27 replies to this topic

[A.N.Onym]

I've suddenly found myself in the middle of having to prepare a presentation for a conference about the ways to increase ROI of search/internet marketing in the English language Internet.

I can think of:
- a groundbreaking product, built by marketing/usability
- awesome, detailed and verry long content
- web usability
- persuasive content on sales pages
- magnetic copywriting everywhere, especially in headlines
- a/b/multivariate testing
- social marketing (where applicable). However, some might doubt the "high ROI" of social marketing, too.
- consulting with Ammon Johns

and there are other ways, naturally.

Now, which ones would you name?

Since I haven't been as active in reading SEL and other blogs lately, I am researching the topic more vigorously right now, but I'd still like to hear any suggestions from you.

Thank you.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 12 September 2011 - 02:49 AM.

[Black_Knight]

One thing I've found easy to explain over the years, is to treat the website as if it were a top-class sales person/team. But it is a sales team that is omnipresent, in every home, shop and business that wants to hear the pitch, it works 365 days a year, and never takes a holiday.

It always surprises me that there are still business owners that treat their website more as a brochure or flyer than an automated sales person. Obviously, the ROI of enabling the website to make as effective a sales pitch as your best sales executive is huge. If only the marketing bod who wants to treat it like print can be pushed out of the way.

If businesses doubt that, sometimes it is fun to challenge them to an A/B split test where version A is created by the existing marketing/web dev team, while version B is done by sitting the company's top sales people down and getting them to walk through a typical sales scenario, translating that into the web.

The other thing that always hugely increases the ROI is to stop focusing entirely on getting a sale, and start thinking on how to get a customer. A repeat customer who will next time come direct to your company, or search for it by name, rather than on keywords. Customer Lifetime values are one of the most important considerations, and so often completely overlooked.

Amazon is always a great example of a company built entirely on gaining customers rather than winning a sale. They really understand the huge importance of relationship building, upselling and resupplying over having to 'buy' each transaction through investment in marketing.

There's some considerable further detail on Customer Loyalty and Customer Lifetime Value in the Marketing 101 thread I still have in my sig as The Most Important Thread of the Forum.

Most companies still battle to pay for each sale, each transaction, rather than using their marketing to ensure that next time the customer will come direct, or on a search for their brand names or trademarks that others can't compete for.

Building customer relationships is always a smart move, and one of the best reasons for using social media, running a company blog, etc. These things give a company the chance to become a 'friend in the business' to many people, making them the preferred company to go to, even where others are slightly cheaper. Its a trust thing.

Edited by Black_Knight, 12 September 2011 - 03:06 AM.

[A.N.Onym]

Ah, yes, I've almost forgot the customer focus and learning more about the customers. I did initially have personas and close SEO client relationship in the list, however.

I did start reading your thread earlier today and I've specifically shown your post about customer lifetime value to my partner, because it so struck home so many times Even the example about your lingerie customer came useful, since that's the type of shop we are working on

Thanks again.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 12 September 2011 - 04:55 AM.

[DCrx]

The high ROI way of doing things is to get closer to the customer than the competition.

The high ROI way of doing things is to make good on the broken promises of the competition.

That's how you, for instance, walk into an MP3 player market saturated with low-ROI competition and price cutting, with a ridiculously overpriced product called an iPod. And eat everyone's lunch.

When Gateway is closing its chain of stores, that's how you open a chain of Apple stores. And eat everyone's lunch.

But don't listen to me -- I cheat.

[EGOL]

Decide what you want visitors to do on the site from the perspective of your business. Then build a site that will make that happen.

If you want visitors to call you then be sure that your number is very obvious and associated with text that invites the call. If you want them to fill out a form, make it easy to find and quick to complete. Whatever you want them to do, steer them to the goal, make it easy to find, easy to understand, accomplished as quickly as possible.

Display signs of trust. This can be your authorize.net seal. Or, tell that you have been in business on the web since 1994... that you have over 100,000 satisfied customers... clear returns policy... etc.

[DCrx]

Usability is okay. But you won't get a call to your easily seen number until the reader wants to use it.

Bad usability is a demotivator. But good usability just barely gets you to neutral.

Desirability makes the phone ring.

[RisaBB]

Are you speaking to an audience of big-business owners or small ones?

It is very daunting, though necessary, to do all those things, especially if you are a one man/woman show. Someone listening to you who is a small business owner might get overwhelmed with the tasks required to make a website succeed, so perhaps the tasks also need to be prioritized, though I'm not sure how, since website usability and content and social media are all simultaneously important.

I'm sitting on a list of at least 30 things that I know I must do to make my website better and my internet marketing efforts better, but my problem is time and knowing where to spend it.

[AbleReach]

Desirability makes the phone ring.

Desireability may make the phone ring, but without usability they won't be able to find your number or figure out what to do with it.

Have you ever gone to a site, intending to buy something, but left after looking around and failing to figure out how to actually make the purchase? I know I have!

[DCrx]

Desireability may make the phone ring, but without usability they won't be able to find your number or figure out what to do with it.

Which was why I stated pretty much just that ... to head off the inevitable "tastes great, less filling" tug o war.

I guess the topic of the presentation should then be the Hulk could sooo beat up Superman .

[A.N.Onym]

Risa, I'll be speaking in front of:
- a good number (about 85-95%) of SEO professionals, who work in Runet
- a very small number (hardly more, than a dozen) of marketers, who work in the English language market (or foreign market, as we call it)
- maybe, a small, longtail variety of interested people: web developers, business owners, journalists, etc.

Since I am looking for ways that can obviously and relatively easily increase sales by 50-150% or more, those are the same strategies/methods one would use before any others.

I've just realized that while everyone's abuzz about conversion optimization, I haven't heard/read any Internet marketer, except Ammon (and Seth Godin, if we pile him in there), to optimize for the lifetime value of the customer (and to optimize, one must measure, analyze, test/improve and measure again, naturally).

Edited by A.N.Onym, 12 September 2011 - 08:52 AM.

[DCrx]

CLV design isn't about just data collection.

Take the Groupons and such. Recently a business person was complaining about how they foster consumers over customers, and one shots that only happen due to low-ROI price competition and rampant discounting.

I continually make the distinction consumers aren't customers. And the vending machine (usability only ... find exactly what you came for ...then leave) model of ecommerce doesn't really support shopping behavior. There are no "stores" as such, just the bin at the bottom of the vending machine everything falls into.

Should you talk about CLV, I'd point this out. Then I would talk about LevelUp.

The LevelUp model completely upends the Groupon model. What isn't being understood is how to design something different. LevelUp gives first time buyers a small discount. Regular buyers get a bigger discount. With best customers receiving the lion's share.

Sorry, but that's not from the internet marketing camp. That comes directly from "leveling up" in game design.

This does everything catering to consumers with discounts does not. Repeat buys. Loyalty. Profit. It isn't rocket science. And is totally lost on the zeitgeist which views Groupon et al as the only possible model.

And completely unfathomable to designers who don't know how to design something different.

You can data collect everything about the Groupon status quo, and roll out a million minor variations of groupthink for testing without ever hitting on a LevelUp.

My whole schtick about visual merchandising is based around upsells, cross selling, repeat buys. The stuff of customer lifetime value.

Edited by DCrx, 12 September 2011 - 10:02 AM.

[A.N.Onym]

I guess I haven't read many (ecommerce) blogs, after all. This seems to be a great article from Avinash Kaushik, for example.

But I meant more the longevity of a customer (repeat buys, supposedly) and how many customers he can bring, rather than the amount of products he buys within a limited time range.

Edited by A.N.Onym, 12 September 2011 - 10:04 AM.

[DCrx]

than the amount of products he buys within a limited time range.

Exactly what time range beyond a lifetime did you have in mind?

There are a number of ways to expand the stickyness of the site so customers spend more time on the site. Touchpoint design.

Customer retention design is also a possibility to expand the length of the relationship. But we're still talking about that icky money thing.

Dotcom bubble logic aside, if they ain't spending money they are not customers.

Word of mouth is just the same thing as my post about Leveling Up. There are a number of ways to level up in game design, and refferals are just a variation of the model.

What if internet marketers took a look at how games foster word-of-mouth? Could be interesting.



Related:

Smart Gamification: Designing the Player Journey Points. Levels. Unlocks. Game mechanics ...and loyalty programs. Hmmm....

Edited by DCrx, 12 September 2011 - 10:45 AM.

[Black_Knight]

Gamification is one of those really hot, over-hyped terms right now, but there are indeed great lessons to learn from games.

However, it is also really important to note that not every game is a success either. Despite what the gamification pundits seem to say, just apply game theories, mechanics, and techniques may not help at all. Even games themselves, built by experts in making games, built to the same rules and principles as leading game titles, sometimes completely flop.

What made World of Warcraft a huge hit, yet left thousands of exceptionally similar games high and dry to founder? What made the original Civillization by Sid Meirs a huge hit whose popularity is still fondly recalled, yet his later versions, with more advanced gaming ideology never came close?

Games themselves are no sure-fire hits, and they too struggle in marketing. More games fail than succeed, even when they come from the same manufacturers as the hits, even if they are part of the same series, etc.

[jonbey]

Rebel Star Raiders was the best game ever made.

[A.N.Onym]

It depends on whether you see lifetime as the lifetime of the customer regardless, of where he buys, or only the period, before the last time he bought from you. A customer may not be committed to you forever and maximizing profit, while he's with you, doesn't make him a repeat customer. It seems to me that more effort is spent on maximizing short-term profit, rather than trying to increase customer loyalty.

What's worse, I don't remember reading any tests that measured customer loyalty. Guess it's something I need to research

Thanks for sharing the gamification video, DCrx: it's the topic that I was interested for a bit, but didn't find adequate resources about.

Thanks for the feedback, folks. Gave me several ideas to research on

But feel free to note down your own thoughts on the matter, there's never enough of perfection

Edited by A.N.Onym, 12 September 2011 - 10:45 PM.

[DCrx]

Despite what the gamification pundits seem to say, just apply game theories, mechanics, and techniques may not help at all.

The very point made in the vid. There is no "story," simply gimmicks dropped onto the page.

In that it's not very much different from everything else, like Jquery gimmicks ... and every other staple of web design today. So situation normal.

Games however might actually get the focus off the technology and shift focus somebody having fun with the business ...for a change.

Heavens forfend an interruption of the constant genuflecting to Google.

Edited by DCrx, 13 September 2011 - 12:31 AM.

[Black_Knight]

One more suggestion for helping to max-out the ROI on internet marketing: Landing Paths

Its an old idea, but still incredibly under-used. I posted an Article about it for Peter Da Vanzo back in 2003
http://web.archive.o...nding_paths.htm

The idea is basically that the entire experience is based around what you know of the customer. The site effectively adapts itself to the user, using their values and interests specifically.

In the article I specifically noted keywords showing something about the customer, plus I showed how a first link choice might tell you the customer's main focus. In either case, you use this to give them a journey that places their expressed interest foremost.

[A.N.Onym]

Yeah, I rarely see it mentioned. I've only encountered a good description of the persona+landing paths architecture in posts/books by Bryan Eisenberg, the persuasive copywriting/architeture specialist.

Speaking of contemporary design, do you imply that most of the site elements change, maybe even dynamically, according to the visitors past experience/actions?

Thanks again

[DCrx]

Doesn't this fit squarely into the difficulty discussed in the IA vs TA thread?

IA and TA should be complementary. The choice of making them adversary with "versus" speaks more to the issue.

Just for context: Back in the bad old days, there was a trend of putting absolutely irrelevant java games onto sites to make them "sticky." So yes, there is an able and conscientious effort to take every idea and implement it in the most disasterous way imaginable.

When I questioned this people looked at me as if I were questioning and finding fault with gravity.

And people gravitate to that worst practice as a matter of course.

Welcome to the web and the low-ROI status quo.

Edited by DCrx, 13 September 2011 - 10:39 AM.