What is the customer experience?

The other day I called 118 118. For those of you outside the UK, that is one of a number of directory enquiries companies who provide details of business and private telephone numbers. I knew the name of the company I wanted to call and their address, but it didn't help. I didn't find out their number until I got back to my computer and looked them up on their website.

I don't imagine that many potential customers would try to find them through directory enquiries, and it wouldn't matter if they did, based on my experience. My point is that they haven't put themselves in their customers' shoes and tried it for themselves. If anyone in the business had a similar experience then I'm sure that they would have done something to get their number properly registered with the directory enquiries companies.

Not that they are exactly hurting on the telephone front. Last week I asked them what their incoming call volume was and they told me that it was running at about 150 calls per day - not bad for a micro business!

Link building

Everyone wants to build their site traffic. There are a variety of ways of building traffic, but organic search results offers lower cost traffic than pay per click advertisements. Pay per click advertising offers other benefits, but that is a post for another day.

People understand that links are important in building their organic search traffic, but they tend not do much to actively manage their links. The very best type of links are one-way inbound links, but the quality of the site providing the link is important too.

Actively managing links takes time and it relies on a series of activities. Many sites don't tend to do these things but they are vital unless you believe that link building should be left to chance or that the investment is a diversion which gets in the way of the day to day business.

These activities include:

• research, which sites do you want to target?
• classifying possible links, can you use any facts to help you decide which of these target sites deserves special attention?
• developing an outline link request letter for webmasters which should be personalised to their site and describing why a link will benefit both them and you
• testing the letter on some sites which are less important to you
• developing an escalation process, in case they don't respond to your initial offer

I'll be developing these ideas over the next six weeks or so.

What is the purpose of your website?

There is a point of view that the main point of website is no longer to simply sell a product or a service but to begin a relationship with the visitor. As a concept I'm not entirely convinced by this since it is difficult to test, and the essence of the proposition is that it won't be testable for a period.

The idea of changing the purpose of a website from one which sells to one which develops a relationship is that a site which is attempting to develop the relationship is more interested in giving the visitor something than it is in selling a product or a service. Normally the things being given away are in exchange for an email address and the list which develops becomes the focus of an extended email campaign which may include additional free materials in order to cement the relationship further.

The idea is that by getting the visitor to commit to a free gift, you have achieved significantly more than the average website which has no way of capturing any information at all about its visitors.

The core of the argument is that permission marketing like this allows the website operator to provide the mailing list with a wider and more comprehensive view of the products, services and value that he/she can add to potential clients without actually attempting to actively sell anything. It's because this is so difficult to test that I have difficulty with it - if a sales effort fails it could be either that:

• the relationship isn't sufficiently mature and the sales offer will be more successful at some point in the future
• the offer wasn't well presented and wouldn't be successful, irrespective of how mature the relationship is
  

That confusion seems to me to get in the way. Give things away by all means, but don't allow low response rates to promotions to become confused by assumptions about the maturity of relationships. If a promotion fails then take a hard look at the offer. Test it if necessary on a subset before mailing it out to the entire list. Use that research to tune the offer further.

Permission marketing is a great way to build a list, but I'm not convinced it is the way to really build sales. To do that, you need to qualify prospects and that is a very different way of developing the offer.

Copywriting thoughts

Read, read and read again!

Don't just keep a swipe file of advertisements or PR copy to raid when you have to create a new piece of copy, read the material to try to understand what works and what doesn't. If you use the swipe file simply to provide you with crude templates then it is almost inevitable that your resulting copy won't perform quite the way you expect.

Good copy relies on you being truthful about the product or service to the target audience that you want to keep, it doesn't rely on using psychological trickery or deception in order to force people to make a purchase from you. Writing to an audience that you want to keep will help you keep the writing more focused and readers will qualify themselves better, too. Then, when the product or service lives up to the descriptions in your copy, you can expect that you will benefit from word of mouth and referrals to support your campaign.

Eye tracking gives us clues on how to write for the web

In late 2005, Nielsen/Norman conducted an eyetracking test with 255 people in New York City. Sessions with each test subject lasted about one to two hours.

The study helped to highlight how people read web pages and illustrated some interesting differences in the way males and females scan the screen differently.

Here is one of the key findings:

An original press article should not be used on the web - Rewriting & reformatting can increase recall.

Rewriting a dense text resulted in higher comprehension and retention than the original newspaper article.

The original version was revised to increase white space, make the main idea concise, remove unnecessary images, shorten lines of text and adding a graphic for each element in the article.

The eyetracking data highlighted the length of time that readers spent looking at each area of the screen. Readers spent a longer amount of time (about one minute) viewing the original version of the content but remembered 34 percent less than those who received the reformatted story. In both cases a greater amount of time was spent looking at the left-hand side of the page.

Readers find it difficult to read large amounts of dense text on screen unless it can be made memorable in some way. Take this into account when constructing copy and test wherever possible the readability and clarity of what has been written.

BTW, this post has been constructed to follow those guidelines, so make sure you remember what you have read!

How important is the brand?

In Rain's 2007 report on lead generation, there was an interesting insight on the importance of brand in the sales process. Brand matters: 65% of well known companies report themselves as being good or excellent at lead generation while the comparative figure for less well known organisations was 44%. If you are well known, whatever lead generation tactics you employ are likely to work better.

So what does that mean? It could be that branded companies are overemphasising their abilities at lead generation, but that sounds unlikely. It could be that less well known organisations less gung-ho in their self evaluation but that sounds unlikely too.

The Executive Summary - 6 Lead Generation Insights - can be downloaded from Rain at no charge.

You only have seconds to make a good impression

Today I got some junk mail. It was a reasonably well-constructed sales letter and it was well directed - I was certainly within its target group. It was let down by some very basic failures in the paper and the printing.

I know I'm obsessive about this stuff, but plenty of people notice if a letter is produced which:

• is printed on 80 grammes paper which looks as if it has been recycled from old cereal boxes
  
• is printed by a jet printer where the paper handling is so poor that the area of the letter with the contact address has bounced under the print head producing a quite unacceptable blurring of the print
• carries a print ghost higher on the paper, presumably produced by stacking the printed output while the ink was still wet
• has a very low quality logo in the top corner of the letter

It wouldn't matter if I thought the offer was good. Their lack of interest in these details means that they are people that I don't want to work with.

It's got great distribution

My wife likes to drink tea in the morning at breakfast and when she stays at hotels outside the UK they very often bring hot water to the table and a selection of Lipton's tea bags. She doesn't enjoy it much. Her description of Lipton's tea bags is that they are designed for people who don't enjoy drinking tea.

As a brand though, it's well-known, and it must have great distribution. They claim that their teas are drunk in 180 countries. Hotels obviously buy it because they want their guests to enjoy the authentic flavour of a quality tea in the morning. All that well-meaning effort and they buy Lipton.

What Lipton has done very succesfully is to provide Hotels with a short-cut. They can buy the (admittedly extensive) range as an easy choice. That makes it hard for a new entrant - unless they used a cherry-picking strategy to develop volume and then use the volume to justify the distribution required to deliver greater penetration. That's quite an uphill struggle and not many competitors are going to want to adopt that as a strategy.

Make sure that you sell value, from the beginning

• We have the best product / service
  
• Our customer service team is the best
• Our pricing is the most competitive
• Our team is the most qualified
• We are number one in our market

Buyers hear this day after day and they simply stop believing it and start looking for more solid evidence. It's a common habit in sales to present these descriptions as fact when there is no opportunity for the Buyer to test whether the statements are true or not.

As a sales and marketing approach it isn't very effective and it doesn't distinguish the business from any other supplier - it's a 'me too' sales tactic. These approaches are often supported by marketing programs that use a relatively passive communication model which consists of "here it is, this is what we do". Why not try something a little different?

Is it possible for any of your prospects to experience your business value prior to the first meeting with your sales team? If they can, it can be a springboard to the process - it reduces the comparison with competitors, the sales cycle can be shortened and it will be easier to protect gross margins.

Your sales team can spend most its time personalising how they will help the prospect use your product or service as a business tool, instead of spending a disproportionate amount of time in the sales cycle cold calling, and educating prospects.

One way of letting prospects experience the value is give them free business content which encourages them to make a call for a salesperson to visit.

Marketing tools like webinars, teleseminars, newsletters and workshops can be the key to communicating your value first to generate qualified leads. These marketing devices allow your prospects to learn about your value through their own filtering and judgment process and if done correctly, they will call and say "I am interested".