24 Sep 07 My Campaign is Running But I’m Not Getting Sales
I recently have been watching a campaign for a friend to see how he is converting prospect to leads. Basically the campaign is converting less than 1% and my friend is dying to figure out why.
You know when staring at these campaigns with metrics is a job but just imagine what it’s like if you don’t have any metrics. You see my friend is running a Google Adwords campaign and the goal is to find a lead and convert them into a sale. What my friend doesn’t know is that there are some important factors that contribute to why prospects aren’t converting to leads. Here are some;
- Not knowing what the customer really wants. You see in the search market (actually in the I want to buy something market) there is a spectrum of buyers some closer to buying than others (A-Z Spectrum with Z being as close as possible to buying) In order to get a customer to buy you need to understand where they are in the buying cycle. In the beginning the customers is looking for information, so their search is broad but as he starts to move down the scale the prospects search gets much more specific. So you monitor your metrics to see if what the customer is searching and send different information based on where they are in the buying spectrum.
- Drip, Drip, Drip. In this world of continuous and never ending marketing messages, prospects forget about you and it’s your job to remind them constantly about your business, services, products, sales etc and the more reminding the more they are likely to remember you when they get closer to the buying decision. The also are more likely to refer you because if you are doing a good job providing valuable information they will reward you with a reference to a friend.
- Lastly (well not really because I can keep going) is message to market match. This is very important. The idea is to enter into the conversation that your customer is having in their head already. So based on where they are in the buying cycle, you enter their conversation and if you connect they reward you with a sale.
As we installed more monitoring and analytics tools, my friends conversions started to increase, the more we segmented the listed, dripped and enter the prospects conversation, my friend was rewarded with increase sales. You can do the same.
23 Sep 07 Use Twitter to tell customers about sales in your business.
If you know your customers and have a their contact info Twitter may be a great way to tell them about new items and sales in your store.
Twitter is a free service designed to let you stay in touch with friends (customers) no matter where or what they are doing. The way Twitter works is you send a message from your cell phone or computer and Twitter sends it out to your list of friends and posts the message to your Twitter page.
SOme of the compaies that have implement a Twitter stragey to increase sales include Amazon.com, Orbitbooks and more. Even if you don’t have a website Twitter can be used to tell you customers what is going on in your business.
So here is how Twitter would work for your friends(Customers). Let’s say you sell special womens bags and you have a group of customers that want to know about when new products come in or you have a sale. You invite your customers to receive special information from your business and collect their contact information. Then when you have a sale or special info you want people to know about you can use Twitter to send the message to the customers cell phone via a text message.
This is just another way way your business can use the Internet to find new customers and tell existing customers about exciting events, products and specials.
Dedicated to your success
13 Sep 07 The Key to Business Success is in the Data
Today, I watched on CNBC a show called “The Age of Wal-Mart”. The story focused on the successes of Wal-Mart, what they do to be successfull, what data they track, what they know about their customers and more. The story got me to thinking about how a small business coluld use similar technology to get the same data and grow their businesses.
One of the most obvious success technologies Wal-Mart uses is knowing their customer. Here’s what I mean. When you buy from Wal-Mart. they keep you receipt transaction for two years and analyze that data to see what the trends are for a particular product. You could do the same thing in your business if you use a POS (Point of Sale) System in your business and collected the same data.
As importantly Wal-Mart knows alot about how their marketing works. Now grant you, Wal-Mart has tons of money to track this information and pay people to compile and analyze this data, but with a small change in marketing you could do they same by using automated systems.
For example, when you create any marketing material, insted of driving the customer to the phone or the store, drive the customer to a landing page on your website. This landing page should be specifically tailored to this product and shoudl allow the customer to enter their contact information so you can continue to market to them.
This use of offline marketing drives traffic to an online system that can be connected to free software that tracks all types of data. This is truly Wal-Martesque.
BY driving customers form an offline ad to an online collection device (webpage) you can use a free product like Google Analytics to track all types of data about your customers.
For example, you can track where your customer lives by using the geographic tracking in Google Analytics. You can track what they like about your data, how long the customer spends reading your markeeting material and even if they want more information.
Combine this data with the data from your POS system and you’ve got Wal-Mart success. You can fine tune your marketing message, test pricing, test messages, test shipping or coupons and more. You can track the entire process all they way thru the sale.
This is the secret to Wal-Mart’s success and you should use similar systems to increase your businesses chances for success
Dedicated to your success
