Technology Marketing by Tatum MarketingJust another WordPress weblog

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

“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.

As many of you know, I have a tendency to get very cranky about money being wasted on marketing. It’s just so dumb. With all the tools at hand for tracking, measuring, and optimizing marketing campaigns, there’s no reason to burn money.

Yet companies do it all the time.

And here’s one method that is particularly irksome: don’t follow up. Or if you do, make sure you wait a while.

Several years ago I saw a statistic on the number of companies that fail to follow up with contacts after a trade show. I don’t remember the exact number but – trust me – it was huge. Somewhere well over 50% of all the companies who spend tons of money planning and participating in trade shows simply never follow up with the prospects they meet. 

I thought this was outrageous until I saw a MarketingSherpa report containing information about how companies respond to email requests. Specifically, the report talks about marketing to engineers, but there is a message in it for all marketers.

Engineers, not surprising to anyone who has worked with them, prefer to communicate by email. So do a lot of other people. They will research products online and then send an email requesting more details. 

What happens to that email at your company?

MarketingSherpa found only 17% of suppliers responded to an email request within 24 hours. The majority (53%) took between one and two days. And everyone else took longer. 

Now think about this for a minute. I want to look at this from two angles. One, you’ve spent a lot of time and money building a solid website that addresses preliminary concerns and questions of your prospects. Your efforts have succeeded in interesting prospects enough to have them reach out, identify themselves and ASK you to contact them. Why would you wait?

The second angle is from your own perspective. Assume you’ve carefully researched a purchase. You’ve eliminated as many sources as possible and now you want some additional information from your top choices. This decision is top of mind with you right now. You send an email. Two days (or more) pass before you hear from the company. What are you thinking now? Are you still as hot to talk to a sales rep?

Probably not.

Things happen fast on the internet. We’ve become accustomed to immediate responses – even if they’re only automated ones. Other things being equal, the sale will almost always go to the team that is most responsive.

What a great opportunity! If you just make sure your marketing or sales team is responding to email requests within 24 business hours you could beat out 83% of your competitors. 

Technorati Tags: email, responsiveness, conversion

Sometimes it helps to look beyond our own industries to discover what marketing tactics others are using successfully. According to an OMMA research brief, a recently published Forrester report, called Retailing Online 2009: Marketing Report, provides a good opportunity to do that. 

Amidst all of the data included in the report, two things have real significance for non-retail marketers.  Online retailers are using: 

1. Search engine marketing (SEM) for customer acquisition and 
2. Email for customer retention.

If you’re interested in the numbers, SEM is the marketing tactic most often mentioned as an effective acquisition tactic (83%). Search engine optimization is the second most frequently mentioned tactic (51%). And affiliate programs come in third (41%). Email is the most frequently mentioned successful overall marketing tactic (89%).

This is not terribly different from what we find successful in the non-retail world. While search engine marketing alone is rarely – if ever – the only tactic needed to acquire a new customer, it is by far the most effective and efficient way to start the process. Unless of course no one is looking for your product or solution, which is a different challenge altogether.

Business-to-business company owners and marketers often come to us torn between conventional lead generation programs – direct mail, email, or telemarketing – and online search or advertising programs. Our advice is nearly always the same: 

Start with search.

The reason is really simple. When people are actively searching for a product or solution like yours, you are relevant. You do not have to fight a bunch of noise for their attention. They are looking for you. Your only competition is the other marketers taking advantage of the search situation.

There is also a simple reason online retailers don’t find email marketing to be among the most effective customer acquisition tactics. When email is used for initial engagement, it faces a big list of obstacles. At the top of that list are delivery issues and competition from everything else in the prospects inbox. In the business-to-business world, this can literally be hundreds of other email messages. 

This is not to say that email isn’t useful. In fact, it often plays a major role in successful non-retail marketing campaigns. Not only can we use it for customer retention – as the online retailers do – we also need it for lead development. 

In the non-retail world, most purchases are multi-stage. You are not, for example, going to be able to use a search marketing campaign alone to sell an expensive software application or consulting relationship. We know that a high percentage of prospects (75% to 80% or more) are not going to be ready to buy when they first make contact with your company. Email is a great way to build and maintain an on-going relationship and turns those semi-interested visitors into real leads.

 So, you need both – search marketing and email – for an effective new customer marketing program. You also need a great website and consistent conversion optimization, but those are subjects for a different article.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, conversion, customer acquisition, lead generation

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you probably know that Flash is not my favorite homepage element. There’s plenty of evidence to show that it’s a bad idea for several reasons.

• Most website visitors don’t read Flash messages.
• The motion distracts visitors from other – more important – elements on your page.
• Business-to-business website users tell researchers they hate it.

But does it drive visitors away from your site? Maybe not.

We’re currently running an experiment with a technical software client. The company has a not-awful bounce rate of 40%, and we’re working to improve it further. Their homepage Flash image is one of the best I’ve seen. It actually shows what the product does – as opposed to most homepage flash sequences that just send pictures and words zooming across the page.

Still, Flash is annoying, right?

We decided to run an experiment to find out how much the bounce rate would improve if we eliminated the flash. The client actually came up with 4 versions to test against the original.

1. No animation at all.
2. Animation cycles once and then stops.
3. Animation pauses 30 seconds between cycles.
4. Animation cycles faster.

While the results are not yet conclusive, we’re seeing an interesting trend. Surprisingly (to me), the animation with the faster cycle appears to be winning. We’ve seen a reduction in bounce rate as high as 15% in this mode. The one with no animation is showing very little improvement – less than 1%.

Can we conclude from this experiment that Flash is actually a good thing? No. It appears to be working for this client, but it may not work for you. Even with this client, more testing is required before we could say that the Flash is good.

The point is it’s time to stop assuming we know what works and what hurts. It’s time to test our assumptions and let prospects tell us what they like and don’t like. Such testing is so easy to do these days even the smallest of marketers can test.

And I just might have to rethink my position on Flash. At least maybe I’ll stop automatically hating it.

I’ll let you know later which version ultimately wins in this experiment.

Technorati Tags: Flash, optimization, testing, measurement, results

Last month one of our clients, Adam Washington (not his real name), achieved a 24% increase in website visitors signing up for a demo of his software. He did it basically overnight and without spending an extra dollar to drive traffic to his site.

How did he do it? He simplified the request form.

Adam got rid of a bunch of questions that weren’t necessary and asked only for information he really needed: the visitor’s name and email address. (Interestingly, through testing we found that adding a field for the visitor’s country increased response.)

The original form looking like this:

The new form looks like this:

Instead of spending a ton of money to drive more people to his website, Adam focused on the visitors who were already coming there. As a result of the form change, he was able to get many more of his website visitors to take the action he wants – and needs – them to take: download his product demo. This ultimately resulted in more sales opportunities for the sales team at a much lower cost.

Think about that for a minute.

Imagine this is your company. Let’s say 20% of the people who fill out the demo form eventually end up buying your product and an average of 80 people download the demo each month. Let’s also say that each purchase is worth $5000. Your product revenue is currently $1,200,000 annually.

By getting 24% more people to fill out the demo form as Adam did, you would add another 20 people to the pipeline each month and – if everything else remains the same – that adds 4 additional customers (@ $5000 each) every month. At the end of the year, revenue has increased by $240,000 and it cost you nothing!

This is why we advise so many of our clients to focus on optimizing conversion rates and not just on generating more leads. There are an almost unlimited number of ways to get more prospects moving through your pipeline – and all of them are less expensive than generating the prospects in the first place.

In the spirit of full disclosure, let’s go back to Adam’s form for a minute. You may have noticed that the phone number is missing from the new form, and if you try to pass this directly to a sales team for follow-up you’re likely to get some very loud pushback. In fact, one of our next tests with Adam will be to add the phone number back into this form and see what happens to the signup rate. There are also other ways to get the phone number for the sales team, but that’s not the point of this article.

The point of this article is to show how a few minor changes within the marketing process can have a dramatic effect on the number of prospects who make it through this conversion point in your marketing process and ultimately on your revenue.

Is Adam’s success with the demo form experiment a fluke? It could be – time will tell whether or not the modified form maintains its high performance level. But based on our experience with other clients like Adam, it will almost certainly continue to provide Adam’s company with increased prospects week after week after week.

Technorati Tags: conversion, optimization, prospects, leads, website, revenue

With every business scrambling today to do more with less, it surprises me how many are missing the very best way to increase leads or sales with existing resources.

Marketers call it conversion optimization, which borders dangerously on being jargon but I haven’t thought of anything better to call it yet. What we’re talking about is paying attention to the points in your marketing process where you want your prospects to take action and tweaking those points to get a greater percentage of visitors to do that.

Sales people do this all the time. They are regularly judged on how well they turn qualified opportunities into sales (the closing ratio). But marketing people for some reason have stayed away from creating a better process instead focusing solely on driving more website traffic or generating more leads.

This is expensive – especially if you are driving leads into an inefficient marketing system.

If you think about your prospects’ buying process there are likely to be several points at which the prospects decide to keep moving forward toward a purchase – or not.

Here are a few common examples:

• Your homepage.
• Newsletter and other subscriptions
• Product demos
• Free trials
• Trial-to-customer conversions
• Landing pages
• Contact Us forms
• Download whitepapers or reports
• Event registrations
• Any link you want your visitors to click on

Get more from what you already have.

Increasing the number of people who take any one of these actions ultimately increases your sales or sales opportunities. Over time, even the slightest increases compound into big numbers. It’s the same “power of compounding interest” argument the Motley Fools and other investment advisors use to convince us to invest early and often.

Let’s look at product demos as an example.

Suppose that currently 50% of prospects who experience your product demo become customers and suppose that each new customer is worth $2500 a year. Here’s what happens if you increase the demo-to-customer ratio just 5% a month.

Imagine how much your revenue can grow if you optimize multiple conversion points. It’s surprisingly easy and immensely rewarding. And the best part may be that you can get more leads without spending more money on lead generation.

If you’re new to conversion optimization, you’re not alone; and if you act fast you can get a real jump on your competition – especially those who are cutting back on spending and watching their pipelines deteriorate.

Tatum Marketing runs conversion optimization programs for all kinds of clients. Contact Us if you want some help.

** Inspiration for the above chart comes from a Future Now video.

Technorati Tags: conversion optimization, conversion rate, leads, traffic, sales, prospects

At first glance, the title of this article might seem ludicrous. What growing business doesn’t need more leads? The key to the title question is the word “generate”.

In my experience, both business owners and marketers tend to focus marketing efforts almost exclusively on lead – or traffic – generation. No doubt this is an important part of the process. You’ve got to have a good level of website traffic or inbound inquiries to fill the marketing funnel.

But the generation part is just the beginning. Next, you have to convert the barely-interested, just-looking visitors into people who want to do business with your company. And this is where a lot of marketing programs can use some improvement.

For every two companies I talk with that really need to generate more traffic before doing anything else, a third company can get more results-per-dollar by focusing on conversion.

Confused?

Since most if not all new business prospects will wind up on your website at one point or another, let’s take a closer look at what happens when your lead generation efforts drive traffic to your website.

A large portion of your traffic will arrive as new or first-time visitors. This is good. It means your search marketing, SEO and/or online advertising efforts are working. People are finding you.

But mere visitors are not good enough.

Your marketing efforts must convert website visitors into interested, engaged prospects and eventually into sales-ready leads or customers. This is usually a multi-step process, and it pays to ask yourself whether or not your marketing efforts are doing a good enough job at converting these visitors.

The first challenge you face after driving traffic to your website is actually getting visitors to stay there. A disturbing number of websites today do a lousy job of this. You can see how well your website performs this responsibility by checking your bounce rate. People who bounce immediately from your site are sending you a message.  They are not going to become customers – you’ve lost them.

Once you get visitors to stick to your site your next challenge is to get them to do something. The actions they take differ from company to company depending on the buyers’ decision-making process.

Your desired conversion steps may look like this:

Download a whitepaper → take a product preview tour → attend a webinar → contact a sales person.

Or maybe more like this:

View an online demo → sign up for a free trial → become a paying customer.

Or

Visit key website pages → subscribe to a newsletter → sign up for a free consultation.

You may have multiple conversion paths and your paths may consist of some or all of these action steps or others I haven’t mentioned. The point is, you must get your visitors from point A (semi-interested visitor) to point whatever (customer or qualified lead) or your lead generation efforts are pretty useless.

Fortunately, improving conversion effectiveness is doable for any company that takes the time to following a few basic steps.

1. Identify your most important conversion (take action) points.
2. Measure the percentage of visitors who take the desired actions.
3. Brainstorm ideas for how you can get more people to take action. This can be affected by anything from your offer to the images and the persuasiveness of the copywriting to the color of your Contact Us button – and everything in between.
4. Try some of your ideas. Test, test and test some more. Google Website Optimizer is a free application that puts some sophisticated testing techniques well within the reach of small to mid-sized marketers. (More on this in another article).

The point is, you can generate new leads and traffic over and over and over again; but if you don’t turn those visitors into people who want to do business with your company then you’re just wasting money.  The best marketing program is a well-balanced one: lead or traffic generation followed by capturing interest and getting them to take action.

To ignore your conversion effectiveness renders lead generation activities about as useful as pouring good wine into a glass with a hole in the bottom.  What a waste.

Technorati Tags: lead generation, generate traffic, conversion optimization, conversion rate, website, bounce rate

Every business owner or marketer I’ve talked to lately has the same question on his or her mind: How can I lower marketing costs but still generate leads?

Reducing marketing costs without screwing up your ability to grow is easier than you might think.

Here are five ways to do that.

1. Eliminate waste.

Over the years I’ve looked at hundreds of marketing programs, and I can tell you honestly that nearly all of them have some kind of hole that either drains money directly or allows leads to be lost.

Before you cut anything, take a good hard look at what you’re doing. Are there programs that aren’t delivering the results you anticipated? Fix them or get rid of them.

Is there anything that can’t be traced to increasing sales opportunities? Unless you have a pile of extra money, now is not the time to be spending money on marketing efforts that don’t generate more leads or develop the ones you have.

2. Make fewer mistakes.

Another way to say this is: turn to people who know what they’re doing.

Marketing – which has never been exactly simple – has changed a lot in the past few years. Customers and prospects are in charge now, and they’re looking for you online. If you’re not on the internet, you’re not in the game.

While I admire business owners who try to figure marketing out for themselves, it wastes a lot of time and it leads to mistakes that could be avoided with some experience.

You may not need a proven marketing pro on staff, but if you don’t have one somewhere on your team you’re probably wasting money.

3. Nurture what you’ve got.

Successful lead generation programs bring in people in different stages of the buying process. Some are ready to commit more to you than others are. Some are ready to talk to a sales person and some aren’t.

Think of any lead generation activity you’ve ever done: search marketing, email, advertising, telemarketing, networking, trade shows – it doesn’t matter. Were all of the people who responded ready to schedule a two-hour demo of your product? Of course not.

But that doesn’t make those people any less likely to buy from you in the future as long as you maintain a relationship with them.

If you’re one of those businesses that has a bunch of inactive prospects sitting in a database (or on your desk), you may be better off nurturing those people than paying to find new ones. And nurturing leads can be a lot less expensive than generating them in the first place.

4. Increase conversions – not just inbound leads or traffic.

This point is similar to the one above it, but it’s important enough to look at from a different angle.

Let’s say you have 2000 visitors a month going to your website and 60% of them leave your homepage without going anywhere else. Which do you think would be cheaper, changing your website so that an additional 20% (400 visitors) stay on your site or doubling traffic to the site? The results are the same.

(Hint: if you picked the first option, you’re right).

Complex purchases – such as technology, high ticket goods, and on-going services – are made up of many different conversion points where the buyer decides whether or not to spend any more time with you. Each of those conversion points can be tweaked to pass more prospects through and provide a better return on your investment.

5. Consider outsourcing.

To have a successful marketing program today requires skills in multiple disciplines – some of which didn’t even exist a decade or so ago. For example, you need
website strategy and development, search engine optimization, paid search marketing, prospect conversion optimization, lead nurturing and web marketing – just to name a few.

Staffing an in-house team with all of this expertise would cost more than most small to mid-sized businesses are willing or able to invest. Yet you can easily – and cost effectively – get this expertise from an outside firm or group of individuals.

It’s worth looking into.

Last week my partner and I, and a couple of dozen other investors, arrived in Buenos Aires on a due diligence trip. What followed was five admittedly-fun days of cocktail parties, tango exhibitions, tours to our various properties, and activities galore.

We made new friends and had a cool time. Unfortunately, that’s not the only reason we were there.

The investment group had an agenda. They were trying to get our commitment for increasing our investment. We also had an agenda. We wanted to understand how the initial funding had been spent and what was planned for the future.

The hosts didn’t think this through. They thought all they had to do was entertain us.

Because the information we were seeking was not made available, at the end of the trip we found ourselves with more questions and doubts than we’d had at the beginning. This is not a good way to get investors or customers.

Understanding your prospects’ intentions, concerns, expectations and questions is fundamentally important to good marketing. It’s a step that simply can’t be skipped. And it’s one that needs to be revisited regularly – especially when changes occur in the economy.

I suggest that now is a very good time to ask the following questions:

• Who are these people that are potentially interested in our product?
• Who all is involved in the buying decision?
• What business problem or challenge are they trying to solve or avoid?
• What questions are they likely to ask?
• What answers will move them to the next stage?
• Where do they go for this information?

When the economy tanks, as it has for most of us, you also need to ask yourself whether or not yours is a “must have” purchase or just a “nice to have”. “Must haves” still get bought. “Nice to haves” can be postponed. What can you do to make yourself a “must have”?

In the case of our Argentina trip, the host company blew it. They assumed they knew what we were looking for, and in the end they spent a lot of money and left us feeling less likely to take the next step.

What makes the situation even worse is that we were able to talk to other participating investors who shared both our concerns and our frustration at not being given answers. This in turn helped solidify our negative reactions.

A similar situation occurs on blogs and forums and communities where customers and prospects can easily share their experiences.

It’s good to remember that – for most of us – the buyers are very much in control. To succeed, you must provide the information they are seeking and not just the information you want them to have.

Otherwise, you’re just wasting money.

Have you seen your prospects’ information needs change lately? If so, share it here with the rest of us.

Technorati Tags: lead nurturing, messaging, buying process