Non-Line Blogging

Many marketers work in a multi-channel world because their customers use different channels to engage with them.  One of the biggest challenges is tracking the off-line to on-line marketing experience; getting people to go on-line is not hard as we can shout "visit our website" in our ads and give them the web address.  But how successful are those campaigns, and how do we attribute on-line success to off-line campaigns?

One option is to create "vanity urls" that we expect people to remember and then type correctly, never mind just googling (or Binging?) the company and campaign key words.  The result is that many successful outcomes will end up being attributed to Mr Google simly because people can't be bothered to type things into address bars any more! If you want a comprehensive run-down of all the multi-channel tracking options then Avinash Kaushik has several posts that cover it admirably.

Here are a couple of examples from the world of retail.  

One quick (old and quaint?) way is to simply stick up a poster and ask people to email somebody.  It ticks most of the registration boxes...its quick, uses universally accessed media and has a simple "value exchange".  You could have different email addresses for regions of retailers, or for different incentives and there is no marginal cost of acquiring a new contact. Its easy to measure the success of these tactics and develop better versions over time. Maybe texting in your email address to a short-code number could tap into a medium that people may hold in their pocket/handbags rather than relying on people jotting down an email address on a scrap of paper and finding it when they got home.

However, Facebook has muscled it's way onto my High Street (Reigate, Surrey, England) with an altogether more robust proposition.  A clothes retailer has created a Facebook group (free, takes 10 minutes), has built a simple value proposition (20% off if you join our group), and now has the chance to push people back in store AND develop a longer term relationship.  In these difficult recessionary times I applaud any retailer who is brave and smart enough to look at exploiting a multi-channel relationship. And with the lovely people at Facebook still blasting out emails to your group members for free, its a pretty cost-efficient way to beat the credit-crunch.  

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! 

I can retire a happy man.  After 4 years of effort, my humble one-man band site is top in Google for the most important search term in my competitive market that is full of search savvy marketers.  Googling "digital marketing training" in the UK or globally yields Non-Line Marketing as top banana. 

Of course that statement comes with a raft of qualifications.  First up, I may not be there tomorrow (as I wasn't there yesterday), and I am not even there all the time today.  Maybe Google is giving everybody 15 minutes of search fame to keep us happy in these recessionary times, but in truth it is seeing whether people validate their search algorithm by clicking on my link.   Second, it has taken 4 years to navigate to the top of the page by following all the usual tips about key word density and consistency and linking and so on.  Thirdly, I built the site 4 years ago with a clunky design package and it's looking a dated site that doesn't render well in today's larger screen resolutions automatically, so my quality score will suffer as people click back to the search page.  And also, the "Description" meta tag I crafted is not being pulled from my clunky design and so I am not compelling enough to encourage more clicks.

Anyhow, for the moment I am up there with the Big Boys, looking down on the IDM, E-Consultancy, CIM and even the mighty Dave Chaffey!  But I won't be there for long. 

So in the meantime I have a new site ready to roll - I've been building it over the past few months and its got all the Web 2.0 bells and whistles every digital consulting Johnny needs..shiny buttons, drop shadows, acres of lovely white space.  Trouble is, once I switch to the new site I'm probably going to wave goodbye to my new found "Topagoogle" status.

Yes, the tech brigade say that it is easy to use the right re-directs to carry all the old stuff to the new, (here is Dave Chaffey's thoughts on the 301/303 debate), but I've just seen what has happened to E-consultancy...they launched their lovely new site a few weeks ago and have dropped out of the search rankings for key training phrases.  Two months ago e-consultancy was top for all digital training searches but the new site has let pip-squeaks like me into the rankings. 

So, in the immortal words of The Clash, "Should I stay or Should I go".  Stay, with a naff site, or go, and lose my "Top Banana" status? 

You'll know I went when I drop off the edge of the search cliff! 

For the past 3 years I have been using the Ford web site as the benchmark for BAD registration forms, specifically the dreadful way that it managed the "Brochure Request" process.  So imagine my horror when I arrived at the site this week to find it had all changed...this could seriously damage my career as a consultant. 

But I should have known better.  Despite spending huge amounts of money on the shiny shiny new site most of the critical tasks that support car sales are still dreadful. Oh yes, the home page is fantastic - they must have spent a fortune on it. In these times of credit-crunchery I'd have thought it was time for Ford to get back to basics and make their site support processes that make the till ring - brochure requests and test drive appointments.  But oh dear, they seem to have forgotten to do that.

When I blogged about the aggregation of marginal gains last year (focus on doing 1000% things 1% better), I got this precient response from Avinash Kaushik.  He said:

This is a fantastic post!

Just yesterday I spoke to 2,400 people in the Auto industry and each and everyone of them was trying to move the ball by "1000%". Yet they have horrible landing pages for even the simplest of keyword searches and their paid search ads.

So there we have it.  Automotive marketers across the globe are spending bucketloads of money (they don't have) on the least important parts of their business process.  

So, just how bad can it be.  Let's pretend I want to get a brochure and, as I have owned 6 Fords in my life, we can assume my "reservoir of goodwill" (from Steve Krug )is filled to brimming as I approach the lovely new Ford site.

First up, what do we think of a home page that is 460K in weight?  To be fair, if the site is great then maybe you have to pack it with features, but this is a pretty big home page, according to the lovely web site optimisation site.  Here is the page size analysis for the shiny shiny new Ford site: 

And here is their report for the "Classic" Google homepage, perhaps the most successful page in web history:

So, the new Ford home page comes with a range of "health warnings" that are probably quick and easy to fix for a speedier (and maybe better) customer experience, again from web site optimisation  

• Warning! The total number of objects on this page is 132 which by their number will dominate web page delay. Consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Above 20 objects per page the overhead from dealing with the actual objects (description time and wait time) accounts for more than 80% of whole page latency
• Warning! The total number of images on this page is 115, consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Recommend combining, replacing, and optimizing your graphics.
• Warning! The total size of this page is 466330 bytes, which will load in 119.34 seconds on a 56Kbps modem. Consider reducing total page size to less than 100K to achieve sub 20 second response times on 56K connections.
• Warning! The total number of external script files on this page is 9, consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Ideally you should have one (or even embed scripts for high-traffic pages) on your pages. 

But anyway, lets say that the page loads and I'm keen to press on with my brochure request.  The navigation has been tucked down in the bottom left hand corner but with a bold heart I click on the right link and come to a REALLY important page.  OK, it's had a lick of paint in the up-date but the page looks awkward, dull and out of keeping with the home page.  It's a few check boxes - where's the passion, the dream of owning a new car - Volkswagen show you pictures of cars - how nice is that?!

Worst of all Ford insists on restricting it's "soon to be customers" to only 2 brochure requests.  Given that the Ford car portfolio often has 3 or 4 cars that overlap a persons needs this has to be a mindless barrier to purchase.  Not only that, we now come face to face with the 1 million pound error message (follow the link to my prevoius post with all the maths) 

So, there we have it - site with a fantastic new home page and vritually no money invested in the key checkout processes that turn visitors into prospects.

So to Avinash's "horrible landing pages for even the simplest of keyword searches and their paid search ads" we can now add "horrible check-out processes".  With customers so thin on the ground shouldn't we all be trying to convert the faintest of nibbles on our site into qualified leads?

Been working with a client this week on proposition building - trying to "distil the product down to its core proposition".  It reminded me of the brilliant quote from Dilbert (Scott Adams) and how many companies struggle with this...

Value Proposition:  

A long, awkward sentence that demonstrates management's inability to think clearly

Looking around the UK marketplace it seems retailers are falling back on slashed prices as their only proposition as they try and soak up the small amounts of cash in circulation.  Sorry to be banging on about retailers right now but they seem to be throwing up a rich seam of email marketing experiences - some good, some bad.

It worked when Howies did it in an "out of character way"...their 20% proposition was a surprise because this is not what they normally do.

Great Little Trading company just sound a little bit desperate and in too much of a me-too way, (In My Humble Opinion)...  

Boden are not shy in leading on price...all their on-line propostitions start with at least 10% off.  However, last week Boden showed a glimpse of quick thinking and quick actions to mask the recent reduction in Value Added Tax from 17.5% to 15%.  It's done with a light touch and a patriotic heart... 

So maybe the companies that will survive will be those most able to respond to opportunities, as we have seen this week with the Howies case study.  Aside from the "biggest single day in Howies history" quote I want to share something else with you.  Our man at Howies also said to me... 

So yeah, it went really well.. and I think the success made us realise we have to be a lot smarter and a lot faster about marketing in the future. Especially in the current climate.

Meanwhile I was chatting to another retailer, this time a big traditional retailer, about being quick off the mark.  He wanted them to go with an email campaign the other day -  a swift, tactical response to market conditions.  But no, it was all too much for them.  (Reminded me when I asked a UK high street bank team how fast they could get an email out the door...the response was "6 weeks")  Howies said in their email to their customers...

We didn't need a board meeting, we didn't need to get the idea signed off by loads of departments. We didn't even have to get the calculator out. We just decided whilst we were walking over the bridge to work. 

Maybe that's the difference between success and failure.  Not just having the ideas, but having the process efficiency and corporate mindset to "just do it".  So the challenge for 2009 is to create a way of working that allows you to dream up great propositions and also execute them swiftly.  And in the next post I'll outline 10 ways to speed up the time taken from "thinking" to "doing"...which may just keep your company afloat in 2009!