It's Digital Marketing » Business Performance

2nd Chance: easy way to boost your conversion rate

Gary — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 21:01:12 +0000

This article is one of a series entitled Digital Marketer+. The series is aimed at marketers working in the digital marketplace and also at others looking for new ways to promote or build their business online.

The intention of the series is to take a second look at what you’re currently doing and approach it from a different perspective. So far we have covered knowing your objectives, fixing your customer experience and conducting a Mobile review. Plenty more to come, including tips, best practice and case studies.

photo credit: Katie Tegtmeyer

I’m going to let you in on a secret. In your very near future, you’re going to see a stupid, crazy spike in your conversion rate. Bold statement, but true.

If you spend any money on advertising your website, you need to be doing this. Trust me.

The great thing is, your competitors are highly unlikely to be doing it, so now’s your chance – your advertising performance will improve and you’ll look like a genius.

And the craziest thing about it; it’s in a place you’d never think to look.

Spill the beans

I’m sensing I should get to the point. So what is this magic elixir that will cure all marketing ills?

Display advertising. That’s right, you heard me. Display advertising. Okay, so no ordinary display advertising, but dynamic retargeting.

You’ll be aware of standard display ads and you’ve probably heard of behavioural targeting, whereby ads are targeted to users who match broad segments (i.e. visit a travel site on an ad network and be shown holiday ads in the future). However, dynamic retargeting takes it a whole bunch of steps further, by creating personalised displays ads containing content relevant to the individual, based on their previous activity on your site.

As the ad content is tailored based on the user’s intent and deeplinked to the relevant product page, your click through and conversion rates are significantly improved.

You talking to me?

Let’s take a look at an example. Bob is looking for a holiday in Spain. He’s spent the week sneakily checking out travel sites – including yours – during his tea break at work. Now it’s the weekend and he’s in a well known coffee chain taking advantage of the free WiFi with his Latte, whilst checking the football match reports.

As he scans the page a display ad catches his eye. Now normally he wouldn’t give it a second glance but this one is different. Yes, it shows Spanish holidays, but more importantly it contains the exact holiday resort he was looking at earlier in the week and several other very similar resorts he may be interested in. So what happens? He clicks the ad, books the holiday and the rest, as they say, is paella.

There are 2 reasons why the ad was so successful in converting Bob. 1) The content was personalised to his preferences and 2) it was presented to him whilst he was still in a buying frame of mind.

Bob may very well have forgotten about your site in all his research, but your use of dynamic retargeting has enabled you to leapfrog your competitors in his mind, and secure his custom.

So how does it work?

There are a number of companies that provide behavioural based display products, including Google and Criteo, but the product I’ve been describing in this post is from Struq, which from my perspective has the more sophisticated technology of the three. Hand in hand with that sophistication goes a greater conversion rate, due to its ability to deliver personalised content.

In terms of how it works, this graphic explains it well (click to enlarge).

How retargeting works - image courtesy of Struq.com

In a nutshell, the user comes to your website, where Struq collects data on their activity. If the user leaves without converting (e.g. purchase), Struq will display a personalised ad to them if they turn up on another site in the ad network(s). The ad will contain at least one item they have previously looked at on your site, plus other similar content / products they may be interested in. Clicking on the ad will take the user straight through to the deeplinked product detail.

There is a live demo running if you want to see it in action.

Awesome but does it work?

From personal experience, yes, it certainly does. I’ve seen click through rates 1000% better than standard Run of Network display advertising, very impressive conversion rates, and cost per acquisition lower than pay-per-click advertising.

Clothing site, Republic, have reported getting ‘conversion rates for retargeted customers that are two or three times higher than our normal average’.

However, It’s worth pointing out, that dynamic behavioural targeting is not a replacement for your other advertising activity. Consider retargeting as your second chance to convert. Your PPC, SEO, email marketing, TV advertising and social media activity are all still needed to drive the traffic into your site in the first place, but the retargeting presents a great opportunity to complete the sales cycle and reduce wastage.

5 Key takeaways

Dynamic retargeting is a cost effective way of bringing back unconverted visitors
Delivers relevant content to users whilst they’re in a buying frame of mind
Enables you to keep your brand ahead of your competitors in the mind of the potential customer
Must be used as part of your marketing mix, not on its own
Dynamic retargeting dramatically outperforms other types of display advertising (and other digital media)

You don’t need a lot of money to get started with dynamic retargeting, so it’s a great, low-risk opportunity to make a significant difference to your marketing performance. If you want help with your digital activity, I can recommend I Spy Marketing (who I use), or you can contact Struq directly.

So I’m guessing you weren’t anticipating an article raving about the incredible performance of display advertising, right? Well, I was sceptical when I first heard about it too. It took about a week for that all to change when I saw the first performance numbers come in.

I’m pretty confident, that you’ll think the same too. Thank me later, just don’t tell everyone about our secret. It’s too good to share.

Other posts in this series:

Know your Objective

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Experience

Your 60 Second Mobile Review

_____

Over the course of this series, we’ll be looking at a wide range of things for you to try in your marketing, including behavioural re-targeting, smarter customer service, social media monitoring, conversion rate optimisation, mobile marketing, and creating linkbait to boost search performance. Please feel free to add your comments and join the conversation.

Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

No related posts.

Your 60 Second Mobile Review

Gary — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 21:27:19 +0000

The intention of the series is to take a second look at what you’re currently doing and approach it from a different perspective. So far we have covered knowing your objectives and fixing your customer experience. Plenty more to come, including tips, best practice and case studies.

Let me know if you’ve any ideas or experiences you’d like to share.

___________

For many companies getting the website right is enough of a task, so something like Mobile just has to wait. Especially as it’s not yet mainstream, right?

Or is it? If you read the press / blogs, it’s very clear that this year is finally the long-promised ‘Year of Mobile’. Smart phone uptake is substantial, Facebook has 150 million active mobile users and more and more companies are making mobile revenue.

Great for them, but your market isn’t quite there yet, is it?

Or is it? I think it’s an easy assumption to make, especially for less ‘glamorous’ industries. But I’ll ask you this, how do you know?

On the clock

This series is about being a better digital marketer and making a personal impact. Well, to do so you have start looking at things differently. This is an easy one, it’ll take just 60 seconds for you to work out if you need to pull your finger out and go mobile now or whether to add it to your list of ‘check back in 6 months’ projects.

It’s simple. You could survey your customers now and ask them if they would use a mobile solution and run the risk of getting a bunch of “sure, probably would, I guess” answers. Or, you could just look to see what they are already doing with mobile.

The answer lies in your analytics.

A mobile case study: Jobsite.co.uk

Before I show you where to look, consider this example. Over at Jobsite.co.uk we have just announced some fantastic stats for our mobile usage. Over the past 19 months, traffic from mobile devices to the website has increased by over 600%. We’re not playing around with impressive sounding percentages on tiny actuals here either, the mobile traffic represents over 5% of our total site traffic – more than double what Yahoo and Bing search engines provide to us combined.

The takeaway from this example however, is that we only discovered the initial mobile traffic growth because inquisitive minds asked the question (“I wonder how much mobile traffic we get?” ). Stunned by the numbers, the data was fed into strategy and product development discussions and a year later Jobsite is now leading the way in mobile recruiting.

We could have waited until the mobile recruiting market was more established, but our customers were telling us otherwise – they wanted a mobile job hunting solution now – so we moved quickly.

What are your customers telling you? And are you listening?

Checking the numbers

So, this is what you need to do (using Google Analytics for this example):

Login to Google Analytics
Select your date range (top right). Recommend at least a year to see a growth pattern.
Open the ‘Visitors’ menu on the left of the page
Click the ‘Mobile’ link to open up the mobile options
Select ‘Mobile Device’
Marvel at the information

So what do your customers say? Is there a need for a mobile friendly version of your offering? If yes, you need to ask – and answer – some important questions.

Does your business lend itself well to mobile?
Can you improve the customer brand experience via mobile?
Should I do something in Mobile right now?
Which first – iPhone, Android, Mobile or other?

You can answer these questions soon, but right now you need to spend 60 seconds in your analytics package. You’ll learn something about your business and customers and have an opportunity to influence the future direction of your company’s strategy.

Other posts in this series:

Know your Objective

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Experience

_____

Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

photo credit: Jesse757

MOBILE: iPhone or Android – which is more App for your business?

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Experience

Gary — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:52:40 +0000

photo credit: Mooganic

This article is part of a series entitled Digital Marketer+. The series is aimed at marketers already working in the digital marketplace, but also to others looking for new ways to promote or build their business online.

The intention of the series is to take a second look at what you’re currently doing and approach it from a different perspective. It will include tips, best practice, case studies and a fair amount of opinion. Not just my own, I’d love your input too. If you have any great ideas or experience, please do share it, as I’m keen to become a better digital marketer too.

_______

The customer service department is unlikely to be the first port of call for a marketer looking to improve their performance. However, if you want to make a significant difference to your website’s performance, its worth walking over and saying hello.

Whilst your outbound marketing – TV, display advertising, video, etc. – might be more exciting at first glance, it’s the information collected by Customer Services that is arguably more valuable to your business.

Customer Service is the coal face of your business – the closest your online business comes to your paying customer. Any questions, enquiries, returns or complaints go through these guys. It’s not the easiest job, or the most glamorous and the pay rarely reflects the hassle that comes with it. It’s often neglected or ignored by other parts of the company.

So why should you be interested?

Because there’s gold in there, that’s why. Every record from contact with a customer holds information to make your product better. It’s not always obvious; sometimes you have to look beyond the words the customer uses to identify the real problem. Reviewing the contact records will reveal technical problems with your site (broken pages / processes), inaccurate / outdated information (i.e. pricing), poor site copy / instructions, clumsy user interfaces and new product ideas.

Still wondering what this has got to do with you?

Even if you work in any organisation in which the Marketing department is only responsible for promotional activity, you have to make this your business or at the very least bring it to the attention of someone that can do something about it.

If you want to become a more complete marketer you need to think about the whole business; how you can make it better and how you can improve the brand experience of your customers. That makes customer service your business, even if it doesn’t state it on your job description.

8 Steps to fix it

Speak to your Customer Service reps. What are the common problems / complaints they face? What would they change about the website? (why don’t they get asked this question more often when they face the problems every day??)
Review the customer records yourself. Get a feel for what is wrong and what could be improved. Remember to read between the lines
Draw up a list of all the issues you uncover and identify their potential solutions
Establish the frequency of common complaints / issues. This will aid you in determining priorities later. Add this info to the list
Flag each item as either ‘Technical’ or ‘Non-technical’. Technical items will need IT development work. Non-technical issues could include things like re-writing the on-page instructions, changing button labels, writing help guides or re-examining the positioning and promises in your advertising.
If your list is long you’ll need to prioritise all the items to determine which need to be addressed first. It’s important to be realistic when you request these changes. A very long list may be delayed until sufficient resources are available. Breaking it into smaller chunks will improve the chances of the important things getting done.
If you have a very busy IT department you’ll need to make a case for your changes to be made. The best way – and hardest to argue against – is to put financial figures against them. What are you losing each month due to these problems? What is the revenue opportunity by fixing them? Consider the best metric to use. Do you know the actual financial loss? Or could you use an average basket value? Or lifetime value?
For the non-technical changes, the responsibility probably lies with you / the Marketing department. Think about the best way to fix the issue – will a screencast help? A FAQ? Or do you need to feed the info into the discussions about your next advertising creative?

Whatever solutions you implement make sure you continue to work with the Customer Service department and monitor the impact. Have your changes improved the situation? If not, continue to press on – what else can you do?

Things are rarely perfect in life, so never assume your work is done. Keep monitoring, keeping testing, keep improving.

One benefit you’ll find from fixing some or all of the problems will be the new found friends you’ll make in the Customer Service department. They’ll appreciate you making their life a little easier, which may well come in handy a littler later.

So what’s the outcome of this endeavour? Are you a better marketer?

Without a doubt. You’ve just hit on all Big Three Goals of business. In fixing the problems you increased your customer satisfaction. This lead to an increase in revenue from your happy customers (not forgetting the friends they recommended you to). You also lowered your costs – you now convert and retain more of your visitors, so there is less wastage on your advertising and fewer hours are needed in supporting your product (or at the very least you can put it to better use).

Well done. Not bad work from going to say hello.

Other posts in this series:

Know your Objectives

Your 60 Second Mobile Review

_____

Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

Know your Objective

Gary — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 19:59:09 +0000

photo credit: WorldIslandInfo.com

This article is the first in a series entitled Digital Marketer+. The series is aimed at marketers already working in the digital marketplace, but also to others looking for new ways to promote or build their business online.

_____

Know your objective

There are probably far more exciting things to talk about to kick-off this series, but it’s important we start here, with Objectives. We need to know where we’re going, before we can work out how to get there.

Ask yourself this – do you know why you’re crafting that email newsletter today? Or why your display adverts are using that creative? Why that particular wording in the press release? Or why you’re monitoring mentions of your brand in Twitter?

If you don’t know, why are you doing it?

How much of what you’re doing today, is because you did it yesterday, and last week and because the person who trained you said you should do it that way?

The key to being a better digital marketer – or any marketer or business person for that matter – is to know what you’re trying to achieve and why. Only then can you unleash the creative beast inside you and deliver the outstanding results you want.

Tip: As toddlers we drive our parents mad, asking them “Why? Why? Why?” to everything. It’s a habit we grow out of as we get older. Try it again today, question others, and question yourself. But don’t just blunder on regardless.

There are three areas I’d recommend you consider:

Business Objectives

What are the objectives of your business? This is crucial to know. Each employee, each department, will have their own objectives, but they should all serve the objectives of the business.

Jim Sterne, in his book ‘Social Media Metrics’, says there are only three true business goals:

Raise Revenue
Lower Costs
Increase Customer Satisfaction

According to Sterne, “If the work you do does not result in an improvement to one or more of these Big Three Goals, then you are wasting your time, wasting money, spinning your wheels, alienating your customers and not helping the organization”.

If you’re not sure of your company’s goals go ask your boss. If he/she is not sure either, maybe you need to go find a new boss too.

Project Objectives

Moving to a more tactical level, let’s look at what you’re trying to achieve from your own work, using a few examples:

Customer email newsletter: what is its purpose? It’s notoriously difficult to achieve high open rates on B2B newsletters, mainly because most are full of promotions to get the customer to spend more money. But is that your objective? Should it be? Or should it be about providing additional value to the customer and developing a longer term, more profitable relationship?

Campaign landing page: You have all your campaign ducks in a row…display ads, pay-per-click (PPC), email, facebook ads, video pre-rolls…all pushing potential customers through to your landing page(s). What do you want them to do when they get there? Purchase? Register? Vote? Follow? If you have a clear objective in mind, you’ll know what goes on the landing page – and what doesn’t. Just getting traffic to come in and dumping them on your homepage, hoping they’ll do something positive is not really a viable – or successful – strategy.

Social media monitoring: you’re ahead of the curve; you’re monitoring mentions of your brand in social media. Great. Why are you doing it? Watching out for negative comments is the most likely answer; protecting your company’s reputation. There are so many opportunities here, its important to be clear on what you want to get out of it. Yes, there is reputation management, but consider customer service, ideas for new product development, relationship building, sentiment on advertising campaigns and yes, in the right situation, a revenue opportunity.

Whatever the project, start by asking what do I want to achieve, swiftly followed by how will I measure it. Key to your objectives will be knowing when you’ve achieved them.

Personal Objectives

It’s not all about the company (unless you happen to own it). Think about your own objectives too. What do you want to get out of your work? Is this the best company and the right position for you to achieve what you want to do?

I consider myself fortunate that I work for company that has a culture of innovation and experimentation. It enables me to be creative, to test new products and ideas and recognises there is no harm in failing a few times along the path to success.

This works nicely for me. I deliver results for the company, while building my skills and experiencee, which in turn makes me more valuable to my current employer (and those in the future).

Have a think and write down what it is you want to be doing now in your role and again the same for 5 years time. Then think about how you’re going to get there. Will working for your current employer enable you to do that? If so, what do you need to learn and what experience do you want to gain?

And if its not the right company, well, even in this climate there are other jobs available that may suit you better. Follow this series and hopefully you’ll pick up some ideas that will boost your current performance and give you something to help you stand out from the crowd at your next interview.

So there you go, the beginning of your journey to becoming a better digital marketer. It all starts with the objectives. You have some thinking to do now. You’re at Point A and need to work out what Point B looks like. Then comes the fun part of making the journey.

Other posts in this series:

8 Steps to Fixing your Customer Service

Your 60 Second Mobile Review

_____

Or if you’d like to contribute to the series by writing a guest blog post, please get in touch to share your idea for consideration.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Customer Service via Twitter

Gary — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 22:30:10 +0000

"HE RECKONS IF YOU CAN'T SEE THE TWEET IT DOESN'T EXIST"

What’s worse – not providing customer service or providing poor customer service?

That’s a question I’ve pondered recently as a consumer, whilst experimenting with utilising Twitter as a means of contacting brands when I’ve needed assistance. It’s been an interesting and varied experience, something we as marketers should consider for our own businesses.

You don’t need me to tell you times are changing. With the prolific adoption of social media, companies that are not monitoring brand mentions are missing a huge opportunity to serve their customers or to build / repair their reputations.

The conversations about your brand are happening in the social space whether you like it or not. Making like an ostrich and sticking your head in the sand is not going to make it go away.

But why would you want it to? The benefits of monitoring the social sphere are plentiful. For instance:

answering customer questions to aid use or encourage sale
addressing / resolving customer complaints to improve satisfaction
directing non-customers to useful services or info (both your own and others), as a longer term, value-based relationship builder
crowdsourcing new product development ideas or improvements to existing products

The list could go on, including being a revenue generating source, if appropriate to your business (though I’d avoid the direct, hard sell approach).

It’s early days as a service medium however, and consequently customers are encountering a mixed bag of experiences. Here are 3 of my own:

The Good – LOVEFiLM

I love film and love the approach of this company. They clearly ‘get’ how to use this medium for relationship and brand building. Not only do they share film news, run competitions and converse in an engaging, cheerful manner, they provide bloody good customer service.

For example, having watched ‘Numb3rs – Season 1’ (sue me, it’s a guilty pleasure), I wanted to move on to Season 2 but it wasn’t listed on the site (though Season 3 was). A quick exchange of tweets with @LOVEFiLM and they’d dispatched an enquiry to their catalogue team with a promise to come back to me with an update. Crucially they did, less than 24 hours later I received a follow up tweet to say the DVD had been sourced and would be available shortly.

One happy customer.

The Bad – Halifax bank

The polar opposite of LOVEFiLM is the Halifax bank. They don’t even have a Twitter account. So when they changed their bank charges at the end of 2009 – a move that appeared to leave a large proportion of their current account customers worse off – the howls of protest online fell on deaf ears.

Now, could they have lessened the negativity by participating in the conversation? Maybe, maybe not. But wouldn’t that have been preferable to adding to the frustration by ignoring their customers?

(I switched to a much friendlier bank, by the way)

The Ugly – BT

BT has a customer service account – @BTCare – though many would agree with my assertion that the name is a fabulous oxymoron.

They clearly try to provide a good service, having invested time, money and resource into their solution. For this they must be commended. However, they may want to review its application.

When I tweeted about the trouble I was having with my internet connection, they were quick to respond with a tweet within a couple of hours – even though it was the weekend. Their apology and offer of help was appreciated. Ignoring my reply was not.

When I did finally get a response a couple of days later (following more tweets), it was evident I was being dealt with by someone who had no record of our earlier conversation (or didn’t look it up). Then when I had to switch the conversation over to the telephone I had to start my conversation all over again.

I found the whole process incredibly frustrating. When you can’t get something to work and someone comes to your rescue offering a solution, only to disappear, then reappear with some kind of amnesia and no solution, your hopes are cruelly dashed.

It doesn’t help that they seem to have a lot of problems with their service. A thankless task for their customer service people, if I ever did see one.

Make my day

So, back to my original question – which is worse? Not providing any service like the Halifax or having a poor experience such as the one with BT?

In a vacuum I’d probably say no service, but in reality I was more annoyed with BT. Of course, I’d love it if all companies I dealt with were like LOVEFiLM. Sadly, they’re not, but its something we as marketers should aspire to with our own businesses.

What are your best experiences with businesses using Twitter? What about the worse? Please add your comments below, I’d love to know your thoughts.

If you aren’t monitoring your brand in social media and would be interested in finding out more, I’d recommend speaking with the good folks over at 6Consulting, the UK partner of Radian6.

Birthday Greetings from Server 12

Gary — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:29:37 +0000

photo credit: Kiwi Morado

Saturday was my birthday. Thank you, you’re very kind.

Unfortunately, your best wishes are a little slow compared to those from the UK Business Forum and NFL UK Forums.

Both businesses sent me birthday wishes in the small hours before I’d even woken up to start on my 37^th year.

How very kind of them, yes?

Giving gifts

These two messages led me along a train of thought about the act of gift giving. For me, the best birthday presents and wishes are those that have significance to me personally. I appreciate the kindness and thoughtfulness of the giver. It’s even better if they get you something you really like or always wanted.

But can a company do this? Can you automate a personal message? Note I said personal, not personalised – inserting the user’s name into the email is not personal.

Scale is a challenge for most businesses; you cannot know all your customers, so you cannot craft a thoughtful, personal message for each one.

So the tendency is to create a standardised message that goes out in an email on the user’s birthday, based on the data they left when using a site.

The problem with that can be seen with the messages from NFL UK Forum and UK Business Forum below. An impersonal, bland message, made worse by the fact this is obviously an out-of-the box feature of the forum software provider. Different ‘sender’, same text, sent at the exact same time – 00:01 on the date of my birthday. The sincerity was distinctly absent.

It must be possible to do better.

Paying for your own present

Let’s think about the real world giving of birthday wishes. Often it involves a card and sometimes a gift. It is done – in most cases – without expecting anything in return.

If you buy a present for someone, you don’t ask them to pay for part of it either, so why do some businesses say ‘Happy Birthday! Here’s 10% off your next purchase’?

Here is something novel. Why don’t you give them something for free? Something useful, with no strings attached.

The effect of this generosity will stand out and raise their perception of your brand instantly. You’ll have taken a step towards attaining brand loyalty and advocacy from the recipient.

Obviously, you can’t do this for every customer, but do you need to? If you segment your data, you’ll already know who your best and most valuable customers are – why not reward them for their continued business?

Don’t stop there; identify those with potential to join your best customer list, those on the cusp. Your gift won’t necessarily be the clincher of long term use but it will certainly make an impression.

If you’re concerned about the cost of gifts, think of creative ways to provide value. If a user pays for monthly access to your service, perhaps you could give them a bonus week (or month if you’re feeling generous). If they’re receiving a volume of service (such as file storage capacity on a photo site for example), then give them additional storage.

Whatever the gift, keep it relevant to the needs of the user. A branded keyring or calculator is of no use to anyone (unless you lose your keys regularly or struggle with your maths).

This advice is applies equally to the B2B and B2C markets. However, applying this approach to the consumer market is the really exciting application of gift giving. In B2B, gifts are given to decision makers in potential customer business every day, but think of the impact this could have if you applied the same approach to consumers. It would be very powerful and a way to make your business stand out from the crowd.

Do you know of any business that already take this approach with giving gifts to consumers? Does it work? Please feel free to share your opinions or stories below.

No related posts.

Innovate for your brand’s survival

Gary — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:54:41 +0000

Let’s be honest, you can milk your Cash Cow for quite some time. However, like oil, one day it’s going to run out. Then what?

Well, by that point it’s too late. One, or several, of those pesky start-ups who launch good looking websites with shiny, multi-featured products, will have figured out how to monetise their passion and will be waving at you in slow-mo as they pass you by.

You’ll be left to wonder what happened and at some point you’ll look at your new market leaders and will lament “we could have done that”.

Ideas needed – apply within

So, you’ve seen the future and you don’t like it. What are you going to do?

Firstly, look to your customers. And particularly to those who aren’t your customers. Don’t start building anything until you understand what they need. Not necessarily what they say they want – or what you want – but what they need. There is a big difference. Answering a need secures a customer for the long term, answering a want will have you following fads and wasting resources.

Secondly, embrace the creativity in your workplace. Great ideas are not limited to the executive suite. The Support Assistant on the phone speaking to the irate customer may have the greatest insight of all in your business. A cliché it may be, but employees are the business’ greatest asset. Tap into it. Treat your employees like citizens, let them join the cause.

This is a cultural thing. Much like your brand in the social sphere, is your business happy to relinquish ‘control’ to the ‘masses’?

Consider it. It can produce exciting results.

A case in point

At the 2010 Onrec Awards for the online recruitment industry, Jobsite.co.uk won in two categories – one of which was for its candidate services. Amongst the products included under that banner, were Jobs-by-Twitter, BeMyInterviewer and RecruitRank.

Jobs-by-Twitter is an API integration between Jobsite and the micro-blogging platform. It was created as an experiment to understand how we can reduce the searching workload of jobseekers by delivering relevant jobs to a platform they were already using daily. It was also a direct response against the torrent of untargeted job tweets gushing into the Twitter sphere

BeMyInterviewer is an interactive interview practice service that utilises video to enable jobseekers to rehearse with top industry professionals, including the likes of Dragons’ Den mogul Duncan Bannatyne.

RecruitRank is a jobseeker feedback system, enabling applicants to rate recruitment agencies for the customer service they received. It came in response to research that revealed over half of jobseekers find the process of job hunting frustrating and demoralising.

All three products came to life through the creativity of Jobsite employees – be it initial concept or enabling the idea to flourish into a fully featured – and useful – product for our customers.

It was possible because the culture promotes such creativity – to step beyond the paint-by-numbers approach that has littered the industry with commodity products.

Be a market leader

Seth Godin, in his book ‘Linchpin’, defines a Hierarchy of Value as follows:

Lift, Hunt, Grow, Produce, Sell, Connect, Create

For your company to be (or continue to be) successful it will need to deliver at multiple levels across the hierarchy. However, to lead your market into the future you need to excel at creation, at innovation.

Take a look at what you offer your customers. How is that different to what your competitors provide? Now find out what your customers actually want and throw some grey matter at finding solutions. It’s crowd-sourcing on a company level. Get everyone in a room – physically or figuratively – and throw away the job titles. Leave them at the door, they’re not needed here.

Now start creating.

photo credit: Locomotive Stillstand

No related posts.

7 Top Tips for increasing revenue via the web

Gary — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:09:59 +0000

Kevin Costner lied to us.

‘Build it and they will come’

It may have worked for disgraced baseball playing ghosts in the Iowa corn fields, but that doesn’t mean it will work for your website.

The internet has long promised to be a Mecca for entrepreneurial types to make their fortune, but it’s never been a simple matter of laying out your website (or baseball diamond) and waiting for the customers (or ghosts) to appear.

It takes a lot of work and some smart, joined up thinking.

So wasting no time, how can you increase the revenue generated from your website?

Tip 1: There is no online and offline

Stop thinking of these as two separate entities. They are just channels. If you run them independently, as silos, then you’ll miss many opportunities to increase your revenue. You may need to hire people with different skill sets, but they should to be working together to achieve your business and revenue goals.

For example, if you run an event such as a music festival, are you acquiring customers’ contact details when they register for tickets, so you can send email alerts for future gigs?

Tip 2: Instil Confidence

Appearances are important. A poorly designed website will act as a deterrent not a facilitator to sales. You don’t necessarily need to hire an expensive design agency, just a skilful one that understands your brief and is able to apply learnings from their experience building transactional sites.

And security is crucial. You must be able to clearly demonstrate your site is secure or your potential customers will be gone, off to your competitors before you know it.

Tip 3: Show the product

Youtube just announced that 24 hours of video footage is uploaded to their site every minute. Why? Because people respond to imagery. We love to watch. A picture paints a thousand words is a saying for a reason.

Don’t just tell your customer about your product, show it to them. Use photos or video, whichever lends itself to your product. If you’re selling books, a cover photo will suffice (better still, show them inside the book), but it you’re marketing a cruise or a motor show, use video to convey the experience. The words are important, but the imagery can bring it to life.

Tip 4: Social proof

The wisdom of crowds, as social proof is known, is when individuals look to others’ behaviour when faced with making a decision. The principle follows that if I see all my peers buying an iPad then maybe it’s the right thing for me too.

Examples you can use on your site are customer testimonials, ratings & reviews, number of subscribers, recommendations, number of products sold, press clippings, etc.

Your site can be set up to collect these as part of a process or as a feature, but don’t forget to take advantage of your real world interactions with your customers. If you have sales people, give them a Flip video camera and get them to interview their clients.

Tip 5: Test, test and test some more

If you have a shop, you probably move your displays around to see what works best for getting customers to fill their baskets. The same applies online. Here it is called A/B testing and multi-variate testing.

I’m a big fan of testing. Making small changes to your web pages can return huge dividends in sales. A common problem with most websites is that once built, they are left alone. The developer or web designer’s preferred approach is deemed the right one – i.e. the best way to convert a visitor into a paying customer.

Conversion rate optimisation challenges that limiting approach and finds the true path to financial enlightenment…the one trod by the customer.

I recommend reading my post ‘How to increase landing page conversions by 100%’ for a detailed explanation and case study.

Tip 6: Reduce waste – retarget

To maximise your advertising you need to ensure more of your visitors convert to sales. Conversion testing will help that from a process perspective, but you need something else to bring back the browsing visitor who is researching before purchase.

A new form of display (banner) advertising is available based on behavioural targeting. It works by dropping a cookie on a visitor’s computer when they view a product (but don’t purchase) enabling you to present them with relevant display adverts on other sites they visit.

This is super targeted advertising. For instance, if you visited a job site, looked at a job but did not apply, the banner will show you the job you looked at, plus similar jobs. Every visitor will see different content in the banner, depending on the jobs they viewed. The reason why this type of advertising is so successful at driving conversions is because it serves relevant ads to the consumer whilst they’re ‘in-market’, in a buying frame of mind.

Tip 7: Capture email permissions

Finally, we come to email. If you don’t yet have a customer email database, get one. You can go through all of the above steps and successfully convert a visitor to a sale. However, if you implement a successful email marketing system and database, you can make multiple sales.

You have to get it right though, as breaking the rules can be costly to your business. You don’t want to go to all this effort just to get hauled in front of the Information Commissioner for spamming or having your emails blocked by the ISPs.

Read up on the legislation. Then read it again and make sure you’ve set up your system correctly. Remember it’s all about the permission. Don’t assume you can email individuals just because you have their address. Seek permission first.

Don’t stop with email addresses and permissions though. Try to collect more information on your customers – unobtrusively – so you can segment your audience.

For instance, what did they buy? When? Where do they live? Do they repeat purchase? What else did they look at? Etc.

Use this data for future mailings, offering products and services of relevance. This way you can increase the yield per customer, whilst minimising the number of unsubscribe requests.

So there you have it, 7 top tips to increase revenue via the web. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but a good place to start. What other tips would you like to share? Let us know using the comment box below.
photo credit: Sister72

No related posts.

How to increase landing page conversions by 100%

Gary — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:57:25 +0000

photo credit: belgianchocolate

An inordinate amount of time, effort and money goes into optimising paid search accounts. If you’re good at it, you can either save a lot of money, or get a lot more bang for your buck.

Anyone that has done paid search advertising will know that you can make some big improvements quite quickly just by optimising your accounts (I say ‘just‘, there can be a lot of work involved and unless you’re blessed with such talents it usually involves getting in a specialist or search agency to help).

However, there comes a point where the changes you make result in smaller and smaller gains. It’s still getting better but you’re not getting as much return on your efforts as you once did. This leads to a belief that the only way to achieve more conversions is to increase the budget.

Wrong. There is in fact, a massive opportunity staring you right in the face. The problem is you can’t see it because you’re probably looking in the wrong place.

Chasing your tail

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You need to bring in traffic to your site, traffic that converts, buys your product or uses your service. You set up paid search accounts, organise your campaigns, ad groups, keywords and tracking URLs. You choose a page on your site to send them to (or knock up a bespoke one for that purpose, because that’s better right?) and start feeding Google the cash.

You check the reports, you make some tweaks, you fist pump when the conversions improve, you pour in more cash, report, tweak, fist pump, cash, report, tweak…until you reach the point when you run out of ideas to make it work better.

Enter, landing page optimisation.

Where did it all go wrong?

I say enter landing page optimisation, but to be perfectly honest, you should really be doing this right at the beginning of your campaigns, not when you’ve run out of ideas.

So how did we end up here?

There are basically two common mistakes with approaches to landing pages (or any website pages, in fact).

1. The ‘Build it and Leave it‘ approach – usually found in companies under-resourced or over capacity with ideas. There is so much going on and not enough time to do it. So the first page up there is staying up and don’t even think of slowing down the next project in the pipeline, thank you very much.

Unfortunately, there is a very high probability that this page is not the best it could be at converting your endless stream of – paid for – traffic. Whilst your company is quickly moving on to the next project to make money or improve efficiency, you’re busy pouring part of your marketing budget down the drain.

2. The ‘I Know Best‘ approach – is found everywhere experienced, enthusiastic, opinionated people are striving to make their company successful (it’s also found in companies where people couldn’t give a hoot for that matter).

Regardless of intention, sometimes that experience, enthusiasm and opinion can get in the way of making the right decision.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist and author of Web Analytics 2.0, describes this quite nicely when he talks of HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). In a room full of potential contributors to a solution, the HiPPO’s way is invariably the way that it’s going to be. It’s not necessarily the wrong solution, but it isn’t always right. It’s just human nature – in times of tricky decisions we tend to look toward authority first.

The MVT Generation

The answer to both problems can be found in data. Yes, I know, big yawn, but trust me, when you use it in the way I’m about to describe you’re actually going to get excited about data.

What you need to do is employ Multivariate Testing (MVT).

If you’ve never come across the term before, then essentially, multivariate testing is a process by which multiple components of a page (or pages) on a website are tested simultaneously in a live environment to determine the variant with the highest probability of achieving your goal.

In other words, test a whole bunch of variations of the same page to find out which version is more likely to get your visitor to convert (i.e. purchase / sign up / download, etc.).

The great thing about multivariate testing is that it removes ego and opinion from the process. It relies entirely on data from real activity on your site. This is true customer led design. Who better to determine how your site should work than the people who actually use your site?

And for this small concession, this release on decision-making, you get better conversion rates. In other words, you get the greater return on investment you were looking for.

CASE STUDY: Jobsite.co.uk increase registration sign-ups by 103%

In the not too distant past, Jobsite were sending PPC traffic through to a site registration form, with a goal of increasing volume and lowering cost per registration. It wasn’t a particular pretty page – a clunky two column design made it unreasonably long, despite the minimal number of questions.

Start Simple – A/B testing

We started our experiment with a simple A/B test (one version versus another). As ever, you need a default design (A) to compare against the new version (B). In this instance, A was the single page form and B was the same form split over two pages.

Variant A - Single Page

Variant B - Two Pages

There is a web convention that says you should minimise your user journey to increase the likelihood of the task being completed. It’s not unreasonable to view this as a recommendation to minimise the number of pages.

Well, in this case, it didn’t work out that way. Sometimes conventions just have to fall by the wayside.

Our visitors preferred to complete the process over two pages, as we experienced 30% uplift on Variant B over Variant A.

Whilst unconfirmed, it could be surmised that breaking the form into two chunks made it a less daunting task for the visitor.

Step it up a gear – multivariate testing

Next, we moved to testing the elements on the two pages – titles, text, buttons, colours and positioning.

Multivariate testing page elements

How this works technically will vary depending on the MVT product you use. Essentially, you get to slice the page up into element boxes and the software will create variations of your original page using different combinations of these elements. This could result in 5 pages, 50 pages or 500 pages, depending on the number of elements involved.

The software will then serve these variations to visitors in a live environment. You do need a reasonable amount of traffic to the page to run a test; otherwise the sample size will not be sufficiently robust to make an accurate assessment.

As visitors interact with the test pages, the software will identify page combinations that are converting higher than the default page. More traffic will then be diverted to those pages to test the indication. The test will continue until a point where a page (or pages) has established a clear higher probability of outperforming the default page.

Depending on traffic levels, this could take a few days or several weeks.

At the end of the Jobsite test, the winning combination of elements produced a page that increased registrations by an incredible 103% over the original page.

Looks like hard work – do I need it?

If a significant proportion of your marketing budget each month is spent on PPC to buy in new business, then you need to be doing multivariate testing.

What do you think the reaction would be in your company if you reported a 100% increase in conversions?

Let’s make up an example and do some sums:

PPC spend of £10,000 – gets 15,000 visits – converting at 5% = 750 new customers

Average spend per customer = £20

Revenue = £15,000

50% higher conversion following A/B test (1125 new customers)
Revenue = £22,500

100% higher conversion following multivariate testing (1500 new customers)
Revenue = £30,000

Now I’m not saying multivariate testing is guaranteed to get you a 100% increase in your own key metrics, but it is possible. The important thing to remember is that every site, every page and every audience is different. What works for one site does not necessarily work for another. You have to test it for yourself.

A few landing page tips

To get you started, here are some pointers on good practice for designing landing pages. Remember, your site is different to my site, so experiment.

Streamline to one objective on the page
Minimise on-page distractions and means to navigate elsewhere
If you’ve pushed visitors to the page (e.g. via PPC), ensure the page meets their expectations. If you’ve promised a free whitepaper, do not dump them on your homepage and expect them to go find it
Minimise the work of the visitor – keep it simple and collect only the data you need
Experiment with differing headlines, buttons, images and calls to action
Consider adding examples of social proof – e.g. testimonials or statistics – to demonstrate why the users should be following the wisdom of the crowd and signing up to your service

Multivariate Testing Tools

I have experience of using Maxymiser and Google Web Optimizer and both have done an excellent job. Maxymiser is the more advanced offering of the two and they can provide an account team to minimise your workload (they’ll help set up the test, design the page elements and provide you with reporting), but obviously this comes at a price.

Conversely, Google Web Optimiser is a free service, and hence you don’t get all the bells and whistles, but it is a very good piece of software and is perfectly capable of doing the tests most people need.

Other multivariate testing providers include:

Web Trends
SiteSpect
Omniture

Next up

As you can see, multivariate testing can be a game changer for you and your company. On a personal level, it’s a great opportunity for you to make a substantial difference in your own performance. Big improvements at no extra cost tend to get you noticed.

I for one will be doing a lot of testing in 2010. I have a very exciting test underway, as I look to understand how above the line TV advertising impacts online conversion metrics. I’ll share the results at a later date.

I’d be very interested in hearing your own multivariate testing stories. Either leave comments here or share them with me on Twitter.

Impact of TV imagery on website conversion rates

Top 10 It’s Digital Marketing Posts of 2009

Gary — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 17:53:52 +0000

photo credit: coquetboy

And that was 2009.

Hopefully yours was a good one, it certainly was for me. On reflection, much happened in 2009 – both from a personal and web perspective. So much, in fact, it’s hard to imagine it all happened in just 365 days.

I felt like I learnt a lot this year. Much of which, I can say was due to Twitter. On the 5th of January 2009 I wrote my first blog post, entitled ‘What’s the point of Twitter?‘. I’d heard about it, wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it, but thought it was worth a go for a month. I never looked back and now check it at least a trillion times a day via my laptop or iPhone.

Twitter gave me access to the minds of brilliant people. Particular favourites being Chris Brogan, Brent Payne, Brian Clark, Lisa Barone, Scott Stratten and Steve Rubel. I’ve learnt a tremendous amount from them all (many thanks!), impacting my day job and the handful of personal endeavours that have spawned over the year. It’s been an incredibly enriching experience.

It makes me very excited about the prospect of 2010 – what on earth will we learn and acheive this year?

As we close the book on 2009, I’d like to thank everyone that has read my blog this year (or at the very least, come looking for images to re-use). It’s been a very enjoyable experience – one that I need to dedicate much more time to this year.

For one final look at 2009, I’d like to share with you the Top 10 It’s Digital Marketing posts this year. Enjoy!

1. Twitter Statistics: UK traffic increased 22-fold in a year (24th June)

2. Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market? (7th May)

3. 10 Insider Tips to win a Search Agency pitch (2nd March)

4. Ryanair: Cheap flights and cheap service (24th Feb)

5. Building an App for Twitter (2nd July)

6. 10 Signs you’re addicted to Twitter (25th March)

7. Social Proof: The wisdom of crowds (15th Sept)

8. To find a job think like a SEO (13th Feb)

9. Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll: Google Maps Mashup Style (23rd Nov)

10. Social Media Innovation (9th Oct)

Have a happy and prosperous 2010 everybody!

Gary