This time, the topic is Exponential Website Traffic Strategies.

Episode 2: Exponential Website Traffic Strategies

Press “Play” to listen.

Download a FULL TRANSCRIPT of the video in PDF format here

More profit-boosting resources:

• If you’re a Small Business Owner: Discover how to multiply your website profits with the Marketing Results Gold Internet Consulting Program.
• If you’re looking for an Enterprise-level solution for improving web profits: Read more about the Marketing Results Platinum Internet Consulting Program.

It’s almost always the case that businesses will spend much more to acquire a new customer than to get an existing customer to purchase again OR to stop an existing customer from defecting to the competition. (My theory is that customer acquisition marketing tends to be a lot “sexier” than followup communications, so acquisition gets more of the attention).

In much the same way, I often see people mothballing their BEST marketing methods in favour of risky, untested lead gen tactics that produce anything from half to 5% of the results of other strategies.

Of course, this isn’t done with any masochistic intent to deliver sub-par results.  It’s just that we humans seem to have a “love of the new” and think we have to be constantly re-inventing our marketing approaches in order to gain traction.

If you take your eye off your metrics, even for a minute, this is a very easy trap to fall into.

Case in point: I recently consulted with a retail chain with a fairly substantial web channel.   We analysed where all new customers and sales had come from over the last few years and found the metrics somewhat lacking in detail.    Most of the “active” lead generation activity that had been conducted appeared to be rather expensive, requiring at least a year of loyal custom by the new customer to pay the initial marketing expense.

One method that had been tried, but didn’t have any hard metrics associated with it, was enclosing printed referral request cards with orders.  I asked the client about this and the general consensus was that the referral cards were producing a few leads but that the cost was probably not worth it — that’s why they were discontinued for a year or so.

I persuaded the client to try another batch of referral card marketing, and the results were staggering — it was about 500% more cost-effective than ANY of their other active lead generation methods currently in operation.

I had to agree — this simple referral card marketing techniques was one of the most “un-exciting” marketing strategies they were deploying (not a “2.0″ to be seen anywhere!).   But it was also the most profitable.

Having got a handle on firm metrics associated with lead generation, the client is now sending referral request cards to customers no less than 6 times per year.    We will continue to monitor the results on an ongoing basis, but the campaigns will continue until there is something better to replace them.

What about you? Have you become bored with the lead generation methods that worked well for you in the past?  Try resurrecting some old favourites — you may be pleasantly surprised by the results!

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?

I’ve been flat out team building and working on some exciting internet consulting and lead generation projects for clients as well as a few “side projects” including information marketing, and as a result content production and blog posts have suffered.

I’ve recently started creating more content on generating, nurturing and converting more leads online — here’s a brief introductory video on Exponential Internet Lead Generation strategies for product and service businesses. This is the first in a series of three - the other 2 will be posted here shortly.

Here’s a brief summary of the topics I cover in the video:

1. Your Selling Philosophy
2. Your Lead Definition
3. Your Lead Generation Map
4. Testing and Tracking
5. Optimization Strategies, and
6. Integrating Lead Generation and Sales Functions

Episode 1: Introduction To Exponential Lead Generation On The Internet

Press “Play” to listen.

Download a FULL TRANSCRIPT of the video in PDF format here

More profit-boosting resources:

• If you’re a Small Business Owner: Discover how to multiply your website profits with the Marketing Results Gold Internet Consulting Program.
• If you’re looking for an Enterprise-level solution for improving web profits: Read more about the Marketing Results Platinum Internet Consulting Program.

Finding the technology is simple (two popular providers are Zoomerang.com and SurveyMonkey.com) but it’s how you USE surveys to create value and enhance your marketing that really counts.

One Marketing Results client created a comprehensive Business Audit, structured as a survey, that they went on to sell for $297 a pop. Another colleague conducted a survey of IT professionals that was picked up by influential media in the space as “latest research”.

Here are 15 ideas on ways to use surveys in your online business to create more value:

15 Ways To Leverage Surveys In Your Online Business

1. Conduct quarterly “client satisfaction” surveys.

2. Add relevant polls / surveys to your website or newsletters to learn more about your market and start a 2-way conversation.

3. Set up a survey for clients to pass on THEIR clients i.e. leverage.

4. Use surveys to pre-qualify or pre-frame potential clients.

5. Include a survey in an autoresponder series to automatically capture testimonials.

6. Survey customers and clients on where THEY think you add value (their perspective might be different from yours).

7. Use internal surveys to capture ideas to improve productivity or team satisfaction.

8. Include feedback surveys with product literature - use them as testimonial capture device AND to improve future versions of the product.

9. Ask clients or prospects to tell you their biggest frustration or problem relating to your area of expertise. Use this info to develop a white paper based on the most common problems.

10. Use surveys to capture ideas and strategies from a large number of people to collate into a “master” document.

11. Create a short 1 minute feedback survey and include the link in your email signature.

12. Send an email to past clients and ask for testimonials and feedback. Structure the survey so respondents provide information on the topics you want.

13. Structure a product / service as a survey and give it away as a “value add” or better yet, sell it.

14. Use surveys in your front-end marketing to identify customer “hot buttons” so you can craft your sales message in the right way for maximum impact.

15. Survey your market and use the results as the basis of a press release and/or pre-eminence building tool.

Leave a comment to submit your additional survey ideas.

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.

Rather, it covers the “organisational” side of lead generation from a 30,000-foot perspective.

This includes defining what a lead looks like (and getting sales and marketing to agree), instituting closed-loop tracking (tracking a lead from the first contact through to the sale) and ensuring that lead generation and sales capacity are closely aligned.

I have always focused on the marketing side of lead generation - getting qualified leads in the door in the first place - but I’ve realised that the approaches outlined in Lead Generation for the Complex Sale are just as important for producing outcomes and another source of leverage in your sales and marketing process.

If your sales and marketing process involves multiple contacts, I highly recommend that you read and apply the information in Lead Generation For The Complex Sale.

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

Tracking Multiple Traffic Sources With the Google Adwords Cross Channel Tracker

In part 1, we looked at how to use conversion tracking to optimise your paid search results. But how do you track the results of other traffic sources such as banner ads, ezine ads, Yellow Pages Online, TrueLocal ads, text links, directory listings and so on?

There are many tools available that can do this, but one I like because of it’s ease of use and free availability is the Google Adwords cross-channel tracker. According to Google, cross-channel tracking…

…gives you quick and easy access to the performance data for all your online advertising channels - including pay-per-click ads on search, email, banners, and more - all from one convenient location. From your AdWords account interface, you’ll learn which campaigns are producing the highest conversion rates so you can make more informed decisions about where and how to spend your advertising dollars. As an added bonus, this tool is available free of charge.

Reliable third party tool

Many media sources are unable or unwilling to give you reports on how many clickthroughs your ads received.

Others are only too happy to provide you with a summary report of how many clickthroughs you received, but this has two limitations:

1. You know how many clicks you received, but have no idea how many converted.
2. I have found the reliability of reporting from some 3rd party services to be, shall we say, questionable (and it always seems to overestimate click volume).

The cross-channel tracking tool solves this problem. It’s easy to use - just follow the prompts within the Google Adwords interface.

Cross-channel tracker vs Google Analytics

The other day a client asked me about the relative merits of cross-channel tracking and Google Analytics.  My take is this: Cross-channel tracking gives a simple, all-in-one-place overview of important traffic sources.  Google Analytics duplicates (and expands on) much of the functionality of CTC, but is slightly more complicated to use and work with.

Conclusion

While it’s probably not necessary to track the clickthroughs and conversions of every traffic source (if that were possible), cross-channel tracking is a useful tool for understanding the ROI on key expenditures.

If you’re spending money on online traffic and lead generation, then why not keep an eye on how your investment is paying off?

Will Swayne Cross-channel tracker

It contains a number of great ideas so with Mike’s permission I’ve reprinted it below. Or if you prefer, here it is in PDF version.

How To Leverage an Article Found In A Magazine That Relates To Your Industry

1. Email a scanned copy of the article to your database preceded by a short commentary (if not already understood by your readers) that you wanted to keep them informed of changes in the industry. Induces reciprocity; builds pre-eminence.

2. Keep a copy of the article on file (preferably in scanned form that is readily accessible or searchable in a database) so that when you meet someone and the conversation you have with them lends itself to you being able to offer to email, fax or post the article to them, you can do so quickly. This will build your pre-eminence with that person.

3. Refer to the article in future emailings to clients generally and quote portions of it that are interesting without needing to send the whole article.

4. Contact the author and build rapport with them with the view to leveraging the contacts this author has with prominent people in your industry that he or she has interviewed and will interview in the future.

5. Contact the author and build rapport with the author with the view to becoming a quoted person/expert on future topics related to your industry in order to build pre-eminence.

6. Use the ideas in this article to realise that if you are trying to create a host-beneficiary partnership arrangement with a particular person or company, you could find a swag of articles that relate to your prospective H-B partner’s industry to increase your own knowledge of that industry AND send to the intended contact, from time to time, articles of interest to your prospective H-B partner - build rapport and pre-eminence via your increased understanding of their industry.

7. Develop a “stadium pitch” opening line using the statistics provided in the article, eg, “There are only two mortgage insurers in the market today and one of them has substantially increased its claim denials over the last 3 months. How will this affect your attempts to get a loan? Does your broker know who this mortgage insurer is? If they don’t know this information, what impact will that have on their ability to help you get the best loan deal when buying your new home?”

8. Use statistics from the article in your own copywriting material.

9. Presentation Aid: Make a copy of the article, highlight portions of the article and then place it in a plastic sleeve and bring it out when dealing with clients. Refer to highlighted statistics to show prospects three things: (1) you keep up with industry developments; (2) show how your knowledge of this information means you will provide them with a better service or the product you are promoting will help them avoid the problems raised in the article; and (3) use it to overcome an objection or pre-frame a prospect to remove a potential objection.

10. If the article is found in a magazine that is read by your prospective clients, you could consider entering into a H-B partnership arrangement with the magazine to access their database of readers (ie, your prospects).

11. If your prospects read the publication in which the article was published, you could prepare an article or two or a series for publication in the magazine in order to build pre-eminence with your target market.

12. Once you write articles that are published in the magazine, keep copies to send to your list of suspects, prospects and clients - massive pre-eminence builder.

13. Consider advertising in the publication you found the article in IF its readers are also your target clients.

14. Use an article or the information you find in an article (particularly statistics) as a reason to contact your database of clients (preferably via email) to conduct your own survey to cross-check the findings in the articles with a promise that you will share your findings with them. This creates pre-eminence again and gives you an excuse to contact your client base at least twice with some interesting and useful information.

15. Create mindmaps which summarise the main points of an article you read and send your database a copy of the full article and your summary so they can choose to read one or the other depending on their desire for a low or high level of detail.

Thanks for the great ideas, Mike!

By the way, Advocate Mortgage Corporation is a Sydney-based mortgage broker with a difference - their property finance consultants are also experienced solicitors, enabling them to offer “your loans and legals in one place”. Advocate Mortgage are specialists in first home loans and mortgage refinance.