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Recently I sat in on a presentation by Ronny Kohavi, GM for Microsoft’s Experimentation Platform. The talk was called Top Seven Testing Pitfalls.  Among other things, it gave me some good ammo to share with you on the subject of why constant testing is so critical.

As a lifelong marketer, I am thrilled – thrilled – that we can now track, test and measure visitor movement through a website and use that data to improve how well a site turns visitors into paying customers or sales-ready leads. And we get to do this without even once having to sit through a 3-hour meeting to discuss the color of the logo or where it should go on the webpage.

But then I’ve spent most of my career working with engineers, scientists and other logical thinkers for whom statistically significant data ranks right up there with oxygen. The need to quantify decisions rather than going with mere opinions has rubbed off on me. I also like being able to prove that our work produces good results.

I admit, though, when faced with the opinions of a room full of “experts” – especially if you’re one of them – it’s tempting to make decisions based on intuition, instinct or experience. That’s okay as long as it’s just a starting point. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades of marketing it’s that you just can’t be sure what people will do. No matter how positive you are you are right – people will regularly prove you wrong with their actions.

How often are we wrong?

Ronny Kohavi had some very good data (yes, data) on that subject from some of the world’s great testing companies. These are companies that test EVERYTHING and each test clears a number of hurdles including web designers, usability experts, copywriters, marketing geniuses and executives before it is run. Everyone believes the challenger page in the experiment has a good chance to deliver better results than the existing page.

Amazon finds that half of the experiments they try fail to show any statistically significant improvement.

Microsoft finds that about one third of their experiments have a positive effect while one third have negative effects and one third have no significant effect at all.

Why test if most tests won’t give you positive results?

Because you don’t know where the positive results lie until you test! If the experts gathered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft guess wrong most of the time, far be it from me to be able to tell what works by just looking at it.

And I prove that to be true over and over again with our own experiments.

Keep testing.

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Technorati Tags: testing, A/B testing, website, conversion optimization

Today I’d like to continue a discussion I started in my last blog post: “Marketing to the Human Psyche.”

To recap, neural scientists have discovered a link between social needs and survival, a link which could trigger prospects to react to our marketing efforts as if we were a rabid dog.

I know what you’re thinking: “The software we sell isn’t going to harm anyone’s social status. If anything, it will elevate their status when higher-ups in their organization see how much money, time, and/or resources our software saves them.”

That might be true, but before prospects buy your software, they need to buy your story, and logic won’t work if they perceive you as a threat.

There are some techniques –- i.e. qualities –- that a recent strategy+business article suggests can be used to keep the threat response in check. One such quality is certainty. As human beings we crave it, and when we don’t get it, the uncertainty registers as a gap in our brain, causing us to pause until the conflict is resolved.

As marketers, we need to understand that any conflict we create in the prospect’s mind will either slow down the sales process, or stop it altogether. To keep the momentum up, create the perception of certainty. Here are six tactics that will make prospects feel more certain about you and your product.

Certainty-Building Tactic #1: Case Studies

We always knew that case studies can sell, but maybe now we understand a little better why they work: Prospects that relate to the people in our stories gain a sense of familiarity about our product.

Since no two people are identical, however, we need to have a portfolio of case studies that address the industries, geographical regions, organizations, and types of people we serve.

IT folks working in a Windows shop will relate to stories about other Windows-centric IT folks working in similar-sized organizations, government workers will relate to case studies that highlight other government workers, and so forth.

Certainty-Building Tactic #2: Analogies and comparisons

If you’re selling a bleeding-edge product, try to create a sense of familiarity by comparing yourself to a product or concept that was once unfamiliar, too.

Remember when we feared online banking? Nowadays, we don’t give it a second thought. If you can relate your product to something else that once conjured up similar feelings of uneasiness, you’ll help prospects “see” that your product isn’t as far-fetched as one might think.

Certainty-Building Tactic #3: Slower, more manageable steps

Nobody wants to have their name associated with a failed project, especially these days when budgets and job security weigh heavily on our minds. Marketers that sell large-scale, enterprise solutions can create a sense of certainty by helping prospects visualize a path to success.

Here again, case studies work because you can tell stories about how other clients achieved success by breaking down a large project into manageable chunks that fed off incremental successes.

Another way to accomplish this is to develop product offerings that let people buy only what they need right now, while at the same time showing them how your product will grow with them. In effect, people don’t want to buy a super-sized meal when all they need is a mid-afternoon snack.

Certainty-Building Tactic #4: Your own skin

Put some of your own skin in the game by finding ways to show prospects that you believe in your own product.

Money-back guarantees, technical support, and training are just a few good faith efforts that will make them feel more certain about their decision to go with you and your product.

Certainty-Building Tactic #5: Communities

While case studies are great, you can’t ask questions, and there’s always the suspicion that the story glosses over less-desirable bits.

Marketers can eliminate doubts by building into their website a means by which readers can send an e-mail or chat with the people in your stories.

Of course, this requires a bigger investment on your case study participants’ part, so if that seems unreasonable, set up an online community where prospects can freely discuss you and your product with existing customers.

Certainty-Building Tactic #6: An online sandbox

Remember how you felt when you installed Microsoft Office 2007? Despite the fact that I had been using Word for 20 odd years(!?), Word 2007, I found, was extremely unfamiliar and frustrating.

Let’s not follow Microsoft’s lead. Many software companies already offer free trials, but even then, people have to take the time to install the software; a task which can quickly become a roadblock to the sale.

If your software supports it, why not create a sandbox online where people can play with your product? The sandbox environment can be an extremely powerful tactic because 1) it makes it incredibly easy for prospects to demo your product to other people in their organization, and 2) it gives you unique insight into how customers actually use your product.

Stay tuned for my next blog post on November 17th, where I’ll cover the second psychological quality that will keep the rabid dog response at bay.

Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

“The best thing is to do the right thing.

The next best thing is to do the wrong thing

The worst thing is to do nothing.”

I have no idea who said this originally but it’s a quote I heard often from one of my more memorable bosses. If you think about it long enough it can give you a headache – because after all sometimes “nothing” is the “right thing”, but over the years I’ve found there’s lots of validity to this statement – especially in marketing.

And most of us are guilty of “doing nothing” to a certain extent. For example, here it is October and it feels like I haven’t done half the things I set out to do this year. I’ve even let my blog posting lapse inexcusably. Yep, like you I’ve been busy.

But enough about my excuse.

What about you? How is your marketing going?

Even if you’re incredibly well organized and have plenty of time to think about marketing, when you have a lot of options – and the wrong option could cost you a mint – it’s easy to get paralyzed by not knowing what to do. That this is a widespread problem is evidenced by the number of business leaders who ask us the question: “What should I do next?”

I take this question as a sign of good leadership. It means you’re determined to get the most sales & profits possible from your products or services – you don’t want to leave money on the table. You just want to do the right thing next.

Maybe I can help.

Here’s what I would do if you asked me to help you figure out what to do next.

First I’d take a look at your current situation.

1. How much traffic are you getting to your website right now?
2. How many visitors stay there and do something?
3. How many become customers?
4. What’s your current cost of acquisition – for trials and customers?

With this info in hand, I’d ask another question:

Do you need more traffic or do you need to more efficiently turn the traffic you already have into paying customers?

If the answer is “more traffic”, I’d look at what you’re currently doing to drive traffic to your site. How can we enhance that? I’d also look at what you’re not doing. Are you missing some big opportunities?

If the answer is “more efficient customer conversion”, I’d look for the weakest links in your process and test alternatives until we get the best results.

It’s really no more complicated than that.

So, if you’re wondering what marketing step you should take next, do one of two things.

1. Work yourself through the process I just outlined above, or
2. Call me – our phone number is 310-356-6060.

Most importantly, just do something.

Perry Marshall, long thought of as THE guru for Adwords (Google pay-per-click) marketing, has an interesting post on his blog titled “Sometimes Google AdWords is the least effective way to reach your target customer.” In it he mentions four situations in which other marketing tactics (email being one) can be more effective than search.

These four non-search marketing situations are:

Situation #1: When you’re a manufacturer selling parts in large lots to other manufacturers.

As an example, when running a campaign for just such a client, Perry found that a Google Adwords campaign produced mostly consumers wanting to buy the part in single or very low quantities. Not surprisingly the campaign didn’t pay off.

Situation #2: When you’re selling high-end equipment, software or services to high level executives and low level people are a waste of time.

I’d like to add an emphasis on the last half of that sentence: and low level people are a waste of time.

Often said low-level people are assigned initial research duty and it pays to be visible to them to get your name on the long list. We advise clients to be sure this isn’t the case with their product or service before completely abandoning the idea of finding value in search marketing.

Situation #3: When you sell a product or service that solves a problem people don’t even realize they have.

This is bsolutely true. If people aren’t looking for you online, you’re going to have to generate awareness and demand for the overall solution first.

Situation #4: When your buyers are beyond the intro phase, know where they want to go online and are spending time on subject-specific websites instead of searching.

I think this is more of keyword issue than anything else. The more specific your keywords, the closer to purchase your buyers will be. At that point maybe they have left search behind and are more easily found on an industry website. This is where the Google content network – handled correctly – can pay off.

A little testing will answer that question for you.

Over the past half-decade of helping clients attract more leads and customers with search marketing, I’ve occasionally spoken to people for whom pay per click or search engine optimization just isn’t the best approach. The most important question to ask and answer is a fairly obvious one: are my prospects searching for my solution online?

If the answer is yes, go with it.

Technorati Tags: search, seo, search engine optimization, ppc, pay per click, email marketing

I admit it, I wasn’t a big fan of social media marketing, that is, until yesterday.

Yesterday is the day I realized how much I can positively influence my 14-year-old, boy-crazy niece who lives 500 miles away from me, and yesterday is when I realized how much my 14-year-old niece is like everybody else us marketers set our sights on when we jumped on the social media bandwagon.

You see, both 14-year-old girls and potential customers want to be in control. My niece doesn’t like being bossed around by big sis or Mom. Likewise, customers don’t like being told what to do. Both want to make up their own minds — on their own time — even when it comes to subjects that are new or unfamiliar to them.

Lectures and any attempts to control will build walls that grow higher with time. Keep nagging, and they’ll eventually push back, ignore you altogether, or start lying just to get you off their back.

So what does all this have to do with social media marketing?

Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites create an opportunity where you can open up honest lines of communication between you and the public.

Sure, teenage girls might yell “I hate you!” when they’re being rebellious, and customers might post negative things about you when they’re frustrated with your company. In the long run, however, none of this matters. What matters is how you respond to their frustrations.

Horizon Group Management’s recent lawsuit response to a negative tweet is an example where the reaction could end up doing more harm than good. Absolutely I agree Bonnen should have shown some restraint when it came to her twittering about alleged mold in her apartment, but even if Horizon wins their lawsuit, what have they gained?

There’s now more than 9500 references on the Internet for “horizon mold tweet” yet Horizon continues to stand behind their decision to sue. My niece, on the other hand, is beginning to open up to me through Facebook.

Teenagers need parental authority, but we can’t just tell customers to “go to their room” whenever they have an issue with us. Maybe, just maybe, Horizon could have avoided the whole PR nightmare with a social-friendly response.

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.  

Email marketing is one of the fastest growing marketing tactics globally – and in the US – in terms of the number of companies who use it. Not surprising since it’s pretty low cost compared to other tactics and major parts of it can be automated.

But email has its share of challenges. Chief among them is getting through ISP and corporate spam filters and the recipients’ own “why should I care” filter. Over the past few years, response rates were heading downhill like an out of control shopping cart (the offline kind).

Some of that seems to be changing.

According to a recent report from the Direct Marketing Association, email campaigns return an average of $45.06 for every dollar spent. That alone is enough to make you pay attention.

But there’s more. The newly released Epsilon Q1 2009 US Email Trends and Benchmark Study shows an increase in open rates for the 3rd quarter in a row. Business Products and Services in general had opened rates of 29.1% in Q1 — up from 22.9% a year ago.

Click rates increased from 5.4% 6.4% (again in the business-to-business markets) and deliverability was up a little – up to 94.1% from 93.4%

What’s causing the increase in open and click rates? Are recipients becoming more willing to spend more time on email? Are they more willing to weed through the junk to find messages that are interesting to them?

Not likely.

I think email response rates are going up because marketers are getting better at sending relevant messages with a frequency that matches with the customers’ needs. Online marketers are also getting much better at testing to learn which headlines, offers and subject lines work best, and then optimizing messages accordingly.

Unfortunately, what I read of the Epsilon study doesn’t differentiate between prospecting email (messages sent to people who don’t know you) versus lead nurturing type email (messages sent to people who have already had some interchange with your company). I’m sure if we looked at lead generation email alone, the numbers would be much lower.

We’ve found that email is a great way for our clients to stay in touch with and continue to develop prospects and leads. We’re less excited about email sent to a cold list as a lead generation tool. But I’m willing to listen.

If you’d had success with lead generation email, share it with us here.

Technorati Tags: email marketing, lead generation, lead nurturing

“Free” isn’t a selling point. If you want people to give up an hour of their time to come to your webinar, you need to give them real value in return.

I realize you probably think I’m stating the obvious, but I’m doing it for a very good reason. You see, I help businesses by writing e-mail promotions for their online events. I consider it a personal challenge to write content that drives interest and demand for their webinars, and after doing it for more than four years I think I know a thing or two about what works, and what doesn’t. Yet every once in a while, I encounter a webinar presenter who forgets the basic rule of value.

If you really want to kill attendance at your next webinar, here are three tips to do just that

Attendance-Killing Promotional Tactic #1: Emphasize how great you are

Forget about webinar content. Instead promote your vast experience, boast about big-name clients, and talk about how you’ve become independently wealthy with the products and services you sell.

Attendance-Killing Promotional Tactic #2: Reveal nothing.

If you decide to address webinar content, keep the reader in the dark, using vague descriptions, common, everyday language, and meaningless buzzwords to describe what you’ll talk about at the event.

Attendance-Killing Promotional Tactic #3: Throw in some unsubstantiated claims for good measure.

Finally, sprinkle that promotional material with unsubstantiated claims like “breakthrough sales” without providing any meat to back up your claims.

All kidding aside, your experience does have its place in promotions, and an element of mystery does sometimes work.

Don’t give away the farm in your promotion, but do provide enough teaser information to pique your readers’ interest in your event, and do sell them on the webinar content before you start to sell them on the value of YOU.

Then to make your webinar really convincing, offer up tangible proof that what you’ll be talking about works. Tease them with one, two, or three success stories that you’ll cover in-depth during the event, or share statistics that demonstrate success at your own firm.

One company that I think does a fantastic job with webinars is Citrix. Citrix sells a webinar service, but their strategy isn’t to invite people to an online event where they can learn about their product.

Instead, Citrix invites outside experts in to teach attendees webinar best practices, sales techniques, business strategies, etc. This approach is far more helpful, and as a subtle side benefit, attendees get to see how the Citrix webinar product works in practice.

Of course there will always be the odd case where a vague, boastful webinar promotion actually works, but if you want to improve your chances of a great turnout at your next event, strive to deliver great content, and sell the value of your content in the promotion.

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc. 

What’s the most important factor of success in any search marketing effort? The right keywords. Without them, nothing else matters. And yet so many people just want take the first words that come to mind and call it done.

But you’re too smart for that, right?

Steps for discovering potential keywords are much the same regardless of whether you intend to use those keywords for organic listings (SEO) or paid listings (pay per click advertising). But the criteria for choosing the best words is different.

In this post I’m going to talk about choosing the right words for search engine optimization.

To state the obvious, you want keywords that attract the right people in the right numbers. There are five factors that affect this.

1. Relevance.

One of the most rewarding things about search marketing is its ability to put you in touch with people who are actively looking for you. No other marketing tactic does this as well. Keywords tell you exactly what the searcher is looking for. That should be you – or your product or service.

If the keyword isn’t relevant to what you’re offering, your listing might get viewed by a lot of people; but they aren’t going to click on it.

2. Popularity.

No surprise here. You need enough people looking for a particular keyword to make it worth the effort to get a page one ranking. Showing up on the first page of Google for a keyword with no search volume is like placing first in a race with only one contestant – so what.

This point is so obvious you might wonder why I even bring it up. It’s because nearly everyday I talk to people who are so obsessed with top rankings they don’t bother to look at the search volume. As Eric Gerds mentioned in a previous article on this blog, it’s easy to get ranked number one for Limburger cheese socks.

3. Used by your prospects.

One of the easiest mistakes to make when selecting keywords is to choose the words you would use to find your product. Since you are not your target market, that’s no good. Get out of your own head and into the heads of your customers and prospects to find the words they use.

You can find these keywords and phrases in a number of places. Start by asking your sales people, customer service and technical support staff, and anyone else who interacts with your customers. Talk to your customers yourself. Look at your web analytics. They’ll show you what words people have used to find you in the past.

4. Achievable.

Some keywords have so much aggressive competition you could kill yourself trying to get ranked for them. Don’t bother. Instead, add some qualifiers to the phrase and work on ranking for that. Search volume might be less but would you rather be in the top three listings for a phrase with 5000 searches or a higher than 200 listing for a phrase with 50,000 searches?

Here’s an example. “Credit card payments” might be tough. “Credit card payments online” is more achievable. (And potentially more relevant).

5. Profitability.

Ultimately, whatever keywords you choose must be those that drive traffic with the potential, desire and means to buy your product. This is another place your web analytics might be able to help you. Can you track traffic from specific keywords directly to a purchase?

You can also use pay-per-click advertising to find out if certain keywords have good potential. Run a quick Google campaign to see if those keyword phrases drive visitors who turn into qualified leads or buyers.

It takes some effort to find the right keywords, and it’s worth it.

Technorati Tags: keywords, seo, search engine optimization

If you’re a B2B marketer who is still sending out graphics-heavy e-mails, here’s something to consider: nearly two-thirds of the high-level decision makers in corporate America –- you know, the people that you’re trying to reach — probably can’t read your e-mails!

You see way back in 2007, 64% of these decision makers were already telling MarketingSherpa that they “regularly view e-mails using a mobile device,” and given that more than 269 million mobile devices were sold to users during 1Q09 alone, I’d be willing to bet that mobile e-mail readership today is pushing 70%.

When it comes down to it, mobile devices (not lack of interest) might be the real reason behind your recent drop off in open or click-thru rates. The only way you’ll really know is to start catering to the mobile crowd with messages that render properly on their mobile devices.

Here are 5 mobile-friendly e-mail tips, a few which I lifted straight from MailerMailer’s 2009 E-Mail Marketing Metrics Report.

Mobile-Friendly E-Mail Tip #1: During signup, give people the option to receive a mobile version of your e-newsletters and promotions.
If you give subscribers a mobile box they can check on your signup page, you’ll know right away what percentage of your audience plans to use their mobile device to read your messages.

Mobile-Friendly E-Mail Tip #2: Ditch the images.
Images have been known to turn an otherwise great e-mail message into a horrible mess. To be safe, save the flashy graphics for your brochures. Focus on solid content for your mobile readers.

Mobile-Friendly E-Mail Tip #3: Shorten your subject lines.
MailerMailer’s research suggests that succinct subject lines can pull nearly 4% more opens. How short is short? Thirty-five characters or less.

Mobile-Friendly E-Mail Tip #4: Ditto for your e-mail content.
For as long as I’ve been writing e-mails, there’s been a long-standing debate between long copy versus short copy. I myself have always tended towards long, because personal experience taught me long outsells short. The trend towards mobile, however, is making me rethink my position.

If you have a mobile audience, MailerMailer suggests that you give readers an abbreviated version of your message with link they can use to get the full story.

Mobile-Friendly E-Mail Tip #5: Test your messages on a mobile device.
Fine advice if you have a smartphone, but what about us traditionalists who still believe a phone is just for talking?

Fortunately, there are free simulators on the web. A quick search turned up these simulators:

• iPhone: http://www.testiphone.com/ or http://iphonetester.com/
• Blackberry: http://www.blackberry.com/developers/downloads/simulators/index.shtml
• Windows Mobile: http://www.g-site.com/ppc/

Let’s get a discussion going. If you’re already a savvy mobile e-mail marketer, what tips, tricks, and best practices do you use when creating content for your mobile crowd?

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Curious about how other business-to-business marketers are investing marketing dollars in 2009? Here is some info that will interest you. This comes from a study, “B-to-B Marketing in 2009: Trends in Strategies and Spending,” conducted at the end of 2008 by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research. The study surveyed 656 marketing management pros in a variety of business-to-business companies.

Competition hangs tough.

With a bad economy weighing heavily on everyone, b-to-b marketers seemed willing to tough it out. 25% planned to increase their budgets in 2009 and 41% said their budgets would stay the same. You could think of it this way: 66% of your competitors aren’t going anywhere. 

B-to-B looks online.

Almost one half of the marketers surveyed (47%) planned to increase spending on company websites and search marketing. This is a very good move and one that we recommend to our clients constantly – first get your website in shape and then get visible to the search engines. Interestingly, only 13% of these marketers said they thought company websites were an effective marketing tactic. I must assume this is because most b-to-b websites seriously underperform. (Read about the 7 critical components of a high performance website).

Beyond the website and search marketing, 42% of b-to-b marketers said they planned to increase spending on online videos, podcasts or rich media; 41% planned to spend more on webinars; 39% were going to spend more on email. And 36% were preparing to increase spending on discussion forums, social networks and communities.

Offline loses.

Not surprisingly, the tactics that most b-to-b marketers planned to cut were in the offline world – what we think of as “conventional” marketing. This is a trend that has been going on for a while. The percentage of marketers planning to make cuts in this area looked like this: print advertising (55%), TV advertising (51%), radio (48%), trade shows and conferences (43%) and sponsorships (40%). 

Some tactics were projected to maintain the same level of funding: blogs (58%) inside sales/telemarketing (54%) and public relations (53%).

What should you do?

I’ve given my 3 steps for accelerating marketing effectiveness in previous articles on this blog, and they’re worth repeating again. We know they work because we implement them for clients day in and day out with substantial and cost-effective results.

1. Fix your website. I have two things to say about this: 1) your website is a critical part of your marketing program – it’s either helping you or hurting you, and 2) unfortunately, chances are high it’s hurting you. 
   
   
2.  Get visible on the search engines. Prospects are actively looking for you. They’re going to find your competitors. Shouldn’t they find you too? As more and more of your competitors pour online, this may become more challenging but no less important.  
    
3. Nurture the leads that aren’t ready to buy yet. Nearly every company I talk with has a collection of forgotten prospects – those website visitors or inquiries that weren’t ready to talk to a sales person. Many will buy sooner or later. You already know who they are; now do your best to make sure they buy from you. While others spend money generating new traffic, you’ll be ahead of the game.

The steps I’ve outlined here are not only effective, they’re also measurable – meaning you can tell exactly what you’re getting for your money. If you want some help getting started or getting to the next level, check out the website development, pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization and lead nurturing programs from Tatum Marketing. Or just give me a call.

Technorati Tags: b-to-b, business-to-business, online marketing, websites, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, lead nurturing, lead development