My client, who already had a website in place, was unhappy with the number of leads that were coming from his website. He had good positioning in place already and people were being referred by other social networking sites, but the number of sales were just really disappointing!  Armed with this knowledge, my objective was to look at barriers that may be getting in the way of leads being generated from his site.

“The First Test Resulted In….112% More Leads!”

It’s March already – how is your year shaping up? Is it starting to look
like “same old, same old?”

When I started off in 2012, I was determined to better the business model,
build on my knowledge, share some learning experiences and gain more sales!
As an owner of a company I don’t like the feeling of standing still. I
always want and need to feel that I am moving forward and growing
customers.

The feeling that I have when the sales and business is coming through the
door makes it all worth while. Along the way we also get to build up some
amazing relationships with clients and see the impact that comes from
helping them grow their business.

Last month I sent you an article all about trying to think outside the
square in regards to generating more conversions from your website. In fact,
my focus was on trying new things and how making changes can turn your
business upside down in regards to more leads!

The biggest lesson for me was that doing something that may be considered
radical, led to a client’s website generating  300% more leads…and that
to this very day is still an unreal outcome. So where does that leave ” best
practices”? It leaves best pracitices to those that are unwilling to test
their market place, those who don’t want more and more sales, those who want
to be the same as everyone else – which means you may never get the most out
of your website. If you think about where we have come from in regards to
advertising …from Yellow pages, shared hosting, dedicated websites, best
practice landing pages to now, landing page testing I feel we have only just
touched on the fringes of where websites and business growth can be.

This month I want to look into ways you can  improve your website by
watching how visitors use your website. Watching, you say? Yes, watching!

We use software that allows us to track every activity a visitor makes on
your website. Armed with information you can see:

* Where visitors are clicking, and not clicking, on your website
* Where confusion is happening on your pages
* What friction points stop people from making contact with you
* The amount of reading people do on each page
* Where visitors are bouncing back and forth within your site
With this type of information you can study and look at ways to improve
your website by analysing and improving sticking points, catching errors and
fixing places on your site that are causing people to stop and not engage
with you.

The trick to making the most of this software is within the analysis area.
This is where having a team of analysts who study websites for improvement
purposes for a living can take your website to new levels
of satisfaction not only for the end user but also for your business sales.

Yes, once you have this information on hand you are then able to correct and
fix areas on your site that may be stopping people for making contact with
you, making a sale with you, or just engaging with your site at any level.

If you have a site now and feel that you should be getting more leads or
sales from it, maybe, just maybe there are issues with it that are stopping
the number of people coming through the site to talk with you.

This month, with my focus on watching traffic, the Redcow team are offering
a  March Special Deal  that allows you and your site to improve its ability
to sell. Our March deal includes a dedicated resource to watch your website
for an entire month, after the month is up my team will then analyse and
provide a report that will help your website convert more visitors into
buyers of your products and services.

We are offering this amazing service just to you because you are on my mailing list.

This one time deal will expire at the end of this month so be quick, act now! Normally $1000, yours for only $749*!

This is what you will receive with our March deal:

1. A consultation with me to discuss your website
2. Your website will be analysed for for 30 days
3. You will then be provided with a comprehensive report detailing the
areas of where your website is failing to help visitors turn into
customers
4. Along with this report will will recieve another consultation with me to
dicuss the findings and any opportunties for improvement
That’s it for me…

Have fun and don’t ever stop wanting to improve your website!

Cheers,

Dave.

Lets run through this scenario together

1. You have set up a highly targeted campaign in Adwords (so that your website is listed in the search results for phrases that match your business services.
2. You get clicks to your landing page or home page (generally a specific landing page) in your very competitive market place – well done all is going well
3. The visitor then views your web page &  takes no action, non what so ever (no lead generation or sale?)
4. Visitor leaves the site – no sale and  money and opportunity gone!
5. Your none the wiser either! Frustrating isnt it?

OK,  you have done your job, you have generated the interest, you have sent the visitor to the page, but no action is made (ie, no sale or contact made from that visitor) now what?

If the PPC is working correctly does this mean the website is broken or needs to be refined to encourage sales and leads from its PPC visitors. Chances are Yes!, Well not broken but needs work to create sales.

I believe that any site can gain sales, the secret ingredient however is having the entire “sales funnel” correctly aligned around “traffic-interest-activity-analysis” if any of these are failing or not in your sales funnel equation then you advertising is not working it’s potential!

Food for thought isn’t it?  If you would like to know how we can help your website generate more from your PPC give me a call some time.

Dave Lemmon
Marketing Director/Owner
021 425692

More and more these days, people are taking notice of what their websites are doing (or not doing) for them, 90% of business owners now see that and want their websites to generate sales for them.  Where it began…?

Many sites are designed by creative teams of people whose job, as they saw it was to build websites that looked pretty, acted in some order fashion and/or mimicked client brochures.  And to some degree,  for the most part, followed a traditional look and feel that others had on their websites. Ok, so where to from here.

Well just lately, well in fact for the past five or so years, people have been looking at ways that they can have some business generated from their website –  and this is where the whole design first and sell later comes into the forefront.

As I mentioned above, people went to website designers, the designer come up with a beautiful website which promised so much, but in reality has delivered nothing or very little in the way of business sales.

Lets review a typical website – lovely home page with pretty colours, a big “Welcome to” on the centre of the page, followed by content and links to other areas of their website…traditionally, there is an about us, what we do, our location, contact us, our services, our products…blah blah.. – sounds like a winning combination right…well…not really…lets consider a few things here…what do I want from my website, what is it that I want to achieve, and why have I gone out and spent hard earned money on my website? Do I just want a brochure but in electronic format….hmm maybe not…OK..stay with me, here I am getting to the meat and drink of what I trying to tell you…

What if I was to tell you this… if your best sales rep went to a meeting and all they talked about was what was inside your company brochure do you think that this sales rep would be successful..? – People that come to visit your website are effectively people that you are selling to…OK..we are getting closer..

Here is a typical point of difference with websites that sell and convert visitors into contacts and possible sales.

1. They focus on telling people where they are
2. They tell the user what they can achieve by visitors
3. And they then give the visitor reasons to act
4. They provide users with a clear channel of where things are located and how to access them
5. They focus the content on “what’s in it for them”
6. They display their USP, their “unique sales proposition” in the eye-line
7. The are often a mirror image of their greatest sales reps

If we compare this list with the one from the brochure…where does your website fit?

Here are some statistics from our website tests..

1. Business owners that have many websites doing specific jobs sell more
2. Business owners that follow a sales process on their website sell more
3. Business owners that have a 1 page website generate more sales than ones with 1 large website
4. Sites that focus on lead generation verses lovely brochure sites win more sales
5. Sites that are geared around helping others fix problems sell more online

Over the past decade, I have built  my very own list of different types of website models (around 10 or so). Where most people go wrong is that they mix and match these different models which causes confusion, and with confusion people don’t act.

Good luck

Till next time,  Dave.

Some people see us as SEO masters, or pay per click managers, while others think we are website designers. What is our point of difference and what makes us so much different from the others in the market is this critical point…”the end result”

This is what I mean…I try to explain it by starting off talking about what we aren’t, we aren’t just a search engine optimisation company, we are not a pay per click marketing company, we aren’t a web design team..what we are and what we do is utilise these things just mentioned but again…that’s not us either!

We are business analysts for your online business.  We design strategies to help businesses grow online – full stop. How we go about doing this depends largely on where the client is in terms of its current website presence. Some clients might have a website already and want to grow, while others have no website and want to discover more customers. So back to how and what we do….

I see ourselves as marketers who are able to improve or build new business for people by designing web based models in business.

Our major offering is in the key skills of improvement. We, in a “nutshell”, design marketing programs around improvement. We design tests and conduct studies online that help us improve our clients online businesses (much like a business analyst does for any business of substance) – we in a sense become the marketing team/business analyst team that companies don’t have for their websites and let alone can generally afford. What we offer our customers is a full marketing team at a fraction of a cost that they would have to fork out if they wanted a team to grow their business.

Let me walk you through a campaign we did for a client just recently, maybe this will explain more about we do…The client wanted more sales from its current visitors.

• The client had a nice website already but was not happy with the level of bookings it generated
• We started this program but designed a strategy to help the client discover how to make its website more effective
• Unlike others who might do an improvement review on a website based on just “best practices”, we start off by finding out exactly what past clients thought of their website as well as discovering what new visitors thought of their online website model
• We then went about discovering how people surfed their online pages, where people clicked, how far people scrolled on pages,  what keywords brought them to site pages, we recorded people using the website and also conducted a number of user case studies to help us discover weaknesses within their websites.
• After three months of testing and discovering we were able to increase the sites performance (in regards to sales generated) by an amazing 100%

So there you go, that’s just one way we help clients grow….

So, is it clear now what we offer? Maybe a little clearer??

“We help clients grow their business by designing strategies to suit their end goals”

Can this be packaged and sold in the 1000′s, I’m not so sure… but we are giving it go!

For our clients the ultimate growth can only happen once we understand the NEEDS and because each client is unique each marketing strategy therefore must be as well!

While I don’t discount the value of these social streams for some larger businesses, I have yet to see any real business gains for clients that have a smaller catchment of visitors or small or low membership clients. Some of which are ruining their websites with these.

Hi Dave they say… “I want to start advertising in search engines so that we can make more money using pay per click. How much do you charge for this? ”

While the simple answer to this is to give them a rough price and hope you are the lowest in the quote contest, our approach is to gain a meeting with the person interested in the quote so that we can discuss with them their goals, products and services in more detail.

What I discovered many years ago is that per per click alone will not make you rich, the only way to make it successful online is to combine a number of activities together to help you gain as many sales and customers via your web marketing. No, this isn’t a magic formula, its more about designing a strategy around making the goals for the client happen!

While it is true that you may increase your sales from some of the additional advertising you do online, the bottleneck for 90% of our clients is making that website sell for them. If your website doesn’t sell well then you are wasting your time and money.

It puzzles me that people still do not understand that the most important element of the marketing is on their website! PPC and new visitors will only take you so far… in regards to making and generating more business and sales. If your web site is converting only 1% of all visitors no matter how many come looking you will still only covert that same percentage. The objective is to help you design a website that increases this most important element – your “website”. Improving your website alone,  can really increase your sales and return on investment sometimes (if you have enough traffic already) without any need for huge spends in PPC traffic.

Eh…but how do I improve my website…? What analytical data do I track, how can I track what people are doing on my website, where can I get visitors from, how can I track my online videos, how can I get my website found on search engines, where are visitors  viewing, what are they typing in to find my site,  and what they are thinking while they are surfing around my site…What do I have on the home site that is stopping clients from contacting me? How do I know if it is working well for people at all? All of this tracking, reviewing and analysis is what all marketing companies should offer, but little if any (apart from us) do this.

Here is my top 4 suggestions to help your business grow online!

1. Use a marketing company to help you improve your website.
2. Use a marketing company to help you analyse your web traffic.
3. Use a marketing company to create a search engine optimisation strategy for you.
4. Use a marketing company to create a pay per click strategy for you.

Don’t get lost in the crowd – grow your business with expertise behind you

Tell next time…

The Museum Hotel’s Challenges:

The owner of Wellington NZ’s Museum Hotel – Chris Parkin – wanted…

• More bookings through his hotel’s website, more brand awareness, and more sales.
• To increase his website’s presence and make the most of its visitors.
• To reduce the fees he pays to third party travel sites for bookings, and to encourage guests to book from his website, instead.

Dave suggested they…

• Make better use of the hotel’s booking engine.
• Address usability and testing page enhancements to improve sales.
• Add sales elements on the website to improve the sales funnel, and add new content to the homepage and other vital areas that would enhance engagement.
• Work directly with the hotel’s booking engine provider to improve features.
• Work directly with the reservation staff and manager of the hotel to increase bookings.
• Address the site’s SEO content.
• Redesign the online advertising pay-per-click campaign.

First, they accessed the website’s analytical data to determine how much traffic was coming to the site, what levels of contact were made, what and how many bookings were generated, where people went when they visited, how long they were there, and where they left. All of this information helped to paint a picture of the site’s performance.

Dave reviewed the site for usability issues, friction, and confusion points, then looked for gaps in the website where they could enhance value, and studied the site’s flow of information.

Their major challenge was to make the website more interactive and focused – to get people moving into the booking engine as quickly as possible from the website itself; once there, the likelihood that a booking would be made was very high.

Dave proposed a new layout for the home page, then tried and tested different versions to find which one most effectively raised guests’ engagement levels with the site and booking engine.

The next step was to address the pages that were visited the most – providing feedback to the hotel on what those pages were lacking. They also added new tracking systems to monitor visitors and conversions levels, allowing them to track which parts of the pages people were more interested in, what keyword phrases were bringing in sales and customers, and other valuable information.

Finally, they added clearer navigation to aid the user experience, including new contact forms, maps and directions.

They rolled out these changes over the course of a few months, analyzing and tweaking along the way to enhance the overall package.

Results:

In 2009 their revenue increased by 56% from 2008
In 2010 their revenue increased by 11% from 2009

This is a massive revenue increase of 73% over two years

See how we helped Museum Hotel increase their bookings 20% month on month and improve their level of conversions by 100% on their website by improving the functionality, usability and engagement levels. We tell you how in our PDF attached.

See the case study here

I say no… why? Because you can now use the Internet in some creative ways to generate sales and customers for your business.

Here’s a concept that you may have seen on the telly in marketing documents and maybe even on the radio.

Companies are now branding what they offer, what they do etc., with easy to remember domain names that are catchy and informative to the end user. The National Bank now advertises mortgage services using this methodology as do many other major brands, the brand is important it is not used in the marketing of these services.

So what are the pro’s and con’s.

Pro’s

1. Easy to remember domain name, for example www.GetYourMortgage.co.nz is easier to remember and therefore it’s easier for the client to get the information they are after without having to go through the National Bank’s normal home page.
2. The content is rich with information about how to get your mortgage. While the brand is tied in with the product offering it is more the fact that that site is all about mortgages that makes it a far more informative site for the end user.
3. The content and the keywords in the domain name also helps the site be found in all major search engines as the words in the domain and used in the site help to determine the overall positioning within their rankings.
4. It enables smaller businesses to gain a larger market share as they are able to complete against the traditional marketing media that the the major brands depend on.
5. This allows smaller operators to compete for business in creative ways to create new sales and customers.

Con’s

1. Another site for the bank to administrate and manage moving forward.
2. The brand may be lost in the marketing mix to some that depend on that to secure business, so in this form of marketing it is important to ensure the brand is included where possible within the site.

So to summarise, while the brand is important, what the Internet allows you to do is to stand out and be counted by offering unique tailor made service- and product-focused driven websites.