Last week, I wrote about how startups should gather all the analytics they can. This week, I want to give you a couple of free marketing tools you can download to help you tell your story in the next board meeting. Hey, we’re a startup too and this is helping us, so I figured why not share it.
Free Marketing Tool #1
Would you like to try our free website analysis tool and get an instant report on your website in 30 seconds? No signup, no email to give, nothing to install.
You’re a startup and it’s you (the CEO), your CTO and your marketing guy in the monthly board meeting, and your investors ask “so what did you learn from the marketing activities last month?” Don’t say something like “we’re not real sure”, or “traffic went up, but we don’t know from where” – or anything like that. In fact, make sure you don’t fall into the old adage “I know half of my marketing is working – I just don’t know which half.”
A couple of my good friends over at MailFinch, an on-demand direct mail service, and Upstack, a site where you can hire designers to do whatever you need, have both been using ReTargeter.com to drive visitors back to their site. The way it works is a visitor comes to your site, and ReTargeter puts a cookie on the visitor. Once the visitor leaves, and goes to another website, there’s a good chance they will see a banner ad from you. And I’m talking about sites like Huffington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal and many more. It’s all driven to get people to come back, hence the name “ReTargeter,” and so only those people who came to your site and got the cookie will see the ads.
Hubspot successfully analyzed over 1 million websites, 1 million Twitter accounts, raised another $16 million, and yet they only have 1750 customers.
Did anyone else notice this?
I’ve always been impressed with Hubspot, and I have much admiration for Dharmesh Shah and the other founders. I’ve read just about all of their stuff on inbound marketing, permission marketing, conversion tracking and other juicy stuff. But I was shocked to read the news about their $16 million in additional funding with less than 1750 total customers. Boy, with all of the inbound marketing webinars and conversion improvement whitepapers, it seems as though Hubspot may need to eat more of their own dog food. Don’t get me wrong – their customer growth rate looks like the “hockey stick” we would all love to have, and a 350% growth rate in revenue is not too shabby – but I expected more than 1,700 customers. And it looks like it takes 2-3 months to acquire 250 new customers, some of which will churn I would imagine.
After the first two rounds of funding, they’ve essentially spent $10,000 to acquire each new customer, but as you will see further below, their average annual sale is only about $6,000. As good as their product might be, I’m sure they are not counting on customers sticking around for 20 months so they can break even, so they will need to sign up more customers faster than ever to decrease their cost per acquisition and get this thing profitable – and fast. This is the risk by taking on so much funding – how much runway do I need to get our cost per acquisition down and our lifetime value up? They spent the first $17 mil on engineering the product, perfecting it, building brand awareness, positioning themselves as experts with endless whitepapers, webinars, videos and more, and understanding the model to where they could go and raise more money. Surely they know for every dollar they put into inbound marketing efforts, how much revenue and profit they will get on the backend.
Before spending thousands on a tradeshow, know the metrics needed to calculate your tradehsow ROI; and get a few tips on how to maximize your success.
We just returned from the Search Marketing Expo in New York City last week where we launched our new SiteJuice™ product. We brought a big team of 9 people to help manage the expected crowd of 2,000-3,000 people.
To calculate your tradeshow ROI, you first need to define your goals, and that has to coincide with what your spending and what you are currently paying to acquire a new customer. That means if you are currently spending $100 to acquire a new customer, and you plan to spend $20,000 on the tradeshow, you need to get 200 new customers out of the show, which is 2,000 leads at a 10% conversion rate. If that sounds too high, you need to spend less.
OK, so now that you have a rough outline of some goals based on expenses, what is your strategy? Our strategy was people. The more people we had, the more people we could talk to about our product and sell its benefits. We maintained folks in the booth, and other consistently roamed around not only talking to people and driving them to our booth, but also scoping out the competition. This seemed better than blowing a few thousand bucks on some lame bag stuffers that everyone throws away, or an over-priced sponsorship for lanyards or Wi-Fi access. Brand awareness is fine, but it doesn’t sell your product, particularly if nobody knows who you are.
So here are a few tips that I hope you will find valuable the next time you search out the next tradeshow:
Tip #1 – Make it uber-simple to sign up for your product. We created special landing page for folks to sign up for our product that had only 4 fields. Also, we did not require an email verification, and once they entered their info, they were logged straight into their account and we showed them how to set it up. Normal sign up processes won’t work for a tradeshow. Even with this simple process and 3 laptops ready for signups, we still had lines forming.
Have you ever been to a website that takes forever to load? What do you do?
We’ve taken some past research and developed a way to determine how many visitors you could potentially be losing based on how long your website takes to load from 0-30 seconds. This was not easy – only a couple of studies have actually been done, and not only are they “aging”, but they have also been controversial and only up to around the first 4 seconds of load time data. Obviously, there are many factors involved in determining how long you are willing to wait for a page to load, but with tabbed browsing, faster connections speeds, and more, maybe this is why a real study has not been done since 2006.
Here are some key takeaway points from the research we were able to come up with:
- Zona research said in 1999 that you could lose up to 33% of your visitors if you page took more than 8 seconds to load.
- Akamai said in 2006 that you could lose up to 33% of your visitors if your page took more than 4 seconds to load on a broadband connection.
- Tests done at Amazon in 2007 revealed that for every 100ms increase in load time, sales would decrease 1%.
- Tests done at Google in 2006 revealed that going from 10 to 30 results per page increased load time by a mere 0.5 seconds, but resulted in a 20% drop in traffic.
Wow. A half of a second? Is that even enough time to take a breath? Yet, when browsing, most people will lose patience and leave your website before they even have time to breathe. How this relates to e-commerce sites is pretty important. If your website is selling a fairly generic item, your site had better load pretty damn fast or you just lost your sale to some other guy. At Christmas, when every parent is looking for this seasons must have toy, better hope your website loads in under 2 seconds. When a husband forgets his anniversary and is quickly looking for a flower delivery place while the boss isn’t looking, your pictures better not be too big and take forever to load.
So how long does your webpage take to load? Check out Pingdom.com/Tools, and then come back here and approximate your potential visitor loss:
If you prefer to “geek out” and read our entire white paper, you can download it here. (I will warn you that it does mention words like “mathematical model”, “radioactive first oder decay” and “non-linear regression”.)
The following is a blog post by Nan Palmero, Chief Inspriation Officer at Sales By 5, a San Antonio firm that helps companies achieve dramatic increases in sales.
Last December, seeking to enhance sales, Gary Vaynerchuk offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.
Are you using social media to get your story out there? You don’t have to pay for attention anymore.
I’ve been wondering lately about Twitter. I wonder when I send a tweet to my 800 followers, who is actually paying attention not only reading my tweet, but clicking on the link I provide. In reality, it seems to me that we only have a small window of opportunity to be “noticed” or else the tweet just gets buried in the time line.
My guess was that any tweet has a “shelf life” of roughly 2 hours, and assuming about 5% of your followers are considered to be “active followers” (meaning they usually respond to things you post or at least consistently read them), I could expect about 20 click-throughs to the link I provided in my tweet.
The Test
I sent a post at 1:38p CST (right in the middle of the day, when hopefully most are actively using Twitter) entitled “Test: How I Evaluated the Effectiveness of Print Ads: http://bit.ly/19GkSz”; a blog I posted on this site on April 21st. I used bit.ly to track the results, thanks to my friend @bolora. I was using BudURL and was getting frustrated with it, so Bo said to try bit.ly and by inserting “/info” right after the .ly, I would get a full report on clicks, etc.
The Results
Right after the tweet posted, it was re-tweeted by friends @erikdarm (678 followers) at 1:53p, and then 2 of his followers re-tweeted the post; @blellowj (2,047 followers) at 1:54p and @stephenlynch (712 followers) at 1:57. It is now 3:19p and there have been no further re-tweets, so the pass-along value may have reached its limit within the Twitter time line.
Total reach = 4,235 potential Tweeple to read and click on my tweet (my 798 followers, plus the followers of the re-tweets).
If you go to the bit.ly link, you will see a screen like the one below:
So the “Now” screen looks like this and refreshes every few seconds, so the time line keeps moving to the right. (It would be cool if you could go back and see the clicks at the beginning – there was more activity around 2:00p with one time about 6 clicks came in simultaneously).
I think it’s safe to say the post has now exhausted it’s useful life, with the last click at 2:41p CST (it is now 3:29p and no click activity since then).
This shows the activity for the “full day”, with a total of 34 clicks at the 2:00p mark, and 15 at the 3:00p mark for a total of 49 clicks to the link in the tweet (i.e. 49 potential new visitors to our blog/website).
Conclusion
We would have to do several tests to prove this out, and I’m sure would vary if you were Robert Scoble or Guy Kawasaki, but in general (for the rest of us), from this small experiment we conclude that a “useful” tweet has the following characteristics:
-a shelf life of about 1 hr 15 min, and then it “dies”
-1 to 2% click-through rate on links
Which means that this is not a whole lot different than direct mail for example, without out the cost of course. What do you think? Is Twitter really a good way to communicate and share useful knowledge, or is it simply getting lost in the mix?
As I was flying back from the east coast on Southwest Airlines, as usual I pick up the latest copy of Spirit magazine to see what’s interesting as we wait until I can open my computer and do something else. It occurred to me as I was perusing that there were very few ads that had either a direct response mechanism, or at least some kind of tracking mechanism to validate the performance of the ad.
The Test
So I decided I would do a study: count every single ad and see which had a) direct response mechanisms; b) tracking mechanisms; or c) nothing at all. Even when I stopped in Nashville, I went and purchased the latest copy of Entrepreneur magazine and did the same study so I could compare the results.
So, let’s first define the three basic types of ads:
Direct Response – this type of ad has a mechanism to entice the prospect to learn more about the product or service, or to purchase. Examples would be a tear-sheet to mail in for a free something, a link to a website with a promo code, a cut-out to bring in for a discount, a link to a form to download something, etc.
Tracking Mechanism – this type of ad does not have a promo or direct response mechanism, but has a special 800 number or URL so they can effectively track the responses from the ad. The URL mechanisms are fairly easy to spot, but the 800 numbers are not.
Branding – this type of ad has no direct response mechanism and no noticeable tracking mechanism. They simply are there to generate brand awareness to the company/product/service.
Now, knowing these basic parameters, there are some caveats:
1. Brand awareness ads have their place in the world. As a measurement expert, I would love to see all ads of all types have a direct response or tracking mechanism, but it is not always feasible. As long as the company knows exactly how much they are spending on “brand awareness” and has at least tested turning them on and off to see the relative impact, I’m OK with them.
2. While some ads may not have a direct response or tracking mechanism, they could have had a place on their web sign up form with a “how did you hear about us” field. I think these are generally ineffective since you never know if the person was guessing or simply picking anything just to get through the form faster. If you are running ads in multiple publications simultaneously it is nearly impossible to track the performance of them, so you might consider running ads one at a time to see what the relative increase in performance is compared to when you run nothing.
The Results
The results of the test may or may not surprise you, but the use of direct response or tracking mechanisms in print advertising is largely missing. Many of the hotels and casinos were guilty of most of the branding ads in Spirit magazine, while in Entrepreneur magazine, it was the franchises. Collectively, less than 25% of the 125 total ads had either a direct response or tracking mechanism.
The Awards
Based on all of the 125 ads, here’s what we’ve come up with:
Best Direct Response Mechanisms
Gotomypc.com has an excellent campaign where they are giving 30-day free trials if you enter a special promo code. Their ad in Sprit magazine had the code “spirit” and in Entrepreneur they had the code “entrepreneur”. I have also seen them using this on their tv spots as well.
Airport Parking has a pretty good ad that offers 1 day free, and then asks for an email for the 2 days free offer. The sales associate scans the barcode which indicates which offer and which publication it came from. It could be a little clearer that you do actually need to cut this out and bring it in to the retail center.
Kaplan University has a great example of a tear-sheet that you mail in to get a free book. If you don’t want to mail this in, you can call the 800 number (which I am sure is specific to the campaign) or go to the unique URL. I like this one a lot because in the form it also has a referral mechanism where it asks if they can contact a friend on your behalf.
Least Likely to Succeed
IBM – First, this ad is way too busy with so much tech geek crap that I am immediately turned off. I didn’t think the readers of Entrepreneur were the IT-type, but I could be wrong. Then, if you want more information on this “offer” you go down to this small box where it has a long URL, or an 800 number where you are required to remember (or write) down some long string of characters. Really IBM? Surely you can come up with something better than this.
Comcast had an interesting ad that hooked me with the fact that I might be “stuck in an old phone contract that doesn’t fit” (which I’m sure many of us are), and then drew my eyes to the red strip where I thought I would find some direct response mechanism. Nope. Gotta go way back up to the top right corner to get a website and phone number. This could have been so much better…
Most Confusing
The Parking Spot folks, similar to the Airport Parking guys up top, had a similar offer to save 20% at any of their “spots”. Problem was I did not know or understand that I am supposed to cut this out and bring it in to the retail office. Way down in the bottom right corner there is a “For cashier use only” which indicated to me that it was a coupon – other than that, I didn’t catch on.
Biggest Waste of Money
Now this ad was weird. First, I guess I don’t understand the butterfly concept, but more ironically, I had to “search” for this search company’s contact info. And I actually thought the name of the company was “Search Marketing” – that would be a blunder if people went to Google looking for “search marketing” and came up with their competitors. My point is that the number and website (calls to action) are buried in the text that no one reads anyway.
I’m real big on measurement. And I mean BIG. Without data, you can’t measure, and if you can’t measure, you have no real insights to your business as to what marketing is working for you, and what’s not.
Whether you are spending a small fortune on marketing and advertising, or nothing at all, I’m going to show you 5 cost-effective ways to get more insights from your prospects and your customers to help grow your sales.
1. Web Traffic
If you are not looking at the traffic that visits your website, you should start today (that’s an order!). We can debate if you should use a server-based solution such as AWStats, or a javascript-based solution, such as Google Analytics, but that’s another blog post. I am going to recommend 2 products to you that are both javascript-based, and let you decide.
Google Analytics – this is a FREE but very powerful tool. You can literally install Google Analytics in less than five minutes, and start collecting data. You can segment your visitors, say comparing paid traffic to organic traffic, or traffic from one city to another. Their advanced segmentation and motion chart features are fantastic, but take a bit of wizardry to completely understand how they work.
Clicky – this is a paid tool, but does have a FREE limited version. Clicky offers real-time data, iPhone accessibility, and a “spy” tool where you can see what visitors are doing on your website in real-time. But primarily, Clicky is very easy to use.
I like to make the analogy that Google Analytics is like buying a bike in a box that you have to take home and assemble, where Clicky is already assembled and ready to ride.
Now, if you don’t have enough traffic coming to your site to measure, well, that’s another problem, and you’re going to need to run this FREE Website Analyzer to determine why you can’t be found on search engines.
2. Task Completion Rate
So now you have some analytics on your site. What are you looking for in all of those wonderful looking Google Analytics, or Clicky dashboards? You’re probably getting excited with “average time on site”, or “average this”, or “average that”. Beware of averages – they lie! While the dashboards are nice, they tell you little about what the visitor did, and if they were able to accomplish what they came for. So while we do have “conversion rates”, I would like to stress the importance of “task completion rates”, or the ability for a visitor to actually complete the task they set out to do. This can easily uncover some usability issues with your site.
I highly recommend using a FREE site-level survey called the 4Q. Four simple questions that measures how they liked the website from 1-10, the purpose of their visit, if they were able to complete their task or not, and an open ended comment.
3. Customer Leads and Sales
How do you currently track your lead pipeline? Do you know what your close ratio is? I just saw customer service guru Jack Daley speak, and he spouted some interesting data. If you contact a lead 2 times, you have a 5% probability of making a sale. If you contact a lead 12 times or more, you have an 80% probability of making a sale. The real eye-opener is that the majority of sales folks were contacting leads much less than 12 times, and in fact, the percentage that do is single digit.
Secondly, you need to be able to track every lead, the source of the lead, and if they converted to a sale. If you knew this, then you can start to compare quality of leads, such as do your paid search leads close faster than word-of-mouth leads? Or, do leads from direct mail result in a higher gross sale than newspaper ads?
The good news is that there are some tools to help you along. What you need is a simple CRM (Client Relationship Management) System. If you want to use a web application, try Zoho for FREE, or as little as $12 per month. Then there is Sugar CRM, the open source platform that you can download and configure on your own server. The app is FREE, but you will likely need to pay for a Sugar developer to get the tool working the way you want – unless their out-of-the-box solution fits your needs. Lastly, you could always try Salesforce.com, which has some great features like being able to link to your Google AdWords campaigns. The tool is relatively affordable when you start off, but if you are keeping tons of data, then it can get expensive.
4. Email Campaigns
I sure hope you are not trying to email hundreds of people a promo through your Outlook, Entourage or Mozilla email client. If you are, STOP! I have some better tools for you to try:
Constant Contact – you may have heard of these guys, since they have probably been around the longest. Surprisingly, they are not ahead of the curve when it comes to features compared to some other competitors. Their big thing is that they have an affiliate program. Big whoop. You need sales, not puny commissions of some email marketing tool. CC will charge you by the size of your list, and not by how many emails you send out.
Mail Chimp – these guys have tons of great information on how to properly set up and send an email to your prospects with all kinds of white papers and instructions. They even provide opt-in forms for your website that are completely customizable. Sending your first email is a bit of a hassle since they want to know exactly where you got your emails from, so expect about a 3-day wait to send your first email since they have to approve it.
Campaign Monitor – these guys have some neat features such as checking your email against over 20 mail clients so you can see what it will look like before you send it out. It will even convert a web-page to and HTML email if you want, and will even integrate into your Google Analytics account. They are also strict on the first email sent out. If you get more than a 0.02% complaint rate, they will disable your account. Pricing with them is a bit different. It’s $5 per email, plus $0.01 per recipient.
5. Net Promoter Score
This is undoubtedly the most important question you can ask your customer: “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” The score is from 0 to 10, where 9′s and 10′s are your “promoters”, 7′s and 8′s are your “passives”, and the rest are your “detractors”. You can read the book “The Ultimate Question” by Fred Reichheld for more information on how to apply this.
So there you have it – 5 ways to start measuring some things that will improve your marketing performance, and that won’t break the bank.
