo2Cash. We had been using a traditional credit card processing solution for a number of years and were looking for something with a few more smarts and a few less fees. Flo2Cash was an obvious solution.

This allowed Permission to see the obvious gaps in what prospects were told online compared with what was experienced later as a customer. So both teams sat down and reworked the design of the home page and the order in which content was displayed. The Flo2Cash service comes with some very valuable and unique benefits and, while not exactly hidden, they required more prominence on the main pages of the site. In a similar way, the growing level of social proof the service enjoyed with its lengthening list of customers was made more obvious across the revised layouts.

During this stage, the teams also looked at the number and types of lead conversion options prospects could chose from on the website. At the start there was just one, which was suited to those who were a fair way down the sales decision-making process. So the teams worked on adding more that were better suited to those in the early stages of researching their options.

Once in, these changes made the website work harder at converting the traffic it received. And, with the climbing rate of traffic from Google, the site’s lead volume began to noticeably pick up. From here on it was all about tuning things to get the most from the solution. This involves ongoing work to tweak the site’s ‘conversion-inducing’ content coupled with the implementation of a range of tactics to steadily move the site higher in its search rankings.