Ultimate Guide to Increasing web conversions

Posted on 13. Aug, 2010 by Marketing in SEO, Web Design, ecommerce

Turning your website from a drab static website into an exciting lead producing machine can take time and money. Here we have a long list of lessons we have learned over the years to produce the best web design that converts readers into customers. First though, here are some quick tips;

  • Optimising your website for conversion is an ongoing long term initiative, a few quick points from this page will not make your website the best it can be.
  • Focus first on the offer, then the layout.
  • Dramatic changes can yield dramatic results. - we once turned a 40% bounce rate website into a 5% by scrapping the theme and starting again.
Excellent Design. In the end, your website is the most important piece of marketing you can own, and it must look good. The best web design obeys the rules of aesthetics and landing page design, this means premium real estate for the logo and the offer, concise use of page layout, customisable widget areas.
First aim to build trust

Customisable. You should be able to make many changes to a template without spending too much time sweating over the code. You should also be able to do most of that through a CMS system or something similar. The easiest CMS Systems are Joomla and WordPress.

SEO friendly. Your website should at least be optimised for seo, that meant no flash, good used of H1 tags, css menus, title tags, meta descriptions and a HTML and XML sitemap.

Title and description Tags. These are the main tags that Google will use for your listing. Including the main city and your telephone number will increase conversions. Also making sure that the right products and services are included in your description will make sure you are attracting clicks from the right customers.

Accessibility. The best web designs work with all modern browsers and have W3C valid code. Up to 30% of

Reduce form fields required

Remove distracting banner images

Strengthen the visibility of the headlines.

The offer should be easy to see and understand. A large dark headline with light background behind a features area will attract attention to the offer. The best web designs have all other elements balanced, so they don’t overwhelm. You should use short, direct, language that speaks to the user.

A clear primary call to action. Don’t just state “click here”. You should have action verbs that relate to the offer, like “Buy Now” or “Find Me”

Repeat the call to action. Drive customers to interact with you.

Use contrast. The more contrast you have, the easier the website is to read.

Keep the pages short and to the point. Whilst it is “en-vogue” to have a long page jammed with SEO Keywords, the best performing web designs have less content, more focussed offers and several calls to action.

Content on the left, call to action on the right.

You need a two column layout, with the sales proposition to be the first thing that the user sees. Their eye will naturally track to the right, where you put your call to action button. When they use Google to search for your product you want them to see the offer first.

White background.

All research in readability points to having a white background as THE best way to endure copy is readable. To put this another way you should have black text on a white background. If the background is not white, it makes it difficult to use any other colours in your body.

Stretchable side areas (outside of the body)

Either you need to build your website at 1000px across with stretchable side areas, or have no side areas at all.

Reduced Javascript and CSS fed from the bottom

Cut down on javascript and CSS, have them in one file each and load them from the bottom. This will speed up the web page load time.

Test everything

Using Seduction in B2B Marketing

Posted on 08. Jun, 2010 by Marketing in Branding, Marketing, sales

Good marketing is a lot luck the art of seduction. Convincing a new business to purchase your product or service is a lot like trying to win over a potential suitor. All the pieces of the puzzle are the same. There are two parties, one wants to convince the other of their value. There is a goal in mind and there are powerful emotions. To put it another way, seduction follows the same process as marketing;

  1. Make the prospect feel the need to buy the product or service
  2. Make the offer attractive
  3. Use emotions to engage the prospect
  4. Make the prospect comfortable with buying the product or service, reduce fears
  5. Escalate the prospect towards a completed transaction.

In the world of “professonal” seduction, there are set patterns and plays that have been accepted as the best ways to attract a member of the opposite sex. One of the leaders in this world is Neil Strauss, who wrote the bestseller “The Game”. Using the main ideas behind his book, you can see how a business can use the rules of attraction to pursuade a new customer to buy from them.

Pre-Game

Like any good project, good preparation prevents poor performance. Understanding what you are trying to sell, and how you are going to sell it goes a long way to building a marketing program that delivers results. In this stage of the marketing process, an organisation would look at past sales, the competition, the current market, their budget and their current product or service to build an offer that will be attractive to potential clients. In the book “The Game, ” the author went through a make-over process, shaving his head, having his ears pinned back, and joining a gym. Businesses could also follow this lead, but rebranding, or reinvigourating their marketing programs.

Select a Target

Targeting is the most important step in the marketing process. Finding and understanding your customer will allow you to build a thorough picture of their mindset and desires. In seduction terms this would mean a quick scan of the bar or venue to find the girl or boy you are going to target. In marketing terms this means going through your customer list, looking at lists of potential new customers and narrowing down the field. Targets can be selected by demographic, by industry, by buying location, by budget etc. The main aim is to narrow the field to an acceptable number of targets that all have something in common. You also want to be able to talk to the target customer as if it is a face to face meeting.

Approach and Open

sexy marketing

The seduction community says you have 3 seconds to approach and start a conversation with a girl. This should be no surprise, because first impressions are the most important. In order to attract their attention, PUAs (Pick Up Artists) use “peacocking”, a method of wearing outrageous or loud clothing to attract attention. In marketing, you have 3 seconds to grab and maintain the attention of the customer. A businesses “peacocking” might be using outstanding design and original marketing. This also means using a headline that will interest your customer. The best headlines are short, punchy, use simple language and convey the most important piece of value of the product or service.

Demonstrate Value

The best description of what constitutes good value, is adapted from this website

1. There is a clear distinction between, and balance of, customer benefits and the offer.
2. Value involves the psychological and physiological effects of both the benefits and the offer.
3. Good value harnesses the difference between surface attraction and deeper neurology based attraction.
4. Value includes practical applications and call to action to increase the overall odds of converting.

In order to demonstrate clear value to your prospect, you need to show what they will get, how it will improve their lives and how they will feel by purchasing from you. Demonstrating value is also showing that other people have bought from you before, that you have delivered on your promise, and you are not going to let the customer down. This might come in the form of a testimonial, a review from a magazine, or just some facts about how much of a difference your product makes to people.

Disarm the Obstacles

There are many reasons for a customer to not buy from you. In a B2B transaction this might be no previous business relationship, that you are new to the market or that they are “not looking for” your product right now. Having pre-prepared lines to counter these situations are important in telemarketing and face to face selling. In the PUA world, this would be equivilant to being “not really looking for a boyfriend“. To translate this into a business context might be the prospect being “happy with their current provider“. To counter this situation you don’t want to bash their current provider, you don’t want to claim to be better either. You want to put the seed of doubt in their mind, and show you have value in your product. Something like “Does your current provider give you XYZ? Because if when we work with our other clients, not only do we offer ABC but also XYZ“, where you fill in the blanks with your core values.

Isolate the Target

Meeting face to face is an important part of the buying process. We more easily buy from people than we do an automated machine or a website. In the seduction community, moving the target into a position where you are one on one reduces the opportunities for the bond to be broken. In a sales environment, this would mean trying to get a one on one with the prospect, without the distraction of being in the office and around other people. This also means isolating

Create an Emotional Connection

Again, here is paraphrasing from a pick up routine, applied to a B2B transaction.

Find out if the prospect has any business problem or desire in business they feel “passionate” about. Most likely, these may be their sales team, not spending enough time with their customers, cash flow, gaining new customers, anything they would do even if they did it for free.

Ask them “what’s important to you in doing (activity)?” “What do you feel about(activity/business)?” At this point, you are looking to recreate the feeling of doing that activity, and moving them into the states they feel while doing the activity.

Then, feedback these nominalized “feelings” and link these to your product. “What would it be like if we could get you feeling different? ” “How would you feel if we could remove that frustration?”

Emotional connections in business are rare, and hard to achieve. However the goal of all marketing is to get the prospect to recreate the feeling they would have when using your product or service. If they can see themselves using your product, and they can feel themselves in that position, you are most of the way to completing the sale.

Blast Last-Minute Resistance

Most rational people know when they are being sold to. Sometimes it is obvious when someone is trying to sell us something, eg telemarketing, and other times it is less obvious, word of mouth etc. Instinctively people will throw up conscious and subconscious reasons to NOT buy from you. In the case of the really desirable TV or car, the nagging feeling that you can’t afford the purchase is the subconscious urge to not buy that product. It is the job of the marketing professional to smooth the way through those rough waters. In the seduction community, disarming the obstacles might be dealing with a girl who wants to leave with her friends, or getting the guy to move to a quieter location. In  the marketing process this would be focussing on the value of the product to the customer, offering payment plans and guarantees to reduce anxiety or giving them a money back guarantee.

In the pick up world, targets almost always go for the person who isn’t completely available to her. In the business world, we always want to deal with partners who are busy with other clients too, because it shows they are valuable. We all want something we can’t have. We want what there is a limited supply of, because by the sheer fact there’s limited supply of it means it must be good. Many pick-up artists know this so here are a few things they do that can be applied to marketing;

* Always be the first one to end the conversation, if on the phone

* Set a time constraint on any offer, or for the conversation

* Say the product will only be available after a certain date

As you can see there are many ways good marketing is like seduction. Going through the websites on seduction unearths a great range of methods for breaking down a prospect and turning them into a client.

Creative Development is a marketing and web design agency based in Sydney.

Tips and benchmarks for the best email marketing

Posted on 08. Mar, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing

How we beat the industry average for email marketing. Contact us to have a stellar email marketing campaign.

Industry Averages (approximately);

Open Rate: 15%
Click Rate:  3%

Our Performance on email lists over 500 people.

Open Rate: 18%
Click Rate:5%

10 Tips for the best email marketing campaigns;

  1. Target. Find out to whom you want to send the email campaign. Make sure you know what they are interested in and what market they operate in.
  2. Produce quality content. Every day we recieve over 100 emails from various people that go straight to the bin. Make sure you are given the recipient information that is up to date (what is happening in your industry NOW), informative, (dont just give facts, give analysis), fresh/new, (don’t just cut and paste from google, and don’t just steal other people’s conent) and above all make sure that it is well written. Poor content can also get caught in SPAM filters.
  3. Develop a list. Make sure that your recipients have allowed you to send them emails. Make sure you have taken down as much information as possible, at least their names and company names. We use double opt in lists that people actively subscribe to. We also use a different technique to market to potential customers, however we are always moving them to the opt in lists. We are also only marketing to small numbers of potential customers so that we can keep the email campaigns from becoming SPAM.
  4. Use engaging subject lines. Try to sound informative and not “marketing”. Try to show that the email is up to date and has the latest information. Here are the top 5 subject lines, thanks to Mail Chimp
    [COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter
    Eye on the [COMPANYNAME] Update (Oct 31 – Nov 4)
    [COMPANYNAME] Staff Shirts & Photo
    [COMPANYNAME] May 2005 News Bulletin!
    [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – February 2006
  5. Personalise. By far more people will open, become engaged and click through an email that has their name in it, or their company name.
  6. Use a good email marketing program like MailChimp. Mail chimp is a good example of an email marketing client because you can measure your performance, personlise the email. They also have bucketloads of tutorials on how to improve your email marketing campaigns.
  7. Include several calls to action. We make sure in every campaign we give the customer good reasons to click through the email. This can be a particular special offer, a great article or just asking them to update their information. We always use immediate language and make sure that it is clear what is a link and where they should click.
  8. Test for design/looks. For every email campaign we produce we run two different types of tests. Firstly we test the design of the email in several different browsers. We test for useability and readability. We want to make sure of the following;
    Do the images show up, if they don’t does the text make sense on its own?
    Does the image preview well, so people can see the heading/first paragraph of the content without opening email?
    Does the design render correctly in a few different browsers
    Does the content make sense? It seems easy to produce content but is it short, punchy and readable in Outlook?
    Do the links do what they are supposed to do?
  9. Test for performance. We also run A/B tests to see which of two headlines create the best response. Every email marketing campaign we run a small test to up to 50 recipients with a few different layouts of content. We keep track of the changes we make and use this information to improve the performance of our email marketing.
  10. Track Measure Repeat. All our email marketing campaigns are active. We try not to run short term once off marketing campaigns. We use our knowledge for each market in each campaign to improve the quality of the next one.
  1. [COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter
  2. Eye on the [COMPANYNAME] Update (Oct 31 – Nov 4)
  3. [COMPANYNAME] Staff Shirts & Photos
  4. [COMPANYNAME] May 2005 News Bulletin!
  5. [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – February 2006

The lifetime value of a customer

Posted on 04. Feb, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing, sales

One of the number one things marketing companies should do is calculate the (average) lifetime value of a customer. This can be done in many ways, but basically you are looking at taking total revenue per year x number of years a customer would normally work with you.

There are some other ways of doing it but that is basically it.

Twitter Success Stories

Posted on 27. Jan, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing

We are searching the web for Twitter success stories. Webworker has a list of a few and there are a couple of books that attempt to cover this. We want to know how Twitter has helped your business grow.

Moonfruit is a well documented web design company that gained sales by promoting a give away.

Travel writer Zoe Dawes gained followers and a strong reputation through the use of Twitter.

The Blood and Tissue Centre of Texas grew in followers after  a “tweet up”.

Salon.com has a interesting list of Twitter success stories.

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How to gain leads at a conference

Posted on 14. Jan, 2010 by Marketing in Marketing

Here are a few quick tips on how to market yourself at conferences.

Attract Attention

Make your stand engaging. Hire someone to be an entertainer on your stand. Make sure your stand is interactive!

Creating a competition is a good way to build leads, but there is limited brand building and emotional engagement. A slightly better way would be to tell them to either fill out a form, or write on a business card, “In 25 words or less tell us why our product is amazing..” or something to that effect. Engage the people around you by asking them to become involved with your company. Don’t just let them throw their business card in a bin.

Engage the Audience

Depending on your budget, you could have a “skin health” expert at the stand, giving people free 10 minute facials. Make the entertainment relative to your product or service. If your brand is a fun brand, make the stand fun as well. In order for them to get a head massage, or whatever the attraction is, the should need to book a meeting with you later in the week, or some other similar valuable business goal.

Always follow up

Follow up should always be a phone call. In the least you should email them the next day saying you will call them later in the week. If this is a lot of work, get a temp in to arrange the meetings for you. Face to face meetings trumps anything else ten fold.

To track follow ups, good old spreadsheets are probably the “best way” as they are easily manipulated and you can sort quickly through them. Otherwise most CRM systems should have a leads section you can put them in to.

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How to improve customer service pt3

Posted on 14. Oct, 2009 by Marketing in Marketing

Creative solutions
Fix it on the spot, or don’t keep customers waiting. PROMISE to call them back in 5 minutes.

Make promises and keep them. Reliability. Accurate information, perfect delivery, on-time, on-cue.

Excellence in EXECUTION. NEVER JUST SATISFICE.

Speed

Answer your communications-emails and voice messages-promptly.
Early Opportunities – DON’T Wait your turn
Go that extra mile
Integrity EAT-SLEEP-BREATHE-OOZE INTEGRITY “My life is my message” Gandhi. Avoid over-promising.
OBSESSED WITH LEGACY “Dent the Universe”
EYE FOR THE DIFFERENT Go beyond “same old, same old”
Stretch Is Routine “I will drop it off myself”/ “I will see to it
personally”.
Personal Attention
Strong communications, keep them informed. How long does it take you to drive to your clients? How many companies can you call in that time?
Thankyou notes. When was the last time you wrote to say thankyou for your time/appointment/feedback. Compliments are critical.
Phone calls. Spend time each day just saying hi!
It is the little things that can make all the difference. Most business is won or lost in
barely 15 seconds. Personal contact beats e-mail 100 – 1.

Customer feedback, LISTEN!! Gather testimonials. Note pleased customers.
What made them happy. LEARN from unhappy customers. What made them unhappy? How can we improve our marketing/ induction/ training/ development/ service??
PASSION! ENTHUSIASM! You’ve got to be out there on the lunatic fringe INFECT everyone with your passion for results.
THIS IS A QUEST! WHAT IS OUR STORY? HOW DO WE WANT TO BE REMEMBERED?

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How to improve customer service pt2

Posted on 14. Oct, 2009 by Marketing in Marketing

Live, Warm & Friendly service.
Empathy. Put yourself in
their shoes. Communication at their level. A genuine understanding of their needs. Do they really need a trainee?
Knowledgeable. Know the industry award, when the apprentice started, how long they have left, how long the host has been with us, when is their birthday? Have they won any industry awards? What is their favourite drink?
Partnership. We have a duty to Hosts and New Apprentices. We are here to create VALUE for all.
People Skills – By becoming interested in other people, you will
get them to like you. Being the person who makes people feel good will go
a long way toward increasing your likeability in their eyes. Maintain eye
contact.
Treat every customer like a completely AMAZING individual.
Relate to him or her as if they were the only person in the world. People love personal
attention, so hang on their every word and don’t let yourself get interrupted. BE PRESENT.
Share knowledge with your organisation.
Be; Courteous, Friendly, Direct, disciplined, Reliable, Loyal, sincere, Honest, Willing,
Tenacious, Tactful, Worthy

Other great articles on Customer Service

10 steps to grow your restaurant or cafe

Posted on 27. Aug, 2009 by Marketing in Cafe, Marketing, Retail

Here are 10 quick steps you can take to grow your cafe through improved marketing.

Increase the value of each purchase

1. Offer variations in the sizes of portions available. Some of the most successful franchises offer
small, medium and large portions. Get your staff to recommend increasing the size of the portions a
customer offers.
2. Give a list of your best products as specials. There is little benefit in discounting what you offer
the customer, as it only reduces the profit you make.
3. Offer a broad price range of products and encourage staff to promote all products across the
board. Lower priced small items are easier for the customer to decide to purchase and compliment higher
priced items.
Increase the number of meals/drinks each customer purchases.
4. Encourage your staff to offer products that compliment what the customer is already buying. If
they purchase a coffee, offer a cake or something sweet.
5. Group complimentary products together on the menu. For instance you could list that a good
steak goes well with a good merlot. You could also list combinations of meals, including several separate
items together for one price.
Increase the number of people buying from you.
6. Offer a delivery service to those that might not have time to visit your cafe. You can charge a
little extra for delivery, as it is an exclusive service.
7. Offer free, bite size samples, of your best meal/drink to hungry workers in local businesses.
Make sure you let them know who you are, and where you are from.
8. Offer to cater the next school fete or sporting club function. You could do it for free in exchange
for the chance to talk to new customers. You could charge for the service and donate profits back to the
host.
9. Make sure passing foot traffic know you are there. Place a chalkboard somewhere where
everyone can see it and list your best selling and your lowest priced product on the board. If you can’t
find somewhere, offer to exchange chalkboards with another business that is in a hight profile position.
10. As people leave your cafe, give them a loyalty card. It does not have to give anything away, just
encourage them to come back with friends. You could do the same for staff. Encourage as many people
as you can to talk about your business as word of mouth is the most powerful promotion available.
The last point that goes without saying, is, build your list of customers and keep in contact with them through social networking.