Applying the Scientific Method to your Behavioral Marketing
Behavioral marketing vendors are not alone in the struggle to communicate effectively via the Web. One area crucial to success is the human dimension. This is the thing missing from these sites. They don’t answer the human questions:
Who will I deal with?
What is the process of starting, implementing, and reviewing my campaigns?
How often will I interact with the team? What will they tell me?
How much hand-holding can I expect?
Can I trust your team? Why?
When I say: “Transparency”
I mean: “Tell me about how you communicate with me, and I’ll fret less about the technology.”
The bottom line: don’t just ask your behavioral advertising partner about their technology, methodology and ad network. Ask about the ways they interface with you to ensure you’re getting the best information when investigating, hypothesizing, testing and evaluating.
I invite vendors to tell me what you mean in the comments.
Applying the Scientific Method to your Behavioral Marketing
The Language of Behavioral Marketing, Part 1
Why is it so difficult to figure out the differences among behavioral marketing vendors? Let’s start by dissecting the vendors’ Web sites.
Since working to learn about the behavioral marketing industry, I find myself floating on a sea of ambiguity, still looking for islands of meaning. Over the past five months, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a number of industry luminaries. I’ve heard the panels at a major online marketing conference. I subscribe to the industry newsletters. Yet, I find myself without a favorite technique, a “wow” vendor or technology I just have to try. Like most marketers, I can’t devote my full attention to exploring behavioral marketing.
There appears to be some amazing solutions on the market, but I don’t know enough yet to organize my explorations. Whenever I find myself struggling at something, I go back to basics. It’s time to start parsing the language of the behavioral marketing world and find out once and for all what it all really means.
In this column and the next, I will use the Web sites of a number of behavioral advertising vendors in an attempt to clear the fog that surrounds this marketplace.
I can already hear the groans.
Yes, the behavioral marketers’ children have no shoes, to borrow from a famous euphemism. The Web sites of the behavioral marketing world aren’t necessarily the best examples of advanced marketing techniques. But I am not interested in casting stones at individual sites. I’m on a search for meaning and truth.
Here are some general observations about why it is so difficult for marketers to narrow the list of behavioral marketing vendors based on their Web sites.
We’re going to talk today about your social conversion rate.
There is a lot of discussion about social media, Twitter, blogging. What should we be doing? How do we know if we’re doing it right? How do we implement it? How do we pick the places to start? Should we be on Facebook or should be on Twitter? The goal of my presentation today is to give you a way of looking at social media so that you can make those decisions specific to your business.
I am going to start with a premise which you may or may not buy: Advertising was designed to simulate word of mouth as word of mouth was inefficient. Was it designed purposely for that? But that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to have a trusted relationship where we could recommend our own products with more people than we would get simply by waiting for word of mouth to filter through.
Today that’s not the case. Word of mouth is very efficient. Things are changing in advertising.
Defining Conversion
Let’s talk about paid media and earned media, which I’ve redefined a little bit. We’re going to talk about the typical funnel that we are all aware of. Some, add a stage to this. Some add several stages to the awareness consideration funnel. And then we’re gonna talk about the post-purchase funnel.
Dave Evans in his book, “Social media marketing an hour a day”, does an excellent treatment of the post purchase funnel. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be here today to co-present with me. So I get to take all the credit.
We’re going to talk about two kinds of metrics, predictive and definitive and about some of the things we might measure in each of these stages.
The arrows are conversions. So, I will define conversion as a movement to the next stage.
For most of us, a conversion is generating a lead, completing a shopping cart, and that is still true. But in looking at the funnel, we realized we need to convert people to understand what our business does, to be considering our solution as part of their solutions, and then, of course, to take action.
So in different businesses, we’re going to map this differently. It’s going to be interesting challenge.
Paid Media and Earned Media Funnels
Let’s start with paid media. This is very simple. Put in a quarter and connect with someone. Buy a print ad, buy a display ad, Google AdSense, Pay per Click advertising.
However if you’re advertising paid media where you pay somebody for the right to put your message out in public, it’s considered paid media.
Generally or traditionally earned media was applied to articles in press today. We really can apply it to social media. So I’ve expanded the definition of earned media to include social conversation.
I like earned media better than social media because social media sounds like we’re out talking to people. Earned media sounds like we’re out earning our media. And I think that is really where the bar needs to be set.
Your content needs to be worthy of being talked about. Your product needs to be worthy of being talked about. How you talk about your product needs to be worthy of being talked about.
Predictive Metrics and Definitive Metrics
Let’s cover two kinds of metrics. They’re predictive metrics and they’re definitive metrics. Predictive metrics are something that conversion scientists of which all of you will become one day use to get an idea of what’s going to happen. So I know if somebody adds to cart, that’s pretty predictive of them buying something. But not everybody buys, that’s called the abandoned rate.
Somebody visiting my webpage is predictive of a level of awareness. I can assume they’re aware of my company or my brand. It’s predictive. My bounce rate is 90%. It’s not a very good predictor.
Average, page views for visit, time on site, those are more definitive. They tell you what is happening and what has happened. I like definitive measurements because they’re usually really close to business goals.
They bought the product, they downloaded the white paper. They gave us a lead. They called.
Levels of Conversion
How do you measure awareness? How do you measure how well people are becoming aware of what you’re doing through your advertising?
First is conversion to awareness. When somebody says, ah, this company does this. They become aware of what your brand, what your company does, what problem it can solve for them would probably myself or them in the future.
Brand marketing and image marketing are designed to get people to understand what you’re about. Usually at a very high level. But good brand marketing can take you quite far down.
A couple of metrics we would look in here, predictive. How many impressions are we getting? How many people are seeing our ads and ostensibly reading them and understanding what our brand is about?
Becoming aware of our company, RSS subscribers, searches that are made for brand keywords. Those are all what I would call predictive measures.
As you’re thinking about putting together a social media campaign for each media, you need to be asking, what are my predictors? Do I want to measure those? Or do you want to focus more on the definitive measure?
From the awareness standpoint, if they do come to my website, I might infer that that is an accurate measure of their knowledge of my brand. And if I come to a brochure page and tells me I’m the leader in something that I don’t understand, it doesn’t tell a story, they may not actually understand and be aware of what we actually do. They just come to a brochure website. Click throughs, page views, contest entries.
If you’re running a contest, bounce rate, these are all definitive measures of how we’re doing from the awareness standpoint.
Consideration Conversion
So this is considered a conversion consideration. Processing, developing a preference for what you process of someone, developing a preference for what you provide.
In a lot of business to business sales processes, this can be a 30 day, 60 days, three months, six months, nine month process. People are buying something that’s high budget item. A lot of people may be involved. There are lots of little conversions that happen in here as they go through the consideration process and understand what you do, why you’re better, what their alternatives are or what happens if they go without. What happens if they choose someone else. Going through that consideration process around your product or service.
Predictive metrics that I would focus on are:
Minimum number of return visits. If you are a consultant in a high consideration process, return visits would indicate that coming back, home, more information, and you can generate return visits with good things like good email campaigns and social campaigns, bookmarks.
How many people are bookmarking, a piece of information that they’re consuming. Key page visits, key page key pages are a first and foremost, your landing pages. I believe home page and your bio pages are your product pages.
Number of searches made, time on site.
Those are all predictive of people who are engaging with you, who are in the conversion consideration process, definitively. This is where leads and downloads come from. So I know that they are learning more about my product. If you’re downloading things, giving me information, calling me, attending my webinars, attending my seminars. I believe that ours has subscribed as a sample of that.
We don’t know how many people are really reading through our RSS. So this really might qualify better as a predictive metric. Newsletter, circulation visits, to comparison shopping center, shopping pages, and any online chance that they’re doing. All indicative of consideration conversion, people who are engaged.
How many of you have a sales cycle that is longer than 30 days, 60 days, three months, nine months, a year. You’ve got to keep people engaged and entertained in a web.
The web is such a great way to do that. And with social media, we actually have the opportunity to get other people to help us do that.
Conversion to Action
When we say conversion, this is usually what we’re focused on. They bought something, they became a lead, they did something that’s going to materially benefit my business, add to cart, coupons or a couple of predictive action-based ones.
All of the consideration ones I generally use as predictive. If somebody joined the house list, they increase in my eyes the number of people who are going to be buying, even if that’s over time,
Anybody who’s watching anything on their website that tells you things are moving in the right direction or not. Find a dealer. I think that would be a great predictive one. How many people are searching for dealers?
They buy something. They subscribe to our online service. They renew, they upgrade, upsell, add on and they purchase again.
The Post-Purchase Funnel
So we’ve got our traditional awareness consideration action funnel. All of us are taught that in marketing school or we learn it from our sales guys. And what we do with social media is we say, all right, we need to do blogs and Twitter so that we can start cramming more people into the awareness funnel. Get them into the front and work them down to action. That’s what we’re going to do with social media.
Dave Evans in his book said there’s a post-purchase funnel. And these guys are your prime targets for social media. They know your product, they like it, or they hate it.
But these are where you’re going to find your influencers. The guys that will build your tipping point, that will spread the word and begin the feedback cycle.
Just like we did with awareness, consideration, and action, we’re going to go through the same process with the last half of the funnel.
First of all, you have to convert them to use the product. If they buy it, they spent money on it. Aren’t they going to use it? Not necessarily.
Think of all the people who are building web 2.0 applications who do a freemium model and they come in and they sign up for the free trial, a free demo. Software companies then don’t do anything to encourage this person to use it.
Well, they forget about it. Maybe they did it on a whim. It seemed important at the time, something more important came up. Whatever the issue is. If you aren’t actively converting people from buyers to users, you are missing an opportunity.
Predictive Metrics
So what does that mean from the social media funnel? Visits to your help site, service calls, visits to your user forums. These are all what I think are predictive of increased use. An increase in visitors to your forums and increased in posts on your forums, increasing help calls means people are trying to use your product. I would call that predictive.
Reservations is a great example of predictive things to watch that tells people that they’re using your product. Reservations predicts coming and spending money.
Loyalty program and repeat buy.
Definitive Metrics
Unique login. We’re just talking about logins, renewals, registration cards, returns. People are using it. They might not like it. They are returning it. You’ll get a company like Zappos. They’ll let you order three or four sizes of the same shoe and return the others. It turned into a very positive thing for them.
Logins, I think is probably the closest you’re gonna get. If you have a website as a service.
Forming an Opinion
We then need to convert them to form an opinion, Oh my God, are we spoon-feeding these people? Can they not think for themselves?
There’s really two components to opinion. It’s my own personal experience and the experience of others.
My opinion might be swayed by what you hear from other folks. Certainly going to be swayed by my own experience. But people tend to want to either be contrary to the crowd or join the crowd. And depending on what the talk is, the buzz is out there in the social network, social networks or the social media space about your product, it can significantly influence opinion.
How many of you are familiar with the net promoter score? The net promoter score asks one question, would you, after using my product, recommend it to somebody else. They survey, they go out and they ask that one question and they ask you on a scale of one to 10 would you recommend my product?
Then you take the positives, subtract the negatives and that gives you your net promoter score. If you’re a net promoter score is negative, you know that there is something wrong with the product, with the experience, with followup or customer support, etcetera.
It’s a great, great predictive measure of opinion surveys. There’s a number of ways of measuring buzz. I’m assuming that we’re all still trying to figure out exactly how to prioritize and spend our money and resources at this time.
So I’m not going to talk about those tools, but I think there’s been a lot of discussion about those here. What are the comments like? How good are the ratings? How good are the reviews?
Definitively: Are people renewing? Are they upgrading upselling, add on purchases? Are they joining affinity groups? How are my returns? How many bookmarks am I getting?
This tells me, people are plugging into the places a where they can hear other people’s opinion and eventually express their own.
What are you doing to predict whether people are forming an opinion? In other words, how do you know if the loyalty programs don’t indicate somebody who’s bought the product, use the product, developed enough of a positive attitude that they anticipate buying more of the products and joining a loyalty product probably fits better here in the opinion, conversion, would you agree?
One of my clients is selling a software website as a service product. And they’re using a book to teach people the process of using the site and why it’s different, why it’s unique.
Therefore people who visit the book site and buy the book is actually predictive of people using the software. That’s an interesting use of content as a predictor.
Conversion to Talk
Give them some place to talk. Now, today they’re finding a lot of places to talk. You don’t necessarily have to give them a place to talk, but if you can, then you get to be a part of the conversation. Pretty much off talking on Pixo and Bebo and places that you don’t play. You don’t get to be a part of the conversation.
If they’re coming and talking on your blog, you get to play. It is a really good idea to create these social landing pages.
The things that people are talking about was really interesting. Rojas said that if somebody tells you, they’re going to get you 10,000 followers on Facebook, what value is it? I believe friends and follows, authority are all predictive. So yes, having a lot of friends on Facebook can be predictive somewhat.
You’re going to find out whether 10,000 friends translates into X sales per month of your product, X number of leads of your product, search your rank. So using things like Technorati, Google Search. Google Page Rank, these are all indications that people who are linking back to you, and they’re very predictive of how you’re doing out there.
Definitive measures of people who are talking
Things that you can measure, things you can put on a graph. number of comments, number of reviews, number of ratings, how many link backs are you getting? How many shares are you having through share this with a friend? How many people are using discount codes, sending out invitations? How many user groups? What are your user group memberships, both online and offline.
These are definitive measurements of people who are putting themselves in a position to talk about whatever. If they like you, they’re likely to talk about you.
People are using hashtags. II think that would be definitive measure of talk. If you can use the Twitter API or go do a regular search and harvest those things, the problem with Twitter is it’s big and it’s hard. It’s expensive to get those metrics out right now. So it’s hard for me on a weekly basis to make strategic decisions. But the people who are representing me on Twitter will use those on a day to day basis to respond and be a part of the conversation.
A predictive metric of talk
How many posts you make on other blogs? So I just got an email from somebody. I posted something on LinkedIn. He came back, visited my site and commented on my blog and talked about a book that I’m in the process of publishing. The more posts you make is predictive of the number of posts you’re gonna be on your blogs.
And there is a correlation there. When I post three times a week, my traffic just goes. When I stop and cut back to one a week, to a month, it drops or at least flattens out almost like a volume switch.
Anything you can do to measure that sounds predictive because they’re coming to a website and we don’t know what it’s going to mean. It’s essentially a measure of clickthroughs.
But as you start to say, okay, we need some way to measure use. We need some way to measure opinion. We need some way to measure talk. And when someone measures the feedback loop to the original funnel, you start to think, okay, well let’s use bud URL. Let’s use Google tag tracking.
You start to put the things in place that just measure those things rather than just, all right, we need a Twitter page. Puts a little bit of planning in place and if it’s not working for you, you can stop it and see. Can you really unplug yourself from the social media sphere?
Social landing pages
Now we all know that in the awareness consideration action funnel landing pages are incredibly powerful. If we have an ad that says 20% off and we take them to a page that says 20% off, instead of taking them to homepage, they are in the right place. And we were more likely to engage them and get them to finish. The landing page does not give them distractions, distracting navigation, ways for them to hedge their buys, but really gives them the information they need to make that decision to buy that product at that time. Our conversion rates go up.
So what are the social equivalents?
I would argue the best social landing page right now is the blog. And I like the blog because it services all three levels of the social media funnel, the post purchase funnel.
It provides information, which means people, can better use your product or service. In this case, I write a lot of best practices about how to implement email, how to implement landing pages, how to write copy, the things that I recommend to my clients I use my blog to increase use.
User commentary will influence opinions, or you can comment on my blog. People add. people subtract, people argue. This helps to influence opinion. It also helps to influence use.
Calls to action generate talk. There’s a big box on there says if you got something to say, here’s a place to say comment here.
At the same time, blogs are promotional. You really can’t see any of the promotions, but I promote books that I believe in and things like that on my website. And there is a way to join email. Therefore, I am providing specific offers, which bring people from my blog back around to the awareness or the consideration phase. And the beauty of this kind of word of mouth is that people tend to jump in at the consideration phase because the social or the earned media has already taken them through awareness. So you don’t have to worry about explaining to them what you do. You can start talking to them about solving a problem.
Anytime I put something out in social media, I use a trackable URL and that tells you what content is getting traction, what posts are interesting. And it is always not what you expect.
More social landing pages: the help page. This will be good for use help pages increase use. Give them some resources, put those in your notification emails.
Forums that we’ve been doing social media actually for years and years and years going all the way back to the use groups. That’s 25 years ago, social media forums.
As all the components, you can tell people who are highly active, they don’t do friending. Number of posts is the trust system they use here. So, you know, you trust somebody. If they’re a guru or senior poster, they have a thousand or 25,000 posts since joining our forum.
Micro blogs, I’m still trying to figure out what the best practices are in terms of measuring Twitter’s impact. I think the measurable URLs coming back to the Twitter verse. Being able to do searches for tags. Twitter is really just a telephone company and the applications that are going to be coming on to help us manage and understand what’s going on in the Twitter verse are going to be amazing.
Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Everybody’s creating these, these resources for affinity groups. So these become great landing pages. You can post, you can encourage other people to post. You can post videos. So you do the entertainment. You’re increasing use. You’re increasing opinion and you’re giving them a place to talk. These are pretty effective. A lot of these are siloed. In this case, this is a fan page, everybody can see this, but to participate you have to be a member of Facebook. Thus you start to getting these siloed things and it’s going to reduce your social conversion rates.
And finally bacon. I think this is completely under utilized. Bacon is the notification email version of spam. It is the confirmation email that you get. This one is a great example, it was sent to me by mint. After I hadn’t logged on for 30 days and said, we miss you. We just want you to come back and log in. And I could actually, it was a great, a great service cause I had gone in and started doing something, got distracted and forgot. And they sent me this. I got back in and I love using it now. So I’m really glad they sent me this a little bit of bacon.
Whenever you send a confirmation says thank you for subscribing to the newsletter. We want to confirm your email click here and don’t add. Let’s think of a better example. Somebody has just subscribed to your site. So your online sites and you say, thank you for joining click here to S to confirm your email. And that’s all you put on there. Well, how about here’s where you can get started. Here’s our help files. There’s a forum you can visit.
You can start getting people into the use with each of these notification emails. I think it’s terribly under utilized. Every touch is an opportunity to get people further down to create another conversion. So that is it.
What I wanted to do is, once again, plug my friend, Dave who’s really did a lot of the legwork on around this, but thanks for your contributions and the presentation will get better. I promise. Thanks to you.
You can still get a discount with the code TPH200 today
The last time we played What to Test! The Conversion Quiz Show, we were throwing balls and learning about content that converts.
I’m teaming up with Alissa Ruehl of Apogee Search at Interactive Austin 09 bring it back.
They tell you that you should test copy, but what will your visitors respond to?
They tell you to test different button text, but which ones?
They tell you to try different headlines, but how do you choose?
Brian Massey and Alissa Ruehl present What To Test! the Conversion Game Show
We’ll be covering the “Conversion Stack” which is the levels and kinds of conversion you can consider based on your resources and experience.
Join us at Interactive Austin ’09 where everyone that is anyone will be … interacting. Use code TPH200 to get $25 off of your registration fee TODAY ONLY.
For a Conversion Scientist, life is full of A/B tests. You find them everywhere. We are naturally curious creatures, always wondering why people behave the way they do. The answers are rarely obvious.
For example, I have been monitoring a sort of A/B split test happening at a local cupcake and coffee shop called Cupprimo. For some unknown reason, the proprietors have consistently provided both quilted and unquilted toilet paper in their men’s room. As you might expect, the quilted TP roll is consistently smaller than it’s unquilted competitor.
But, as a Conversion Scientist, I have to ask: is it because the position of the quilted roll is more convenient to right-handed bomb-droppers? Is it because the luxurious quilted TP is thicker, and that the roll only appears to shrink faster? Perhaps it is a test error? Are the hapless managers not replacing the rolls at the same time? Here’s the real kicker: are these results consistent with the ladies’ results?
I know that, like me, you’re just dying to find out what the test really tells us. But right now, I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs trying to tie this example to my presentations at the Door64 Tech Fair and the Extraordinary Interviews Seminar for Technology Professionals. You want to go, you just don’t know why yet.
The Job Search and Conversion
While the toilet paper question is important, I’ve had to focus my attention on the problem of job search for the past few months. As in our toilet paper split test, I am dealing with incomplete information in the job search. Elusive are the conclusions we would draw from our job search data.
The ultimate conversion is a job offer. However, it turns out that the resume-to-job-offer conversion rate is fraught with trouble, the most significant being that once we get one or two conversions, we stop caring. We take a job and stop searching.
What we need for the job search is predictive metrics. For most job seekers, the most important predictive metric has been number of resumes sent. But this approach is no different from that taken by any number of companies who’ve spent like drunken sailors buying clicks for search terms that have little to do with their business, hoping that someone might actually become a lead or buy something–anything. This is not conversion.
A more important measure is number of interviews. For the sake of conversion, we measure it as the number of interviews booked divided by resumes sent. I call this the resume-to-book rate. The drunken sailor set will say, “So the more resumes we send, the more interviews we will get, right?” Well, since the resume-to-book rate is a percentage, throwing resumes against the proverbial wall will actually decrease your conversion rate (unless you send each with a substantial sum of money, which is also true in pay-per-click search).
The key is to send fewer more targeted resumes.
When you do this three things increase your resume-to-book rate:
You decrease the number of resumes sent, which will mathematically increase resume-to-book rates.
You increase the likelihood of getting more interviews by spending more time on each application and cover letter.
You target only those jobs for which you are somewhat qualified.
In other words, your doing the exact opposite of what most search marketers do.
Meaningful Job Search Conversion Rates
It turns out that, like our quilted toilet paper test, our resume-to-book rate has some built-in issues. Since 80% of all jobs offers are garnered from a personal contact, sending resumes is actually the least effective way to apply for a job. The number of postings available via job boards is too small and there’s too much competition. In short, it doesn’t scale. The Conversion Scientist ranks #1 on all search engines for “conversion scientists with lab coats.” However, the number of searches is small, so it really doesn’t help. Job postings have the same problem.
Since personal contact is the way to get interviews, then our predictive conversions must be tied to the number of people who are actively helping us look for work. For most of us, that is our parents (motivated to get us to move out of the house again) and that one new recruiter who hasn’t yet learned a tactful way to tell us they don’t really have anything for us.
As it turns out, it’s our old friend “opt-in rate” that is the most powerful predictor of our job search. Most of us have low opt-in rates. ‘We’ve Twittered, “Got laid off. Let me know if you hear of anything.” That doesn’t invite an opt-in. A few of us have sent emails to our professional contacts detailing our qualifications. Then we end by saying “Let me know if you hear of anything.” Not an opt-in either. In short, we don’t give our personal networks anything to opt into, and our opt-in rates would be zero if not for our parents and that one green recruiter.
Why is opt-in important? Because the higher your opt-in rates, the larger your personal job search network gets. The larger your personal job search network, the more unpublicized jobs you’ll be privy to. The people who know how to engage their personal network have the following advantages:
They uncover jobs that aren’t posted
They get inside information on the jobs they apply for
They find champions to walk their resumes into the hiring manager
They circumvent the trolls in HR whose main job is to protect the hiring manager from tidal waves of resumes
We were throwing balls at the audience during the Conversion Optimization and Testing Panel at PubCon South in March. Why balls? Because we were focused on reducing the amount of traffic that bounces off of the audience’s Web site, of course.
Along with panelists Taylor Pratt and Bill Leake, and our moderator Christine Churchill, we gave the audience the best practices for reducing bounce rates and increasing leads and sales.
I decided to have some fun with my segment of the Panel. Several brave members of the audience volunteered to answer the query “What to Test!” for the chance to earn a smiley ball compliments of Smiley Media.
It’s going to be a busy Spring for me, and that means you have several chances to see me, Brian Massey, Conversion Scientist (applause). I’m speaking at several different conferences, three of which are in Austin and one of which is no charge. I hope to see you at one of these.
Austin Engagements
I’ll be presenting my Web Strategies Workshop at RISE Austin on March 4 at 10:00am. We’re meeting at the Thistle Cafe downtown. Check out all of the other presentations happening around town, too.
We also take a hard look at their Home page.
Flavia has one thing going for them: they have metrics installed. In fact, they are double covered with metrics from Omniture Site Catalyst and Google Analytics. This means they know if a change will make a difference in their sales.
What if George Carlin had riffed on behavioral targeting?
In doing the research for my new ClickZ column on behavioral marketing, I became fascinated by all that could be measured and inferred about me from the simple act of visiting a Web page. The agents at work when you visit a Web site are an invisible Pixel and something called a Cookie. Then the marketers, advertisers, publishers, scientists and statisticians go to work on the data, divining what they can from it about you and what ads you want to see.
The list, which you will find on ClickZ.com, is long, ironic, funny and sometimes disturbing. It’s exactly the kind of thing that needs a Carlinesque treatment.
Learn how to use Search, E-mail, Conversion, and Social Media to grow your business while your competitors are shrinking.
All in One Day
I’ve shown dozens of businesses how to use the most cost-efficient marketing methods available to increase their sales. There is no more cost-efficient way to market than online, and the top eMarketers in Austin will be in one place on January 29 to show you how it’s done.
Will you be there?
eMarketing Techniques for Business will show you how to use the bread-and-butter online marketing techniques in your business: E-mail, Search, Conversion, and Social Media. If you don’t know the names of these companies, you should:
Hubspot, Apogee Search, WorkSmart eMarketing, Aperio Marketing, IncSlingers, NLI Media Group, Writeous Words, and Conversion Sciences.
These are the companies that are writing the book on growth when everyone else is pulling back. How much would it cost to engage each of these online specialists? Not as much as you would gain, but a LOT more than a ticket to eMarketing Techniques for Business.
It’s Time to Take Action
The decisions you make in the next 30 to 60 days will determine your fate in 2009. Will you be one of the businesses with a shrinking customers base or one of the few with a growing prospect list, new customers, and more visibility in the market?
The good news is that you don’t have to get up the learning curve on all of these proven eMarketing Techniques. Everyone you need to know will be in Austin on Friday, January 29. All you have to do is show up.
As a speaker at the event I’ve been given a discounted rate. There won’t be another day on which you will be able to get so much decision-making insight as you will at eMarketing Techniques for Business.
eMarketing Techniques for Business
Make visitors stick with Copy and Headlines
I’m going to be working with Amy Lemen to tell you exactly how you can change the copy on your Web site to make visitors stay and take action. No design changes. No new logos. Just change your copy. What could be easier? Well, it would be easier to just stay at home, but then you’d have a much less profitable year than you could.
It’s time you put E-mail to work for your business
Imagine owning a list of 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000 prospects who have shown an interest in what your company sells. How would that change your fortunes? You’ll learn how to build that list and then turn the members of that list into buyers with e-mail marketing.
Learn Only the Most Valuable Search Techniques
There are thousands of strategies for using search to drive your business. There are only a handful that matter to your business. Find out where you should be focusing when you seek to turn searchers into your customers.
Social Media is here. Are you a part of the conversation?
The conversations about your business are happening all around the Internet — if you’re lucky. What if you could be a part of those conversations? Social media is the newest tool for building brand, loyalty, goodwill, and more traffic to your Web site. If you don’t understand how it works, you can’t make good decisions about using it to grow your business.
There is more. Much More.
While this exclusive event could easily garner $2000 or more, it is being offered for just $199. Imagine the very people who know how to drive more sales for your business in one place, and you can get in for just $199. That’s just nuts.
Applying the Scientific Method to your Behavioral Marketing
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingAs you learned in a previous post, I’m just wired to see the world through the scientific method. It get’s extreme.
In this month’s ClickZ Behavioral Marketing Experts column, I apply it to behavioral advertising. The thing I love about the scientific method is that it quickly exposes the challenges in your marketing campaign. Behavioral Marketing is a Conversion Scientists dream, but it poses some challenges when developing hypotheses and figuring out “why” something worked or didn’t work.
Applying the Scientific Method to your Behavioral Marketing
Behavioral marketing vendors are not alone in the struggle to communicate effectively via the Web. One area crucial to success is the human dimension. This is the thing missing from these sites. They don’t answer the human questions:
When I say: “Transparency”
I mean: “Tell me about how you communicate with me, and I’ll fret less about the technology.”
The bottom line: don’t just ask your behavioral advertising partner about their technology, methodology and ad network. Ask about the ways they interface with you to ensure you’re getting the best information when investigating, hypothesizing, testing and evaluating.
I invite vendors to tell me what you mean in the comments.
Applying the Scientific Method to your Behavioral Marketing
The Language of Behavioral Marketing, Part 1
Since working to learn about the behavioral marketing industry, I find myself floating on a sea of ambiguity, still looking for islands of meaning. Over the past five months, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a number of industry luminaries. I’ve heard the panels at a major online marketing conference. I subscribe to the industry newsletters. Yet, I find myself without a favorite technique, a “wow” vendor or technology I just have to try. Like most marketers, I can’t devote my full attention to exploring behavioral marketing.
There appears to be some amazing solutions on the market, but I don’t know enough yet to organize my explorations. Whenever I find myself struggling at something, I go back to basics. It’s time to start parsing the language of the behavioral marketing world and find out once and for all what it all really means.
In this column and the next, I will use the Web sites of a number of behavioral advertising vendors in an attempt to clear the fog that surrounds this marketplace.
I can already hear the groans.
Yes, the behavioral marketers’ children have no shoes, to borrow from a famous euphemism. The Web sites of the behavioral marketing world aren’t necessarily the best examples of advanced marketing techniques. But I am not interested in casting stones at individual sites. I’m on a search for meaning and truth.
Here are some general observations about why it is so difficult for marketers to narrow the list of behavioral marketing vendors based on their Web sites.
Keep reading!
Originally Published on ClickZ: Behavioral Marketing and the Scientific Method
What is Your Social Conversion Rate?
Conversion OptimizationAfter collaborating for a ClickZ article on Social Conversion with Dave Evans, I was pleased to get an opportunity to work with him to expand on the topic. I presented the topic at the eMarketing Summit during Innotech Portland 2009.
This is a topic that is moving quickly, and I suspect you will have something to say. Please do.
Download | Subscribe to Podcast
What is Your Social Conversion Rate?
We’re going to talk today about your social conversion rate.
There is a lot of discussion about social media, Twitter, blogging. What should we be doing? How do we know if we’re doing it right? How do we implement it? How do we pick the places to start? Should we be on Facebook or should be on Twitter? The goal of my presentation today is to give you a way of looking at social media so that you can make those decisions specific to your business.
I am going to start with a premise which you may or may not buy: Advertising was designed to simulate word of mouth as word of mouth was inefficient. Was it designed purposely for that? But that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to have a trusted relationship where we could recommend our own products with more people than we would get simply by waiting for word of mouth to filter through.
Today that’s not the case. Word of mouth is very efficient. Things are changing in advertising.
Defining Conversion
Let’s talk about paid media and earned media, which I’ve redefined a little bit. We’re going to talk about the typical funnel that we are all aware of. Some, add a stage to this. Some add several stages to the awareness consideration funnel. And then we’re gonna talk about the post-purchase funnel.
Dave Evans in his book, “Social media marketing an hour a day”, does an excellent treatment of the post purchase funnel. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be here today to co-present with me. So I get to take all the credit.
We’re going to talk about two kinds of metrics, predictive and definitive and about some of the things we might measure in each of these stages.
The arrows are conversions. So, I will define conversion as a movement to the next stage.
For most of us, a conversion is generating a lead, completing a shopping cart, and that is still true. But in looking at the funnel, we realized we need to convert people to understand what our business does, to be considering our solution as part of their solutions, and then, of course, to take action.
So in different businesses, we’re going to map this differently. It’s going to be interesting challenge.
Paid Media and Earned Media Funnels
Let’s start with paid media. This is very simple. Put in a quarter and connect with someone. Buy a print ad, buy a display ad, Google AdSense, Pay per Click advertising.
However if you’re advertising paid media where you pay somebody for the right to put your message out in public, it’s considered paid media.
Generally or traditionally earned media was applied to articles in press today. We really can apply it to social media. So I’ve expanded the definition of earned media to include social conversation.
I like earned media better than social media because social media sounds like we’re out talking to people. Earned media sounds like we’re out earning our media. And I think that is really where the bar needs to be set.
Your content needs to be worthy of being talked about. Your product needs to be worthy of being talked about. How you talk about your product needs to be worthy of being talked about.
Predictive Metrics and Definitive Metrics
Let’s cover two kinds of metrics. They’re predictive metrics and they’re definitive metrics. Predictive metrics are something that conversion scientists of which all of you will become one day use to get an idea of what’s going to happen. So I know if somebody adds to cart, that’s pretty predictive of them buying something. But not everybody buys, that’s called the abandoned rate.
Somebody visiting my webpage is predictive of a level of awareness. I can assume they’re aware of my company or my brand. It’s predictive. My bounce rate is 90%. It’s not a very good predictor.
Average, page views for visit, time on site, those are more definitive. They tell you what is happening and what has happened. I like definitive measurements because they’re usually really close to business goals.
They bought the product, they downloaded the white paper. They gave us a lead. They called.
Levels of Conversion
First is conversion to awareness. When somebody says, ah, this company does this. They become aware of what your brand, what your company does, what problem it can solve for them would probably myself or them in the future.
Brand marketing and image marketing are designed to get people to understand what you’re about. Usually at a very high level. But good brand marketing can take you quite far down.
A couple of metrics we would look in here, predictive. How many impressions are we getting? How many people are seeing our ads and ostensibly reading them and understanding what our brand is about?
Becoming aware of our company, RSS subscribers, searches that are made for brand keywords. Those are all what I would call predictive measures.
As you’re thinking about putting together a social media campaign for each media, you need to be asking, what are my predictors? Do I want to measure those? Or do you want to focus more on the definitive measure?
From the awareness standpoint, if they do come to my website, I might infer that that is an accurate measure of their knowledge of my brand. And if I come to a brochure page and tells me I’m the leader in something that I don’t understand, it doesn’t tell a story, they may not actually understand and be aware of what we actually do. They just come to a brochure website. Click throughs, page views, contest entries.
If you’re running a contest, bounce rate, these are all definitive measures of how we’re doing from the awareness standpoint.
Consideration Conversion
So this is considered a conversion consideration. Processing, developing a preference for what you process of someone, developing a preference for what you provide.
In a lot of business to business sales processes, this can be a 30 day, 60 days, three months, six months, nine month process. People are buying something that’s high budget item. A lot of people may be involved. There are lots of little conversions that happen in here as they go through the consideration process and understand what you do, why you’re better, what their alternatives are or what happens if they go without. What happens if they choose someone else. Going through that consideration process around your product or service.
Predictive metrics that I would focus on are:
Those are all predictive of people who are engaging with you, who are in the conversion consideration process, definitively. This is where leads and downloads come from. So I know that they are learning more about my product. If you’re downloading things, giving me information, calling me, attending my webinars, attending my seminars. I believe that ours has subscribed as a sample of that.
We don’t know how many people are really reading through our RSS. So this really might qualify better as a predictive metric. Newsletter, circulation visits, to comparison shopping center, shopping pages, and any online chance that they’re doing. All indicative of consideration conversion, people who are engaged.
How many of you have a sales cycle that is longer than 30 days, 60 days, three months, nine months, a year. You’ve got to keep people engaged and entertained in a web.
The web is such a great way to do that. And with social media, we actually have the opportunity to get other people to help us do that.
Conversion to Action
When we say conversion, this is usually what we’re focused on. They bought something, they became a lead, they did something that’s going to materially benefit my business, add to cart, coupons or a couple of predictive action-based ones.
All of the consideration ones I generally use as predictive. If somebody joined the house list, they increase in my eyes the number of people who are going to be buying, even if that’s over time,
Anybody who’s watching anything on their website that tells you things are moving in the right direction or not. Find a dealer. I think that would be a great predictive one. How many people are searching for dealers?
They buy something. They subscribe to our online service. They renew, they upgrade, upsell, add on and they purchase again.
The Post-Purchase Funnel
So we’ve got our traditional awareness consideration action funnel. All of us are taught that in marketing school or we learn it from our sales guys. And what we do with social media is we say, all right, we need to do blogs and Twitter so that we can start cramming more people into the awareness funnel. Get them into the front and work them down to action. That’s what we’re going to do with social media.
Dave Evans in his book said there’s a post-purchase funnel. And these guys are your prime targets for social media. They know your product, they like it, or they hate it.
But these are where you’re going to find your influencers. The guys that will build your tipping point, that will spread the word and begin the feedback cycle.
Just like we did with awareness, consideration, and action, we’re going to go through the same process with the last half of the funnel.
First of all, you have to convert them to use the product. If they buy it, they spent money on it. Aren’t they going to use it? Not necessarily.
Think of all the people who are building web 2.0 applications who do a freemium model and they come in and they sign up for the free trial, a free demo. Software companies then don’t do anything to encourage this person to use it.
Well, they forget about it. Maybe they did it on a whim. It seemed important at the time, something more important came up. Whatever the issue is. If you aren’t actively converting people from buyers to users, you are missing an opportunity.
Predictive Metrics
So what does that mean from the social media funnel? Visits to your help site, service calls, visits to your user forums. These are all what I think are predictive of increased use. An increase in visitors to your forums and increased in posts on your forums, increasing help calls means people are trying to use your product. I would call that predictive.
Reservations is a great example of predictive things to watch that tells people that they’re using your product. Reservations predicts coming and spending money.
Loyalty program and repeat buy.
Definitive Metrics
Unique login. We’re just talking about logins, renewals, registration cards, returns. People are using it. They might not like it. They are returning it. You’ll get a company like Zappos. They’ll let you order three or four sizes of the same shoe and return the others. It turned into a very positive thing for them.
Logins, I think is probably the closest you’re gonna get. If you have a website as a service.
Forming an Opinion
There’s really two components to opinion. It’s my own personal experience and the experience of others.
My opinion might be swayed by what you hear from other folks. Certainly going to be swayed by my own experience. But people tend to want to either be contrary to the crowd or join the crowd. And depending on what the talk is, the buzz is out there in the social network, social networks or the social media space about your product, it can significantly influence opinion.
How many of you are familiar with the net promoter score? The net promoter score asks one question, would you, after using my product, recommend it to somebody else. They survey, they go out and they ask that one question and they ask you on a scale of one to 10 would you recommend my product?
Then you take the positives, subtract the negatives and that gives you your net promoter score. If you’re a net promoter score is negative, you know that there is something wrong with the product, with the experience, with followup or customer support, etcetera.
It’s a great, great predictive measure of opinion surveys. There’s a number of ways of measuring buzz. I’m assuming that we’re all still trying to figure out exactly how to prioritize and spend our money and resources at this time.
So I’m not going to talk about those tools, but I think there’s been a lot of discussion about those here. What are the comments like? How good are the ratings? How good are the reviews?
Definitively: Are people renewing? Are they upgrading upselling, add on purchases? Are they joining affinity groups? How are my returns? How many bookmarks am I getting?
This tells me, people are plugging into the places a where they can hear other people’s opinion and eventually express their own.
What are you doing to predict whether people are forming an opinion? In other words, how do you know if the loyalty programs don’t indicate somebody who’s bought the product, use the product, developed enough of a positive attitude that they anticipate buying more of the products and joining a loyalty product probably fits better here in the opinion, conversion, would you agree?
One of my clients is selling a software website as a service product. And they’re using a book to teach people the process of using the site and why it’s different, why it’s unique.
Therefore people who visit the book site and buy the book is actually predictive of people using the software. That’s an interesting use of content as a predictor.
Conversion to Talk
Give them some place to talk. Now, today they’re finding a lot of places to talk. You don’t necessarily have to give them a place to talk, but if you can, then you get to be a part of the conversation. Pretty much off talking on Pixo and Bebo and places that you don’t play. You don’t get to be a part of the conversation.
If they’re coming and talking on your blog, you get to play. It is a really good idea to create these social landing pages.
The things that people are talking about was really interesting. Rojas said that if somebody tells you, they’re going to get you 10,000 followers on Facebook, what value is it? I believe friends and follows, authority are all predictive. So yes, having a lot of friends on Facebook can be predictive somewhat.
You’re going to find out whether 10,000 friends translates into X sales per month of your product, X number of leads of your product, search your rank. So using things like Technorati, Google Search. Google Page Rank, these are all indications that people who are linking back to you, and they’re very predictive of how you’re doing out there.
Definitive measures of people who are talking
Things that you can measure, things you can put on a graph. number of comments, number of reviews, number of ratings, how many link backs are you getting? How many shares are you having through share this with a friend? How many people are using discount codes, sending out invitations? How many user groups? What are your user group memberships, both online and offline.
These are definitive measurements of people who are putting themselves in a position to talk about whatever. If they like you, they’re likely to talk about you.
People are using hashtags. II think that would be definitive measure of talk. If you can use the Twitter API or go do a regular search and harvest those things, the problem with Twitter is it’s big and it’s hard. It’s expensive to get those metrics out right now. So it’s hard for me on a weekly basis to make strategic decisions. But the people who are representing me on Twitter will use those on a day to day basis to respond and be a part of the conversation.
A predictive metric of talk
How many posts you make on other blogs? So I just got an email from somebody. I posted something on LinkedIn. He came back, visited my site and commented on my blog and talked about a book that I’m in the process of publishing. The more posts you make is predictive of the number of posts you’re gonna be on your blogs.
And there is a correlation there. When I post three times a week, my traffic just goes. When I stop and cut back to one a week, to a month, it drops or at least flattens out almost like a volume switch.
Anything you can do to measure that sounds predictive because they’re coming to a website and we don’t know what it’s going to mean. It’s essentially a measure of clickthroughs.
But as you start to say, okay, we need some way to measure use. We need some way to measure opinion. We need some way to measure talk. And when someone measures the feedback loop to the original funnel, you start to think, okay, well let’s use bud URL. Let’s use Google tag tracking.
You start to put the things in place that just measure those things rather than just, all right, we need a Twitter page. Puts a little bit of planning in place and if it’s not working for you, you can stop it and see. Can you really unplug yourself from the social media sphere?
Social landing pages
Now we all know that in the awareness consideration action funnel landing pages are incredibly powerful. If we have an ad that says 20% off and we take them to a page that says 20% off, instead of taking them to homepage, they are in the right place. And we were more likely to engage them and get them to finish. The landing page does not give them distractions, distracting navigation, ways for them to hedge their buys, but really gives them the information they need to make that decision to buy that product at that time. Our conversion rates go up.
So what are the social equivalents?
I would argue the best social landing page right now is the blog. And I like the blog because it services all three levels of the social media funnel, the post purchase funnel.
It provides information, which means people, can better use your product or service. In this case, I write a lot of best practices about how to implement email, how to implement landing pages, how to write copy, the things that I recommend to my clients I use my blog to increase use.
User commentary will influence opinions, or you can comment on my blog. People add. people subtract, people argue. This helps to influence opinion. It also helps to influence use.
Calls to action generate talk. There’s a big box on there says if you got something to say, here’s a place to say comment here.
At the same time, blogs are promotional. You really can’t see any of the promotions, but I promote books that I believe in and things like that on my website. And there is a way to join email. Therefore, I am providing specific offers, which bring people from my blog back around to the awareness or the consideration phase. And the beauty of this kind of word of mouth is that people tend to jump in at the consideration phase because the social or the earned media has already taken them through awareness. So you don’t have to worry about explaining to them what you do. You can start talking to them about solving a problem.
Anytime I put something out in social media, I use a trackable URL and that tells you what content is getting traction, what posts are interesting. And it is always not what you expect.
More social landing pages: the help page. This will be good for use help pages increase use. Give them some resources, put those in your notification emails.
Forums that we’ve been doing social media actually for years and years and years going all the way back to the use groups. That’s 25 years ago, social media forums.
As all the components, you can tell people who are highly active, they don’t do friending. Number of posts is the trust system they use here. So, you know, you trust somebody. If they’re a guru or senior poster, they have a thousand or 25,000 posts since joining our forum.
Micro blogs, I’m still trying to figure out what the best practices are in terms of measuring Twitter’s impact. I think the measurable URLs coming back to the Twitter verse. Being able to do searches for tags. Twitter is really just a telephone company and the applications that are going to be coming on to help us manage and understand what’s going on in the Twitter verse are going to be amazing.
Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Everybody’s creating these, these resources for affinity groups. So these become great landing pages. You can post, you can encourage other people to post. You can post videos. So you do the entertainment. You’re increasing use. You’re increasing opinion and you’re giving them a place to talk. These are pretty effective. A lot of these are siloed. In this case, this is a fan page, everybody can see this, but to participate you have to be a member of Facebook. Thus you start to getting these siloed things and it’s going to reduce your social conversion rates.
And finally bacon. I think this is completely under utilized. Bacon is the notification email version of spam. It is the confirmation email that you get. This one is a great example, it was sent to me by mint. After I hadn’t logged on for 30 days and said, we miss you. We just want you to come back and log in. And I could actually, it was a great, a great service cause I had gone in and started doing something, got distracted and forgot. And they sent me this. I got back in and I love using it now. So I’m really glad they sent me this a little bit of bacon.
Whenever you send a confirmation says thank you for subscribing to the newsletter. We want to confirm your email click here and don’t add. Let’s think of a better example. Somebody has just subscribed to your site. So your online sites and you say, thank you for joining click here to S to confirm your email. And that’s all you put on there. Well, how about here’s where you can get started. Here’s our help files. There’s a forum you can visit.
You can start getting people into the use with each of these notification emails. I think it’s terribly under utilized. Every touch is an opportunity to get people further down to create another conversion. So that is it.
What I wanted to do is, once again, plug my friend, Dave who’s really did a lot of the legwork on around this, but thanks for your contributions and the presentation will get better. I promise. Thanks to you.
What to Test! Returns to Interactive Austin 09
News & EventsThe last time we played What to Test! The Conversion Quiz Show, we were throwing balls and learning about content that converts.
I’m teaming up with Alissa Ruehl of Apogee Search at Interactive Austin 09 bring it back.
Brian Massey and Alissa Ruehl present What To Test! the Conversion Game Show
We’ll be covering the “Conversion Stack” which is the levels and kinds of conversion you can consider based on your resources and experience.
Join us at Interactive Austin ’09 where everyone that is anyone will be … interacting. Use code TPH200 to get $25 off of your registration fee TODAY ONLY.
What Conversion Metrics Should a Job Seeker Examine?
News & EventsFor a Conversion Scientist, life is full of A/B tests. You find them everywhere. We are naturally curious creatures, always wondering why people behave the way they do. The answers are rarely obvious.
For example, I have been monitoring a sort of A/B split test happening at a local cupcake and coffee shop called Cupprimo. For some unknown reason, the proprietors have consistently provided both quilted and unquilted toilet paper in their men’s room. As you might expect, the quilted TP roll is consistently smaller than it’s unquilted competitor.
But, as a Conversion Scientist, I have to ask: is it because the position of the quilted roll is more convenient to right-handed bomb-droppers? Is it because the luxurious quilted TP is thicker, and that the roll only appears to shrink faster? Perhaps it is a test error? Are the hapless managers not replacing the rolls at the same time? Here’s the real kicker: are these results consistent with the ladies’ results?
I know that, like me, you’re just dying to find out what the test really tells us. But right now, I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs trying to tie this example to my presentations at the Door64 Tech Fair and the Extraordinary Interviews Seminar for Technology Professionals. You want to go, you just don’t know why yet.
The Job Search and Conversion
While the toilet paper question is important, I’ve had to focus my attention on the problem of job search for the past few months. As in our toilet paper split test, I am dealing with incomplete information in the job search. Elusive are the conclusions we would draw from our job search data.
The ultimate conversion is a job offer. However, it turns out that the resume-to-job-offer conversion rate is fraught with trouble, the most significant being that once we get one or two conversions, we stop caring. We take a job and stop searching.
What we need for the job search is predictive metrics. For most job seekers, the most important predictive metric has been number of resumes sent. But this approach is no different from that taken by any number of companies who’ve spent like drunken sailors buying clicks for search terms that have little to do with their business, hoping that someone might actually become a lead or buy something–anything. This is not conversion.
A more important measure is number of interviews. For the sake of conversion, we measure it as the number of interviews booked divided by resumes sent. I call this the resume-to-book rate. The drunken sailor set will say, “So the more resumes we send, the more interviews we will get, right?” Well, since the resume-to-book rate is a percentage, throwing resumes against the proverbial wall will actually decrease your conversion rate (unless you send each with a substantial sum of money, which is also true in pay-per-click search).
When you do this three things increase your resume-to-book rate:
In other words, your doing the exact opposite of what most search marketers do.
Meaningful Job Search Conversion Rates
It turns out that, like our quilted toilet paper test, our resume-to-book rate has some built-in issues. Since 80% of all jobs offers are garnered from a personal contact, sending resumes is actually the least effective way to apply for a job. The number of postings available via job boards is too small and there’s too much competition. In short, it doesn’t scale. The Conversion Scientist ranks #1 on all search engines for “conversion scientists with lab coats.” However, the number of searches is small, so it really doesn’t help. Job postings have the same problem.
Since personal contact is the way to get interviews, then our predictive conversions must be tied to the number of people who are actively helping us look for work. For most of us, that is our parents (motivated to get us to move out of the house again) and that one new recruiter who hasn’t yet learned a tactful way to tell us they don’t really have anything for us.
As it turns out, it’s our old friend “opt-in rate” that is the most powerful predictor of our job search. Most of us have low opt-in rates. ‘We’ve Twittered, “Got laid off. Let me know if you hear of anything.” That doesn’t invite an opt-in. A few of us have sent emails to our professional contacts detailing our qualifications. Then we end by saying “Let me know if you hear of anything.” Not an opt-in either. In short, we don’t give our personal networks anything to opt into, and our opt-in rates would be zero if not for our parents and that one green recruiter.
Why is opt-in important? Because the higher your opt-in rates, the larger your personal job search network gets. The larger your personal job search network, the more unpublicized jobs you’ll be privy to. The people who know how to engage their personal network have the following advantages:
“What to Test!” The Conversion Game Show at PubCon South 09
News & EventsWe were throwing balls at the audience during the Conversion Optimization and Testing Panel at PubCon South in March. Why balls? Because we were focused on reducing the amount of traffic that bounces off of the audience’s Web site, of course.
Along with panelists Taylor Pratt and Bill Leake, and our moderator Christine Churchill, we gave the audience the best practices for reducing bounce rates and increasing leads and sales.
I decided to have some fun with my segment of the Panel. Several brave members of the audience volunteered to answer the query “What to Test!” for the chance to earn a smiley ball compliments of Smiley Media.
Now you can play as well!
See the Conversion Scientist LIVE
News & EventsIt’s going to be a busy Spring for me, and that means you have several chances to see me, Brian Massey, Conversion Scientist (applause). I’m speaking at several different conferences, three of which are in Austin and one of which is no charge. I hope to see you at one of these.
Austin Engagements
I’ll be presenting my Web Strategies Workshop at RISE Austin on March 4 at 10:00am. We’re meeting at the Thistle Cafe downtown. Check out all of the other presentations happening around town, too.
PubCon South in Austin with Brian Massey
I’ll be part of a panel talking about Testing and Optimizing for Conversion on March 11 at 1:00pm. PubCon is one of the best search shows to come to Austin.
Everyone who is anyone in Austin will be at Interactive Austin. I’ll be there too talking about my favorite subject: Conversion.
Elsewhere Around the Country
You may or may not know that I write a ClickZ column on Behavioral Marketing. I’ll be in Hollywood on March 23 to moderate the panel entitled BT Partners — Choosing Wisely.
I’ll be returning to Innotech Oregon on April 23 to discuss Social Conversion, a topic that Dave Evans and I have done some work on lately.
I look forward to seeing you in person.
ConversionCast: Convert Someone to Your Valentine at Flavia
Ecommerce CROHappy Valentines Day from Conversion Sciences and Flavia
It’s time for another special ConversionCast compliments of our friends at Flavia. We look at the three strategies that will make or break an eCommerce site:
We also take a hard look at their Home page.
Flavia has one thing going for them: they have metrics installed. In fact, they are double covered with metrics from Omniture Site Catalyst and Google Analytics. This means they know if a change will make a difference in their sales.
Will their customers be their Valentines by buying their products? I’ll try to find out for you.
You can submit your site or landing page for a ConversionCast. Don’t miss our ChristmasCast if you’re into Holiday conversion.
“Valentine” courtesy Daniel Adam Johnson via the Podsafe Music Network
Behavioral Targeting Lullaby
Conversion Marketing StrategyIn doing the research for my new ClickZ column on behavioral marketing, I became fascinated by all that could be measured and inferred about me from the simple act of visiting a Web page. The agents at work when you visit a Web site are an invisible Pixel and something called a Cookie. Then the marketers, advertisers, publishers, scientists and statisticians go to work on the data, divining what they can from it about you and what ads you want to see.
The list, which you will find on ClickZ.com, is long, ironic, funny and sometimes disturbing. It’s exactly the kind of thing that needs a Carlinesque treatment.
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Try as I might, I’m no George Carlin. Here’s the real deal. Warning: Explicit Language
The eMarketing Techniques That Will Make Your 2009 Big
News & EventsAll in One Day
I’ve shown dozens of businesses how to use the most cost-efficient marketing methods available to increase their sales. There is no more cost-efficient way to market than online, and the top eMarketers in Austin will be in one place on January 29 to show you how it’s done.
Will you be there?
eMarketing Techniques for Business will show you how to use the bread-and-butter online marketing techniques in your business: E-mail, Search, Conversion, and Social Media. If you don’t know the names of these companies, you should:
Hubspot, Apogee Search, WorkSmart eMarketing, Aperio Marketing, IncSlingers, NLI Media Group, Writeous Words, and Conversion Sciences.
These are the companies that are writing the book on growth when everyone else is pulling back. How much would it cost to engage each of these online specialists? Not as much as you would gain, but a LOT more than a ticket to eMarketing Techniques for Business.
It’s Time to Take Action
The decisions you make in the next 30 to 60 days will determine your fate in 2009. Will you be one of the businesses with a shrinking customers base or one of the few with a growing prospect list, new customers, and more visibility in the market?
The good news is that you don’t have to get up the learning curve on all of these proven eMarketing Techniques. Everyone you need to know will be in Austin on Friday, January 29. All you have to do is show up.
As a speaker at the event I’ve been given a discounted rate. There won’t be another day on which you will be able to get so much decision-making insight as you will at eMarketing Techniques for Business.
eMarketing Techniques for Business
Make visitors stick with Copy and Headlines
I’m going to be working with Amy Lemen to tell you exactly how you can change the copy on your Web site to make visitors stay and take action. No design changes. No new logos. Just change your copy. What could be easier? Well, it would be easier to just stay at home, but then you’d have a much less profitable year than you could.
It’s time you put E-mail to work for your business
Imagine owning a list of 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000 prospects who have shown an interest in what your company sells. How would that change your fortunes? You’ll learn how to build that list and then turn the members of that list into buyers with e-mail marketing.
Learn Only the Most Valuable Search Techniques
There are thousands of strategies for using search to drive your business. There are only a handful that matter to your business. Find out where you should be focusing when you seek to turn searchers into your customers.
Social Media is here. Are you a part of the conversation?
The conversations about your business are happening all around the Internet — if you’re lucky. What if you could be a part of those conversations? Social media is the newest tool for building brand, loyalty, goodwill, and more traffic to your Web site. If you don’t understand how it works, you can’t make good decisions about using it to grow your business.
There is more. Much More.
While this exclusive event could easily garner $2000 or more, it is being offered for just $199. Imagine the very people who know how to drive more sales for your business in one place, and you can get in for just $199. That’s just nuts.
We Are Actively Dismantling Your Trusted Marketing Strategies
Conversion Marketing StrategyFrom the Society of Word of Mouth comes this little podcast about the change in marketing. It’s more serious than you might think.
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We Are Actively Dismantling Your Trusted Marketing Strategies