It is easy to believe the misinformation you hear about death of email.
While it is true, spam has not helped make email more effective, it has definitely not killed it.
Less than 2% of all web visitors bookmark a website. Almost none of those who bookmark a site ever return.
If you believe your site is the one exception to these trends and your site is so compelling it defies all odds, you might want to visit a counselor. It is nice to believe that it is possible but it is better to deal with reality.
More important than trying to get a person to buy now, to pick up the phone now or to get enough information they immediately jump in their car and rush to one of your local dealers and buy your product is to get them to sign up on your email list. Get them to slightly raise their hand. We some how hope they will show up and call. Instead they look around for a few minutes, if they don’t find anything very interesting they leave and never come back.
A well written, compellilng website is lucky if it can get 1% of their visitors to buy. Which means 99% of them are gone for good.
What should you do?
Focus on capturing their name and email address. The fewer things you ask for the more vistors will respond. In addition to asking for their contact information, give them a very compelling reason to do so.
If you are in the high tech industry, a compelling white paper has proven to be one of the most effective incentives. If you are in another industry pick an incentive that will further qualify the visitor, not just attract people who will never become customers and will waste your time and resources by having them in your system.
Once they’ve signed up, contact them regularly. First start by encouraging them to consume whatever you gave them. Show a genuine interest in helping them, not in making a sale.
Continue to offer such informative emails that they not only can’t wait for each new email but they print it out and put it in a notebook for future reference.
Be sure to comply with the anti spam legislation in all of your emails.
Now that you are building a list, this is a great asset and you can train them to respond to your offers. First for free information and help, then for your products and services.
If you would like some Internet marketing consulting help please call us at 972-675-1413.
I think the single biggest weakness of most businesses is not having a systematic lead generation system.
The second biggest weakness is only have one lead generation system.
The most common lead generation system is word of mouth marketing. They rely on their friends or relatives to send them leads. While this is a very cost effective form of generating leads it is very haphazard and never seems to produce when you need it the most.
What are some lead generation techniques?
- Word of mouth marketing
- Networking
- Door to door
- Cold calling
- Referrals
- Classified advertising
- Pay per click ads
- Banner ads
- Endorsed mailing
- Endorsed emailing
- Newsletter sponsorship
The list goes on.
How do you start a lead generation system?
- Pick one of the ideas from the list above or one of the dozens of other techniques. Let’s pick Google Adwords (pay per click)
- Create a plan. Let’s pick the right keywords (find at least 200), create a landing page or more than one (a landing page is more likely to convert a new visitor than sending them to the home page), capture their name and email address, automatically send them weekly responses, every 5th issue urge them to contact you for one offer or another.
- Test and track the performance. Once you’ve begun the implementation, track how well it is working. How much money do you have to spend per person that joins your list? Which ethical bribe converts more than the others? What percentage of your list contacts you or gives you more contact information like their phone number? How many of those does it take to close a sale? Test each element of the process, track the results and continually look for ways to improve each step of the way.
- Add more lead generation systems.
If you think of your marketing program as a roof supported by Roman columns. Your roof is much stronger if you have more than one column. Your lead generation capabilities will be much stronger if you have more than one lead generation system working at the same time. That way if one of them slows down, your business will continue to operate.
Mistake #1. Going to a lot of work to build a website and then failing to promote it
There appears to be a lot of confusion about how visitors find websites. I had one client that was convinced that they were going to get millions of visitors the first week they brought their website up. They were so concerned they didn’t allow any email addresses or phone numbers on the site, only a mailing address. After months of delay because of this fear they finally brought it up and had very little traffic. We then had to start working on building traffic. You have to drive traffic to your site with advertising, promotions, mailings, putting the web address on your company literature and dozens of other ways. The concept of: “Build it and they will come” is a line from a movie not a workable marketing strategy.
Mistake #2. Building a website that focuses on you and not your visitors
Over 90% of websites focus on their company and not on the visitor. Their sites seems to say, “ME, ME, ME, ME”. Instead focus on the visitor. Talk about their needs, their pain, their goals and how you can help them. Visitors at most sites only visit the home page and then leave. Visitors usually can’t figure out “What’s In It For Me” and therefore leave.
Mistake #3. Thinking of web development as a one-time event like writing a book
A lot of hard work goes into creating a website. When finished you would like to relax and let it bring in the customers. But that is a mistake. There is nothing that turns off visitors faster than to see and out of date website. Keep your site fresh and up-to-date, keep expanding it, and continually improve it. Keep making it easier and more fun to do business with you.
Mistake #4. Not capturing visitor information
It is easy to think that because your website represents your company and your company represents your livelihood that it should be equally as important to web visitors. It’s not!! They are interested in their lives and their businesses not yours. If you want to keep in contact with visitors, don’t rely on them coming back on their own. Instead, capture their email and stay in contact with them. Send them new product announcements, press releases, follow-up messages, surveys, and enewsletters. Aggressively pursue them rather than hoping they’ll come back on their own.
Mistake #5. Registering your site with search engines just one time
Getting a good listing in a search engine is a very complicated process. Although you see many ads promising to get your site listed as number one in search engines, a one time $99 service won’t even come close to helping you achieve that. Your site needs to be designed with search engines in mind including: meta-tags, titles, using keywords and phrases in the page content, web page names, site maps and so much more. The criteria for achieving prominent search engine positions continually changes. In order to get the benefit of search engine traffic you need to keep working at search engine optimization and continually resubmitting your site to them. The traffic you will get for your effort will be worth it.
Mistake #6. Using only the web technology for marketing
The Internet consists of more than just web pages. Think about how valuable email, discussion groups, mailing lists, webcasts and chats can be to promote your website. As wonderful as web technology is, it is passive only communicating in one direction. If you don’t add things like email, discussion groups or chats, you are going to miss out on a huge opportunity to keep in touch with the customer after they have left your site. Most websites don’t collect a visitor’s email address. So once the visitor leaves, they are gone forever. By asking for their email address you can send them product announcements, send follow-up marketing campaigns or send enewsletters periodically to keep in touch.
Mistake #7. Not giving your visitors a reason to come back
If you want your web traffic to grow you need to give your visitors a reason to come back. Successful techniques include: providing a growing collection of articles about their needs, offering a knowledge base where they can learn about solving the problems they face, creating summaries of industry news events so they can stay in touch with what is happening, etc. Make regularly coming back to your site helpful to them and important to their success.
Mistake #8. Not analyzing your web traffic
Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant said, “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” Most businesses with website don’t even know there are traffic logs that can be analyzed, yet alone take the time to analyze visitor patterns. Web logs track every page a visitor sees on your website. They tell you where the visitor came from, what search engine terms were used to find you, what pages were the most popular, which were the least, in what order they visited your pages and a lot more. By analyzing your traffic you can see what needs to be improved, make improvements and see tangible results.
Mistake #9. Poor customer support
When people create websites they seem to lose their common sense. When dealing with customers businesses traditionally would happily provide customer support, direct phone numbers of the people that could help them the most and maybe even a pager number or cell phone number of their key customer contact. They are ready to respond to the customer’s every need. But for some reason, when these same people build a website, they fail to put their 800# on it, fail to provide a list of helpful questions and even seem to put barriers up to doing business over on the web. They will fail to respond to email queries. My own experience is less than half the companies respond to emails queries. Those that do respond often take three or four days to do so. This is AWFUL. Set an aggressive goal of responding to emails within an hour. You’ll be ahead of all of your competition and you’ll shock your web visitor. You certainly wouldn’t wait an hour to answer your 800# would you?
Mistake #10. Focusing only in increasing traffic and not on increasing conversions
Most Internet marketing focuses on driving more and more traffic to their websites. They focus little attention on getting more of their visitors to convert into actual transactions. A conversion might mean the visitor signs up for a enewsletter, purchases something online, calls a sales rep for an appointment, or donates money to your non-profit organization. You can really leverage the web traffic you already have if you work on improving your visitor conversion rate.
Author
Dan Swanson is president of InnovaQuest, an Internet marketing company. He has been involved in the Internet for the last ten years. During that time he has helped develop over 100 commercial websites and has helped clients create millions of dollars of Internet based revenues. You can contact him at 972-675-1413 or at dan@iq2.com or visit the website http://www.iq2.com/. You are free to reprint this article in your newsletter or on your website as long as you include this last paragraph intact.
The biggest challenge with Internet marketing is learning to think like a visitor.
It is so easy to think about the business, our products, our services like others in the industry. We call our products by the industry’s names or even worse, by our trademarked names and wonder why we aren’t getting sales or leads from our site.
An example is the company Builder1440. They have a service they offer which customized applications for home builders. The name of this service is G.1440. So on their menu system they have G.1440. You have to read careful to find out what it is really all about.
Does a builder wake up one day with a driving curiosity as to how they can get G.1440? But they do ask about ‘builder services.’
Find out what your customers are looking for in their language and focus your advertising to appeal to that, not your company’s or industry’s name for it.
