“Infomercials” exploded after 1984, when US government regulators lifted the 18-minute-per-hour cap on commercial TV content.

At first, TV networks didn’t know how to price these new 30 or 60-minute timeslots. Previously, they had simply closed stations down at night until the next morning. But the networks were happy because every dollar in new advertising was “found money”.

Advertisers liked it too. They quickly worked out how to sell via direct-response TV, and the advertising cost was next to nothing. Those in the know were predicting a new age of easy money and runaway business expansion.

Then, almost overnight, everything changed…

The TV stations started to realise they were undercharging. New advertisers arrived with their cheque books open. The price of media rose, fast.

Mediocre products and mediocre marketing folded and fewer advertisers starting making more of the wealth.

The Internet started out the same way – especially when Pay Per Click advertising started and clicks were 5 cents.

It was easy to make money, even with a terrible website and lame copy. “Early adopters” thought they had it made. But sure enough, over the last 5 or 6 years, we’ve seen the “Infomercial Effect” take over…

New competitors have arrived…

Click prices have risen by 800 to 1500 percent in many markets…

A few years ago 1 or 2 companies in each market were doing SEO… now there might be a dozen or more…

When I founded MR in 2003, I really thought the Internet was the “secret sauce” for making marketing more profitable.

I was wrong. That’s because…

ALL emerging media started out cheap.

Just like infomercials, the days of cheap traffic are over. To dominate your market online, you need to return to fundamental direct marketing principles:

1. Make sure there’s a market for your product or service
2. Craft a compelling USP that differentiates you from your competition in a meaningful way
3. Track everything so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t
4. Use proven direct response marketing principles to attract and keep customers
5. Treat your web strategy like the important business unit it is
6. Deliver what you promise

The good news is, most people in business today either don’t understand this, or they don’t have the team or infrastructure to make it happen.

That’s why I invite you to plug into our proven team and infrastructure for putting your online marketing and lead generation on autopilot – so you can generate more leads and sales with less marketing cost.

Here’s where to apply.

This is the final instalment of a five-part series on Sales Funnel Optimisation. [See the introduction here].

Phase 4: Total Integration

After you’ve evolved from internal orientation to objective measurement through to user involvement, you’re ready to enter the phase that can potentially unlock the most rewards: total integration.

This is where the first three phases feed into each other in a never-ending improvement process:

• developing and prioritising strategies internally
• measuring your results objectively
• capuring insights from users to acceleratete the process

These aren’t “steps” so much as never-ending improvement loop.

So the ideal website development and optimisation process goes something like this:

1. Conduct research of your market, competitors and opportunities.
2. Develop your site based on your “best guess” (plus smarts and experience) as to what is most likely to work
3. Measure everything so you can track what’s working and what’s not
4. Try different approaches and if they work, keep them.  If they don’t, revert back to the control.
5. Glean insights from users to add new ideas to the mix.  Selectively test, measure and optimise.
6. Rinse and repeat!

With most optimisation processes, it is normal to reach a stage of diminishing returns, once the most obvious improvements have been made.

But in the case of online sales funnel optimisation, the field is developing so quickly that there are always new opportunities to test new tools and strategies.

Even if your online sales process is relatively “mature”, it’s still possible to generate ongoing improvements of 10 or 20 percent per month using this process.

About Marketing Results:

As Australia’s leading internet lead generation experts, Marketing Results specialises in helping fast-growth companies generate more enquiries and sales online while eliminating marketing waste.  Find out more about our internet consulting services here.

This is the second instalment of a four-part series on Sales Funnel Optimisation.  [See the introduction and Part 1].

Phase 2: Objective measurement

Yesterday we looked at some of the advantages and disadvantages of relying on internal knowledge and resources to develop your online strategy. Today we’ll look at the next phase – objective measurement.

Objective measurement tools tell you WHAT users are doing on your site and whether or not tweaks or changes are working.

I’ve written extensively elsewhere on these “quantitative” strategies, so I won’t expand further here, except to provide some examples of typical objective measurement tools and what you can use them for:

• Google Analytics – broad-based analytics package, great for showing a range of key visitor (‘How many visitors did we get last month?”) and conversion (“What percentage of visitors from search engines are downloading our White Paper?”) metrics.
• CrazyEgg – shows you WHERE on your webpage visitors clicked and presents the information as an easy-to-understand “heat map”
• Google Website Optimiser – multivariate testing tool. Use GWO to test different page elements (e.g. headlines, copy, offers or designs) and establish which elements convert best.

According to a survey we conducted last year of 324 Australian small and medium business owners, approximately 4 in 5 Australian companies have NOT yet evolved to this level. If you’re already using some or all of these quantitative tools, you should give yourself a pat on the back!

The great advantage of these tools is that they tell you what’s actually happening on your site — what’s working, and what’s not.

That allows you to test new things and if they work, keep them; if they don’t work, scrap them. This step-by-step process of is the basis of our online sales funnel optimisation service that we implement for SME clients.

The disadvantage of a purely quantitative approach is that you don’t have any insight into WHY users are doing what they’re doing. You have to make a “best guess”.  While you can certainly produce dramatic results from a quantitative approach, these types of tools are relatively inefficient for answering the following types of questions:

• What do prospects and clients really think of our website?
• Which specific elements of my website or sales copy are unwittingly turning new customers away?
• What new ideas should I test to improve user experience and conversion further?

To answer these types of “WHY?” questions, you need to evolve to Phase 3: User involvement.  That’s what we’ll look at tomorrow…

]]> http://www.marketing-results.com.au/blog/2009/05/16/sales-funnel-optimisation-phase-2-objective-measurement/feed/ 8 http://www.marketing-results.com.au/blog/2009/05/14/evolution-of-website-sales-funnel-optimisation/ http://www.marketing-results.com.au/blog/2009/05/14/evolution-of-website-sales-funnel-optimisation/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 23:00:47 +0000 Will Swayne http://www.marketing-results.com.au/blog/?p=409

The central question of online sales funnel optimisation is, “how do we get better results than we’re currently getting, as quickly as possible?”

While sitting in a banana-chair in Punta del Este, I got to thinking about this question and the distinct but interlocking approaches and toolsets you need to maximise your online lead generation results including traffic, conversions and sales.  Here’s what I came up with:

There is an “evolution” with four phases that can take you from getting poor/average results to excellent/outstanding results from your website.

Over the next 4 days, we’ll look at each phase in detail.  Here’s a quick summary of what’s to come:

• Phase 1: Internal orientation:
  Many companies and organisations design their websites in line with their own opinions and preferences. While this can be a great starting point for gathering content and ideas, in many cases this can be detrimental to your sales goals.  What’s more, it doesn’t tell you anything about your customers and how they use your website.
  
• Phase 2: Objective measurement:
  Objective measurement tools allow you to reduce subjectivity and manage by fact rather than by hunch. Measurement tools tell you who is visiting your website and what they do when they get there. 
  
• Phase 3: User involvement:
  Measurement tools are very good at telling you WHAT users are doing.  But getting website users to tell you WHY they’re doing it is one of the best ways to gather useful optimisation ideas.  Until recently, professional user testing was beyond the reach of most SMEs at $250+ per user. Now, thanks to a new web-based service, you can buy user tests from only $29 per person!  We’ll look at this in more detail in Phase 3.
  
• Phase 4: Total integration:
  While each of the previous three phases have a part to play, they become exponentially more effective when used in concert. Give this process the time it deserves and it will reward you with increased sales and reduced marketing costs.

Tomorrow we’ll take a closer look at Phase 1 – Internal orientation.

Response was so good to the Google Adwords Optimisation 1-page MindMap that I recently published that I decided to follow up with a Google Analytics 1-Page MindMap as well.

Get The Google Analytics 1-Page MindMap Here

Google Analytics is powerful and easy-to-use system for tracking how users are interacting with your website.  Yet according to a survey of 324 Australian business owners and marketing professionals that we conducted, 81% of website owners are not using ANY analytics program to track their website results (excluding free services such as Webalizer or AWStats that come standard with many webhosting accounts).

There’s no excuse, when Google Analytics is readily available and FREE.

While there are plenty of advanced things you can do with Google Analytics, you can reap big returns by simply inserting the tracking code into your site and setting up a goal or two.   Come back in a week or a month and you’ll begin to see patterns and useful insights you can use to improve your website and get more online sales.

If you’re already using Google Analytics, you may find the mindmap gives you a few more ideas, or if you’d like professional help turning your website data into profitable results, check out our Google Analytics consulting services.

When it comes to boosting website conversion, I’ve always been in the quantitative camp – “send enough users to different versions of your landing page and look at which version works best (i.e. delivers the best conversion results)”.

And that approach works great, but there’s still plenty of room for qualitative tools to help increase your conversion rate (in fact, the two play very well together.)

Conversion optimisation isn’t about software and tools

The tools you need to do A/B and multivariate testing are relatively mature, and they’re not just cheap, they’re free (try Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer for starters.)

But the tools aren’t the constraint.  The constraint is knowing what to test.  You not only need to devise the right test elements, but you also need to apply a proven process to increase conversion on an ongoing basis.

Coming up with “stuff to test” happens in a number of ways, including marketing expertise and experience of what has worked in the past.  Another valuable source of information is to rely on the voice of the customer to help you answer the 4 critical site experience questions…

The 4 critical site experience questions

1. How satisfied are my website visitors?
2. What are my visitors at my website to do (their purpose)?
3. Are they in fact completing what they set out to do?
4. If not, why not?  If yes, what did they like best about their experience?

Knowing the answers to these questions can provide you with new optimisation ideas and priorities, straight from the customer’s mouth. You gain insight into WHY visitors are doing what they’re doing (or not doing!) on your website.

How We Used the Free 4Q Survey Tool To Answer The 4 Critical Questions

Late last year we used the free 4Q exit survey tool (a collaboration between Avinash and iPerceptions) to ask our website visitors the 4 critical questions.

Here’s how the invitation process works (from the 4Q FAQ page):

4Q employs a two-stage invitation process. When visitors arrive at your site, they will be presented an invitation to participate in a survey after their session. If they accept, a second, minimized window, which contains the survey itself, will be launched and will wait in the background for the visitor to complete his or her session. 4Q surveys are designed to be collaborative brand building exercises, not annoying browsing interruptions.

The tool is, by design, extremely simple.  Here’s a sneak peak at the control panel:

4Q Exit Survey Control Panel Screenshot

Once the survey is set up, it’s a case of insert-the-code and away you go.

One of the nifty features is the ability to adjust the survey invitation rate — so only a percentage of users are invited to participate.  For our test, we used 20% of site traffic.

4Q Survey Results – What We Discovered

• Over the course of the test, 46 surveys were completed
• The overall “task completion” rate was 75% (i.e. 25% of people who completed the survey were unable to do what they came to do on the site.)
• A few responses were “junk”, but that doesn’t matter.  We are looking for patterns and bright ideas.
• What they liked: a number of users commented on our use of fact-based website optimisation methods and liberal availability of online marketing case studies.
• What they didn’t like: a few users were looking for information/articles and resented being “sold” to.

Bright ideas:

Here are some examples of useful gems from the survey which we have translated into action:

Bright idea #1:

I had trouble finding the right subscription, which a friend forwarded me initially. I suggest having a ‘subscribe’ link in your email subscription.

Bright idea #2:

Well, I loved the case studies; I really felt like I was connecting with a business that had succeeded as a direct result of their relationship with you and I wanted to be one of those too. But It wasn’t clear which of your services they had used to achieve those results when I went to look on your Services tab to find out more.

Sample output from 4Q

Final thoughts

Was using 4Q worth the effort?  You bet it was.  It is very quick to set up, provides a good user experience and yields measurable and usable qualitative information.

We have since installed 4Q surveys on several sites for our SME consulting clients and a couple of Enterprise clients as well.  In each case, the results have been well worth the effort. In one case, the results have heavily influenced the direction that a major site redesign is taking.   Better to know this information NOW, rather than after the redesign has taken place.

When you take your instructions directly from end users and marry them with scientific testing and tracking, you can also cut weeks or months of your conversion improvement cycles.  And you know what they say about time = money!

Why not give 4Q a go?  And if you need help with an orchestrated program of traffic and conversion improvement, get in touch and we can explore whether or not we’re a ‘fit’.

It’s funny how often marketers shun tried and tested, reliable strategies that bring in new customers much more effectively than other, more elaborate approaches.

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!

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.

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

7-Part Website Optimisation Series

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Users Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns

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

7-Part Website Optimisation Series

• Part 1: Advanced Conversion Tracking
• Part 2: Cross Channel Tracking
• Part 3: Getting Your Emails Opened And Read
• Part 4: Retaining Email List Subscribers
• Part 5: Boosting Website Conversion
• Part 6: Visualising Where Users Are Clicking
• Part 7: Keyword Conversion Of Natural Search Campaigns