Transcript: Top 7 Action Strategies For Accelerating Your Online Sales

Transcription

1 Transcript: Top 7 Action Strategies For Accelerating Your Online Sales This is Will Swayne from Marketing Results. I am excited to be with you here for this Top 7 Action Strategies for Accelerating Your Online Sales teleclass. This teleclass introduces some of the strategies, tactics, tools, and mind sets that you can use to expand the effectiveness and profitability of your website or online marketing channel. Most business websites contain tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of untapped potential just waiting to be actualized and yet many business executives or marketing professionals feel that they sometimes lack the specialised skills, the human resources or the strategies to convert that potential into actual results. Before I begin, I ll tell you a little bit about Marketing Results so you know who we are and where we re coming from. As Australia s leading Internet lead generation experts, Marketing Results uses sophisticated web analytics to precisely understand how and why visitors are engaging with your website, while leveraging proven traffic and conversion strategies to cut marketing waste, expand your reach and effectiveness and boost online revenue by 31 to 812%. Our Client Attraction methodology combines analytics with exponential marketing strategies to produce proven sales results. We work with a range of entrepreneurial and corporate clients. I ll share a few examples and case studies with you, before moving straight on to the action strategies, in which you ll learn new techniques for doing this in your organisation. As I mentioned, we work with clients in a variety of industries in the areas of Internet lead generation and website sales optimisation. We worked with a health services company who was able to boost their lead generation results by 257% in The Marketing Results Client Attraction methodology combines web analytics with exponential marketing strategies to produce increased sales results. Page 1 of 15

2 only six months; at the same time increasing the quality and conversion rate of those leads. We worked with one of Sydney s largest catering companies and they were able to grow their enquiries by 20% in four months while reducing their advertising costs by 34%. That s a net gain of 54%. We worked with one of Australia s largest specialist printers with a significant export business and by systematically deploying these strategies over a period of two years, they expanded from a healthy mid six figure business to a very healthy seven figure business, increasing sales revenues by more than 800% in the process. This web optimisation methodology works for all types of companies. One of our clients is Fuji Xerox and using some of these techniques, they were able to more than double their lead generation results within 90 days, while reducing online advertising costs by 60% - that s a net ROI increase of more than 600% in only 90 days. Here s one last example: We have worked with one of Australia s largest and most successful promoters of speakers and other well known personalities and in the course of a year, they were able to increase their website traffic volume by 1200%, grow their lead database by 400% and build three multi-million dollar business channels in the process. I tell you this to impress upon you that these strategies are exponential. They can produce significant gains in a relatively short period of time and work no matter whether you sell products or services or whether you operate locally, nationally or internationally. So now you have some background. Let s press on and look at the 7 Action Strategies for Accelerating Your Online Sales. One advantage of online marketing over offline marketing is the availability of precise data that describe exactly how prospects and clients are responding to your marketing message. In this program we re going to explore some strategies for transforming this data into improved sales results. Boosting the performance of your website is conceptually simple. It s all about expanding the capacity of your online sales funnel by generating more traffic, making more compelling offers and plugging the leaks that allow visitors to leave your site without opting in, enquiring or buying. Every online conversion process is different, but they all feature similar building blocks. These include traffic generation and traffic monetisation strategies. Traffic generation strategies include paid search, search engine optimisation, social networking (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, StumbleUpon etc.), banner ads and newsletter ads. Traffic monetisation techniques are everything you to do convert a visitor into a buyer. They include marketing, landing pages and opt-in capture, enquiry forms, check out Page 2 of 15

3 pages and so on (in addition to other methods such as contextual advertising which are not related to lead generation). By mapping and optimising each step in your online marketing funnel as part of one integrated strategy, your results can improve exponentially. Imagine that you approached Marketing Results to improve the profitability of your website. Here are the first 7 things we would look at. Optimising Your Paid Search Spend Strategy number one is to optimise your paid search spend. Paid search refers mainly to pay-per-click advertising programs such as Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. My main point about paid search marketing is that it s vitally important that you know where your expenditure is leading to desired actions - for example, an enquiry or a sale - and where your budget is underperforming. A feature called conversion tracking allows you to do this. It s common to find that only a few keywords are producing the real results in your campaigns and that many others are actually reducing your return on investment. Installing conversion tracking is not difficult and you may well be using it now, but the reason why I include it here is because I have seen websites with Google Adwords budgets in excess of $100,000 per year who are not using this tool. If you are using Google Adwords and you re not using conversion tracking, you should set that up ASAP 1. Once you ve done that, you can begin to optimise your results. The Google Adwords platform offers a range of testing and tracking tools that allow you to do this. Here are a few examples of the kind of things you can do. Firstly, you can determine which keywords are leading to desired actions and which keywords are wasting your money. It s very common to find that only a few keywords are producing the real results in your campaigns and that many others are actually reducing your return on investment. 1 For information on the mechanics of setting up Google Adwords Conversion Tracking, see: Page 3 of 15

4 Above: different keywords (left box) produce different cost per conversion figures (right box). You can use this information to optimise your ad spend for maximum effect. You can also scientifically test different ads against each other to see which ads are successful at getting people to your website and which ads are not as successful. It s also relatively easy to actually see which ads lead to conversions on your website and which ads are less successful. It s possible to have a situation where Ad A gets a lot of people to your website, but once they get there they don t buy or they don t enquire. Whereas Ad B might get fewer people to your website, but once they get there they tend to enquire and buy. The Adwords platform also allows you to test which landing pages are generating the best conversion results. What many online marketers still do in my experience is that they direct a lot of their traffic to one or only a few landing pages - typically the home page. Take a website selling home electronics products. To keep things simple, we ll assume that they are testing 10 ads for 10 different products. Each of those ads should lead to specific pages for each product. If people are looking for TVs, they should go to a TV page. If they are searching for stereo systems, they should go to a stereo system page. And you can get as specific as you like. Searches for specific products or model numbers should be directed to the most relevant landing page. In other words, you re looking to segment your paid search into tightly defined groups. That alone can yield massive results. You can even look at factors such as which hours of the day or days of the week tend to produce better results, justifying higher budgets, and which time slices tend to be associated with less productive clicks. Many websites exhibit some type of weekly or seasonal pattern with their enquiries or sales. You often see a lot of enquiries on Mondays because people have been thinking about purchase decisions over the weekend, and fewer enquiries toward the end of the week. Page 4 of 15

5 So to recap: testing keywords, ads and landing pages should be a core part of your paid search optimisation activities. Beyond that, you can look at other factors such as time of the day or week. I often find that even many successful websites have a lot of fat left in their Google Adwords campaigns. They re working pretty well, but they could be doing better. That s why I recommend starting with paid search optimisation - because there are immediate gains to be had in that area. Lately I am also hearing many businesspeople say something like, We get a lot of business with Google Adwords, it s always been a strong traffic generation tool, but recently our results are starting to tank. We ve got more competitors. Our click cost is soaring. We re not getting the traffic or the conversions we once did. Once you know what your underlying sales drivers are, you can start to focus your energies on specific keywords, landing pages and products to ramp up your ROI. That s why you need to be aware of these strategies and how to put them into action so you don t fall behind. Google Adwords is so much more competitive now than ever, and the competition is set to get even more intense over the coming years. Since we ve been talking about tracking, I ll briefly mention closed loop tracking, or tracking search traffic right through to the sale. Most companies that generate leads or enquiries on the internet track the keyword or ad that led to the enquiry. But which of those enquiries turned into sales? Many CRM systems allow you to import web analytics data into custom fields that are attached to specific prospects or customers. In order to close the loop, you have to import the search term and traffic source into your CRM system. Once you know what your underlying sales drivers are, you can start to focus your energies on specific keywords, landing pages and products to ramp up your ROI. Unless your competitors have the same level of sophistication, they will have no idea how you re able to spend so much on Google Adwords for certain keywords. Getting Your s Opened And Read Let s leave Google Adwords and tracking for the time being and talk about marketing. Specifically, how to get your s opened and read. Not every website or company has a newsletter or an marketing strategy, but campaigns often prove to be very Page 5 of 15

6 profitable, and having a process for keeping in touch with prospects and clients is one of the simplest ways to encourage deeper engagement with your website and increase your sales. Let s assume that you have an marketing campaign. How many of your clients are actually opening and reading your s? Many services can provide you with open rates and click through rates, but that information alone is not very useful from a resultsoptimisation point of view. One technique you can use to increase and improve your marketing results is split testing. Split testing is where you test multiple copy versions against each other. A simple example of this is testing different subject lines. Say you take the same list and you break it up into three randomly selected groups, then send three different s to each group with a different subject line. By looking at your stats, you can see which version had the highest open rate, and that gives you a clue as to how to optimise your sales process and get more people opening your s. Here s an actual example. We sent an to our house list, divided into three groups with three subject lines. The first subject line was: <Firstname>, November Client Attraction Newsletter out now. That had a click through rate of 20%. The second subject line was: <Firstname>, here s a new 7 Marketing Trends Report for you. The click through rate on that one was 28%. The third subject line was: <Firstname>, 7 marketing trends I think you should know about. The click through rate on that one was 46%. To recap, the click through rates were 20%, 28% and 46%. In other words, the best subject line was 125% better than the worst subject line. Making this type of split test an integral part of your online marketing process can allow you to ramp up your results by orders of magnitude on an ongoing basis. If you have a large list, you can even test one segment first and then mail the whole list with the best-performing version, or you can test a couple of versions and then r the entire list with the best performing subject line. By the way, a second mailing of the same to the same list can produce around 50% of the original response again. You can also add the best performing version to an existing follow up sequence with the knowledge that it performs better than other tested alternatives. Page 6 of 15

7 Keeping Prospects Engaged With Your Conversion Process That was strategy number two. Now, we ll talk about strategy number three: keeping prospects engaged with your conversion process. Every online conversion process is different, but all are made up of a series of conversion steps. Understanding how users are responding to each step of your process is the key to incrementally improving your results. While an sequence is by no means the only way to convert raw website visitors into high-quality sales leads, it is one effective strategy that we have deployed in dozens of industries. Here s a simple example of how to optimise your followup sequences in real time. This strategy was deployed with one of Australia s most successful independent real estate agents. One of their lead generation strategies involves giving away a very informative Home Selling Guide to people who may be thinking of selling their home, then following Sales leads cost money to generate, so it pays to keep them in your marketing funnel, even if they don t convert into new business immediately. up with a series of autoresponder s to provide additional information and encourage qualified prospects to enquire. At the same time, this process is designed to significantly reduce unqualified enquires. For example, people who are not thinking of selling their home in the next three to six months. A couple of months after successfully launching this process, we ran a report to determine how many people had unsubscribed from the contact list. What this report revealed was that was out of seven s in the sequence, the vast majority of people who were unsubscribing from the list were doing so after s 4, 5 and 6. So we went back to those s to see how we might improve the process. We looked at message 5 and determined that it really didn t add a lot of value. It just reiterated some earlier points from the e-book, so we removed it from the sequence altogether. Messages 4 and 6 did provide some valuable new information, but based on feedback from subscribers, we suspected that the delivery interval between the messages was too short, so that prospects were feeling bombarded by s. We increased the delivery intervals for these two messages from 4 to 7 days. In addition, we actually added some extra messages for delivery after 6 and 12 months. This strategy can be used to automatically follow up with prospects without requiring additional human intervention. Page 7 of 15

8 By introducing these tweaks, the client reduced their unsubscribe rate from around 15% to less than 3% (an 80% reduction). Sales leads cost money to generate, so it pays to keep them in your marketing funnel, even if they don t convert into new business immediately. Optimise Your Site Content To Convert More Visitors Let s move on to the next strategy. Strategy number four is to optimise your landing page content to convert more visitors. Most attempts to increase online sales that I ve seen tend to revolve around increasing traffic volume. While traffic is a very important factor, it ignores the other side of the coin, which is the percentage of website visitors that convert into qualified leads and sales. Certainly in the short term, I ve found that there s more normally more leverage in improving your conversion rate than in Search Engine Optimisation. One of the major techniques for improving conversion rate is to serve different content to different visitors, then trace the conversions back to the content served. There are several programs you can use to handle the technical side of this process, providing you know what page components to test and how to test them. Here s an example: we worked with Australia s leading speed dating service to increase their already impressive conversion rate. We began by setting up a multivariate testing process that included the following variables: 4 headlines 4 photos 3 versions of the main call to action 2 headlines for the registration form 2 different designs for the registration form 2 different privacy policy versions. If you multiply all those numbers out, that gives you 384 different page combinations. Using software, we rotated the different page combinations and tracked which elements were converting at the highest rate. Over six weeks, the conversion rate on the page improved by 20%, which translated into a 20% sales increase for the business. Page 8 of 15

9 Above: testing multiple page elements simultaneously produced fast revenue gains. Google recently released a multivariate testing tool called the Google Website Optimizer 2 and it s a huge advance on many previous testing platforms. It integrates quite well with Google Adwords and Google Analytics and it s free. Visualise How Visitors Are Interacting With Your Website So far we ve been talking about data-driven tools, so let s move on to another tool which allows you to visualise how visitors are engaging with your website. This is strategy number five and this tool is called Crazy Egg. It s located at CrazyEgg.com. There are some situations in which it s useful to understand how users are interacting with your website even though a conversion such as a sale or a form submission doesn t take place. There are ways do this using traditional analytics but the beauty of Crazy Egg is that it provides output as an easy-to-understand heat map. By installing Crazy Egg, which is as easy as creating a free account and putting a piece of code in your website, you can discover exactly where visitors are clicking on the page, which 2 Find more information on Google Website Optimizer at: Page 9 of 15

10 allows you to tweak your content to suit users better and encourage a higher proportion of visitors to click deeper into your website. The easy-to-understand visual output is also useful if you have to negotiate with other people in your organisation to decide what content goes on your website. You can clearly see usage patterns and make content decisions accordingly. Above: CrazyEgg output learn what s hot and what s not on your site. Use Web Analytics To Boost Site Stickiness Let s shift gears again and talk about how Google Analytics can add depth to the output you get from tools such as Crazy Egg. Google Analytics is a free web analytics platform that is powerful enough for even enterprise-level applications. Once Google Analytics is installed (it s as simple as adding some code to each of your web pages), the first thing you ll want to do is set up one or more conversion goals. A conversion goal is any action you want to track. For example: a newsletter sign up, an enquiry form submission or a shopping cart sale. By setting up Google Analytics, you can start to track how people are behaving on your website in a more sophisticated way than with the relatively narrow conversion tracking functionality provided within Google Adwords. I ll just talk about a couple of reports within Google Analytics that are really useful and can help you to optimise your website results without resorting to high-powered statistical techniques. Page 10 of 15

11 The first report is called the Depth of visit report. You ll find this under the menu item Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Depth of visit. This report will tell you what proportion of visitors are conducting one page visits on your website. If 70% of users are conducting one page visits, that probably means they are not being hooked by your website content. You ll find that reducing those one page visits is closely correlated with increasing sales. Above: screenshot from the Google Analytics Depth of visit report you should aim to decrease the percentage of 1-page visits over successive time periods. Here s what you could do. You could use a tool such as Crazy Egg to see where people are clicking on your home page, and when you see that certain content is unpopular, you replace or reposition it. Then you go back to Google Analytics and look at your Depth of visit report. If you find that one page visits have decreased from 70% to 55% you know you re heading in the right direction. One page visits are a gross measure of the stickiness of your website. Another useful metric is the bounce rate of specific pages. The bounce rate is simply the proportion of visitors who enter a page and then leave immediately off the same page. A 60% bounce rate on your home page means that 60% of visitors leave your site immediately instead of clicking to another page. Page 11 of 15

12 Another useful report within Google Analytics is the Top Landing Pages report, which you ll find under the Content menu. The Top Landing Pages report tells you which pages are the most popular entry points to your website. Alongside each landing page is the bounce rate for that page. Above: screenshot from the Google Analytics T op landing pages report. This report lets you optimise key landing pages separately. A fast way to improve engagement with your website is to identify your top five landing pages, look at the bounce rates and then use tools such as Crazy Egg and Google Analytics to systematically reduce those bounce rates. You re never going to reduce them to zero, but you can make changes that impact your bottom line significantly. As I mentioned, there are many other things that Google Analytics can do, but we have looked at three practical tips that add a lot of value without too much effort and without a difficult learning curve. They were: setting up defined goals, reducing one page visits and reducing bounce rates on your top landing pages. Apply Analytical Insight To Natural Search Campaigns The seventh and final action strategy is to use analytics to help you decide which key words to target for your natural search engine optimisation campaigns. Now, this audio program isn t about Search Engine Optimisation because I have a separate program about that, but this is an example of using analytics to make your Search Engine Optimisation campaigns easier and more successful. Most Search Engine Optimisation efforts focus on the question of how to generate more traffic, and that s definitely a good thing, but it s just as important to remember that you also want to target the right kind of traffic in other words, traffic that leads to more conversions and sales. The way to do this is to first look at your Google Adwords account to see which keywords are converting into enquiries or sales. You ll find that some keywords lead to a lot of conversions and some keywords don t lead to any conversions at all. The ones that lead to Page 12 of 15

13 conversions are the ones that you should target in your Search Engine Optimisation campaigns. Above: screenshot from the Traffic Sources > Search Engines report within Google Analytics. Note that (1) Non-paid traffic has been selected to isolate free search engine traffic only, (2) In this report we are segmenting via keyword, (3) the option exists to check the conversion rate of each keyword and (4) separate metrics are available for each keyword. This report allows you optimise SEO campaigns faster and more effectively. When you re designing a Search Engine Optimisation campaign, the smart thing to do is to start with the lowest hanging fruit, i.e. the highest converting keywords and focus on those first. Once your SEO campaigns gain momentum, you can start to target additional search terms to bring in more leads. In this audio program, we ve covered a relatively broad range of techniques and we ve introduced a few tools such as Google Adwords conversion tracking, Google Analytics and Crazy Egg. These are all useful tools, but the danger lies for many in falling into the trap of thinking that data equals knowledge. Converting Data Into Action and Results Converting this data into action strategies is why people come to Marketing Results to help them accelerate their online sales. If you re operating a website that generates in excess of $1 million worth of sales or sales leads annually, then I invite you to contact Marketing Results at Results.com.au to discuss how we could work together. If you prefer to do things yourself, we also have a do-it-yourself solution. I have a special offer for people listening to this audio program. You can access two of our best selling website optimisation resources for much less than the retail price. Let me tell you about these resources. Page 13 of 15

14 The first one is the Advanced Conversion Strategies Audio Program. This program details 55 proven strategies for boosting the conversion results of your website. You ll learn which fonts to use, which layouts, which types of graphics, which copywriting approaches and how to optimise your landing pages for maximum conversion. Using the ideas contained in the Advanced Conversion Strategies Audio Program, you can make five or six changes to a landing page and immediately start generating better results, because the principles have been pre-tested for you. The second product in the set is my Search Engine Optimisation Strategies Audio program. This 75 minute program and full transcript details everything you need to know to get your site to the top of Google. It s basically a summary of over five years of research and results for both Marketing Results and our clients. It gives you strategies to target the right keywords, construct your website properly and also generate links to your website in order to secure top search engine results. So those are the two components in the set. And you can purchase them at for $197 which is a $200 saving on the regular price. The only difference is that everything will be delivered digitally instead of having a physical product shipped to your address. Those products all come with a 60 day money back guarantee. So you can listen to the materials, you can test out the strategies and if you re not convinced that they re working for you, you can simply contact us and we ll arrange a full refund for you.. I want to thank you for listening and I encourage you to start getting some of these tracking tools and strategies in place. Even if you don t use them right now, it s great to have the data on hand for when you do. To go up to the next level there s the information products that I just explained at or if you d like to work with Marketing Results to implement these strategies for you, we can be contacted via the website. Page 14 of 15

15 Popular Learning Resources From Marketing Results Advanced Website Conversion Strategies Audio Program: Discover the tested principles of web page strategy, layout and design that motivate more website visitors to opt-in, enquire or buy. Search Engine Strategies Audio Program: Save tens of hours in research time and months of trial-and-error frustration with this simple, proven system for achieving top search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. About the Author Will Swayne Exponential Internet Strategist With a background in statistics and direct marketing, Will Swayne founded Marketing Results in 2003 with the vision of combining the successful concepts of direct marketing with Internet technologies to create more efficient marketing processes. His core expertise is in establishing sophisticated web based lead generation programs for companies who want to achieve a greater marketing ROI from their online activities. He can be contacted via Will Swayne was recently featured in Secrets Of Internet Entrepreneurs Exposed, available in all good bookshops and online (with free shipping). Page 15 of 15