Scorsese Called – He Wants In!

June 26th, 2008 Chris

Video is hot. Every where I turn, we see people using video to make a personal connection on the web. Video of you, video of your customers, video of you products, etc… It really helps squeeze page conversion rates.

So, off I went to film some video of Colleen for our web site. Given I’ve never so much as held a video camera I did the logical thing and got a reference to a local videographer who could shoot 3 to 5 minutes for our web site. And then I got the quote.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m extremely cheap. As most micro businesses, a penny saved is literally a penny earned.

The quote: $2K for 3 minutes of video. Was Martin Scorsese directing or something? Screw that!

And then I realized, it’s not about the best quality video, shot with the best lighting by a video master. It’s putting a real face behind the name of you and your customers. If it’s good enough for YouTube – it’s good enough for you.

So I dug up a video camera Colleen bought six years ago, took it to the office and shot Colleen doing her thing. It looked great! Or at least, good enough!

There is no reason to pay for top quality video production for a micro business. Your prospects won’t wait hours for HD video to download and that’s missing the point anyways. It’s about building a connection between you and your prospects – they just need to put a face to a name.

Like the guy from ING says – save your money.

Here are some cool video tools that I’ve used or have had recommended to me:

• Video Camera. A friend of mine pointed me to the Flip video camera. It’s a super cool, very portable camera that produces great quality video for the web. It connects right into your computer for easy upload. It’s tiny so it’s not a pain to take with you on road. Best idea ever from this same friend: bring it with you if you are visiting customers and get a video testimonial while you are there! For other great ideas like this, visit his blog – wait, he doesn’t have one (sorry – I had to bug him about that).
• Movie Editing. A would love to use Adobe Premiere but I don’t have time to learn it or the appetite to buy it. I actually use Microsoft Movie Maker to cut up raw footage. If you just want to splice and trim clips, it works really well and it’s included with Windows. OK – all you Mac users, I don’t want to hear about all your super editing tools on your cool computer, blah, blah, blah. Just send me money so I can afford to buy one.
• Format Conversion. We use Adobe Dreamweaver for our web content and it has some great built in scripts for Flash Video. The only problem is usually the video from your camera will be in avi or wmv. There is a great little tool called SUPER that is great at converting to and from different file formats – and it’s free.
• Advanced Editing & File Conversion. I have played a fair bit Adobe After Effects. I does even more file conversion stuff but it’s got a much steeper learning curve. However, if you want to do green screen video – it’s a must. They have a great little guide to doing it – I tried it and it works great. By the way, you can buy a roll of green paper at your local photographic equipment store for around $50 – works great for body and head video. If you want to do full body (ie. with the feet) you’ll probably have to invest in a green curtain (mucho more).

There you go. There is no excuse not to have video on your site!

C.

P. S. The one exception I can see about compromising on video quality is when you are actually showing your product. I suspect you’d want that to be very crisp and clean. Don’t say “but I’m my product” – I’m talking about cars, electronics, whatever physical widget you’re selling…

P. S. S. If you want to see how we have been using video, you can check out: www.engageselling.com/workshop.

Posted in Web, Web Site | No Comments »

Fall In Love with Your Inner Plagiarist

June 24th, 2008 Chris

A friend of mine was telling me the tale of a marketing communication person that, faced with a tight deadline (the most charitable rationale ascribed) to produce some web copy, liberally borrowed from a competitor. Of course, there was much a do about this: company can’t plagiarize…blah, blah blah. I hoisted my beer and likewise lampooned the poor individual.

Fast forward a few months and – low and behold – I have become an unabashed, recidivist plagiarist. While this probably sounds worse than it is (especially if you try to say it out loud three times fast), it still is a pretty big change for me. I come from an environment where thought typically needed to be original and marketing product had do be developed from scratch. The result was a lot of hunched backs and banging keyboards as new prose was developed for each marketing piece in the business.

I’m not saying that’s bad – nothing would be worse than having a CxO prospect get it in their head that a technology company rips off IP from another – even if it is just the marketing stuff. So much for thought leadership. But when it’s just you against the world – that just doesn’t seem as important.

Case in point, we do a fair bit of email marketing (ad passim, ad nauseum) and we’ve been having pretty good results to date. Then, the other day an email from a guy named Dan Kennedy arrived. He sells marketing systems and has a pretty amazing track record at writing copy that sells, a lot. Let’s just say his hobby is horse racing (owning, not betting).

What’s interesting is that this email really didn’t impress me. It wasn’t very well formatted and was pretty aggressive in it’s language – really challenging the reader to take action. But this guy is a wizard so I said what the heck. I took it, changed a few words to fit to our business and let ‘er fly.

Now, here is my rationalization on why it’s OK:

1. We don’t compete with Dan Kennedy guy so we’re not really hurting him.
2. He’ll never find out (OK – that one is lame)
3. We’ve attended a conference hosted by him where he has encouraged folks to apply his work.

So, I think he’d be OK with it. I’ve discussed this with a few other micro business owners and discovered that I was a plagiarism light-weight. People were borrowing whole marketing campaigns, verbatim from other’s who have had success. Again, in different markets so as to not be completely egregious.

This is really part of a broader principle that is key for micro business owners: success leaves tracks. When your small team is continually faced with a mountain of projects to get done to sell more – why reinvent the wheel. You can just look across the fence and see what people in related industries are doing to be successful. What are your neighbors doing:

• What does their web site look like?
• What is the order process for their product?
• What is the wording on their google ads?
• What suppliers do they use?
• What do their sales letters look like?
• How is their store laid out?
• etc…

Remember – this is not necessarily the same as gathering competitive intelligence. It’s about finding people in similar businesses and discovering what they’ve done to be successful. Then blatantly copying them.

Oh yeah – the plagiarized email I sent. It sold three times as much as the best one I’ve ever done from scratch.

C.

P. S. Post a comment or send me a note and I’ll forward you that email…

Posted in E-mail, General, Marketing | 4 Comments »

Thank You and Come Again

June 19th, 2008 Chris

As I mentioned in my last post, we’ve spent this week at our marketing group meeting. Lots of good ideas and I have to admit, once and a while its completely embarrassing. Not that the attendees aren’t supportive and genuinely trying to help each other. It’s just when you get advice that makes you realize how daft you are not to have thought about it.

One point that really struck me this week is the opportunity we’ve been missing each time a prospect or customer has an interaction with us. Basically, the principle is that every time you have an opportunity to sell something – do it!

What specifically we’d been missing is a sales opportunity when you are thanking a prospect or customer for a sign-up or purchase. For example, when a customer that signs up for our newsletter, we automatically send them to a thank-you web page confirming the details. What we hadn’t been doing is using that opportunity to try to tell them about a purchase offer on that same purchase web page.

Another example is for events. We used an attendee info follow-up web page after someone registers for our Powerhouse Event. It was great for providing logistic details but what we should also be doing is offering a discount if they sign-up a colleague.

On our squeeze pages (the pages that someone goes to after clicking on an offer where we try to get them to sign-up or buy), we even added a “No Thanks” link just below our order button. The “No Thanks” sends them to another page where they get a free offer to join our newsletter. We’ve done that recently and had great conversion for folks in joining our newsletter where in the past they’d just be gone…

The long and short is that many folks forget to take advantage of a responsive customer – that is a customer demonstrating that they will respond to your offer. Why not give them an opportunity to be even more responsive when you thank them?

So instead of “Thank You and Come Again” try “Would you like fries with that shake?”.

C .

Posted in E-mail, Marketing | No Comments »

Taking a Buzz Saw to the Trees (Figuratively)

June 17th, 2008 Chris

I have a laundry list of issues that make me dangerous in our business. One of the top ones is that I have strong focus on execution. While on the surface that can be good, it does represent a major risk. I get so focused on the closed loop of the plan, execute, measure and evolve process, that I sometimes miss the ideas out of left field that can represent real break-throughs in the business.

In a bigger company this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some folks are head’s down get ‘er done people and some are more strategic planners. They complement each other.

In a micro business, there just aren’t that many of you. So you can’t afford to be one or the other. If you keep your head down and focus on execution, you’ll miss major opportunities to learn from what others are doing and those crazy ideas that make growth go non-linear.

So what’s the best way to take back out of the forest and explore some new ideas? I find the best way is to get together with others in small businesses – out of the office. Not that it was easy for me to do this…

Colleen, however, is great at it. She is part of a marketing group targeting entrepreneurs called Glazer-Kennedy (www.dankennedy.com). When she first joined, I had a major fit because it was expensive to join (I’m also a cheap bastard). But I’m now a convert.

It’s not necessarily that everything I hear is directly applicable to our business or even that I agree with evertyhing – but it does force me to think outside the box. I find that even 1-2 days out of the office, listening to others talking about stuff that does and doesn’t work leaves us with pages of ideas for Colleen and I to try.

Even just one or two of the things we learn make major differences in our business. A couple of months ago, it was a tip for our web site that more than doubled our newsletter sign-ups. This time, we’ve got a number of suggestions for making sure that members in our coaching program understand the benefits of upgrading to high levels. Just one or two ideas more than pay for the investment to be part of the group and are critical to getting our revenue to ramp higher.

But you don’t necessarily need to go and spend money and join a group. I also have a group of friends who get together and brain-storm on each other’s businesses over breakfast (or occasionally a beer). I believe this concept is called masterminding but I refuse to refer to it as such as I think it’s the goofiest name I’ve ever heard… But the result is the same – one or two great ideas that emerge that could take our business to the next level.

If you’re like me and can get trapped in execution mode, you need to force yourself to take a step back at least once every 3 – 6 months and expose yourself to other perspectives. That fresh look could make the difference between micro business success and failure.

C.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Don’t Cross the Border

June 12th, 2008 Chris

Every once and a while (not as often as I should), I do a little split testing of our solicitation (i.e. sales) emails. I make two versions and send one to respective halves of our database. Because of the marketing tool we use, we can track open and click rates. Ideally, this shows us what works better.

I’m always amazed at how little tweaks can make significant differences in open and click rates. One tweak that we’ve had a debate on was the use of borders in email communication. That is, whether to send emails with free-flow text (text-wrap taken care of by the email client) versus setting a specific width to the text.

The former tends to look more personal – something that we’d do if we were writing one-to-one. The later looks more professional but is more obviously a mass mailing. Colleen was leaning to the former as she is fantastic at adding personality to communication. I was leaning to the border version as I am more anal about look and feel. So we put it to the test!

We drafted two versions of a sales email: one had free flow HTML text and one had a nice border to constrain the width to about 650 pixels. The text itself, including all formatting (line spacing, para spacing, bolds, italic, etc…) was identical. We sent each one to 3500+ recipients and waited for the results.

The difference was dramatic. Click through rates – that is, the number of people that opened and clicked through to look at our web page where our product could be ordered – varyied significantly with one being 240% of the other.

And the winner? Borders rule. Keeping our email text within a border resulted in 140% more clicks to our web page than without.

I spent the next two hours redoing all our campaign emails to make sure they had borders. I also savoured one of the very few times where I’ve been right versus Colleen.

I typically reserve the “Geek” piece for technology issues but I have to expand on a math point. Every since my former CFO Dave Wagner corrected me, I’ve become a bit of a zealot on this point. It’s about calculating how much “more” something is versus something else.

In the click-through-rate calculations above, I stated that the rates with borders were 240% of those emails without. In other words, the number of click-throughs with borders, divided by the number of click-throughs without borders was equal to 2.4, or 240%.

This does not mean that the border-equipped emails performed 240% better or got 240% more clicks – it means that they were 240% of the non-border email clicks.

For a calculation of how much better or how many more there were, you need to take off 100%. So for example, if you have 100 apples and 200 oranges, you have 200% (200/100) as many oranges as you do have apples. But you only have 100% (200% – 100%) more oranges than apples.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve been doing this, it’s a common gotcha. Dave mentioned that even some CEOs have been known to do it…

C.

Posted in E-mail | 1 Comment »

It’s Important to be Regular

June 10th, 2008 Chris

When I was at Entrust, we started the blog thing. It was an pretty much a complete flop. Why? It’s not that I wasn’t passionate about the topic (OK – it was Internet security but I am a geek). It’s not that I was completely unknown in the industry. It’s that I was lam-mo with respect to posting.

I would typically post with a flurry – at least relative to my droughts which often lasted for a few weeks. So even with pull technologies like RSS readers that make it easy to go and get articles, I didn’t do it regularly and it never took off.

In our current business, our model is such that we first establish communication with prospects via a regular newsletter. We don’t have a sales force so we only make money when we sell to that base – that means it’s critical to be regular.

Why? Database atrophy. For every month that goes by without connecting to your base, you lose 10%. I’ll say it again – every month that you don’t touch your database, you lose 10% of those prospects. That’s a disaster.

I’ll talk about just how frequent is frequent enough – without being a pain, but it also pays to be consistent. Sending an email twice one week, then none for two weeks, then one email, etc… leads to prospects not having any expectation on when they will be hearing from you and they definitely won’t go looking.

As an example, we recently switched our newsletter from twice a month to every two weeks. Believe it or not, our open rates went up. The twice a month thing meant that it was always hard to predict when the newsletter would arrive – just like you always have to check the calendar if you are paid twice a month (when is the 15th, does it fall on a weekend, etc…). Once every two weeks is much more predictable – if it didn’t arrive last week, it will arrive this week!

So, are you touching your base regularly or are they atrophying?

C.

P. S. I’m sure there is some irony in this topic with respect to this blog. For this reason, I’ve made the commitment now to post regularly – every Tuesday and Thursday – versus the hap-hazard ways of my past. If you have a blog, you’re really supposed to blog every day but I know myself well enough to know I won’t. Remember if it starts with a “T” – come learn with me (barf…).

Posted in Marketing | No Comments »

Fugly is Beautiful

June 5th, 2008 Chris

As I’ve mentioned before, I think that ugly looking, unprofessional communication hurts any business – especially a micro business fighting for credibility against bigger fish. However, the other day, I stumbled accross another effect – how being fugly can actually help business!

I was sending out an email from Colleen to the base, trying to upsell some members in one of our programs. It was a great offer and the email looked good. Colleen was out so I hit the send button.

To my horror, I found that in getting the email out, I had forgot to include the proper “from” address. Instead of Colleen’s, I had included mine. So, imagine this big blast going out with a very important (i.e. revenue generating) objective – all screwed up ’cause it arrives with a “from” address that no one has seen before. Not only did this risk the opportunity to generate some more dollars, it also risked annoying or confusing receipients to the point of being thrown into the “junk senders” abyss.

What did we do? Well, we tried to rescue the situation with a quick follow up email. It went exactly like this:

Oops! I’m sorry – I asked Chris to hit the send on this as I had to leave the office but he forgot to put in the correct “from” address. Guess who’s doing the dishes tonight?
Thanks for your understanding, Colleen.

That follow-up “Oops” email got over three times the response rate of our normal sales emails. We were surprised and definitely pleased. It reinforced an effect we’ve seen a few times now: the importance of personality.

The “oops” email we sent wasn’t pretty – in fact the whole thing was kinda fugly. But it was interesting, it was honest and highlighted that Colleen and I are real individuals. People like to buy from “real” people – people with personalities that they can have a relationship with.

And as a micro business, this is also a key tool against larger competitors. They are too big to have a personality. Who is the personality behind IBM, GM, Walmart, etc… Some try (think Wendy’s Dave and that Dyson vacuum guy) but the vast majority don’t. It’s pretty easy to match bigger competitors’ polish these days, but it’s hard for them to match your personality.

So, it’s important not to be ugly but it’s equally important not to sacrifice personality in your customer communication. Beautiful but boring is a killer. Highlighting your personality is what will build a relationship with your customers for on-going success.

Your challenge: Read your last few pieces of customer communication. Do they have personality?

C.

Posted in E-mail, Marketing | 1 Comment »

That’s Ugly

June 3rd, 2008 Chris

We use a piece of software called Infusion CRM in our business. It’s a real jackknife of tools that does everything from contact management to marketing campaigns to order management, etc… It’s generally very good. However, I recently got into a bit of a scrap over an issue with their software.

I’d like to think that I have a pretty realistic expectation about software quality and dealing with the inevitable bugs. Over the year we’ve been using it, the software has performed very well even though it has had its fair share of bugs. Most were treated with the right level of severity and handled promptly. That is, until last week.

The HTML editor in the product that is used to handle customer emails was upgraded and, unfortunately, a bunch of the formatting broke. Suddenly, emails that had a certain look had several elements of their style blow-up. Nice borders were gone. Fonts changed sizes. Spacing was changed.

Email is a major tool for us. It’s the way we deliver our newsletter, we use it to deliver offers to our base and it’s a key tool in many of our customer deliverables. So this was important.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am very anal about how we present ourselves to customers. I firmly believe that in 99% of cases, if you look bad or even inconsistent, you will sell less. What do you do look for when you make a buying decision?

Unfortunately, the folks at Infusion didn’t agree with me. The first line support person did look at the style impact to our company’s emails and then decided that the impact wasn’t severe enough to be rated “essential”. I recall from my Product Management days what that meant: maybe the next major release, if the development team has time on their hands (ya – that happens a lot), and Jupiter aligns with Mars…

To say that I was steamed was an understatement. Could you imagine if your printer came back with a customer mailing whose formating was screwed up and told you that it wasn’t a problem and to just deal with it? You’d go postal. So did I.

It was the angriest I’ve been at a vendor in the past year – mostly because they just didn’t get how important it is to look consistent and professional with your image. Not just for some abstract desire to create a particular brand – but because without that, you make less money.

C.

Posted in E-mail | 1 Comment »