There are 3 things that are very important (I like to think of them as mantras) when you’re doing Online Marketing:
Acquisition is the art of getting people to your website
Conversion is the art of convencing those people to commit, to buy your product or sercive
Retention is art of keeping that costumer happy and, therefore, buying more
It is pretty obvious that each one feeds in to the other. No Retention without Conversion and no Conversion without Acquisition. Pretty much like a pyramid or a funnel if you rather. Ideally you would like to do well in each one of these key activities. Let’s explore them in a little more detail:
Acquisition
Acquisition is all about calling people’s attention and making them come to you. There are many, many internet users out there… how do you get them come to your website? There are many ways to to do that, here a list with the most used ones:
- SEO - Search Engine Optimization. This is basically 2 things: generating proper content and organizing the pages on your website in a way that it is easy for search engine’s robots to go throught it. The main idea: when pages of your website are highly ranked on Google’s and Yahoo’s you will get a lot of trafic.
- Paid Search - Basically it is paying Google or Yahoo to appear on a special place on their results pages. To be efficient here you need to know which words to bid, bid the right way (sometimes it is not just how much you pay) and keeping the creatives and Landing Pages relevant.
- Banners - A very well known way of getting visitors to your website. There are many diferent banner formats and generally you hire an OnLine Midia professional to tell you where to place your banners, which formats to use and so on.
- Affiliates - Supose you have a blog or a website that you want to monetize. What do you do? You enroll in one of the Affiliates program out there, place and ad from this Affiliates and start making money (I’ve seen people making cents and people making hundreds of thousants). As you’ve probably guessed, affiliates programs are generally very “long tail” and work pretty well not being so broad as the above alternatives.
- E-mail marketing - Who likes to receive spam? Although when you user base is well worked it can bring you good results.
- Viral actions - This can be a funny post on you blog, a video on YouTube an e-mail chain with a PPT attached and so on. This works, but is very difficult to plan.
- Member get member - There are many different ways to accomplish this… I believe I could explore it a bit more in detail in another post, since it goes wat beyond the scope of this one.
- The list goes on: Social Networking, On Line video Ads, Printed Ads, PR, Direct Marketing, Catalogs and so on.
Your goal is: bring people in! Be aware, however, that you should focus on qualified type of traffic - that is: people who are within your product’s target. Be aware that sometimes other audience (rather than the intended one) is comming and Converting. My advice: take them! Do not change you strategy just because the people you thought would come are not coming. Instead, make room for the “new people”.
No matter what, pay attention to what people are doing once they’re in. It is mandatory to have web analytics. By knowing where people came from and figuring out what drives them, you will be able to fine-tune the ways you acquire prospects, thus increasing your results.
Start small, think big, grow fast (ooops, I’ve heard this somewhere else…). Test what you are doing to do first, I know this sounds pretty obvious, but don’t go arround spending big bucks on a Google campaign just because everybody talks about it. Do a small test, measure the results, fine tune, and grow - step by step. If you want to do it right, know that it might take some time.
Conversion
If you’ve done the earlier step well, this means you are going to get people landing on your website. They will land in diferent places on your website: your home-page, a product-page and so on. Where they land is what we call the “Landing Page”. Your Landing Page can be your home-page, a product-page, and depending on what you want: a specially build page.
When your goal is very defined it can be a good thing to have specially built Landing Pages. For example: supose your are selling an Anti-virus and you want to attract people based on “easyness” and “safeness”, then you should create at least 2 diferent Landing Pages (one for each). Each one of these Landing Pages will try to convince whoever comes in using an aproach that will work better for each type of visitor. Go ahead and create a Paid Search campaign and have 2 (at least) Ad Groups: one for each appeal (easyness and safeness).
Although those 2 Landing Pages are for people sensible to different appeals, there are some things you should respect always. Here is a cake recipe:
- Be relevant -> Your Landing Page should have only relevant information.
- Be clean -> This means: have only what matters written. Even though your product might have a lot of different features, people’s brain usually freeze when they are in front of too much information.
- Give the visitor the possibility of “knowing more” -> This means: even though you gave him just about enough info to make a call, give him a “details” or “know more” link and there you could stuff a lot of info
- Have the most relevant information within on scroll of the screen (find out the screen resolution through your web analytics software)
- No outbound links -> It sounds wise not to give your visitors links ta point to outside your Landing Page. Enough said.
- Use call to actions -> A call to action can a phrase like “Click here” ou “Buy now” and as weird as it might seam, statistically it has been demonstrated that it works. People obbey orders.
- Try to avoid the use of the word “NO” -> For some reason this word generates some crazy pattern inside peoples brains.
- Give the user some sort of experience -> In a traditional store people can handle what they intend to buy, but it is not possible to do so online. Zoom-in pics and reviews are a good way to achieve this.
- Have a nice shopping cart -> I’ve cases where I wanted to buy something but I didn’t know which creditcards the store accepted or even how much the product cost was. Horrible.
- Don’t ask your prospect to do something you wouldn’t -> Imagine this: you want this guys to commit to a $10 bucks / month product. And you make him go through hell filling up a ton of forms with personal information (not to mention when the javascript on this forms don’t work well). By all means: make this guys life easy (it pays!).
- Don’t lie about your product.
Conversion if a subject I enjoy talking about. So expect more posts about it!
Retention
Last but not least. It seams everybody talks about how to sell online and little is said about how to keep selling online. If you are selling a service, how can you keep your base of subscribers? Furthermore how can you do up-sell or cross-sell to your current costumer base?
You guessed it right when you thought that it is not only up to you, but the guys who do CRM and the Product People in your enterprise. Yes, because if there’s not a well mantained product (I’ve seen VoIP that doesnt route well, or Wi-Fi service that doens’t work anywhere …) how can you get that guy who bought something from you to keep buying? And I am not even considering that a happy costumer will recomend you to 3 other people and an unhappy costumer will make sure he tells 10 people about how terrible you are.
One of the things I like to do if always go through the buying process and see where it fails. Keep many diferent account and use the products to check how they do. Ask “off line people” to use the product (and whatch them use it) and so on. The bottom line is: test your products.
Keep an eye on your product’s churn rate and be close to the CRM people. If you’re small enough no to have a CRM peolple, than be your own CRM people by creating metrics and understanding things like costumer life cicle. Act upon your costumer life cicle! If you discover that the average costumer drops out about 6 months after he/she commited, that you could do up-selling or cross-selling before 6 months, this way you could keep them longer.
It is less expensive to have stickness than to go out and acquire new costumers!
