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 »

I’m Back and Interactive

January 22nd, 2009 Chris

After a long holiday break I’m back. And my New Year’s resolution is to be committed and regular on the blog. Not a great start give it’s the 22nd…

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.

Posted in Marketing, Web, Web Site | 1 Comment »

How’s Your Day Going? Mine Sucks!

July 17th, 2008 Chris

I had a very bad day on Tuesday. First, I left the house with a dozen eggs on the stove hard-boiling. About 5 hours later I pulled back in and heard a strange whiny sound. Turns out it was the smoke detector going off. I opened the front door only to be greeted by a waft of smoke and a very bad smell.

Luckily, there really wasn’t a fire but I did discover an interesting aspect of eggs – when exposed to high heat, they explode. So our kitchen was coated with a uniform layer of egg guts and I spent the next two hours cleaning shrapnel off the floor, walls and ceiling.

Unfortunately, the worst casualty was our dog Conrad who ended up hiding in the back yard having been traumatized for hours by the alarm and the smoke. I’ve enclosed a picture of him hiding under a bush in our yard, refusing to go back into the smokey, eggy house.

My day took another turn for the worse later later when I was at my Tuesday night track work-out. On the first 1000m interval, I finished and sauntered off the track. Unfortunately, while doing so I rolled my ankle which made a delightful snap. Or at least, so I was told by others as I was too busy rolling around on the ground reciting every curse I could think of.

After fours hours at the hospital, I was happy to hear nothing was broken – just torn ligaments. A month of no running will be a drag but that also means I get to sit back and watch Colleen walk the dog, bring me beer, etc… Not all bad!

My day would have been much worse if I had to be re-creating our blog and member site databases. As I mentioned in my last post, our web hoster had major backup issues and we almost lost a wack of data.

My experience with web hosters has been very checkered. If someone from a micro business was to ask me for advice who to pick to host their site or blog, I would impart the following wisdom (random thoughts?):

First, if you don’t have tens of thousands of visits a month and your site is not transactionally intensive (no climate modelling), a VWS (Virtual Web Server) should be fine. A VWS is where you and other sites share the same server. Thus, you share the load but it’s also very economical (and you really can’t tell that you’re sharing).

When I say economical, no one should be paying more than $10 a month. In fact, we pay under $5 a month. Web hosting has become a pretty much commodity business. But beware! While prices for VWS hosting are pretty standard, the service you get can vary.

For example, my current web hoster is terrible. Hosting Zoom (no link provided because you shouldn’t use them) is a great case study of all the things a hoster can screw up. They have a lot of down time (our site is unavailable for at least an hour or more every month), their service is terrible (they don’t have phone support – everything is via email or chat to India) and as you’ve recently read, they have an unreliable backup process.

Why don’t I switch? Well, three things: 1. I am lazy (or at least we have other thing that more urgently require attention), 2. I have a one year contract with them (i.e. I am cheap) and 3. I just switched from GoDaddy! (who also suck) and there is a fair bit of work to do so (see #1).

But when I do, I likely will be going with Host Monster. I’ve had a personal reference for them plus they routinely appear in reviews as one of the top providers. As a test, I phoned their support line (they have one!) and spoke to a nice gentleman from California who was eager to help me – a refreshing change!

So, in short:

• Don’t put eggs on the stove and then leave the house.
• Watch where you’re going when you’re on the track.
• Don’t pay more than $10 a month for a web hoster but make sure you have a reference for whoever you choose.

C.

Posted in Web | 1 Comment »

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 »

A Cheap Trick … that Works

May 16th, 2008 Chris

I was going through tips from a recent session on web marketing and I came across one that made me cringe – the dreaded drop-in pop-up. Yep – that horrible thing that comes floating in front of content that you’re trying to read with some obnoxious request to sign up for a free newsletter, e-zine (puke – I hate that term), report, etc…

Having had all my conventional wisdom proven wrong about a million times in the last year, I decided to tried it. The problem is that, despite my qualms, it worked. It really worked. I threw it on every page with a one month “snooze button” (if dismissed with a no-thanks, it goes away site-wide for a month), and registrations for our newsletter more than doubled. It is the single most cost effective way that we’ve increased our database in the last year (and one of the easiest). You can see our implementation at www.EngageSelling.com.

Hold your nose and do it!

What did I use to implement the drop-in? Because I am the cheapest bastard on the face of the earth, I started going down the free scripts route. Of all the free scripts sites, I found www.dynamicdrive.com was the best with lots of robust and well documented examples.

The problem is that most of the free scripts didn’t have exactly the features I wanted. I wanted to be able to dismiss the drop-in from any page on the site and not have it return for a specific amount of time (or ever). After a fair bit of research I found Advanced DHTML Pop-Up. Had all the features, was easy to use and Joe provided awesome support. And it was cheap. Highly recommended.

C.

Posted in Prospecting, Web | No Comments »