June 2012 IN THIS EDITION. Calendar of Events. Permission Website Marketing Update. June 21 Customer Teleconference Call

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1 Hi there, I m writing this edition high up on the 7th floor of the San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel looking out over the bright sunny bay area. On the other side of the hotel there s a steady procession of planes landing and taking off from the multiple runways you can see just across the water. As a wayward youth I was into plane spotting in a big way so for me this sight is a true delight (don t ask too many details re the plane spotting please, Claire will be mortified to know I have shared this fact with you all). Anyway, this is my second trip to San Francisco in the last four weeks. No, I m not in the process of selling out to some cashed up Facebook exec seems like the smart ones got in very early. Nope, this trip is all about some training for a business group I belong to. I ve come all this way to learn from the best in a very specific part of business marketing, about which I ll be sharing more later this year. Trip #1 was a conference on marketing put on by a US vendor we work with. They have grown like topsy and have a customer group packed with everyday US and international brands you would know. This month s customer call covered some of what I learnt over those three days. One of my articles in this newsletter talks to this area too. I always say that it s very rare for marketing NOT to be part of any successful online strategy. Please ensure you are using it somewhere in your activities in the month ahead. Next there is something about achieving more from the limited resources you have. I begin with how to efficiently move your offline traffic online with the help of QR codes. Yep, those black smudges of mini squares that can actually be used to benefit business owners like you. Then I cover a new product from Permission that will help you apply a good old-fashioned business blow torch to how effective you are at managing your inbound phone call traffic. How well do these calls convert into quotes or sales compared with your web pages? Are pieces of HTML doing a better job than real live humans? And finally, let s get down to the nitty gritty of creating the perfect recipe for baking the financially tastiest e-commerce cake. You may know the top and bottom numbers but what ingredients do you need and which recipe should you follow to create this success? This month I share the four ingredients you MUST have to make it work. Then there s some discussion on which one needs to be sorted first before you begin on the rest. June 2012 IN THIS EDITION QR Codes Building Bridges with those Black and White Smudges New Permission Product Applies the Blow Torch of Accountability to Inbound Calls Marketing after 12 Hours in a Confined Tube Baking your way to e- Commerce Achievement Calendar of Events June 21 Customer Teleconference Call That s all for me this month. Must be time for another Double Chocolate Chip Venti whole milk Frappuccino with whipped cream of course a mere 450 calories. Have fun, Chris Price Director Permission NZ Ltd facebook.com/permissionwebsitemarketing twitter.com/permissionnz Permission Website Marketing Update Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved

2 QR Codes Building Bridges with those Black and White Smudges You have probably seen them yourself. Black squares of smaller squares that look like if you stare long enough you will either see a lion or an old woman. Well sorry, neither is true. What is true though is that these special codes, when read by a usually free smartphone application, will take the snapper either to a web page somewhere or fire up an address or even spark up a phone number. So how is this useful for a digital marketer like you? Well, this stuff comes in handy when you want to move offline people to online hosted content. It s common to mix both offline and online content but not that common to make it easy for people to traverse between the two. For example, like us, you may use both content types in your sales process. So prospects frequently find us through our website, which may drive a form submit or an send. A Permission person will then call to learn more about what the prospect wants to achieve and the problems that may be standing in their way. If there s a possible match between what they want and what we do then we continue the offline content as we post out an information pack, which includes some coaching CDs and printed copies of previous newsletters. Just so they can read and listen to some of the work we do. Now, it would make really good sense for us to place QR codes on our prospect CD packs to link these people back into the customer case study area of our site so they can read stories of companies like theirs that have chosen to use Permission to apply the knowledge discussed in the recording. Here s another example of this linking in action, this time for a long-term customer, the Wellington-based New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO). The NZSO team has an extensive digital marketing strategy that involves search, marketing and a very active and informative social media presence on Facebook. They also have a strong design-led focus on street-face marketing with billboards and posters spread around the urban areas the orchestra is playing. These posters now include QR codes that people can scan to hear samples of the music that will be performed in the promoted concert. Here s a snap of a similar style QR code that they have on a brochure for a recent event. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 2 of 8

3 Or how about this one see the image to follow. I snapped this recently while walking down a main street overseas. Like many others around me, I was moving quickly past the shop front. But still I had time to take out my smartphone and snap this shot. Doing this took me straight to the specials page of their website. It s an ideal strategy to get the list of shop specials into the hands of your time-starved, fast-walking customers. And finally, there s this one I noticed while reading the Wall Street Journal. Who wouldn t want to snap this one and hear a CEO motivating their team? Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 3 of 8

4 So how do you go about testing this out for your business? Before I answer this let s clear up some basic questions you may have. Question #1: do they cost any money to create? No. The tools you need to create them are usually free and you can print them where and when you want, as many times as you want, and it doesn t cost you a cent other than the printing costs. Question #2: Do I need to engage someone else to create them? No. It s a simple task to set them up. The software is usually a snip to learn and creating your first code shouldn t take you more than a few minutes. Just Google qr code generator and you should find one for your PC or Mac. Question #3: What s the smartest place you have seen them used? OK, another one from my recent US travels, but unfortunately I don t have an example to show here. It was mentioned during a conference presentation on how to build your list. There we were told how Home Depot (think Mitre 10 but a fair bit bigger) were printing QR codes on their plastic general garden fertilizer bags, which they must sell millions of. These came with the text trying to entice customers into signing up to their gardening newsletter list. And to make it even better, once you snapped the code you were taken to a subscribe page specifically designed for the mobile environment, which made registration a snip. Cool eh? Question #4: OK, you have shown me the good places to place them just so I know where are the dumb places for these QR codes? Any place online. No need for a code here the trusty hyperlink will do the job. And yes, I ve seen them placed on website home pages before. So that should fix the top 80% of the questions most people have. Now let s move into testing whether people are using them. Testing usually involves tracking and digital tracking for us is all about Google Analytics. So the plan would be to decide what web place you want your code to link to and then build a traceable link with all the necessary extra tags to help your Google Analytics account split out all QR code traffic from the rest it receives. Here s a short link to the tracking code builder page that will help: Then all you need to do is build your codes, place them on your brochures, posters or outside your building and use your Google Analytics account to tell you what does and doesn t get used to act as a bridge between your offline and online content. Have fun. New Permission Product Applies the Blow Torch of Accountability to Inbound Calls I would like to say that this new product came from some extensive brain-storming completed by the team, incorporating the latest in mind-melding techniques. But I would be lying. It all started with a customer and a problem. This customer owned a lead generation website that did an above-average job of taking paid and organic search traffic and converting it into good quality sales leads. Each month they would review their traffic and lead count to match up how their conversion rate was going. And if it needed improving think every month there is room for improvement site changes would be tested to edge this rate further upwards. The whole process lived and breathed on hard facts, Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 4 of 8

5 all underpinned with a strong desire to grow faster. Things were going well. But still their business needed more leads to achieve the growth they had planned. So my attention turned to their inbound call volumes. Yes, their website had a phone number but it was their general office number, which they used for all their other marketing too. Now we knew that some prospects called using this form while staring at the website but we didn t know how many took this option and the effectiveness of turning this traffic into leads. In one meeting I made a strong suggestion that this phone traffic needed tracking with as much rigor as was being used for web tracking. Fortunately, they had a spare number they could use and so we swapped out the website number with this just to see what turned up. Needless to say, the fact that this whole train of events spawned a new product points to what they found being quite a revelation. For instance, the site was generating as much phone traffic as form submission leads. And let me remind you that the online lead count was at the top end. Everyone was surprised with this one. But then when they ran the numbers through, it was the conversion rate of this inbound call traffic into quotes by their call centre that was the real issue. The numbers were startling. It was running at under a quarter of the online conversion rate. So that was the real target for achieving fast growth. All they needed to do was double the effectiveness of how they handled inbound calls to bring it up to about half of the online conversion rate and they would more than double the total number of quotes the company did without spending any more in marketing cost. Now, not everyone has a spare telephone number hanging around waiting to run a test like this. Which is why we are launching this new product. It s a simple concept. We supply you with a phone number (both regional and 0800 numbers are supported) that sits on your website or perhaps in your Google Ad. Anyone who calls that number is routed directly to where you want them to go. It s a seamless process for the caller. Each month you receive a tracking report from Permission that shows you how many people used that number, the length of the call, etc. Plus, with some extra magic, we can integrate this into your Google Analytics account so you can see the calls coming off your website as individual events. And if you want you can turn on call recording and have access to recordings of all the calls that come your way. There s a very nominal monthly line rental fee, a small minimum term, and even smaller costs per minute for the calls to be routed where you want them. Tracking and measurement are a snip to do for your online marketing activities. Now you can put the same blow torch of accountability to your inbound call work to see how you fare in this area. Contact us today on sales@permision.co.nz if this makes sense for your business. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 5 of 8

6 Marketing after 12 Hours in a Confined Tube Early this month I did the overseas conference thing with marketing. It was a couple of years since I last attended and a lot had changed in land since then. So I decided that it was again time to spend 12 hours in a confined silver tube to experience all there was from our North American marketing friends. The customer conference call this month covered some of the details I found but, nevertheless, here are a few takeaways that you can apply with your marketing this month. 1) Batch and blast messaging will garner less and less prospect attention. There is only so much online attention to go around. And as social media sucks up its growing share and general volume increases year on year, a poorly targeted, highly generic offer will get less opens and even less clicks. The alternative? Highly targeted and relevant offers or, the subject of a number of sessions I sat through, campaigns automatically driven by a change of behavior of the prospect or customer. For instance: when they subscribe; when they buy for the first time; when they would normally purchase a restocking run or even when they add an item to the cart BUT fail to check out. Yes, most of these are technically a lot more challenging than just loading up a list and firing out a message but that s going to be the price you need to pay to get the attention you need to make your promotion work. 2) This was from a presentation on strategy three simple questions you should answer BEFORE sending your next campaign. Is this campaign tied to our overall campaign and organizational goals? Why should my subscribers care? What are my subscribers to do next? If you can list down some solid answers to these three then all s looking good. 3) If you are not testing you are guessing. A great snippet on an early slide about (surprise, surprise) testing. We all fall into the busy, busy tactical trap of doing stuff to get a campaign out. Nevertheless, it s the smart ones who can look back over what they used to do three months ago and compare that with what they do now and see a difference due to the results their tests achieved during this same period. 4) With relevance being the catch cry of marketing improvement, there was some good discussion on the type of content you require to make this a reality. For instance there is Evergreen Content that works for everyone and will never change. Then there s content with a Long Shelf Life that works for all but lasts say 3 4 months. Then there s content just suited to your target segments. By producing content across each of these three areas you can efficiently put together a series of campaigns without having to create 100% bespoke content for each. Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 6 of 8

7 5) And the final point wasn t really a point more a realisation that the long-term effectiveness of marketing will have very little to do with the creative or content of the message itself. It s more about how well the media integrates with other parts of your online and offline properties. For instance, does your e-commerce tool integrate with your app so a series of welcome messages can be sent to those purchasing for the first time? Or can your room booking engine connect to a tool that allows messages to be sent to not only confirm a booking but also, five nights before arrival. It s these nitty gritty points of integration that will turn what could be a very ineffective batch and blast strategy into a highly specific and highly profitable behavior-based campaign. Have fun. Baking your way to e-commerce Achievement I am reliably told that successful baking is a lot like chemistry. All you need to do is follow the instructions, add in the right ingredients in the right order and you are all set to create the same successful outcome of your experiment every time. Somehow, it never seems to work the same way for me. Either I rush things and miss something out or, even worse, mistake one thing (think salt) for another (think sugar) and a disaster is on the way. Nevertheless, get it right and what you see in the image at the top of the recipe page should be close to what you take out of the oven. And let s face it, it s that image we all want. Yep, a nice thick slab of carrot cake with a very non-healthy spread of cream cheese icing. Yum scrummy. The thought of munching through this makes all the hassle of creating it and cleaning up afterwards worthwhile. E-commerce websites are nothing like carrot cake. That I know. I also know that their owners all have revenue and profit targets they want them to meet. And for me that s the picture at the top of the recipe the bit that gets them excited. However, for many, the bit below the recipe they need to follow to make the image a reality that bit is missing. What exactly do they need to do to bake their way towards these numbers? All this came up during a recent customer planning session. We were working through the next 12-month target for a very successful e-commerce website. The target or the yummy picture that got us all excited was very enticing too. Double digit growth was expected in both top- and bottom-line numbers. But what was the recipe they were going to follow to make this a reality? There were a few blank looks around the room so I started with the carrot cake analogy and then as a group we worked through designing the recipe they would need. Fortunately, an e-commerce website requires fewer ingredients than your average carrot cake. The four staples are: visitors, customers, purchases and costs. Of these, it s the customer part that s the most important to sort first. The outcomes of the work in this area drive the marketing costs you will need to afford and with it an understanding of the visitor counts this expense needs to generate to make it all work. So how many customers did they need to achieve their goal? Was it, say, 5000 people spending $150 each or 1000 spending $750 each? And of these customers how many would they expect to buy more than once during the year? And of this group what would their average annual spend be? These are very simple questions that can be deceptive in the amount of work required to find credible answers for. In this case, the client had to go away and analyze their previous 12-month sales figures and then spend a few days drilling through this data to reveal the answers they required. Fortunately for them they had a great business, selling a great product that customers purchased reasonably fre- Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 7 of 8

8 quently during the year. And of these three wins it was probably the last one that was the most important. Repeat purchase e-commerce websites are so much easier to make work. marketing fits nicely into this space too. So does paid search. You can afford to enter this market and pay high click costs if you have the promise of a repeat purchase customer at the end of it all. Conversely, businesses built on once-only purchase activity are a challenge. To make these work the margins need to be good, with strong and obvious points of differentiation to make them sustainable. Both of these are hard to create and even harder to protect. But as I mentioned earlier, thankfully this wasn t the case here so we mapped out expected sales from repeat purchasing, allowing for some increase. Some of the margin from this work would support our marketing efforts a solution ideal for customer retention. The gap we had left over was a new customer revenue line. This was spread over the months ahead allowing for some demand fluctuations during the year based on seasonal changes that affected their industry. Then we had traffic to sort. We had a good understanding of the site s conversion rates for new customers based on the last 12 months so we could work out these figures and calculate the required visitor growth to make the conversions we wanted a reality. We then split this between SEO and paid search, based on the ability of specific keywords to reliably bring us new customers. After a couple of relatively focused sessions and some deep analytical work at their end we had our recipe. And yes, it had some assumptions that needed validation as the year progressed. Things like we expect existing customers to spend 15% more this year due to our improved marketing and our product margins will remain the same. But still, it was there ready to be worked through during the months ahead. So are you an e-commerce website owner who just stares at that nice revenue and profit number hoping it will eventuate? Well, now s the time to stop hoping and start creating the ideal recipe for you and your business. Let me know if you need any help with your ingredients. Have fun. Not all of our customers use all of our services so as a refresher here is a short list of the key areas of our capability. Marketing design and html set up. Spam checking and delivery monitoring. deployment technology advice, installation service and support. content to RSS transfer. While we don t build websites per se, we have expertise in blog design, creation and marketing (Wordpress platform only). Postal Address: P O Box Point Chevalier, Auckland Office Address: 60B Surrey Crescent, Grey Lynn Auckland, New Zealand Online Lead Generation Strategic planning. Landing page design and creation. A/B and Taguchi testing tools. Website analytics installation and support (Google Analytics only). Website marketing support. Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing paid advertising set-up and support. Website search engine optimisation (SEO). Phone Contact: Chris Price Office: sales@permission.co.nz Copyright Permission NZ Ltd, All rights reserved Page 8 of 8