How To Know When Subscribers Unsubscribe From Your Autoresponder Email Sequences

Lead generation on the internet, like all direct marketing, is a constant interplay between you (the marketer) and your prospects and clients. By understanding how suspects and prospects and clients are responding to your marketing message, you can tweak and optimise your approach accordingly - and the faster you tweak, the faster your results improve.

A client in the B2B consulting area recently asked me what a “typical” unsubscribe rate is for an email or autoresponder list. Here’s how I replied (paraphrased of course — I don’t actually speak in numbered points).

1. Unsubscribe rates can vary enormously. The main factor that influences your unsubscribe rate is the VALUE you offer your list on an ongoing basis. There is a delicate balance between education, value and selling - and the general rule is it’s much more effective to demonstrate value first before selling.

2. You’ll notice I didn’t actually answer the question above ;). If I had to give a figure, I would say that typical unsubscribe rates for “Special Report/White Paper + followup” sequences are in the 5% to 30% range.

3. Your unsubscribe rate is cumulative — it will tend to climb over time so in order to maintain a robust list size, you have to add new members faster than they unsubscribe.

4. Some messages in your autoresponder series will trigger many more unsubscribes than others. If you know which message(s) are the main culprits, you can edit accordingly. Take a look at the Followup Status - Unsubscribed report from within the Aweber autoresponder system (highly recommended, by the way):

As you can see, message 7 is the main offender — responsible for a massive proportion of unsubscribes!

A quick check of message 7 confirmed that the subject matter switched from good information and education to a “buy now” pitch, with some fairly clear-cut “disqualification” criteria. In other words, “buy now or go away”. Many subscribers obviously “took the hint” and hit the “unsubscribe” button.

Should you really care if list subscribers unsubscribe?

Making your unsubcribe rate as low as possible is NOT optimal in most circumstances. If your unsubscribe rate is very low, that MAY indicate your offers are too weak or you are not qualifying clients and/or setting appropriate buying criteria.

Autoresponder series are not only a powerful education tool but also a powerful QUALIFCICATION tool. Let me give you an example:

One of our clients is involved in property development project management in Brisbane. Their marketing had been quite effective at generating enquires, but of a very low quality. The result was that the sales team was forced to pick through the pile of low-quality leads to get to the hot prospects.

They solved this problem by publishing a targeted Special Report on their website, backed up by a series of autoresponders, educating prospective property investors about new property development options and how to put a deal together. One of the main purposes of the sequence is to DIS-qualify “non-buyers” BEFORE they call and start consuming salespeoples’ time like hyper-absorbant sponges.

So in this case, a certain number of unsubscribes from the list are a good thing.

Although not all unsubscribe patterns are as pronounced as the one in the image above, if you at least know how users are responding to each stage of your lead generation process, you can test new approaches to get improved results within only a few iterations.

Here’s to YOUR success!

Will Autoresponder Marketer

P.S. I highly endorse the Aweber Autoresponder system because of it’s very reasonable cost and raft of useful features, including the ability to SPLIT TEST multiple emails to the same list and track the results — that’s instant leverage.

Internal Tags: autoresponders, aweber, email analytics and unsubscribes

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Alternatives to “Submit” and (UGH!) “Reset” Buttons In Online Forms

Something that really raises my hackles is the use of the default buttons “Submit” and “Reset” on web forms.

For starters, the “Reset” button should be banned altogether. Why on earth would you want a perfectly good prospect or client to reset an entire form? Although this seems self-evident, I’m amazed the the number of companies (even big, reputable companies) that still feature “reset” buttons on their forms. (In one case, tweaking form design including removing the dreaded “Reset” button doubled conversion for that page.)

Then there’s the trusty “Submit” button. Remembering that EVERY element of a form can potentially influence response and that the button is the last thing the user sees before taking the desired action, wording is critical.

Some good alternatives to “Submit” are…

• “Free Instant Access” (very good for opt-ins and digital information)
• “Yes! Count Me In!” (good for event and seminar registrations
• “Yes! Reserve My Place”
• “Yes, Fast-track My Application”
• “Contact a Website Conversion Expert Now”

You get the idea.

You won’t always significantly boost response with a custom button name, but it is one of the many conversion levers you have at your disposal, so why not use it?

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Do You Nurture Leads, Or Do You Just ‘Follow Up’?

Brian Carroll recently made an interesting post on his B2B Lead Generation Blog that draws an important distinction between nurturing leads and merely “following up” with periodic, are-you-ready-to-buy-yet? calls.

My company’s focus is on improving the profitability of our clients’ online sales channels, but I’m becoming increasingly aware of the need to ensure that lead gen efforts are tightly integrated into the sales process as a whole.

Front-end lead generation activities tend to receive a lot of the marketing “glory” and can be a source of great leverage (especially online, where you can test, track and optimise everything in real time), but it’s just as important to pay attention to what happens after the lead has been generated.

“Lead Nurturing” vs “Following Up”

The more complex (read: expensive) your product or service, the more lead nurturing has to be done, especially in a B2B environment.

Nurturing needs to go beyond your CRM-system reminding you to make an are-you-ready-to-buy-yet call. While followup calls are better than nothing, complex sales processes demand more subtle solutions.

How To Nurture Leads More Effectively

1) Timely response

The best time to convert a lead into a sale is as soon as possible (assuming that a lead has been properly qualified). In more complex sales situations or when dealing with large organisations, sales cannot necessarily be closed in days, but quick response times (e.g 4-hours) to initial calls and subsequent followup enquiries create an excellent impression and are unlikely to be matched by competitors.

Timely response is even more powerful for cheaper and/or less complex products, where “convenience” forms a larger part of the purchase decision.

2) Regular, value-added communication

Keeping in touch with prospects on a regular basis with relevant, value-added information is critical. This may include newsletters, white papers, technical updates, audio interviews or video presentations, invitations to events and so on. The key is to stay on message with high-quality information that is offered as a service to prospects.

3) Strategic conversion process

Your methodology for converting prospects into clients is another key levearage point. The 80/20 principle tells us that certain steps in your conversion process will produce a far greater effect than others.

One client was who was selling six and seven figure software systems for an international software company in a past career made the very interesting discovery that ALL new clients had at some point attended a 2-hour evening workshop. Getting bums on seats in those seminars thus became the focus of lead generation activities, yielding exponential results.

What step or steps of your conversion process are responsible for most of your completed sales? What could you add to boost your conversion rates and speed up your sales cycle? What could you take out without any loss of results?

4) Multi-modal contact

If leads are of sufficient value, experiment with varying your contact methods. Go beyond a monthly newsletter to include phone calls, hard mailings, webinars and face-to-face events.

Although newsletter lists and autoresponders provide huge automation benefits, they do have limitations - not the least of which is the sheer volume of emails that are competing for your prospects’ inboxes and mental bandwidth.

There is just one word you need to keep in mind: VALUE. Most DM communications that I critique are professional-looking but ultimately self-serving. By focusing on providing value your communications will be enthusiastically received.

5) Appeal to different VAK Learning Styles

Different people process information in different ways according to their VAK (Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic) profiles.

Some people are “visual” - they learn best by seeing.

Others are “auditory” - they learn best by hearing.

Others are “kinaesthetic” - they learn best by doing.

Varying your communications to appeal to different learning styles is another way to increase the overall effectiveness of your lead generation activities.

Use diagrams, charts, powerpoints and video to appeal to Visual types.

Use audio programs, video (with audio) and live presentations to appeal to Auditory types.

Use interactive webinars, surveys and live workshops to appeal to Kinaesthetic types.

In the past, my own lead nurturing activities have been mainly print-based (specifically, wordy newsletters and articles). While these have produced good results, there’s no excuse in this day and age not to offer other delivery formats including audio and video, which is what I’m doing now.

Where to start

In a sense, “lead nurturing” covers a good proportion of the entire sales and marketing process. If you know you could be nurturing leads a lot more effectively, but are not quite sure where to start, here are some ideas:

1) Do you have a functional CRM system that integrates your sales and marketing efforts?

Without this, you can’t begin to nurture leads effectively. We use and work with Salesforce.com which offers a range of pay-per-seat solutions to suit all sizes of organisation. Many other industrial-strength CRM systems will do the same thing.

2) Have you instituted “closed loop tracking”?

That is, are you able to track your marketing progress right from the lead through to the sale and lifetime value of each client? Depending on the size of your organisation, this can either be relatively easy to set up or a major IT project, but the value that this provides is enormous - it allows you to concentrate on the lead generation activities that lead to the greatest number of sales conversions.

3) Do you have a organisation-wide lead definition that everyone in sales and marketing understands and uses?

Unqualified leads frustrate salespeople and waste your time, money and energy. Defining exactly what a qualified lead looks like is a great first step toward knowing exactly whom you should be nurturing.

4) Have you identified where your leverage points are?

If you know the key drivers for qualifying and closing sales (e.g. a seminar, an onsite demonstration, a product trial), you can focus your marketing efforts on driving these high-yield activities.

5) Do you have all your prospects’ contact details?

Do you know all your prospects’ email addresses and physical addresses? If you don’t, start a database-cleaning exercise (e.g. handled by well-trained telemarketers). By making some kind of offer at the same time as cleaning the database, you can turn this into a self-liquidating exercise or even turn a profit.

6) Do you have a documented lead nurturing system?

Even if your sales nurturing system is one 6-monthly followup call, that’s a starting point. Which one or two things could you do to add the most value to the customer experience?

Here are some suggestions:

• Send a white paper in print or electronic form.
• Send or stream a video of a relevant presentation by your CEO or other executive.
• Conduct an industry survey and report back on the results.
• Hold an event or seminar.

7) If you do have a documented followup system, are your salespeople following it? Compliance with a documented followup system is just as important of having the system in the first place. Many CRM systems have “compliance” functions built-in, but ultimately having a system that works effectively is the surest way to get salespeople to stick to the system.

Will Swayne from Marketing Results specialises in lead generation and online sales funnel optimisation. He can be contacted via this contact page.

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Website Optimisation Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

This is the 7th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results “hybrid” approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

How Well Are Your Natural Search Campaigns Converting?

Once the fat has been trimmed from your paid search campaigns and your website content is performing well, the next step is natural search engine optimisation.

Most Search Engine optimisation campaigns deal with the question of how to generate more traffic to a website and this is certainly a worthy goal. But it’s just as important to remember that you also want to target the right kind of traffic. That is, traffic that leads to more opt-ins, leads and sales.

Another useful application of Google Analytics is that it allows you to distinguish between traffic generated via natural search and paid search.

When deciding which keyword phrases to target in your SEO efforts, it’s useful to know which keywords are already converting via paid search. You can use conversion tracking within Google Adwords (and/or more advanced tools within Google Analytics) to establish this.

The next step is to establish how competitive your target keyword phrase is - are there dozens of well-ranked competitors in the space already, or are there no strong competitors?

Assessing the strength of your competition can be complicated, but one of the best resources for simplifying the process is the SEOmoz Page Strength Tool.

If the websites who already occupy the search engine rankings you’d like to occupy have high Page Strength scores, it may be wiser to start with less competitive key phrases and work your way up.

Above: output from a “CPC vs Organic Conversion” report within Google Analytics. [cpc] refers to paid search and [organic] refers to “free” search engine traffic. In this example, two conversion goals called G1 and G2 are being tracked. The system also allows drilling down to get a clearer picture of what’s going on.

N.B. This screen can be accessed via the Marketing Optimisation > Search Engine Marketing > CPC vs Organic Conversion menu within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a surprisingly powerful platform, especially considering that it’s free! The danger lies in falling into the trap of thinking that data = knowledge.

Conclusion

In a previous post I wrote about the democratization of web technologies. In years gone by, companies spent their online optimization budgets on either media or the “widgets”, software and systems to drive their website. Now, those technologies are becoming freely available - now smart organisations are shifting their focus to invest in clever people.

Converting analytical data into actionable strategies is why companies retain consultants such as Marketing Results.

This article concludes this 7-part series. What did you think? What did I leave out that you think should have been included? Leave a comment and I’ll respond to your feedback.

Will Swayne Website Optimizer

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Website Optimisation Part 6: Visualising Where Visitors Are Clicking

This is the 6th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results “hybrid” approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Visualising Where Website Visitors Are Clicking

In a previous post I commented on a service called Crazy Egg which allows you to visualise where users are clicking on your website. This post expands on the use of Crazy Egg as a data visualisation tool.

Above: Crazy Egg generates an easy to understand “heatmap” image of the Jay Abraham Asia Pacific website, revealing exactly where visitors are clicking.

Why do you want to visualise data anyway?

The first thing you may want to know is - with so many analytics packages and tracking tools on the market, who needs one more?

Here are 4 reasons:

1. When an easily identifiable “conversion” is difficult or irrelevant to track.

On many types of website that you may wish to optimise (e.g. a blog), an easily identify “conversion action” such as a sale or enquiry doesn’t occur. Crazy Egg provides meaningful information by showing you where users are clicking - what’s how and what’s not.

2. When you want a detailed picture of how users are engaging with your content.

Many services including Google Analytics offer some visualisation functions that reveal where users are clicking. Crazy Egg’s output is much more detailed than other services I’ve seen. Rather than just telling you that a graphic or link was clicked, it shows you exactly where it was clicked. It also reveals when unlinked content was clicked (e.g. a graphic with no link).

3. When you want to decrease bounce rates and optimise clickthrough rates.

One effective technique of website conversion optimisation is to use your homepage bounce rate as a proxy for the effectiveness of your homepage in general. (Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your site without clicking onto another page. An ineffective homepage will have a high bounce rate.) Crazy Egg allows you to quickly identify what’s working and what’s not on your homepage so you can optimise accordingly.

4. When you want to quickly understand and communicate what’s happening.

Let’s face it - a picture is worth a thousand words. Not everyone thinks in terms of figures and data. A visual summary of user behaviour is a useful way to communicate what’s working and what’s not without resorting to long reports or reams of data. (This can come in handy if you’re forced to engage in internal battles about what content to have on your company website).

Generous “free” plan plus paid plans

Crazy Egg offers a number of service plans, starting with the free plan, which is more than sufficient to test drive the service (or as a complete solution for relatively small or low-traffic websites). The fee-based plans are big enough for enterprise applications.

Conclusion

Many companies have no formal process for deciding how content is organised on their website (often it’s either by decree or by committee). Tools such as Crazy Egg give you the power to make informed decisions on what works so you can optimise accordingly.

Crazy Egg is also a simple, visual alternative to data-driven tools that many people find either too boring or too difficult to interpret.

If you could get just 10% more visitors to click deeper into your website than they are now, what would that mean to the profitability of your online channel? For many websites, this would translate into a significant increase in results.

Will Swayne Data visualiser

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Website Optimisation Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion

This is the 5th instalment of a 7 article series on how to accelerate your online sales using the Marketing Results “hybrid” approach to website optimisation.

See Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Optimising Your Site Content To Convert More Visitors

Most attempts to increase the effectiveness of websites that I have seen revolve mainly around increasing traffic volume. While increasing traffic volume is undoubtedly an important factor, it ignores the other side of the coin - the percentage of website visitors who convert into qualified enquirers and customers.

In the short term, there is normally more leverage in improving your site’s conversion rate than in Search Engine Optimisation.

One technique for improving conversion rate is to serve different content to different visitors, then trace conversions back to the content served. Multivariate testing platforms can be used to handle the technical side of this process, provided that you know what page components to test and how to test them. The following case study illustrates what some of these factors are.

Case Study:

Australia’s leading speed dating service Blink Dating asked us for assistance to increase their already impressive conversion rate. We set up a multivariate testing schema that included the following elements:

• 4 headlines
• 4 photos
• 3 versions of the main call to action
• 2 registration form headlines
• 2 registration form designs
• 2 privacy policies

In total, this makes 4 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 384 page combinations organized into an experimental design that allows relatively fast and accurate testing of the different versions using Taguchi multivariate analysis.

Above: 384 landing page combinations were tested, increasing the conversion rate of Blink Dating’s online client acquisition process by 20% within 6 weeks.

This process resulted in a conversion and sales improvement of 20% within 6 weeks by identifying which page elements were most effective at encouraging visitors to sign up.

Recommended Tool: Google’s recently released (and free!) Website Optimizer is a huge advance on many previous multivariate testing platforms. You can think of this tool as “Free Money”.

Conclusion

For some reason, most business owners and marketing managers I talk to get very excited about search engine marketing and search engine optimisation, but are far less enthusiastic about website conversion optimisation efforts. Why? Increasing website can be equally as effective and often faster than SEO efforts. Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

Will Swayne Website Conversion Geek

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The Theory Of Constraints, and its Application to Sales & Marketing

This just in from Wikipedia:

Theory of Constraints is based on the premise that the rate of revenue generation is limited by at least one constraining process (i.e. a bottleneck). Only by increasing throughput (production rate) at the bottleneck process can overall throughput be increased. The key steps in implementing an effective TOC approach are:

1. Identify the constraint (bottlenecks are identified by inventory pooling before the process)
2. Exploit the constraint (increase its utilisation and efficiency)
3. Subordinate all other processes to the constraint process (other processes serve the bottleneck)
4. Elevate the constraint (if required, permanently increase bottleneck capacity)
5. Rinse and repeat (after taking action, the bottleneck may have shifted or require further attention)

The Theory Of Constraints can also be applied to sales and marketing. Your typical lead generation and conversion scenario is a series of interdependent processes that goes something like this: Generate a lead… Convert the lead into a firm enquiry… Produce a proposal or Action Plan… Follow up… Close the sale… Fulfil the work or order… Rinse and repeat…

And it’s very common - almost to be expected - that one area will get out of sync with the others. It seems that you either have too many leads and not enough “closing” or fulfillment resources, or else a sales team who are desperate for qualified sales leads to turn into sales. (They spend the majority of their time on relatively UN-productive prospecting work and only a small proportion of time doing what they should be doing - closing sales). If the “fulfillment” part of your business is time-consuming (as it can be in the case of service providers), this can upset the apple cart further, as you switch priorities from lead generation, to sales, to fulfillment - either as an individual or as an organisation. There’s no easy answer, but the TOC certainly supplies some valuable ideas. On the TOCCA website, there’s a fantastic flash video that demonstrates the key principles of the TOC. It’s a little hard to find: click the link on the bottom left that says Click Here to View 3 Minute Flash Demonstration.

Eliyahu Goldratt’s work in another great source of information on this subject.

Will

P.S. What’s the secret to evening out your lead flow and bringing a measure of control back into your sales process? Automated lead generation systems of course! Ones that utilise “pull” marketing and the web to build a herd of interested prospects that you nurture over weeks, months and years to generate an even, steady stream of sales leads that YOU can turn on and off like a tap. Is it easy? Nope. But it is possible.

Internal Tags: eliyahu goldratt, the goal and theory of constraints

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