Private (Email) Lessons

June 4th, 2009 Chris

As I’ve mentioned on many occasions, what works and what doesn’t is often a complete mystery when it comes to on-line marketing. I’m sure it has to do with how our brains are wired and we respond to one stimulus versus another.

The best that I (and most on-line marketers) can prescribe is to do these three things: 1. Test, 2. Test, 3. Test some more. That is the best (and often only) way to figure out how to optimize your marketing efforts. And of course steal ideas of people that have done the testing for you!

So this week I thought I’d share a couple of my lessons learned from recent email marketing testing…

Lesson #1 - Subject Line

I hate to actually share this since the more people that do this, the less effective it will be… We did an experiment where we put the source of the email on the subject line of our newsletter blast. You’ve probably seen a few in your inbox like this.

Specifically, we tested Subject: [Engage] Engaging Ideas versus Subject: Engaging Ideas.

Turns out that by putting the [Your Company Name] in the subject line, we found open rates increased by over 5%.

I can rationalize these results with my own observations that emails with this consistent subject start stand-out from the other clutter in your inbox. And as users become more used to seeing it from you, they are more likely to automatically open them.

Of course the downside is that if you spam your users to much, they are also more likely to automatically ignore your emails with this method. So, as always, always try to give your readers something valuable every time you hit them…

Lesson #2 - Embedded Links

Virtually every call to action with email marketing involves a user clicking on a link. And of course we always try to make it look pretty by having the actual link URL behind the scenes. It makes the email easier to read and allows a more directive call to action - ex. Click here now!

But what about folks that have been programmed to not click on links in emails due to security concerns? What about those people that have screwed up their MIME settings and when they click, it just opens a browser but doesn’t go to the specified URL (my browser was like that for two months recently…)?

What we’ve started to do is include both the embedded link as well as an explicit statement of what address to go to. Here’s a recent example:

The results: we receive about 10% of the actions from people that copy and paste the link in their browser versus those that simply click the embedded link. That’s 10% of folks that we wouldn’t get otherwise.

Well, that’s it for today. More testing to follow…

Got some of your own test data - leave a comment and share!

C.

Posted in E-mail, Marketing | No Comments »

Slipstream Dev Process

May 27th, 2009 Chris

I was visiting a friend of mine posted to NATO in Brussels over the last week (OK, visited for two days and went to Paris with Colleen for the rest). He was lamenting the use of PowerPoint in his job and I had to agree. In my former corporate life, PowerPoint was the way of communicating. Didn’t matter how complex the issue - it would be boiled down to a few bullets on a chart.

There is a very cool design guy my friend Eric introduced me to, named Edward Tufte. He wrote a great book called The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, making the argument that the typical charts only serve to weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.

However, I did find a new use for PowerPoint in a development process we’re using for the stream-lined MicroBiz Development Process (MDP - a new acronym!). Why a new development process? Well - I guess the long and short of it is that the traditional development process I’m used to is way too slow and expensive.

I’m used to writing long, gory specifications, complete with personas, etc… and handing it off to a development team for detailed functional specs, design specs, UI specs, QA plans, etc… Those are great if you can have millions to spend and 6-9 months. I have neither…

Instead, with the MDP (wat dat? oh yeah…), the goal is to compress these activities by leveraging a very important factor - a detailed and clear picture of what the application will do in the mind of the “Product Manager” (aka me).

Traditionally, I’m used to letting the gory details of the application get sorted out by the experts as part of the discovery and specification process. If we want to compress that, it means that I have to have a very clear picture of what the app will do and how it will do it. That cuts out a bunch of steps although still leaves the risk that one develops something that then blows up capabilities or the schedule or the cost or all three…

So what did I do specifically? For our app, I create two documents… 1. A high level specification complete with a list of functions that the app has to do that and the role of the people who do them. This is pretty much like a standard requirements document except I focused on the stuff that was behind the covers (performance, scalability, security, etc…).

2. The second thing I did was what really made this project fly… It was to dust off PowerPoint and used it to create a UI wireframe. That is, to go through and show the various screens that the app presents. In my case, I had one section for the end user and one for system administrators.

It was an incredibly effective but laborious process. Each screen was mapped out including what info would be presented and what actions the user could perform. Essentially it was compressing the requirements spec and UI design into one document. Along the way, it forced me to examine every aspect of functionality - essentially reducing each user interaction to a series of inputs, a series of processes, then a series of outputs.

Was this the final UI design - nope. That the dev experts can work. But what it clearly showed is what the application needed to do and the wireframe was close enough to the UI design that it was a relatively straightforward transition.

But coming up with the wireframe slides was a painful process  as it required a very crisp view of what the app was to do. It took me at least five run-throughs till I was happy with the 80-slide result.

Then the real payoff occurred. The MDP relies on rapid prototyping. That is, quickly implementing somewhat rough hunks of functionality for review and testing. With the Powerpoint wireframes, the dev team was able to crank out the first half of the app (ie. about 50% of the functionality) in only three weeks. And they’ll have the whole thing ready for alpha in another three weeks.

So six weeks from delivery of these documents to a fully functional alpha… Pretty cool. That, combined with some intensive testing by the Quality Assurance team (aka me), and we’re developing this application faster than I would have ever guessed was possible.

Now, will we hit speed bumps that impact our cost and time and effort? Absolutely - that is to be expected when moving so fast.

Is it still an order of magnitude more efficient for us than the traditional large company dev process? Absolutely.

We’ll see how it goes - only two months till beta and four months till commercial release. What could go wrong? (oh yeah - it’s software…).

C.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Hired Guns

May 14th, 2009 Chris

As I said last week, I’m getting back into software. And to answer the question I got from several of you, I’m not yet disclosing what it is going to do. We’re still a few months away from launch and I don’t want to tip any potential competitors…

One of the biggest fears I had in getting into all of this was the tremendous investment I feared would be required to actually develop the code. I came from the world of big enterprise software where development is slow and expensive.

Not that the developers weren’t fantastic - they were talented and opinionated, very opinionated It’s just that the paradigm was different. Big software releases happened every year or two, had tons of new features, had to run on multiple platforms and had to be bulletproof.

So when I first developed the concept on the app we’re developing, I assumed that it was going to cost a lot to build - originally I assumed at least $50k - $100k. What I soon discovered gave me the encouragement and cash to go ahead with the project…

Two key aspects of our project substantially reduced the development cost:

1. Software as a Service. We wanted to build this app as a service versus the old fashioned download-install-run model. That meant no multiple platform requirements, no installer, etc… All the stuff that adds tremendous cost without value for the customer.

2. Built in Product Manager. We were not looking for a full-service development house that had project managers and extra layers of overhead. I wanted the type of relationship I was used to: me as the product manager and our hired development guns as the development team. That eliminates a lot of overhead cost.

So I did up my specification (more on that in a later post) and went out to collect a couple of bids… And was blown away by how little this was going to cost!

I should note, that I didn’t go off-shore as I wanted to see the white’s of the team’s eyes. I wanted to sit down over a beer and make sure we all understood the requirements. I want to sit down over a coffee and make sure that the schedule is one I can count on. I was worried that remote development would add a bunch of barriers to communication that would counter-act any cost benefits.

In the end, I found a great team right here in Ottawa who gave me an aggressive but credible bid. And we’re off to the races.

Of course, this is software development so schedule and requirements churn is to be anticipated. But because I’ve got the right team and the right price - I know we’ll get there in the end.

In fact, this model is quite liberating. With the barrier to develop so low, the consequences of failure (from a sunk cost perspective) is also quite low. Which means that if one project doesn’t succeed for one reason or another, you can always try again with your next great idea…

Although that won’t be the case for us - this one’s a winner!

C.

Posted in Financial, Technology | No Comments »

Revenge of the Nerd

May 6th, 2009 Chris

Over a pint (quelle shock) with a buddy yesterday, I was bugged about my lam-mo blog posting frequency of late. And the jab was well deserved. I have been very lame…

I could justify it by saying that we’ve been very busy: our Powerhouse Event was last week (with double the attendees of last year!) and Colleen’s new book is hitting the book stores (go to honestysells.com, now!).

Those items (listed above purely for promotional purposes) have taken a lot of our time but the real exciting news is that we’ve decided that I get to be a nerd again… That’s right, we’re getting into the software business.

I have to be honest: I love the software product business. But based on my experience at my former employer, I thought that it was mutually exclusive with the lifestyle that Colleen and I have grown to love. Too much money was required to launch a product, too much effort was required to market and sell, etc…

But then I started to run into folks that were launching software solutions as micro-businesses and I was inspired. Development could be done inexpensively. Sales and marketing could be done cheaply yet effectively. The big difference is the goal: no desire to go public and make tons and tons of cash. Instead the goal is to launch a product that does relatively well, provides a revenue stream and allows for the continued   lifestyle.

So, Colleen and I agreed on an area where a software solution could add tremendous value to our clients and we kicked off the project! But to do so, we agreed on a few core tenants:

1. Self Funded.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single person say, I love my VCs… We don’t want to deal with the stress of all that so the first criteria is that we be able to develop, launch and grow the product only with funds that we generate in the business. So no investors - we own it all.

Now it does help that our business is currently throwing off a bit of profit so we don’t have to borrow any from the bank on the ol’ Line of Credit at this point. But if some point we have to, that’s OK. As long as we don’t get ourselves into the position that any debt on the product could take down the company.

Does that mean the product won’t grow as quickly and we’ll not generate as much revenue. Absolutely! But that is the trade-off to keep it ours…

2. Lifestyle Preservation

I am addicted to our lifestyle. The not shaving or wearing pants on most days. The three months in Miami. The lack of PowerPoint in my life. And this project cannot change that.

So, we will need to do things virtually - working with contract developers. Getting sales and marketing help without hiring. Etc…

3. Complementary to the Business

At the end of the day, we need the product to be complementary to the business. That’s how we get a multiplier effect. We’ve got over 10K people in our database which is an amazing starting point to up-sell and cross-sell. And it means we can leverage Colleen’s high visibility in the market to promote this as part of our overall portfolio of services.

So in April, we pulled the trigger and began development. And we’re moving fast, aiming for commercial release in the fall.

I know there are a thousand things I’ve not thought about and will learn by trial and error… And I’ll make sure I share them all on the blog. Hopefully, together we’ll confirm that you don’t have to be a big, VC-backed company to successfully launch a technology product…

Next week: lessons learned in getting stuff developed…

Thanks, C.

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

The Bank (Screw) Job

April 8th, 2009 Chris

It has been a crazy last couple of weeks here in South Beach. We’re coming to the end of our 3 months here and have loved it so much that we’ve been trying to buy a little place so that we can have our own pad and won’t have to pay rent. I say trying to buy because despite the one zillion places available including a host of foreclosure properties, we have failed to close.

Why you ask? Surely, there are many motivated sellers given the glut of properties and the hard-asset-starved financial institutions sitting on these worthless mortgages. Surely, in such a buyers market, those with the most to gain from the sale (ie. the banks) would be bending over backwards to move these properties.

Well, sadly, the only ones bending over are the buyers…

In the last two weeks, we have tried to buy three foreclosure properties and each time have been met with  unresponsiveness and a general screw-you attitude.

You’d think that with a mountain of these condos, the banks would go the extra mile to provide the buyer with information to ensure there were no objections in moving the sale forward. Instead the bankers are radio silent. Ask a question and you get crickets chirping… Request to see a piece of information and you hear the echo of your own voice.

There is no question that in this process, you are marching to the bankers’ drum-beat. I remember in the military there was an expression, hurry up and wait. Well this is alive and well in the real-estate market here. Submit a bid and you hear nothing for days and days (and days). Then, all of a sudden, you have hours to provide some info or respond to a request for a new bid. Ask any questions about the process, again with the crickets.
Finally, you really are left with the impression that you are being screwed. Submit your bid and several days later, you’re told that you have only a few hours to submit your best and final bid with no indication of what the bidding was currently at. Then a few days later, another request to submit your final best and final bid. And then you never hear anything again…

One of the big horror stories was a place we were bidding on that had been stripped down to the studs. Not a big deal - for the right price you can remodel just the way you like. The contract said you were buying it “as-is” and the seller had no knowledge of anything bad (mold, asbestos, etc…). Well, I did a little digging with the condo board and it turns out that when the previous owner was booted out by the bank, he turned on the hot water tap and left. Fast forward several days later - the mold was  bad, the drywall was black from floor to ceiling. So the entire Sargeant Shultz (I know nothing!) routine was BS. Oh yeah, and there’s a huge bill for the clean-up that the buyer will have to foot.

So we leave in a few days without a property and a thorough bad taste in our mouth from the whole experience. And with the knowledge that next year there will still be lots of properties ’cause the way the banks operate, they won’t be selling many.

What the heck does this have to do with a microbusiness? Not much - but it did remind me that I need to hug our banker when I get back to Ottawa. We have the world’s best business banking rep (Barb) at the Royal Bank. She’s responsive and always is acting in our best interest. If you don’t have a great banker, then switch. There are great ones out there…

C.

Posted in General | No Comments »

More Pretty…

March 18th, 2009 Chris

Last week I went to a conference for users of the CRM package we use here at Engage. It’s called Infusion and in the last couple of years it gathered a base of over 2500 small businesses.

I say CRM but it’s really much more and provided an integrated platform for our marketing, sales, ecommerce, etc… And the conference was fantastic with lots of great info on Internet marketing (using their tool of course…).

I was pretty excited by the almost 100% improvement in our Newsletter landing page conversion rates as I mentioned last week. Then, at this conference, I got even more ideas of how to improve it.

So off to work I went and made the following changes:

Specifically, as you see above, we did two things:

1. We moved the sign-up box to the top on the right so that it was above the fold. That is, it could be seen without scrolling down. We also put a red box around it to make sure it stands out.

2. We put the benefits on a coloured background to make them stand out.

The other thing you’ll notice is that the page isn’t particularly pretty, just more pretty than it used to be. You are witnessing the extreme limits of my graphic design capability. But it’s pretty to the user in that it gets their attention and gets them to focus on the key benefits to them as well as their call to action. Even if it’s not that slick graphics-wise.

OK - so what are the results… Well, according to Google the new page is converting 40% more than the previous revision (which was performing 100% better than the original).

All pretty simple changes to make the page, well, more pretty.

The other lesson here is to continue to come up with variations, test and measure the results. It’s amazing what an hour invested here or there on a little experimentation can do for your results.

C.

Posted in Web Site | No Comments »

Pretty Persuation

March 11th, 2009 Chris

Like many micro-businesses, we use the Internet to add to our prospect base - basically getting people to come to our site through various mechanisms and sign up for our newsletter. Whether it be a referral from a partner, someone reading one of Colleen’s articles or Google Adwords - we take advantage of their visit to try and get them more engaged with the business.

We do this by offering them a free newsletter subscription and a ten day eCourse. That is, ten emails in ten days, each with a great sales tip. All they do is give us their name and email address and we’re off to the races.

The page where we make this sweet offer is often referred to as a squeeze page in that we are trying to squeeze their interactivity down to a specific call to action (and only that call to action). In our case - it’s that Newsletter and eCourse sign-up.

As you may suspect, our goal is to maximize the number of folks that sign-up and so we look at the conversion rate - the percentage of those that visit the page that do indeed sign-up.

And figuring that out is half art and half science. I say half art as, often, the stuff that influences visitors to sign-up is not intuitive. It’s tied to psychology and what motivates us to take action. And it is generally to complicated for me to figure out. That’s where the science comes in.

Just like advertizers that conduct all sorts of market testing, the key to maximizing the conversion rate of a squeeze page is trying different approaches and measuring the results. For example, one thing that we’ve found that improves conversion rates is providing more graphical cues on the page. Here’s an example…

We took that squeeze page for sign-ups and added the following graphics:

To measure the actual impact, a great tool is provided with Google Adwords (although only measuring traffic that comes from Adwords - still very useful). It allows you to measure the effectiveness of different versions of your squeeze pages. It does so by randomly sending Adword clickers to one of your pages and keeping track of the conversion rates of each.

So what did the extra graphics do on the page conversion rate. Lets compare the original page (Original) with the new one (Variation 1):

As you can see, adding the graphics almost doubled the conversion rate from 8% to 16%! That ultimately translates is a halving of customer acquisition costs and doubling of sales! All by adding some graphics…

It’s worth taking a look at where you are asking customers to make decisions on your web site and asking yourself, is it pretty? And then test the heck out of it…

C.

Posted in Marketing, Web, Web Site | 2 Comments »

Dead Right

March 4th, 2009 Chris

In my life in the corporate world, we were very sensitive of the competition. Fighting for scarce customer resources meant that we had be very aggressive at battling those that were trying to eat our lunch.

Often, the fervor spilled over to pretty-over-the-top dissing of the competition. I specifically remember putting up pictures of competitive CEOs and superposed shots of our own management team punching them in their respective heads. It got the sales team rev’ed up and more confident to go do battle.

Despite the energy spent bad-mouthing them, one thing was always true: we never dismissed the competition. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent is critical to beating them. And it requires the acknowledgement that the competition is doing somethings better than you.

While admitting that you were being beaten on a particular front was a little tough on the ego, it was critical to understanding what lessons you could borrow from them and what counter moves you could mount. The alternative was to live in a self-absorbed fantasy land - one in which business continues to suffer while you tell yourself that you’re the best… Not good.

That’s why I was shocked late last week by the response to one of our marketing pieces. An email we sent out discussed the need to be an effective presenter/speaker as a sales professional and referenced Obama’s recent visit to Canada. Specifically, it cited his ability to inspire and motivate - a fact that anyone objectively must concede he’s good at, regardless of your politics.

Well, some of the response was the most viceral I’ve seen in my life. Here are two examples:

 I believe you should keep your political opinions to yourself as this so-called president is destroying the America we once new. If successful, he will eliminate any motivation to be self sufficient and take risks to become successful. He’s ordering us to redistribute our wealth to those who are irresponsible. He will destroy our health care system with rationed health care. I am really tired of seeing this usurp in the news and watching the stock market tumble every time he speaks. I would say he is far from being inspirational! He is a sociopath, terrorist, liar, and agitator. Furthermore, I compare the likes of him to the anti-Christ! His loyalty is not to the United States but to his home country. I am not alone; 20 states are currently in the process of using their sovereignty to resist the federal government’s efforts to spend this Country into oblivion.

and…

You, ma’am, must be on some serious hallucinogenic drugs. Obama is burying our grandchildren’s generation in debt, with his “inspiration” and ‘motivation”. You Canadians may embrace socialist tenets, but America, even as bad as our economy is now, is a great capitalist-based country. For instance, why do you think your countrymen come to the US for state of the art health care? Because our capitalist innovations keep or medicine at the worlds forefront. Please don’t use the Obama inspires and motivates analogy with me – he just taxes and spends.

Now, Colleen is always respectful of such responses and politely responds that we, as business professionals, need to take lessons from the strengths of others, even if we don’t like them or their business. And typically those that write these emails don’t respond.

Let me, with a bit more force, reiterate Colleen’s point:

• Oh, extreme right-wing reader, let me point out that there is much to be learned from Obama, even if you don’t like his politics. Especially as he just kicked your party’s ass all over the country. Surely in his record fund raising (from those that make much less than the average republican supporter), record crowds, record public approval ratings, etc… you may find a lesson that your party could use to be more successful in the next election.
• “Anti-Christ”. Are you joking? It is pretty sad when you refuse to believe that the competition has any strengths and, instead, attributes any success to the work of Satan. Good grief.

For clarity, my political beliefs actually do not align with Obama and that’s OK. I can look at what he does well and think - wow, we could learn something.

And - as a complete tangent and in a humble defence of Canada’s health care system (and that used by every country in the industrialized world, apart from the US) - our system is based on the believe that everyone has the right to medical care, not just those that can pay for it. To fear-monger about such a system is just that - fear mongering… Here are a few stats for your consideration:

• Canadians live longer than Americans. That includes the average for white, affluent Americans (to counter an argument made in very bad taste by a particular TV pundit).
• American infant mortality is twice that of Canada.
• Per capita we spend 1/2 as much on health care than in the US  (combined public/private).

OK - sorry, I guess that was a bit of a rant. But to reiterate, politics is not very different than business. And in business, we study our competitors to learn their strengths so we can copy and counter them, and we learn their weaknesses so we can capitalize on them.

As an old boss of mine used to say to me: you can be right or you can be dead right. By being arrogant and not believing your competition has any strengths you can learn from, you’ll be dead right - and you’ll be broke.

C.

Posted in General, Marketing | 1 Comment »