Non-Line Blogging

Back in 2005 I wrote a White Paper for Internet World Exhibition titled "Direct Marketers Will Inherit the Digital World".  We would shift, I grandly claimed, from "one size fits all email" and "brochure-ware" web sites to a world of personalised, relevant, timely dialogue.  Underpinning all of this was a sound understanding of gathering, mining and using data.  As companies fight to stay afloat in 2009 I would venture to suggest that the ones with a database of customers, prospects and web visitors will have more chance than most of surviving and here's why...  

It's not getting any easier or cheaper to drive traffic to your site and so you need to be working hard at making them register when they arrive.  It's then much cheaper to draw them back through the RSS/email route, so building a "prospect database" is critical.   Now with a pool of prospects you can use email and RSS (or phone or direct mail?) to convert them.  All you have to do is work out how to convince people to register and every day you will harvest a list of red-hot leads! So let's look at the business case for building the best possible registration process on your site in more detail...   

Registration and Acquisition

In an earlier post I looked at how the really smart companies are working hard on getting expensive new site visitors to part with some personal data, giving you another chance to market to them.   If I'm paying a dollar a click and 1 person in a 100 converts that's costing me 100 dollars a customer.  If I can get 20 of them to register and through follow-up emails get 2 more of them to convert I've made 3 sales at 33 dollars a customer.  No contact details, no control, no more sales...unless you're really lucky and they come back by themselves.  Too risky!

Registration and Retention

I've written plenty recently about the need to stay close to your customers in the bad times and how valuable email marketing can be...even generating the best sales day in one company's history.    Suffice to say, DONE WELL, email has the capability of getting you new clicks, leads or sales for a fraction of the cost of "traditional" sales routes.  Put simply, if I needed to generate 1 more sale to stay afloat today I could pay 100 dollars to Google (see above);  but wouldn't life be better if I could email "abandoned "Product X" shopping carts " or "people who clicked on the "Product X" link in an email", or "people who opened but did not click on the product X special offer" email, or even mail people who "bought Product Y because it goes well with Product X".  Cost of mailing 100 people?  One tenth of a cent.  Cost per sale with a 1% response rate? One tenth of a cent.     

Get it right! 

I have spent the past 20 years of my life getting terribly excited about databases.  I now feel it is time to share what I have learned so that more companies will make it through 2009...it's that powerful!  So, as my "Magnum Opus", I will use the next 2 posts to share the best web registration techniques I have seen. We'll pick off "The Business Case for Registration" now and then move on to the finer skills of "Visibility; Value; Ease" later.  So before we start knocking up web forms we have a few BIG battles to fight internally

Do the Math...

Trouble is, a registration form is seen by many people as a big fat waste of prime web site real estate.  That means you need to work out the VALUE OF AN EMAIL ADDRESS or a REGISTERED SITE VISITOR in order to convince people to get the registration form on the best part of the high traffic pages. 

Value is a function of cost savings and increased revenue.  A UK high street bank put the value of an email address at well over £200:  Imagine over a 5 year lifecycle being able to "turn off" paper statements and direct mail in exchange for electronic communications...that would be about 20 mail campaigns a year at about 50 pence a pack...£10 a year and £50 over 5 years.  Then factor in the ability to cross or up-sell one product, maybe based on triggers from web content viewed, or speedy executions of topical campaigns...a single £50 up-sell every other year and BINGO...an email relationship is worth £200.  I can think of no better use of a 200x200 plot of your web pages than building a registration device and earning £200 every time somebody converts.

Another way to look at VALUE is through the OPPORTUNITY COST.  If you did not have a registered site user to ping with a "we've got new content you like" message, how would you go and find another visitor?  Probably by paying for it.  But if you want page views, or daily visitors, isn't getting last week's visitor back for not much money better than paying lots for a new one this week?  So you could begin to model the revenue generated and traffic costs saved by, for example, getting 15% of last weeks visitors back through some RSS/Email pull technique. 

So, how much is an email address worth to you?  And how much would you pay for somebody to create a web profile, or sign up for RSS feeds from the site?  You can just do it on cost savings..less Ad Word clicks and affilaite PPC deals, less direct mail, less outbound telemarketing.  An electronic relationship is virtually free!  And then factor in all that ad revenue, or those incremantal sales just by drawing people back for fractions of a penny.  Once you have a basic fix on these you will be able to determine the right registration strategy.

Be Bold.  Be Brave.

I'd like to finish with what I think are the most exciting, amd maybe the most successful registration devices...roadblock registrations.  Some companies have done the math, had the big arguments with the "customer journey princess" and decided that everybody who comes to their site gets a great big, in your face, REGISTER NOW screen.

I love this one from Marketing Sherpa.  It is dripping with reasons to join, it is short to complete, and if you don't like it then you can just step on through.  But here's the business analysis...I recon they know the "value of an email address" and they will also know from their analytics the following key data:

• Total Roadblocks Served
• Total Email Adresses Gathered
• Total Roadblocks clicked through
• Total Bounces.

They could get even smarter from here, understanding what source gives the highest bounce rate (so we can choose not to serve to these people) and then allow more people through to the site where other registration devices will be lying in wait.

For instance, here is a lovely one from Trip Advisor.  They serve a registration page that is contextually relevant to the content you are looking at.  Not quite a roadblock, but not a passive bit of web real estate either.  Given the relevence and low-impact nature of the solicitation, this could be deployed successfully all over the site, reaping yet more registrations

So the conclusion here is that you cannot afford NOT to get good at registration.  You need to do some big sums to work out the value of these registrations and then you have the option of being really bold to make it happen, safe in the knowledge that everything can be monitored and amended.  Armed with the knowledge that you need to get good data gathering, my next post will break the experience down into the 3 critical "customer experience" components of visibility, value, and ease.  In the meantime, watch out for sites trying to seduce you into registering!