Making a business more stable

A small business that I know set up a new offer in my area about a year ago. From a standing start this offering has generated new revenues of about $400k in the last 12 months. That indicates that there is a genuine need for the service and the pricing must be relatively attractive, particularly since this growth has been achieved without anything other than poster advertising.

It wants to grow the revenues from this new offer further since its core business has been cyclical and the new service is significantly more predictable, limited by the capacity of its facilities and the availability of suitably qualified staff. The supply side is complex with both national and local suppliers, all competing for the same kinds of staff and not differing much in the pay and benefits on offer. It looks as though recruitment may well be the key process in helping the business to grow.

Here I am, where are you?

I got an email from someone the other day which said, more or less, "Here I am, where are you?", it then went on to describe some work that the writer wanted me to do.

The email was from the Managing Director of a high street brand that I had done some work for a couple of years ago. I had facilitated a 2 day workshop for a cross-functional management team and although I had excellent feedback from them, nothing seemed to happen as a result. I followed up several times over the next 3 months but it went very quiet.

The moral of the story has to be, don't bore people to death with follow-ups but have patience. If they really liked what you did then you won't be forgotten.

Copywriting the Halbert way

Having noted the death of Gary Halbert in a previous post, I thought that it might be worthwhile to reflect on why his style of copywriting worked. Halbert himself didn't think it was much to do with the quality of his writing. He said that it was the quality of the ideas that was important and he used to spend at least 90% of his time on thinking about what he was supposed to be selling and less than 10% on the writing itself. On that basis, Halbert should probably be revered as a marketeer or a super salesman rather than a copywriter.

The thing that he looked for was a hungry audience. He didn't mean people who were literally hungry of course, he meant a group of buyers who were desperate for the product or service he was promoting. If he could identify that audience then he knew that he could sell. His gift was very often to identify an aspect of a product which had been overlooked by other people which could confer real benefits to that hungry audience. He was, in his own words "an ideas man" who could generate value for a business both on the top line and the gross margin. Read some of his newsletters to get a flavour of how he helped to redefine business models for some of his clients.

He appeared to be a robust character who enjoyed telling the unvarnished truth, but that was probably a persona for public rather than private consumption. He was obviously a complex man who straddled the old and the new and tied them together by understanding that, at root, the buyer was untouched by the technology. His ability to tie in an advertisement to that buyer was what made him famous. His influence is significant and I have no doubt that many of his ideas will be stolen and used again and again.

A sale is a very fragile thing

The headline is a quote from Gary Halbert who died on Easter Sunday. Halbert was internationally respected as a copywriter and managed the later years of his life as a mentor and trainer of people trying to develop their own skills.

Like many people, I became aware of him through the Gary Halbert letter which contains several hundred newsletters, begun by him during the 1980s and selling at that stage for about $185 per year. A lifetime subscription to the newsletter sold for about $2800. The point is that people paid over that money willingly because they admired the content, but also the style. Halbert's sales letters are masterpieces of carefully drawn, highly effective prose. If you want to look at a master writer developing a variety of themes then this is a great place to start.

The thing that makes Halbert stand apart as a copywriter in recent years was in his understanding of reach and channels - he knew that for the copy to do its job, it had to find its audience, and he was very inventive at getting his copy in front of plenty of eyeballs. A talented writer and one well worth celebrating.

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.

PPA and click fraud

Advertisers will like Pay per action adverts because they will pay out only when an action is completed. In the current experiment, advertisers can define what the action is (for example, a newsletter sign-up or a sale). It should eliminate the incidence of click fraud too, because the action has to complete before the advertiser has to pay Google. That's where things may start to become more complex.

If the desired action is a sale then at what point does the advertiser pay Google? At the point that their card acceptance service registers the payment from the customer? When the product or service is delivered? What happens if the advertiser pays Google for a completed sale and the customer subsequently asks for a full refund? If these issues can't be handled automatically, then Google may fall out of love with PPA very quickly.

PPC or PPA?

Pay per click has been with us for a while and it has proved to be highly popular with web marketers. It offers immediacy, targeting and test data. What it hasn't done up to now is offer every advertiser low cost. Some advertisers find that Pay per click advertising is highly expensive since they find themselves paying for clicks which don't convert into sales or relationships which can be exploited subsequently.

Google is experimenting with Pay per action advertisements. During the experiment, these will be available only on Google's content network, but because they focus on advertiser-defined actions they may ultimately prove to be even more popular than Pay per click ads.

While the experiment is in beta, there are some additional limitations for advertisers wishing to take part:

• U.S advertisers only
• You must have conversion tracking (or be able to implement conversion tracking code) on your website

Advertisers will have to think through just what an action (a sign up for a newsletter, a sale of a book or another product, for example) might be worth to them and that will no doubt mean that bid prices for sales actions could rise sharply which will do Google's share price no harm at all.

I can't wait to see this experiment roll out beyond the content network and then into Europe. This looks as though it will be a very exciting innovation.

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!

Increased level of security planned for eCommerce

The future of online payment processing is coming under significant debate, both nationally and internationally. In the UK fundamental changes are happening. The major clearing banks are attempting to make online banking and credit / debit card clearance significantly more secure. This is both to reduce the current levels of fraud but also to give normal customers the confidence to spend more money online.

In order for online retailers to process Maestro cards from 1st July, 2007 all merchants will be required to be “3-D Secure enabled”. Inevitably this change will cause teething troubles.

For those of you not yet fully aware of “3-D Secure”, the process is actually quite simple; as part of the website checkout process, at the point when you seek to authorise payment from the customer's payment card, the customer is taken to a pin / password entry screen. This screen is hosted on their own card issuer’s servers. The customer will then need to enter the correct password (like a PIN number). If the wrong password is entered then the transaction will be rejected and the merchant will not get the authorisation of the order. However, if the password is correct the customer will be returned to the shopping site to finish their transaction.

While this promises a reduction in the level of charge-backs levied against suspect transactions, online retailers need to make sure that their sites will be compliant by 1 July.

Get the right headline for your readers

I have just read an interview with a copywriter called Gary Bencivega. He tells a story of writing headlines for investors. One of his clients sold gold and silver coins and bullion. In this case it was an ad for silver. The headline ran for many years, “Why the price of silver may rise steeply”. He suggested that the agency should test a headline that sounded stronger, bolder, more confident such as ‘Why the price of silver will rise steeply’. He wanted to make it sound as if the writer believed what he was predicting.

Testing the new headline showed that the original was better. “Why the price of silver may rise steeply” outperformed “Why the price of silver will rise steeply” by about 200% despite having the same body copy in both versions. He found it difficult to understand why “may rise” worked so much better than the more forceful “will rise”.

Finally he concluded that it was the disbelief factor. Most investors are knowledgeable and thoughtful. The promise of something that is unknowable such as “will rise”, makes readers conclude that the writer didn't know what he/she was talking about. By building in a little bit of understatement at the headline stage, investors got pulled in to read the whole of the copy.

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.

What should we spend the money on?

Sagefrog carried out a survey last year of 100 marketers in North America and discovered that the activities that respondents reported as having the lowest ROI were:

• Direct mail
• Advertising

It's easy to understand why marketers feel negative about Advertising, it is difficult to justify print advertising and there is no guarantee that the beautifully crafted ad will even be read. Direct Mail on the other hand is much simpler - lower cost to develop and simpler to test. It's odd that a technique which has a long history and which is still developing major revenues for some organisations should be regarded so negatively by this group of respondents.

The survey results can be downloaded from Sagefrog.

What makes a great eCommerce website?

Creating a successful eCommerce website requires the same kind of tried and tested approaches as those used in sales letters. So what are those techniques?

• develop a focused approach to a targeted audience (pre-writing preparation) - that focus will help you to develop the right kind of copy and it makes testing simpler because you know what type of audience to test it on
  

• grab their attention using a combination of powerful headlines and sub-headings which they can use to navigate their way through the site
  

• hold their interest by reminding them why they are on the site (to solve a problem) and give them teasers about the solution or product that you are offering
  

• develop trust - often the biggest hurdle for budding copywriters – building an interesting and emotionally-compelling story that can get through built-in lie detectors that readers have developed and make them trust you, as well as convince them that you have the right solution or product

• demonstrate your credibility using testimonials although if you are already high profile in your market, talking about your background by mentioning specific achievements (facts and figures) will work as well

• make your offer by setting out the pricing, the main product, the incentives and so on

• close the sale. The “Call To Action” must be absolutely clear – there's nothing worse than going through all the effort of writing a carefully constructed sales letter than to have your reader leave at the end because the close isn't doing its job
  

UBPs and ad copy

Remember Andy Bounds? He is very good at reminding us that everything we do as sales and marketers has to be tested in a world populated by buyers who look at the world differently from us. He believes that the copy has to meet the buyers' unique buying points (UBPs) rather than our selling points.

So where does the buyer want to see the price in an ad? Different ad producers tackle the problem in different ways, some people:

• put the price in the headline
• set out the price in the opening paragraph
• leave the price until the point they are asking for the sale
  

It's obviously important to get this right, so let's start to look at an ad from the Andy Bounds perspective. The price is not a benefit to a buyer so emphasing price in the headline could alienate some buyers before they find out how wonderful the product is. Of course, if the product is a staple where the price is well-known then a low price could make a compelling headline providing it detailed the saving rather than the price itself.

Putting the price in the headline makes a number of assumptions:

• the buyer is aware of the normal price for the product
• the buyer will find the discounted price attractive rather than suspicious
  

Using the UBP approach, it makes more sense to focus on the benefits that the buyer will enjoy from the purchase - what they are left with after the product or service is delivered.

If the benefits are really compelling then the price can be introduced after the buyer understands what the purchase will do for them. It's at that point that the buyer makes a decision based on their individual value proposition - are those benefits so attractive that they overcome the price that you have just disclosed? If they do, then there is a good chance that your buyer will close the sale.

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.

The squeeze

We had a prospect who had been dithering. Time was moving on and they seemed to be reluctant to get down off the fence and make a decision and live with the consequences. Eventually we used a squeeze to close the business.

I'm not sorry that we used a 'trick' to encourage the decision. It was important that they moved on and stopped wasting time. I think that they have made the right choice but only time will tell. We will do what we can to make their copy sing and if we get it right then we should see the results in their visitor statistics.

In pipeline terms we understood how much they needed our solution and valued our input - where we took a risk was on how much we could influence the outcome.

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".

A different eye

A designer has taken a look at one of our eCommerce sites and has shown us some ideas about how we might change its look and feel. We looked at them together yesterday and we all agreed that visually, he was right - his visual concept is significantly more sophisticated than the one we are using.

The trick is to combine some of those visual concepts with other things we already doing. In some ways we are very pleased with the site - it has great positioning for several good keywords and products already sell from the page - and although it is intended as a classic B2C site, it is developing a steady list of enquiries for larger volumes from businesses who are interested in buying the product.

I'm going to have a word with him today to see if I can get him to adapt his approach a little to see if how can we can get the best of both worlds. None of us claims to be strong in design - but we know what we like - and we get plenty of value in working with designers who approach our problems without our baggage about what the web page has to include.