Selling large, costly and most likely complex products and/or services can be a challenge online. Here prospects don’t decide on a Monday what they want and from whom and by Wednesday have the transaction complete and their solution in their hands. Nope, these decision cycles can take weeks, months or even years to work through. During this time prospects will vacillate from supplier to supplier, option to option, and could well end up not buying off anyone at all.

More often than not the actual decision to buy will NOT be made with a web page and order form in front of your prospect. This might occur over coffee at the dining room table, at the roadside when their car gives up the ghost for the umpteenth time or, with luck, with your salesperson in your office. How and where the sale will end is hard to predict; nevertheless, there’s a very strong chance that it will start online. Here a prospect will kick off some research using trusty Google and a broad category-type keyword like “crm software”.

Hopefully, if you sell CRM software, your website will feature in this list. Now all you need to do is to capture this early level of interest and convert it to actual orders week or months or more later. Up for the challenge? Understandably, there’s a lot to get wrong during this time. But to help you along the way here’s my list of the seven most common mistakes people make, with a short note on how to avoid each of them.

#1 – Failing to include lead nurturing

So they arrive on your website, read your content, perhaps print out a report you offer, and then are gone for another few months as they consider their options. Remembering that these big ticket decisions will take weeks or months to complete, somehow you need to keep in touch as prospects work through their decision. Email marketing is the obvious choice here as long as you have permission to send it. But let’s not forget direct mail or even telemarketing too, or even all three in a neat “mix and match” format.
People lead busy lives and because of that prospects will naturally forget what you told them or what they read on your website. A regular drip feed of content to politely and persistently remind them of all the key facts is required. Do this well and you will have them move from thinking you are just one of many viable alternatives in month one to being convinced you are the best option in month ten.

#2 – A website that talks too much on how you can solve rather than understand a problem

Think of it this way. Say you need a builder to come in and fix a stuck window in your lounge room. It’s a simple job that’s been bugging you for ages and now it’s time to find a builder – any builder really – to get it sorted. Your criteria of who gets the job would probably include things like whether they are local and what their minimum call-out fee is. Simple criteria really to fix what is quite a simple problem.

Compare this with when you need a builder to help you create our ideal home. This requires a completely different list of criteria and there’s a strong chance that the builder that fixed the window is not going to be the one to build the home. Now, the ability for them to understand the problem matters more than where they operate from and even what they charge. (No point in paying less for something you don’t want.)
So home-building builders would be well served by a website that explains the process they follow to listen and understand what their prospects want. Ideally this content would be supported with some testimonial proof from happy customers that say they did exactly that. This leads me nicely onto my next point.

#3 – A website with a paucity of social proof

It’s not that purchasers of big ticket items are less trusting of suppliers than their small ticket cousins. Oh well, let’s face it, they are. Making the wrong decision here is a problem. It’s not that easy to take your recently built home back and ask for a replacement. Or pull out a multi-million dollar CRM system because it doesn’t do exactly what you wanted it to.

So buyers take more care and are naturally pleasantly reassured when they read the successful stories of others who can attest to the process or product doing exactly what they are being told it will do. For instance, if your website says that your $8000 ride-on lawnmower will easily manage long grass on sloping terrain then that’s fine. But if a customer sends in a video of them using the machine doing exactly this AND raves about the finish it leaves behind then this is so much more believable.

#4 – Failing to offer impartial, valuable information for buyers who are interested but not yet ready to buy

Just by the nature of the long sales cycle that big ticket items operate within, more people will arrive at your website interested than those who are ready to buy. The proportions could be 10 to 1, 50 to 1, or even 100 to 1, depending on your business category and the marketing they have received before arriving.

Now I realize that persuading those ready to buy now to contact you is a very big priority. But very close behind this is developing a system to do the same for those interested – the vast majority of your site traffic.

To achieve this you could offer them an impartial buyer’s guide, technically detailed white papers or even complimentary CDs of prior coaching sessions. During the customer conference call I mentioned over 25 different types of content you can offer for this stage. They span all types of media choices and formats but all have the same thing in common – they offer interested prospects something of real value.

This is not the time for product catalogues or a full-on sales pitch in print. Prospects are not ready for this yet. First, you need to win them over with some meaty, valuable and timely content that helps them during the research and information-gathering stage they are in now.

#5 – Failing to answer the top questions prospects have during their buying process

We covered this one at length during the coaching call. The key points are that there will be a list of questions – probably less than 5 – that the majority of prospects will need answering BEFORE they will even consider you as a valid supplier. The first job is to use some effective but relatively easy to run research to find out what these questions are.

The obvious next step is to answer them completely during your sales process. For instance, business owner purchasers of accounting services may have at the top of their list the ability for their supplier to explain complex issues in simple to understand language. So accountants selling services into this space would be wise to own a website that does exactly this.

#6 – Prospects doing the hard work of translating features into benefits

This is sales training 101 but still we can all slip back into old habits – especially when we are writing website content. So let us be clear – it’s not about you and what you do – it’s about them and how their life will be different after using you. For instance, you may run quarterly seminars where all clients are invited to meet and mingle with other business owners like them. That’s a feature. There are a ton of benefits this could flow into. One may be for attendees to learn from others just like them who have experienced the same problems and have gone on to solve them in new and innovative ways.

#7 – Failing to add value to entice people to leap from the online world to the offline one

In most cases for big ticket items you will need to transition your ongoing online lead nurturing communications into real face-to-face sales talk. This is a critical stage. Do it correctly and all your prior online work is worthwhile – make a mess of it and all this was for naught. You can improve your chances of success here by “selling” the act. For instance, why not rev up a simple “call us for a free quote on your payroll processing needs” into something like “call for your 20 point payroll industry benchmark review”. Ideally, this statement would be delivered on its own landing page that explains exactly what will be delivered, by whom and the benefits others have gained by doing the same.

So there you have it, seven mistakes to avoid when selling big ticket items online. I hope you weren’t making all of them? Contact us today if you would like a complimentary assessment of your efforts so far.

Have fun.

We all know that optimising the shopping cart process can push these rates upwards. But what about actions that occur prior to the cart stage? The bit where people are looking through your products, trying to decide if this is really for them. These are actions that occur further back in the sale process, where the goal is to influence, persuade and motivate the visitor to take action.

Here, the task is to present the right type of message in the best choice of content. Text, images, documents and videos – all of these can work well – if your visitors decide to consume what you offer. So let’s get stuck into how we can set up some kind of conversion tracking for these stages.

Conversion Action #1 Document Downloads

Say you sell technical products that cost north of $400 and are struggling to make any sales after months of promotion. Lots of visitors to the product page but no one placing it in the cart and the till just isn’t ringing. To debug the issue you might decide to produce a product manual in PDF format for free download. Or maybe a buyer’s guide for those looking to purchase a product like this for the first time. Both documents could be loaded to sit nicely on the product details page ready for the next interested visitor to come along.

Then with some swanky changes to your Google Analytics code you can now see if either of these documents are being downloaded. It could be that both are being pulled off the site by 50% + of those that visit – or that no one pulled any of them off at all. Unfortunately, if you can’t get anyone to grab a free download on the product then you’ve got a bigger problem to solve than your e-commerce conversion rate.

We saw a similar situation with a customer only the other month. They had been purchasing Google AdWords traffic for a number of months with very little results. Lots of clicks, lots of dollars but no sales. They had a smattering of PDF manual documents around their website but no tracking to see if they were being used. We updated their Google Analytics set up, started tracking downloads and found that for every 100 clicks there were over 30 downloads. The traffic was interested in the products on offer – the first hurdle was overcome. It was just the sales process that needed to
be revamped.

See the image to follow that shows a Google Analytics account modified to show event tracking underway. This can include downloads, email link clicks and clicks to external websites.

Action #2 Video Plays

Video is another great source of content that, once tracked properly, can become a great conversion value to monitor and improve. Last year we worked with a client who owned a website that sold one product promoted through a 35 minute video of a webinar they had run recently. The content was great. When they ran live webinars the conversion rate of attendees was impressive. Nevertheless we weren’t sure putting all 35 minutes online for visitor consumption was the right plan.

They, of course, thought it was perfect as it was. But were smart enough to know that good Analytics would tell the real story. So again we modified their website tracking, updated the video player and began to track the video play action itself and the length play time per session.

The image to follow shows some of this data that was collected.

And the results? Well, there was a high percentage that arrived on the page and played the video. That was the good news. The bad news was that the average play lasted 10 minutes, and those that played to the end were no more likely to convert than those who watched just some of the content. They all converted the same, and it was at a higher rate than those who didn’t play. So the playing mattered – the content just needed to be re-worked to get all the good stuff at the front end and to make the video more widely promoted around the website.

So there you have it. By tracking your PDF downloads and video plays you can start to see what affect – if any – they are having on your sale process. Usually the more content visitors consume – in whatever form – the greater your chances of closing the sale. Have fun.

]]> http://websitemarketing.co.nz/blog/grow-conversions/website-conversion-tracking-follow-journey-destination.html/feed/ 0 http://websitemarketing.co.nz/blog/email-marketing/stages-email-marketing-complexity.html http://websitemarketing.co.nz/blog/email-marketing/stages-email-marketing-complexity.html#comments Fri, 23 Mar 2012 05:15:36 +0000 admin http://websitemarketing.co.nz/?p=1095 Read more »]]> I received my first HTML email marketing message in 1999. I had just been hired to establish an email marketing technology start up. It was during the “dotcom” craze – a time flush with cash but funnily enough devoid of any SPAM. The business I worked for was part of a small “stable” of Internet start ups, funded by some very wealthy people.

Our offices were split across two floors of a six storey building overlooking Auckland’s waterfront. A perfectly good lift took us from the ground floor carpark to our office. Nevertheless it was decided that it was too much effort to ferry us between floors. So a brand new architect-designed marble stair case was cut into the two concrete floors. No expense was spared.

How times have changed. I can assure you there are no marble stair cases at Permission HQ! And while there are billions of HTML based emails flying around the planet, SPAM makes up the high percentage. But through all this email continues to hold its own against the other options available.

To do this it has managed to flex and wane to meet the growing demands placed on it by marketers wanting to communicate ever more complex messages. Here’s my take on three core stages of complexity that most marketers work through.

Stage one – let’s get started.

This is where intentions meet actions and the first few email campaigns are the result. It’s the classic “load and blast” stage where one message is sent to the one list. The content is written to appeal to everyone and designed to look both colorful (with HTML formatting) and functional (with a complementary text version). Legally, things are taken care of with the appropriate unsubscribe option and details of who sent it, where they are located and why the subscriber received it in the first place.

All this is usually dispatched using a hosted web service, in such a way that it looks like it has come from the business. Before it’s sent a few test emails are generally dispatched to three or four different email clients, just to ensure it looks OK.

Once the “send” button is pressed the reporting begins. The technology usually shows who opened the message, if they clicked on any of the links and whether they decided to end it there and unsubscribe.

Ideally the list will grow by new subscribers joining via a web form hosted on the website. Those that unsubscribe are automatically removed, as are those that either a) have their email message “bounce” more than a set times per month or b) if they are automatically deemed as having an address that will never work.

It’s all very functional. But still there’s a lot to learn for the newbie email marketer so the first few campaigns take longer than you would think. Then they get into some sort of a rhythm, and the campaigns start to take on a momentum of their own. Dispatching one a month doesn’t seem too hard. The beast has been created. Now all you need to do is produce the content to keep it happy – which is the real time commitment.

Stage two – Let’s become relevant

The bridge from stage one to stage two is usually preceded by someone standing back from the tactical day to day experience to review progress. So they dive into all the stats, costs and time invested to see where’s the room for improvement. Not everyone does this. A fair chunk remain in stage one forever – which is fine. For them this is enough work thank you very much, and the results? Well they’re OK – nothing amazing – but still OK.

Nevertheless, the rest head off into the land of increasing complexity, hunting out higher returns on their email marketing time and money. Most start by altering how they define who gets what message. In stage one just being a subscriber counted you in. This is changed so that age, gender and perhaps location are used to define who gets what. No longer is it one message for everyone – improving message relevance is the goal here.

Sometimes an upgrade in email sending technology is required to work in this stage. Not every tool can send out different types of message within the one send. This makes proofing the message a bit harder too, so a seed list is created that ensures all the different variations are seen during the testing phase. Tests are now sent to 30 or 40 different email clients to ensure that a high proportion of the list can see what they should.

The web form on the website gets a remodel too. Now it is placed in a more prominent position and perhaps a subscription offer is run to drive list growth. And while previously a new subscription was met with just a simple “Thank You” page on the website, in stage two an automated “welcome” email message is dispatched. (As an aside, this type of message usually has a 25%– 50% increase in open rate from any campaign message you send them, the simple reason being because it’s expected.)

Knowing if all this extra work is worthwhile requires an upgrade in message tracking also. All the traffic generated by these stage two campaigns is configured to sit nicely within their own analytics “bucket”. Now the marketer can correctly match up sales or conversions to the email campaign responsible for them. So simple sums like campaign sales less campaign costs become a breeze to run.

It’s a more complex space to work within, but usually the rewards are there to make it worthwhile – with higher opens, clicks and conversions than stage one.

Stage Three – the death of the campaign

This is not the stage for those wanting the easy life. There’s more technology and marketing headaches in here than you can shake a stick at. And I realize this contradicts what most email tech vendors will tell you. But after living in this place for a small selection of clients for a few years I have seen what it requires to make it work well.

The critical difference between this stage and the two prior is that your campaigns are no longer driven by what you do, but by what your subscriber does. You set up the rules, define the messages, make the technology “talk” amongst itself and then sit back and let the subscriber experience it all in its wonderful form.

So for instance you could set up a campaign that welcomes new customers to your business via a series of five email messages which begins when they make the first transaction on your website. Or if they haven’t purchased for three months, when they used to regularly, they are sent a special offer to get them purchasing again. Another stage three message could be sent out to those e-commerce customers who placed a product in their shopping cart but didn’t make it all the way to complete the transaction. You could have a myriad of fully automated campaigns working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A complete “lights out” marketing operation that runs with no manual involvement. Sound attractive?

Well before you get too excited, do realize that there’s a jungle of technology to work through to make these operate properly. Email tools need to talk to billing systems and possibly e-commerce applications. Yes, it’s set and forget, but with a fair amount of time spent on the setting.

Still, once you get there your campaign statistics can soar upwards. A 2x increase in open rates when compared to normal load and blast strategies is not unheard of. Click through and end conversion rates can also leave the earlier stages for dead. There is work involved, but there are also results.

So there you have it. Your three stages of email marketing complexity. Some marketers will live at stage one – others will operate campaigns across all three levels. Very few will not do any. Why not start exploring the merits of the stage ahead of you this month?

Now, I know that practicing effective online marketing is nowhere near as complex as flying a plane. And likewise if you miss a step or two there’s no chance of anything fatal occurring. But nevertheless it’s a complex space to work within and there’s a lot to miss. So here’s my checklist on the basics of online marketing. Think of it as a companion document to the recent customer conference call on the same subject.

The Basics of Online Marketing Checklist	Tick When Complete
A website analytics application – of Google Analytics standard or better – is running on your website
Time has been spent learning or being trained in the data this application reports upon
You know what the five most insightful web analytics data points are for your type of website and you track them each month
Your Analytics application has been configured to track the success of three or more actions – or goals – your website visitors will achieve
You present these actions to your website visitors on the high traffic pages of your website or even inside an area called FREE STUFF
You offer content specifically written to help your prospects work through their decision-making process
The split of content on your website is roughly 20% sales (about your business and what you offer) and 80% prospect-centric valuable information
Every two weeks you add more prospect-centric content to your website
There’s a place on your website for customer testimonials
This area of your website is updated at least monthly
You use email marketing
You send a message to your list or lists at least once a month
You offer an incentive for new subscribers to join your list
You have set up your email marketing application to “work” with your website analytics account. This enables you to track the effectiveness of your inbound website traffic generated by your email marketing campaigns
Like your website, the split of content your email messages contain is 80% prospect value centric and 20% sales promotion
You know how much traffic the Google search engine sends to your website
You know the keywords people have used in Google to find your website before they have clicked and arrived
You know which of these keywords have high search volumes behind them
You know the high search volume keywords that you are not ranking for within Google and are doing – or having done – some work to improve their ranking
You are having some fun doing – or having done for you – all this work

HTML Tables

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.

Anyway, during my early days doing this, I was shown a strategy that I’m now going to renovate and present back to you as something super smart to apply to your online lead generating efforts. Think of it as a matt, dull object from the past that is probably a bit more valuable than its usually shiny, bright cousin we come across each and every week.

Anyway, this business had a rather crude but effective way of generating leads. It involved sitting its sales force down at their desks, arming them with phones and phone books and then yelling at them repeatedly to cold call prospects in their chosen territory to make sales appointments.

OK, so perhaps the yelling part is overstating the fact a bit. But still you were expected to be at your desk from 8:00am until 10:00am calling up purchasing managers (remember that role) and convincing them to see you either that day or sometime soon over the week. It was a soul-destroying task but, surprisingly, a reasonably effective one.

Printing was a fickle business then as it probably is now. Printers came and went, service levels were up and down, and staff churned away. So if you were fortunate your call could coincide with someone who was so annoyed with their current supplier that you got a hearing. If you were lucky.

I really hated this cold calling part of the sales process. So I would arm myself with as much coffee as my body could contain and then work through my call list as fast as I could. I repeated my sales script in a jabbering caffeine-fueled way – in what was probably so much of a blabber that no one could tell what I said and as such any chance of success was quickly snuffed out.

So as the clock struck 10:00am I was evicted with the rest of the sales force. They bounced off to their first call. I drove down the southern motorway just knowing what was coming up next. Now as sales people we were only allowed back in the office after 4:00 pm and then only to write up our orders from the day’s calling. So if my phone cold calling drew a blank then I had a day ahead of an even worse experience – door knocking.

Yep, picking some unsuspecting street in industrial East Tamaki and working from one end to the other asking to see the person in charge of printing. I hated this even more than the phone. After the first month, it was obvious to everyone that I was not the company’s best hire. So it was no surprise when my boss called me into his office and sat me down “for a chat about my future.”

Clyde told me he could see some promise but things had to change – and fast. He then pulled out a pen and paper and began to map out my progress to date. Their sales process required us to complete daily call reports that showed exactly who we had phoned or visited, what was discussed and a nice space to list down the orders we had achieved.My reports had a bunch of stuff in the activity areas, but very little in the place left for orders. Between us we tallied up the orders made – that didn’t take too long – then the number of phone calls and sales presentations I had made.

The numbers for the two weeks just gone were something like – 200 agonizing phone calls made – 10 appointments made – 9 sales presentations delivered resulting in 3 orders collected with sales worth $6,000. As a rookie sales person I was on a very small base salary, which was topped up with a commission on gross sales – so I knew the dollars but the activity numbers were new to me.

Clyde then broke down each step of the sales process and assigned a dollar value to it. So the orders were worth $2000 each and on average I needed 3 presentations to make an order – which means each presentation was worth $667, while each appointment was worth $600 and each phone call – hold on – was worth an amazing $30.

This changed everything. Now, whenever I picked up the phone I didn’t just think fear, doubt and extreme worry – I also thought three nice and shiny $10 notes – just waiting for me to grab them. And when I was presenting to a prospect, while I thought features vs benefits – features vs benefits – features vs benefits, I also thought $667 is very close now so listen hard and don’t blow this.

I would have liked to say that this epiphany changed everything and overnight I went from a cold calling disaster to become king of the phones. But it didn’t. Nevertheless, it made things a bit easier – the phone wasn’t so scary; the appointments were not so haphazard.

So how does this apply to your lead generation website?

First, let’s kick off with the general agreement that there’s a multi-stage process people follow before they buy. For printing it involved me calling and convincing them to let me in their office for an appointment. That was all I was told to present. Nothing about what I could offer – just the benefits of sitting in a room with me to discuss their printing needs. That was step one. Some agreed and booked a time. Others fobbed me off and asked me to send a brochure in the mail (sort of like a step 1.5). Anyway, I did what was asked of me and then called back politely but persistently to get that appointment.

If all went well then step two had me placed eyeball to eyeball across their desk – pitching them what I could offer. And all going well, one in three would buy.
Let’s now apply this to lead generation on the Internet. Some prospects will come by your website, immediately like what you offer, and complete your “Contact Us” page form. Now, this “some” could be between 2% and 5% of your total visitor traffic depending on your industry, the content you offer, and your standing in the market. Think of these as the purchasing officers who were absolutely fuming about their printing supplier and were very happy I called that day.

But there are not a lot in this group, so you have the remaining 95% to 98% of your website visitors who do nothing. Some of this group will be mildly interested. But how do you entice them to linger a bit longer and eventually transform themselves into a lead?

Before we talk about some options, it’s worth remembering that the Internet is a cruel, harsh environment when it comes to prospecting. As a rookie sales person, very rarely did I have people slam down the phone on me within the first 30 seconds of my phone pitch. Nevertheless, prospects visiting your website could arrive, not like what they see and read, and be off in half this time. They are truly a fickle and demanding bunch that needs a selection of enticing “stuff” to capture and hold their attention.

So for “stuff” you could offer blog posts, free reports, newsletter subscriptions, pre-recorded seminars, and teleseminars – all containing content that your prospect would deem as being very valuable. For example, you may offer a PDF report they could download without registration, a recording of a webinar they can stream off your website and an information-packed Free Report they could register for. Now some prospects will grab all three options, while others will pick just one that suits them. And by reading, listing or viewing it they will become a bit more likely to contact you rather than your competitors.

Once you have these available on your website you can sit yourself down and calculate the relative values for each content piece that prospects consume just as Clyde did with me. As an example, your figures could tell you that out of 10 web contacts you will make 6 appointments, which produce 3 sales worth $1750 each. So your appointment sessions are worth $875 ($5250 / 6) and your web contact requests are worth $525 ($5250/10).

Now working back through your analytics data you can see that out of the 80 visitors that decide to take up the option of your PDF download only 2 go on to make a web contact, so that action is worth $6.50 ($525/80). Delving further into your Analytics data you find that of the 130 visitors that look at your webinar, 1 makes a web contact – so that action is worth $4.00. Meanwhile, of the 30 that register for the free report, 4 have gone onto make contact, which makes this action worth a whopping $70 ($2100/30). Now I realize that the numbers are rough and there is room for some double counting BUT you can start to see how all this helps to prioritize your efforts so you spend time optimizing your website for more prospects to register for that free report before you try and get them to watch the webinar. There’s gold in that there strategy.

Plus, if you are content to live with the “rough edges” of the relative amounts of these action values you can then include them in your Google Analytics account so the totals are tallied up each day. For instance, seeing that your website produced a relative $2500 worth of lead generating actions (PDF downloads, free report registrations, etc.) during the week just gone – all without you having to make a single cold call yourself – should be something to smile about.

There I was sitting in a prospect’s office in Auckland’s central city, listening to the story of why they were looking for services from someone like us. It was just a few minutes into our discussion when – Bam – out came this bombshell. A failed AdWords experiment was there sitting across the table from me.

Now, some would miss the opportunity a comment like this can bring. They may jump into the many reasons why buying an email list was probably the least favourable of all options worth pursuing. But not me. Nope, this was just gold. So I started to question exactly what they had experienced with AdWords and how their failure here could reveal some startling truths about the overall health of their online marketing.

I asked some more questions and my prospect shared all he could, in all its tragic detail. How their cost per click was in dollars not cents. The AdWords budget was in thousands not hundreds and after all this there were pitifully few leads produced at what ended up to be an abhorrent individual cost per lead. The first two parts of the story were actually good news of what could lie ahead – that I will expand on later. But losing money with Google is never fun to experience for anyone, so I took my time to explain what this all meant and how it was worthwhile to take on Google again – but perhaps with a few tweaks to their methods of engagement.

I began with why the strategy was worth pursuing. You see, your ability to run a successful on-going Google AdWords campaign is a real-world gauge of the lead generation effectiveness of your website compared with all those of your bidding competitors. Yep, your ability to purchase clicks at a profit can reveal how effective your website is at turning traffic into leads – compared with everyone else in your market who tries to do the same. This in itself is some quite cool live data with which to benchmark your business against others.
I followed this with a few words on why expensive keywords are a good thing to find when you enter a bidding market like the one AdWords operates. Let’s not think cents here, nope we are really looking for those keywords that are worth dollars per click. For instance, Google and its Keyword Tool can tell me that for the keyword “cash loans nz” I should be prepared to pay around $4.00 per click. This is an amount that would make most online marketers think twice before paying. Nevertheless, trust me, it’s a good sign. Prices like these reflect what competitors are prepared to pay day in and day out because for them the investment is worth the return. And in most cases, large dollar clicks are there because for the majority of bidders they are producing large dollar returns.

The prospects behind those clicks have a strong need that they want met AND they are prepared to take action online to help them find a solution. In comparison, super-low click costs – say sub 10 cents – are warning signs that you are possibly entering a troublesome market. Here you may find clickers but those willing to take some action – and a profitable one at that – may be a bit more elusive.

As an aside, for those interested in knowing their keywords bid price but who are not yet running an AdWords campaign, fortunately Google makes it relatively easy to get a guide on this value. Just head over to the Google keyword tool, then login to your AdWords account (you don’t need any campaigns running – just an account set up) and search the keywords of your market in your region. You should see something like the image to follow.

So by now we had discussed how his keywords were in the costly part of the market and how this was a good thing. And just by looking at who was bidding on these words we could also assume that others in his market were living with these costs. This left the simple question of whether he wanted to make the necessary changes to enter the market and survive.

Well, with 90% of NZ searchers using Google as their tool, he really didn’t have a lot of options. That left the task of finding out the areas he needed to focus on to make these dollar clicks start to pay. Here’s a short overview of just four of the points we covered.

Conversion rate was the starter. Yep, the hard truth could be that your bidding competitors may own an e-commerce website that converts at 4% while yours struggles to get above 2% for exactly the same items. Or for those of you in lead generation land, your competitor’s offline sales process could be twice as effective as yours. It could be their lead follow-up, their phone script or even their face-to-face presentation. Any one or all of these could be a good rung or two above your own, which ensures they convert twice as many leads into customers as you do. Even though their lead quality is, once again, exactly the same as yours.

Next up was the method by which his competitors were valuing the total of each sale or lead and then allocating a proportion of this to marketing. For instance, they could be valuing each sale just on its initial amount. So when a typical first-time customer may spend just $100 then a proportion of this amount would go towards their AdWords costs. Now it could be that over the next 11 months these “typical” customers will purchase another nine times. And if all goes well after this they will do the same for an average of three years, moving their lifetime value to $3000 rather than the paltry $100 of the first sale.

Those who are super-confident in their customer retention strategies can afford to invest with the $3000 value in mind, leaving the rest to struggle, trying to compete in a world where their sale begins and ends at $100. With work, they could look at each lead not as $100 coming in the door but as $3000 of long-term value. Strategies to move your world beyond the first sale include an email newsletter, a rewards program, or whatever it takes to transform single-purchase customers into multiple-purchasing machines.

Following on from the economic power that comes to those with a strong customer retention plan there’s also the hard fact that your competitor could make more money per sale than you do. So while you may both bid on and sell item A, your bidding competitor could then go on and sell to the same customer items B, C and D, none of which you offer. This pushes up their average revenue and therefore profit per transaction. Maybe even to a value that allows them to sell item A at a loss, knowing that the other products will make this up and then some. Not such good news for those who only sell A (.

Unfortunately, it may well be one or all of these strategies at play with your high-bidding competitors. It would be so much easier if you could wave a magic wand and have revealed exactly what they are doing to make it work for them when it doesn’t for you. Nevertheless, there are some very crude maths you can run to help reveal how far you have to go to get things back on track.

So to follow on from my cash loans example – here we have an average $4 per click amount. Allowing for a fictional goal application conversion rate of 5%, the cost per application would be $80. The first question is, if you operate in this business, could you live with this cost? And if not on your first sale, could it work if your looked further down the lifetime of your customer? If the answer is still no, then what conversion rate would it work with and is this realistic?

We answer questions like these during our Online Marketing Review process. It’s the first step we take new customers through when they are looking to join Permission. Yes, it’s a paid service but comes with some performance guarantees that ensure you only pay for what you want. Call us today if you would like to learn more about this first step.

Four simple words that in both instances did a great job of cutting to the nub of the issue.

So how about we ask the same question of your website?

We all know the costs are easy for everyone to see. There’s hosting, web development, and even optimisation services from people like us. But what about the other part – the revenue side – where can you find these parts hidden inside your web pages?

Most people think that e-commerce websites are the only ones that can produce the necessary answers. Of course they’re wrong. Lead generation sites can do the same – you just need to know how to set up their analytics tools to do the job. Then all you need to do is know which reports “show you the money” and you are underway.

Nevertheless, I’m going to tackle how to find the answers for all those e-commerce website owners first. So Mr and Mrs e-commerce website using Google Analytics its now your turn to “Show me the money”.

OK – let me start with the bad news. Out of the box, the Google Analytics code you add to every page of your e-commerce website WILL NOT gather the “money” data you need. So while you may be able to correctly set up some goal completion actions to see each sale roll through your website, none of these will have any revenue data attributed to them.

The good news is that Google spells out clearly what needs to happen to make this work. All you need to do is amend the Google Analytics tracking code so that the final page of your shopping cart includes the revenue and order details for each converted sale. This will then be swallowed up by Google Analytics account and reported back to you later on.

Yes, it is a bit techie to set up. But fortunately there’s a ton of content inside the Google Analytics help centre to make the changes relatively straightforward. And finally, yes, you will need to test the bejeevers out of it to ensure it works exactly as you want it to.

Once done you are well on the way to seeing the money in your website. The first obvious place to look is the overview e-commerce report that shows the large bucket of all the revenue your site has generated. All going well it should marry up reasonably closely with what your bank tells you your Internet sales deposits were for the same period.

This is nice to know but not necessarily very useful when deciding what needs changing. So sales are up 20% – now what?

Finding out what traffic source is responsible for what % of revenue is quite handy to know. The image to follow shows this. Down the left-hand side are some of the traffic streams this website receives – Organic Google, Google AdWords, Direct, Yahoo and Bing. On the far right there’s a per visit value for each stream.

So now we can see that when someone arrives onto the website from typing the URL into their address bar – as direct traffic – they represent $13.14 in revenue. That’s quite cool. Just imagine a bell set up to ring in your office every time it occurs – with you smiling, knowing that this means another $13 dollars is very likely to be heading towards the bank account. Nice.

So why is it so high? Repeat business. Yep, these are customers coming back again and again and it reveals a very strong operation that does a great job of keeping its customers informed and very happy.

However, now look at Google AdWords – here the revenue per visit is a miserly 98 cents. This traffic is dominated by prospects so the sales values are much smaller. There needs to be some careful work done here to ensure that the click cost doesn’t chew through all this possible revenue.

Per visit value reports are a great way for your website to “Show you the money”. Here’s another report that uses the same metric but this time relative to the organic keywords customers have used to find your website. Data privacy concerns means that this looks like just a big box of hidden data but look to the right and those values relate to keywords listed – but hidden – on the left-hand side. And yes, there’s a keyword in there with a per visit value of $80.96. That would be the big bell that rang when someone arrived from Google using that keyword

How much optimisation work would you embark on to improve your listing for an $80 keyword compared with a $10 one? Reports like these make the decision of where to focus your search engine optimisation efforts so much easier to make.

There is one last report for those interested in optimising their pages for sales rather than just for search terms. This one shows the per visit value for the top landing pages of your site. (Remember that Google Analytics defines a landing page as the first page your visitor lands on when accessing your website.) This site is well optimised for Google so while their home page receives a ton of traffic so does a long list of other pages – all responsible for making that great first impression for a new visitor.

Cast your eyes across to the right and you will see Per Visit Value data here too. Yes, the home page is the top value of $11.65, but there’s a $6 page that looks to be doing well also. Conversely, there’s a $0.00 for a page that attracts a fair bit of traffic – trust me on that one – this page needs a bit of work.

OK, so that should get a few e-commerce website owners diving for their Analytics accounts to “Show themselves the money”. But what about our lead generation friends? Are they completely left out? Fortunately not – BUT they do need to make a small change to see reports like these in their accounts. To do this they need to amend their goal tracking details to include an approximate revenue per lead.

The process of working out what this should be can stop people in their tracks and ensure they go no further. So lets make it a simple thing for everyone. How much is an average quality lead worth for your business? Now, you don’t have to be exact but is it $250, $100, $75, $50 or $20? Either pick one that “feels” right for your business or work out some sums including the average conversion rate of your sales process, lifetime value of your average customer and the cost of marketing you can attribute to your profit and still have an ongoing business.

Work through the simple maths and you should end up with a value. You can then attribute a percentage of this value across the various goals you have running on your website. For instance, a goal registering a quote request could get 100% of the value, while a person subscribing to your email newsletter would be only 20%.

To follow is an image of where to add in this value in your goal set-up area.

Once you have done this, all those “per visit value” reports you thought were just the domain of owners of e-commerce websites are now available to you and your lead generation website. For instance, to follow is an image of the landing page report for a lead generation website with per visit values for each page – handy stuff when it comes to optimising these pages to push this value northwards.

So why not sit down this month and ask your website to “show you the money”? Some may want to shout out the request at the screen, others will suffice with the little dance that Cuba Gooding Jr does as he asks Jerry the same question – whatever fits for you – just ensure you get the answers you need.

http://tinyurl.com/Jerry-Show-Me-The-Money

Earlier in 2011, I wrote about how to improve your chances of success when I took a very generic model I had stumbled upon and applied it to online marketing. You can read more about it here.

http://www.websitemarketing.co.nz/blog/simple-way-create-powerful-website-marketing-plan-2012

While writing this I had an epiphany moment. When I looked deeper I could see one part of the model that, when followed, would act as a reliable predictor of whether a particular change was going to be relatively easy or difficult to deliver. Recent events have underscored this point even more.

And the piece of the model? What’s at stake.

Yep, after you have spent all the time describing what the current situation is and followed this with the nice blue sky of what the future should look like, then you should sit down and write down what’s at stake if nothing changes. What you write here will be a very strong predictor of whether anything changes at all.

Here are a few examples of this in action.

I start with one from my own history. I can’t remember for how many years I told others I wanted to run my own business. It must have been at least 10. But still I did nothing about it. Then in mid November 2002 I was called into a meeting room and told my position was being made redundant and I was expected to leave the office in a week. Young family, young mortgage and a recruitment market that was winding down for Christmas. There was a lot at stake so I purchased some business cards from a local quick printer, borrowed a laptop from a friend and within two days the name Permission was born and I was calling on prospective customers.

Now something closer to home. There was a lot of discussion prior to the election on the suitability of Phil Goff as the Labour Party leader. Personally, I thought he did an OK job but the knives were apparently out looking for a replacement before the election campaign began. As we know nothing changed until after the result was in. I seriously doubt that the person who got the job after the election would have achieved it before.

Now something too close for comfort. I ride with a friend who has recently gone through prostate cancer and survived. He’s had one hell of a year. He rides with a bunch of us that bash our way around Woodhill Forest on our mountain bikes most Sunday mornings. Our ages range from late thirties to mid sixties. Prior to finding out about Nick, how many of us do you think had been to the doctor and inquired about checking on the health of our prostate? None. And now – all of us.

If there’s nothing or very little “at stake” then there’s very little chance the change you want will take place. So thinking back to your possible list of New Year’s resolutions – how about becoming fitter, losing weight or owning a new Ferrari. What really happens if none of these are achieved? Best way to get fit? Register yourself and your friends for an event – be it cycling or running – 6 months out and start training. Now there’s something at stake.

This is a great example of you having to actively create the “at stake” part to ensure the change occurs. Goal setting is another way to do this. Publicly stating your goals takes this one step further and is proven to increase your chances of success. All you have done is raised the “stake” one level higher.

The unfortunate thing is that sometimes life can create the “at stake” part for you if you don’t. For instance, a competitor opens up nearby and starts to entice your customers their way. A health scare makes you realise that exercise is really important or the act of having a doctor’s check-up is worthwhile.

So this January please take the time to plan where you are and where you want to go but also think through what really happens if nothing changes. Really? If there’s not a lot AND you really want the change to occur then start creating some serious down and gritty “at stake” issues.

Have fun.

Nevertheless, there are a few customers out there – we know who you are – who are stubbornly refusing to move forward into the land of email.So for them I present these six online marketing myths all busted with an explanation on how an effective email marketing strategy can come to their aid.

Myth #1: Everyone visiting your website is ready to buy

A good e-commerce website will covert at 5% – leaving 95% able to visit and leave, hopefully to return at some time in the near future.Hope is nice but how about you replace this with a persuasive email subscription form to cajole them into joining your email newsletter list? A credible 15% may take you up on this option, moving your total conversion rate up to a very respectable 20%.But, more importantly, you can message them on a friendly frequency in the hope that this time they are more likely to buy than they were when they subscribed.

Myth #2: All prospects will say yes to your proposal

Similar to Myth #1 but more suited to those who sell face-to-face.Now I must admit that some timeshare salespeople of old may have come close to a 100% conversion rate but legislation has now sorted out that way of selling.So normal people selling normal products may close 25-50% and even 75% of sales but there will still be those that need to be nurtured after the presentation.That’s where a permission-compliant email newsletter can work its magic to move people along the buying process, gradually nudging them closer towards the line of commitment.

Myth #3: Your customers will remember you and your company

They won’t.There’s too much going on in their lives to make what you do that important for them.Somehow you need to drop effortlessly into their Inbox life every month or so and share something of interest.Email is easy for them to “consume”, simple for you to construct and a short click away from something that can sell. (Yes, that’s your “salesperson” website.)

Myth #4: Offers are only to be sent to those who are focused on buying a bargain

Walk around any Warehouse store and look at the people filling the aisles.There’s every demographic you can imagine.And all are there because they want to be where “Everyone gets a bargain”.So take care before dismissing that offers always bring in the wrong type of customer.Many a retail fortune has been made by those who understood the value of an offer to bring in the right type of customer, who then decides to purchase the right high-margin product.

Myth #5: People will bookmark your website URL

When was the last time you bookmarked a supplier’s website?Probably a long time ago.Your customers and prospects are the same.So you need to actively work on strategies to bring them back again and again.Yes, you can support Google’s growing fleet of jets by using the AdWords system but email marketing is a much more cost-effective strategy to bring them back.

Myth #6: Customers will decide when they are ready to buy and NOTHING you can do will influence when this occurs

Customers need convincing.And yes, it could start with deciding that it is time to buy something in your category and then work its way all the way down to the finer details of the sale such as the colour of the seat leather. Short, direct messages of persuasion sent via email can add some strength to your argument that moves them closer to you and not your competitors.

So there you have it.If you don’t already have email marketing as part of your online marketing mix then please write down the answer to these questions.

1. Why?(By the way, lack of funds and time are not valid reasons )
2. How long would it take you to write 750 words on an area of your business that you think your clients would be interested in learning about?
3. What proportion of your customers do you have a valid email address for?If it’s above 10% then you are on the way forward.

Send your answers to chris@permission.co.nz and let’s get this thing started.