Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

Seth Godin, marketing guru and savant of small things, writes about how inbound calls are the most important and most ignored aspect of marketing. I couldn’t agree more.

We did an SEO/SEM campaign for a client that was completely focused on developing highly qualified inbound leads. The criteria was simple: Get potential customers to visit their site, then pick up the phone and call for more information. A secondary goal was an email request.

One of my first actions in planning this was to call the number on the website and experience what a prospect encounters… and it was not good. First, a person did not answer- I got a phone tree. My options did not clearly include ‘talk to a rep’ as the first option. When I did get to that option, I got voicemail.

A new customer for this business is worth 5-6 figures minimum revenue in the first year. Many become long term partners. An inbound call is a serious indicator of interest yet this otherwise savvy business was placing impediments every step of the way for that caller.

Our response was that before we even work on lead gen, they needed to dedicate a phone line and a live person to answer that line 24/7. This can be done with a call center whose script is to determine the caller’s physical location and connect them with the appropriate sales rep for that territory. The sales rep is trained that calls from this source are serious prospects that must be contacted within hours, at the latest (leads are time sensitive and rapidly get stale, often within hours).

Even before the lead gen work was done this change made a significant difference in sales volume. As much as I believe in the power of online marketing, the power of great service is far more important. Put the two together and things will explode.

SalesIntelligentsia.com is a new blog in our network with a focus on success in sales management using all of the incredible online marketing tools out there. We’ll be talking about lead generation, sales processes, recruitment, CRM, reviewing books and training courses, discussing scripts, motivation, prospecting, compensation and a lot more.

So if you’re involved in sales, sales management, business development or own your own business check it out.

Jonathan Mendez runs multi-variate testing and finds that, contrary to common belief, having navigation on landing pages increases conversions. He found it particularly important in financial lead generation pages where having nav elements increased the comfort factor for visitors.

Fascinating stuff (do I have a boring life or what!). Seriously.

Here’s ten more really interesting, tested observations on site design and SEO.

A not so brief brief digression regarding landing pages. For those who are not familiar with them, landing pages are pages designed to serve as the place where a person who clicks on an ad or offer ‘lands’. i.e. the page they directly navigate to via the click. This almost never should be a web site home page, in fact it should almost never be an actual web site page at all. BTW, by ‘web site page’ I mean a page that is a part of a site including that site’s architecture and navigation.

To many this may seem illogical- after all aren’t I paying for advertising to get people to my site? Don’t I want the visitor to learn all about my company, to know we’re a real business, to hear about how wonderful our products and services are?

The answer is no or not really. Let’s be that visitor for a second. Suppose I’m looking for something specific like ‘translation services in Rochester, NY’ . This is a keyword string that gets analyzed for intent by the search engine which returns organic results and PPC ads that it thinks most closely match the keywords.

Now imagine that the top ad was written by a savvy search marketer and it includes the phrases ‘translation services’ and ‘Rochester, NY’. Great, thinks our searcher, that’s just what I want and she clicks. Depending on the savvy of our marketer one of two things happens:

• She comes to the home page of a translation business
• She comes to a page specifically designed to address her query, i.e. a landing page

In the first instance the home page isn’t selling translation, it’s selling a variety of language services that includes translation services. For the purposes of a web site, this page is fine- it gives a general overview of the company. For the purposes of our visitor, it is a roadblock in that it requires her to parse the page to find another link to get her closer to translation services. Given average bounce rates (percentage of visitors who leave the page within ten seconds of arriving) of 60%, you’re going to lose at least 6 out of 10 visitors right away because of this roadblock- and you paid for those clicks. In fact you’re going to lose nearly 100% of your visitors because eyetracking studies show us that most visitors rapidly skim headlines and if they don’t find what they want, poof!- they’re gone.

With a landing page your goal is simple: to capture the attention and satisfy their needs. We know her intent- she needs translation services and prefers a company in Rochester. All we want our landing page to accomplish is to assure her that we offer these two things and show her exactly how to get them with the least amount of hassle. So we start with a nice big headline:

Translation Services, Rochester, NY

That’s right, the keyword string is the headline. And yes, you are going to create individual landing pages for every keyword string. Creating this kind of page couldn’t be easier and server space is fantastically cheap so don’t complain, just do it.

Then you write copy, in bullet list form, delineating your translation services. This is a place to qualify the customer. If you don’t do small projects, tell them your focus is on larger projects. If you don’t sell retail, only wholesale, say so. If you’re nice point them to another resource (nicey-nice is good karma. They might come back with a bigger job or order). Keep your bullet list succinct and focused on benefits rather than features. If you don’t know the difference, read a bullet, pretend you’re a customer and ask yourself if you care. If you don’t, it’s not a benefit.

Once you’ve told them what you offer, tell them very clearly how to Contact you. Let me emphasize something here: keep it simple and make sure they reach a live human if they dial your number and/or get a quick response if they email. With email, use an autoresponder to verify that you’ve received their request and that a person will be responding within x number of hours. Do the same if they get directed to voicemail. Ideally you have a number dedicated to this campaign so they don’t get a company directory- remember they don’t know who they’re calling (of course you could tell them the name and direct them to that person’s inbox/VM- even better).

Here’s a very serious sales tip: Qualified leads are ripe fruit- which means they get more and more rotten by the minute. Each half day, by some estimates, that you don’t respond to a lead cuts the value of that lead by 50%! So squeeze that fruit right now while its nice and juicy…

The only other thing you’re going to put on this page is a small link that says: Visit Our Website.

That’s it, that’s your landing page.

So why are we doing this? Because the sole purpose of most search marketing is to generate a qualified lead (if you don’t sell retail, you don’t want a retail customer) and convert that lead to a customer. Anything that gets in the way cuts down on the likelihood of getting to a conversion, so do things for a reason, not because we are in love with our home page.

Here are six more great tips for creating landing pages that convert.

For domainers, if you get this far, parked pages are basically crappy landing pages. You could build your own and make them a lot more relevant by following some of this advice. Won’t work for every domain but…