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.

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.

Anyways, one of the central story lines of the movie is that us little humans spend a lot of money and time to try to make contact with our brothers from a different primordial soup. And believe it or not – I see a lot of parallels with web site development.

My philosophy with our use of the web has changed significantly in the last two years. Originally, my dream was to develop a bunch of web functinoality and content, and let it loose. I’d just put my feet up on the desk and watch the cash roll in.

Today, I have a very different view. Instead of the primary goal being to get people to purchase something off the web site while we rest comfortably in bed, our ultimate goal is to get people to make Contact!

Why? Well, I’ve noticed a few things:

• The more prospects feel like there is a person behind the business, the more likely they are to purchase.
• The more prospects feel like there is a person behind the business, the more they are willing to spend.

I think that shouldn’t be a big surprise. For most adults, this ecommerce stuff is relatively new (last ten years) and we basically trust people, not web pages.

So now, our web site objectives are aligned with that philosophy. The primary goal is to provide information as effectively in order to maximize the number of qualified buyers who take the next step and contact us.

What do I mean by effectively:

• Simple – make it easy to find the information based on who they are and what they need
• Efficient – be able to get to the information they need as quickly as possible
• Interactive – engage the user in order to deliver information visually, aurally and with words (readilly?)

And when I say take the next step and contact us, we want to provide as many mechanisms as possible:

• Call (toll free of course!)
• Email / Contact Us
• Live Chat

On the LiveChat front, I previously mentioned our implementation. I have to say that it has been great. Just in the last week, Casey in our office has closed over $1,200 in sales using Live Chat. That just paid for the service for the next 15 months. And by providing a mechanism to quickly get questions answered, it’s enabled or accelerated countless other sales.

Now – don’t get me wrong! I still love on-line sales that don’t require human intervention. We have several products that continue to sell very well and deliver great value to the customers. Our view of them strategically has evolved to be in line with this new philosophy. Instead of the dream of building our entire business around these autonomic sales, we see them as gateway products that introduce customers to our business. They are the first step in engaging with the business which hopefully leads to larger sales as they get to know us.

So, down here in South Beach, I’m feverishly working on a substantial redesign of our web site in-line with these objectives. Simplified structure, even more interactivity, more role-based content.

Take a look at your web site – how easy it for your prospects to press 0 to speak to an operator?

C.

Anyways…

Last fall, Colleen and I heard a guy speak at a conference. His name eludes me but what he said didn’t. He started a very successful on-line dating site and his advice was to focus your efforts on getting people who visit your web site to interact with you personally as quickly as possible.

That stuck with me and just a few days later, I saw a talk about Live Chat. It was a shameless sales pitch, but I couldn’t help but think that there would be a lot of value in proactively asking visitors to your web site if they are finding everything they need.

In case you’ve not experienced it, live chat is like instant messaging, but for the web. You can chat back and forth with an operator in a browser window. It can be initiated by the site visitor or by the operator.

I couldn’t help but think about the analogy of a retail store. Would you have a brick and mortar store without any sales clerks. No one to help shoppers find what they need or answer any questions? That would be insane.

So we bit the bullet and have now implemented live chat on the engageselling.com site. And the results have been great. We had such a reaction in the first couple of weeks that I had to go in and limit the number of simultaneous chats as Casey (in our office) was going insane trying juggle five conversations at once.

And one of the features we really like is that if you stay on a given web page for a certain amount of time (ex. 2 minutes), you are automatically prompted to see if you have any questions. Just like in a real shop!

We’ve even made sales with the chat.

Long and short, we’re going to be doing several things to make our on-line presence more engaging and more interactive – so we can quickly move from a prospect only browsing to a potential client interacting with us personally.

<rant>

OK, while I’m talking about live chat, I must share my frustration with some of the vendors servicing the entrepreneurial market. The gentlemen I mentioned above who was pitching his live chat solution was charging $3K plus $80 a month. It came with scripts and set up instructions along with the on-going chat service (the actual back end is hosted in most solutions). Long story short, he got everyone riled up, because live chat makes sense, and made a bunch of sales.

I tend to not make impulse purchases when it comes to the business (or in our personal life according to Colleen) and so while she was half way to the stage with her credit card in hand, I said Whoa. Instead, I did some reseach over two evenings and found that what the gentlemen was selling at the event did have industry leading features but he was reselling someone else’s service.

I found and contacted the service directly (god bless google) and got the exact same service for no money upfront (vs. $3K) and $79 per month.

The moral: always shop around… (the way I figure it, Colleen owes me $3K)

</rant>

C.

I’m a big proponent of seeking inspiration from industry leaders (surely not blatant copying…). The other day I came across one of the most brilliant ways of helping your prospects find what they need and get engaged with you on a personal level…

It was done by a guy named Ford Saeks who is one of the leading internet marketing guys for small business and entrepreneurs. His home page treatment is brilliant: http://www.profitrichresults.com.

Every one’s using flash but I thought the marriage of video, engaging graphics and a clear call to action was unique.

You want a good test: go to Ford’s home page, then go to your home page. When I did it I was blown away by how unintuitive it was without the video and clear “do this now” direction.

We must copy his approach. In fact, I pledge to have something done like this within three months. Feel free to keep me honest!

C.

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.