Weeding out bad conversions

Everyone gets bad conversions.  Customers who are hard to deal with, complain about your product, or demand a refund.  These customers end up costing you more money than they're worth.

Wouldn't it be great if you could weed out those visitors before they ever became customers?

Not only can you, but you should.  These customers could be drowning your business.

The key to being able to weed out bad conversions is the same as increasing your good conversions.  The same way you create a profiles of your ideal customers, you need to create a profile of the person you are trying to weed out.

Ultimately, the goal isn't to try to piss this person off and give them a hard stop (like putting a cookie on their computer that redirects them to Google every time they try to come to your website.)  You want to politely let them know they are in the wrong place and would be better served somewhere else.  

Progressive does an amazing job of this.  

Insurance companies make more money when they never have to pay out a policy.  So naturally, the best drivers are more profitable.  Progressive doesn't want to be competitive for bad drivers.  In fact, they would rather you choose one of their competitors.

By very clearly stating when they don't have the best price, they are politely saying, "You're in the wrong place.  Please leave."

This little comparison tool actually serves 2 purposes.  It weeds out bad conversions AND it's a marketing tool.  They can advertise that they care more about getting you the best deal than they do winning your business while only attracting their ideal customers.

Conversion optimization isn't just for increasing the number of conversions you get, it's also about increasing the quality of those conversions.

How can you weed out bad conversions?

Best way to double your business

It is a common goal for sales teams to want to double their sales.  They constantly look for ways to talk to twice as many people, or close twice as many calls.

For business owners and team leads, this is a worthy endeavor.  If successful, the company would double in size.  But, sadly for most companies, sales teams are rarely successful at doubling their sales.

Marketers always try to reach and attract twice as many people.  But advertising to twice as many people generally means spending twice as much.

The single best way I've seen to double the size of a business is conversion optimization.  

If you need more leads, you can tune your traffic sources to send better qualified visitors, and test changes to your site that get more of those visitors to become customers.

If your leads don't end up buying, you can test changing your site so that they know your sales process up front, before they contact you.  

If your leads are hard to sell, you can test segmenting your visitors to soften or weed out leads with a specific profile.

Most companies who have never worked on conversion optimization have a conversion rate of less than 2%.  Doubling that number so 3 or 4% of your visitors purchase or become leads is relatively easy.  

Even if you already have a great conversion rate of 10%.  That means only 1 in 10 visitors ever purchases from you.  Convincing 1 more person that they have found the right place is all about how you present your product.

Conversion optimization gives you a framework to generate new ways of presenting your product and test them to see what works best.

Could conversion optimization double your business?

Content Marketing Planning

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your content is to not have a plan.  If you produce content of any sort: blogs, white papers, ebooks, or even just the pages of your website, you need a plan.

Your plan doesn't have to be a super complicated Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint flow chart.  It just has to answer a few simple questions.

1. What is the purpose of your content?
2. What method(s) will you use to achieve your goals?
3. How will you measure success?

Purpose:

The purpose of your content is the most important.  Are you trying to get more business? or are you just writing for fun?  Where do you see yourself in 5 years and what role did your content play along the way?  

Most companies say something like, "The purpose is to establish ourselves as the experts."  That's great, but why do you need to be an expert?  Is it to get more business? get a book deal? or something else?  9 times out of 10, it's to get more business. 

Method:

There is more than one way to skin a cat... that's sort of a gruesome way to think about your options.  But what if we think about catching a [stray] cat (instead of skinning one). 

• You can set out food and water and feed it until you have gained enough trust that it will let you pick it up.
• You can set out a humane trap that will trap it in a nice carrier for you.

The first one is how most content marketing campaigns are designed.  You essentially create a content channel that appeals to your target audience.  This gives you a personal stream of "potential" clients that you can advertise to.  Assuming you provide useful information and advertise appropriately, you will gain enough trust to pick up some new clients.  It is important to realize that this is not a quick process.

The second method is focused around increasing conversions.  Rather than blogging about everything related to your industry, you focus in on the key parts where you are the best.  This leads readers to not only see you as a trustworthy source of information, but also as the best solution.  This method draws a line in the sand to separate those who might be interested in buying and those who just came for the free cookies.  

I understand the urge to blog about everything, and everyone is different, but I tend to advise companies to create public content that focuses on conversions.  If you still feel the need to publish your vast industry knowledge, you can do so as a newsletter or private blog that is only available to your clients and inner circle. 

Success:

That last thing you need to know up front is, how will you know if you are succeeding or just wasting time?  Depending on your purpose and the method you use, your measure of success will be different.  Ultimately, most content is aimed at increasing sales.  If you can't attribute a growth in your bottom line to your content strategy, chances are you missed something important.

Does your content marketing produce results?

The problem with home pages

Most companies view their home page as a veritable table of contents.  A way to show off everything they do and give visitors access to all of it.  Unfortunately for visitors, this approach lacks focus.  

I'm not saying that you shouldn't make a menu page, a page that acts as a portal to all the various parts of your website (what most people use as their home page), but rather you should pick the 1 thing that matters most to your business and let your visitors start there.

I see lots of agency websites that have huge lists of all the services they can provide.  This isn't inherently bad, but it's akin to a one-man-band calling himself the accordion-symbols-drum-horn-trumpet-flute-harmonica-whistle guy: the concept of a one-man-band gets confused and lost.

If you do provide a large list of services, try using your homepage to convey the [singular] concept of being a solution provider.  There is no need to link to all of the various solutions you provide.  If you can sell your visitors on the idea that you are their solution provider, vetting your services is just procedural.  

On the other hand, if you don't do a bunch of things, don't feel like you need links to your blog, Twitter, Facebook, or about pages to try to flush out your home page.  Having a clear focus is a good thing.  It draws a line through your audience to weed out the disinterested.  Everything else just adds confusion to your concept.

Content Marketing Mistakes

Content marketing is one of the (current) hottest plugs for every agency out there.  Why not?  After all, content is king.  It demonstrates industry leadership, search engines love it, web users consume unstoppable amounts of it, and if you're lucky, it might even get shared and bring loads of free traffic.

If your business model is to sell ads on your website, all you need is viral content.  But, I've seen an increasing number of businesses, B2B and B2C, that are publishing traffic attracting content and getting no business results.  What's worse is there are agencies saying that you should use your content to attract potential customers 3 years before they need you.

The goal of conversion optimization is to reduce the length of the sales cycle, not open it up to 3 years!  So, how do you create content that brings conversions?

You have to create content that helps people make a purchase.

By focusing your content on the people who are already looking to buy, you don't waste time and effort trying to build a long term relationship that will be lucky to last 3 minutes, let alone 3 years.

What does this content look like?  Well, have you ever taken your tech friend to go help you pick out a computer?  Or asked your mechanically inclined friend to help you pick out a car?  It's kind of like that. 

You're an expert in your industry, so it seems obvious that you would be the best equipped to help someone navigate their options.  You get more conversions from this kind of content by shining a light on your own business and solutions.

These visitors are already looking to buy, and if you do it right, you've set yourself up to be their best option.

Here's a real world (personal) example: Choosing the right Conversion Optimization Company.   

What does your current content help visitors do?

The power of landing pages

Landing pages operate on the principle that less is more.  Fewer options, mean you don't have to decide what to buy, just that you will buy.  And you don't have to figure out where to go, there is only one path forward.  This creates an obvious focus that decreases indecision and in turn increases conversions.

But, there is another force at work here.  We, as a species, have a hard time accepting pluralistic values.  Pluralistic value is when two or more descriptions of a person or item are technically correct, but are in conflict with each other.  Depending on the gravity of the conflict, we unconsciously choose to ignore one or more of these views/descriptions, and accept only the one we feel most comfortable with as the "correct" view.

An example of this is a person who has purposely killed someone and is a good person.  In many cases we put this person in jail and view them as a murderer.  There is no way they can be a good person if they are willing to kill.  The flip side is the men and women of the armed forces.  Many have killed and are good people.  Regardless of the reason, we do not view them as murderers, rather, they are just good people.

The above example is an extreme view on the topic of pluralistic value, but it relates just the same to small conflicts.  An accountant who is an artist, or even a person who is an expert in multiple fields.  It seems hard to imagine that the accountant could be equally good at a logical task (accounting) and a creative task (art), or that a person could achieve and maintain the highest ranking of expertise in multiple fields.  

It would be like Micheal Phelps winning the 100M Butterfly and the 100M Dash.  Would you call him a swimmer? or a runner?

Many businesses don't limit themselves to just a single product or service and thus there is naturally a pluralistic conflict displayed on the homepage of nearly every website.  Luckily this is where landing pages come in.  

You can segment your traffic based on what they searched for in the search engine, where they came from, their location, and even their history on your site.  Showing them only what they came for will increase the likelihood that they won't feel conflicted about your company and will be able (mentally) to move forward much easier.  (You can always up-sell or cross-sell them after you have them on the hook.)

Note: I am working with a client who sells thousands of products in hundreds of categories AND services all of them.  Currently they have no landing pages.  Over the next couple of months, we'll be deploying a few hundred landing pages for them.  I'll be sure to write up a case-study to show you how it worked out.

What makes your website so valuable?

Your website is the most valuable marketing tool you have because it is where you start, and maybe even complete, the sales transaction.  Seems like common knowledge, so why is this ground breaking?

Research shows that over 50% of customer loyalty is attributed to the experience of purchasing the product or service.  

It seems more logical that an amazing product at a great value from a trusted company would inspire more loyalty, but it doesn't.  I'm not saying that these things aren't important, but I am saying that the buying experience controls the majority stake in repeat business.

I understand that this is a hard concept to grasp, so let's look at a real world example.  Starbucks goes to great lengths to make the experience of purchasing coffee unforgettable.  The aroma of freshly ground coffee hangs in the air.  There's smooth music on the radio that's just loud enough to get lost in, but not so loud you can't hear yourself.  The hustle of the baristas adds to the noise of world around you while the comfortable lounge area calls for you to slow down and take a moment for yourself.  The same coffee at McDonald's, just isn't the same.  

Conversion Rate Optimization isn't just about getting people to say "yes" and click "buy."  It's about creating an experience that makes it easy to say yes and where you don't worry about clicking "buy now."  

CRO creates a process that instills trust, confidence, and gives the buyer piece of mind.  This reduces hesitation and buyer's remorse.  It all adds up to a better purchasing experience that increases customer loyalty.

Are you ready to start optimizing your website?