Direct-Response DIGITAL Marketing
Direct-response (DR) marketing is not a fad, not a limited-time approach, and certainly not media dependent. As you and many of your peers and competitors are now disproportionately focused on digital marketing channels, you need to know that DR is completely media agnostic, and as a matter of fact, in our opinion, even more effective in the online arena than offline. We are pioneers in the art and science of digital DR marketing.
The good news for all of us is that most entrepreneurs are doing it poorly and downright wrong most of the time. That’s when and where DR kicks in. It puts proven marketing principles in play, whether on your website, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, and whatever new channel has come up since you started reading this chapter. Applying DR to your digital footprint is the single most important step you can take to ensure your marketing success.
There are websites, and then there are DR websites. Just browse for a specific item to buy, check out four websites that offer the same or similar item, and you’ll know what I mean. Regularly at GKIC, we meet entrepreneurs who ask us to review their sites. Some come to us to show off their “great” website, which they take a lot of pride in after spending months and perhaps thousands of dollars on the handiwork of their new college intern. But when we ask them how many page views they get, or how many leads they’ve captured on their site, or how they handle cart abandonment, or even how much of their business is actually website driven, they often answer “very little,” or worse yet, “I don’t know exactly.” Are you kidding me!?
The days of websites being pretty brochures for your business to tell the world how great you are have long passed. While having an attractive site that provides sufficient details about your product or service is a good starting place, it isn’t enough. Far from it. Yes, people need to be moved to take action, and not just any action, but the exact action you intend with the tools to secure volumes of information that will be the basis of the rest of your digital marketing efforts.
Let’s start where your customers start—at your website. Let’s build a direct-response site that sets you up for true digital marketing success.
The purpose of your website is to convert a website visitor to a paying client—it is your 24/7 online salesperson. What we see lacking in pretty much every website we look at is a total lack of a sales process. Done right, your website will ensure the successful execution of many of the DR principles in this book. Ensure that your site is the tool that it is meant to be.
Traditionally, websites have been designed to sell the customer on your business and to help make a significant enough impression to persuade them to buy your product or services. However, websites need to do a whole bunch more and offer a whole bunch more so visitors can make choices and take action. THAT is what a direct-response website will do.
Having a DR website is the fastest thing you can do to affect change in your business. Let’s consider that again. Initiating a DR website is the fastest way to initiate powerful, positive change in your business.
When we asked our good friend Bill Glazer what the single biggest factor had been in his success at growing Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle (GKIC), without pause he responded, “Our website.” If you haven’t already, now is the time to apply the same DR principles to your business. This means a dramatic website mind-shift from “Here are my kids, my car and golf trophy, my products and services” to “Act now!”
Direct-response websites are set up to motivate—no, demand—that visitors take action. They are designed to generate and foster a relationship with the customer, but more important, initiate leads. Does your website do that now?
Consider this: The majority of websites are old-fashioned, brochure-style, basically ineffective designs. They are an expense for your company and usually not nearly the benefit you think they are. You can spend your marketing dollars on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to drive people to your website, but once there, your efforts are hampered by your lackluster, ineffective, pamphlet-style site. Now imagine if those same leads went to your website and were prompted to take action right away! See Figure 12.1 on page 140.
You want to have a headline that clearly attracts the kind of customer you are looking for. It needs to be emotionally impactful, attention-getting, and at the top of your site’s home page. This will have you standing out from the crowd of others in your field, as most merely have their company name or logo at the top of their site.
FIGURE 12.1: The Eight “Must-Haves” for Direct-Response Websites
As for your USP, it isn’t “lowest price” or “best service” . . . boring! You need to consider the benefits you truly offer your customers and encapsulate the idea into a short response that summarizes why people should buy from you. As Dan always says, your USP should create the reaction, “Wow, that’s really cool, can you tell me more?” or “Wow, how do you do that?”
As you consider your design, place heavy emphasis on how your DR website is designed and how it looks on mobile devices. Mobile devices surpassed desktops for media time and online searches in 2014, and usage time continues to rise. If you are not able to reach your audience through mobile media search or display, or your DR website doesn’t offer a superb, smartphone-friendly experience, you will lose out to other businesses that do.
So, we’ve agreed that your DR website is not just an online fact sheet that gives the necessary details of your company, product, or service. It has a specific call to action with the outcome being a lead or sale generated. The call to action could be completing a form, signing up to receive email, printing off a coupon, watching a webinar, calling in to hear an audio recording, requesting free information, completing a purchase—really, the possibilities are endless. When you think of your own website or those you have frequented recently, consider how many of them actually do this.
This type of website does not mean you sacrifice appearance, style, or your brand. Your website can and should be appealing and accurately reflect your brand. But even if it isn’t attractive, this approach—set up right based on DR website design principles—can be more effective at generating sales and leads than a “pretty” website.
Business owners have often mistakenly believed that once their website is up and running, they just need to sit back and the customers will come—the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy. They hire someone to build a website, or build it themselves, make it pretty, choosing just the right fonts, pictures, and graphics but fail to consider the customer in its creation. Consider all the questions a potential customer would ask you if you were face-to-face with them. Now look at your website. Do you answer all those questions in an easy-to-find, creative, fun, engaging, informative manner? Your website is a sales presentation. Is it dull? Informative, but dull? Or lively, engaging, and encourages the website visitor to act?
“Pretty” websites are, well, pretty, but do they get people to buy? Unfortunately, there are few website designers who are actually direct-marketing educated. They will design an attractive site that few people will go to, and even fewer will buy from, if they do visit it. Ask yourself right now: Can you track and measure your online marketing presence? Is it making the impact you need, want, and expect? The beauty of a direct-response website, and a clear advantage over a pretty website, is you can track everything because you have set up a separate phone number that is just for your DR website. Tracking is built in!
Imagine you are the captain of a ship. You need to have some excellent navigation skills to maneuver this ship around and get to where you want to go. If you just hop aboard and take off without any strategies, techniques, or systems, you are going to go where the winds and currents take you, not necessarily where you want to go. Your business is the same. You need to navigate traffic to your direct-response website, convert them to cash, and keep them coming back.
First, you must have well-researched, strategically placed keywords. These are SEO keywords that are used most frequently in online searches. The more of these you have embedded in your site, the more likely your site will come up in someone’s search, and thus, the better your chances of them visiting your direct-response website. Lists of keywords are available for free online. Find the ones that best match your brand, product, or service, and plug them into your site. The more people who come back to your site, the higher Google will move your SEO ranking. Frequent, repeated site visits indicate you are an authority with good content, and that increases your score in the Google algorithm. Better scores move you to page 1, and since about half of search traffic goes through Google, and the majority of resulting purchases take place from businesses on page 1, that is exactly where you want your business to be! Yes, this process takes time, knowledge, money, and energy, which most business owners are not willing to exert. But again, can your business afford for you not to?
So, El Capitan, steer this ship and drive people to your site by using prominent keywords that link your site to what people are looking for.
There is a fine line here that must be noted. Often, people build a website that contains lots and lots of information—too much. This style of website might attract a wide range of visitors (due to high keywords) but achieve minimal or no conversion. The key here is to design your website so that visitors click “buy,” not click away. Your direct-response website needs to have a simple design that is easy to navigate, and it needs to have at least ten things for potential customers to do, only one of which is purchasing your product or service. Have a special offer to attract new customers (e.g., free introductory service, free sample, new customer discount/coupons, buy one get one free, etc.). Consider using “loss leaders” to get people into the fold of your business. This is “buying” customers at break even, or even a loss . . . so you have the possibility to offer upsell opportunities in the future. This requires figuring out and understanding the concept of “Lifetime Value of a Customer,” which is knowing how much an average customer spends over their “lifetime” as your customer—this enables you to determine how much you can afford to spend to get new customers.
Do you have a Special Report or other lead-generation magnet on your site? If not, consider building a lead-generation magnet as an opt-in function on your website to entice visitors to request the freebie in exchange for their contact information. A lead magnet can be a video link, audio link, free report, free subscription, free coupon, discount coupon, free sample, free tip sheet, free book.
Figure 12.2 is a website that has a number of the direct-response techniques, strategies, and systems that convert website visitors to prospects and then, through the follow-up marketing funnel, converts prospects to paying customers.
• Dedicated phone number for online tracking and email link on the top left
• Book an appointment in a different color on the top right and middle picture
• High-value procedures immediately in full view for ease of visitor navigation
• Email capture for New Patient Special Offer on the right side—coupon is emailed to the prospective patient and then put in a marketing funnel
FIGURE 12.2
FIGURE 12.3
• Secondary New Patient Special Offer (Figure 12.3) on the right side in the header picture; it slides down the page as the website visitor scrolls down. It opens when clicked and is on all secondary pages. Free Report is sent with Coupon.
• Live chat tab on the left side—live chat opens and scrolls across the page automatically after five seconds.
• Not Seen—below the fold, as you scroll down, there is a video Review, along with written reviews and a link to the Reviews page
• The navigation tabs on the top are drop-down menus so the visitor can see what services/procedures are available without having to click to another page.
• The site also has a “Patient Referral” page so existing patients can easily and quickly refer family members or friends. They get an email with the New Patient Special Offer for tracking purposes.
These are only a few of the many direct-response marketing and conversion strategies and systems for the home page. Every page on the site should have conversion DR techniques for visitor action.
Resource Alert!
GKIC Digital Solutions offers an unbiased assessment of your online marketing efforts and evaluates how you stack up against your competition. (Call to get started at (800) 871-0147, or visit www.gkicdigitalsolutions.com.)
Offer a lot of variety—the sales letter for the reader, the video for the person who wants to watch and listen in, facts for the statistician. Most websites don’t do this. They are into big pictures and lots of text that talks on and on about them, and not about the consumer. But it is all about the customer! Websites need to have prospect-oriented copy—not about you, your product or service, and how great you are/it is. It’s about them. Test and test again to find what is working.
Do a split test with two websites to see what appeals to your clientele. Try different headlines, different types of copy (long, short, different content), video vs. copy, popover boxes or not to better assess what works. Some designs/setups that you think are a home run might not be in your public’s eye. You can’t always predict what will be more successful until you split test. Definitely split test with landing pages; especially on high-transaction-value landing pages.
If you want a conversion-oriented website, you need an online marketing system that captures email addresses, makes sales, gets phone calls, makes appointments, tracks five-star reviews, keeps people on the site, and tracks visitors for retargeting. Opt-in offers, email capture, video reviews and testimonials, exit pops, chat boxes, online appointments, and call-in offers are a few of your options to encourage customer engagement.
Often, we find that businesses have a nonfunctioning email capture system. Email capture is the lowest barrier to entry. People are more likely to provide that information than any other. You should regularly be checking how many or how few people actually visit your site and how many of those leave their email contact information.
Look at your Google analytics, and it will tell you how many visitors came to your site—it can also identify what kind of traffic you are getting (you have to exclude the spambots, as they are real traffic). These numbers are very important and often overlooked. (Remember the inaccurate “If I build it, they will come” theory?) Without the contact info, you can’t build a relationship with these potential customers, you can’t offer them help, and you won’t know what their buying-decision time frame is. When it comes time for them to actually buy something, will they remember to go back to your website? Probably not. Studies show that if they leave your website without you capturing their contact info, chances of them becoming a client are reduced by about 80%. They will probably go to the last website they went to, and if it looks reasonable, buy from there.
Another critical aspect of most websites is not having a “relentless, ongoing email follow-up system till they buy, die, or unsubscribe.” If you don’t have time to set it up yourself, find someone who will. It is money well spent on your business. GKIC has a follow-up email system that is full of relevant, interesting copy to help build the relationship with the consumer. Keeping in touch with your customers, clients, or patients builds better relationships and leads to more referrals. Since you don’t always know where your customer is in their decision-making process, you’ve got to maintain regular communication with them so when they cross that threshold, boom! There you are. You’ve been building that relationship with them by offering reliable, relevant content.
When I say “relentless, ongoing email follow-up system,” we are not referring to a digital barrage of boring, “I’m so great, my product/service is so great, blah, blah, blah” messages that make your reader tune out at “hello.” These must be interesting, engaging, and, dare we say, FUN emails that they look forward to reading. Make it a pleasure to be part of your community. Offer interesting information; pop in to say, “Happy Mother’s/Father’s Day”; at Thanksgiving sponsor a little food drive; make yourself part of the community; make them want to be part of your community. Do this through your direct-response website, emails, newsletters, etc. Most of all, make it interesting and fun. Have contests once in a while. Engagement improves significantly when there is a contest involved. Hold contests two or three times a year with the entry form on your direct-response website. Tell them the winners of this contest will be notified in your regular emails—this gets everyone to read future emails!
The times they are a-changing. Everything changes so quickly nowadays. With that in mind, are you using outdated online marketing technology and tools? Monitor and make immediate changes. In this particular circumstance, experience and tenure might actually be a detriment now, as we often rely on what has worked in the past—and that may not work the same way today with so many dramatic shifts in technology. As Google continuously changes its algorithms, the things that earned you a Page 1 rating yesterday might drop you to Page 2 or 3 tomorrow. When was the last time you updated your online marketing? Landing page? Website? Google and Facebook are always changing. Keep up. It is a changing world, and unless you change with it, it could cost you a lot of money.
Try to stay within the three-click rule—people often get frustrated if they have to spend a lot of time clicking around to find what they need. Fast, simple purchasing options encourage customers to follow a purchase to completion. The more steps they have to go through, the more likely you are to lose them.
Part of the sales/navigation process for your website should include testimonials, also known as “Five-Star Reviews.” What others say about you is infinitely more powerful than what you say about yourself. That’s why referrals are the easiest people to sell. Someone they know and trust recommended you. Visitors to your website expect you to say “I’m the best” or “I’ve got the best service.” However, that has zero credibility with the first-time website visitor.
Statistics tell us that over 50% of online searchers who are looking for a product or service will check out the online reputation of the particular company they are thinking of doing business with. What that means to you is that you should have “Five-Star Reviews” on your website, Google+ page, Yelp, and other online review sites.
A good review needs to have certain direct response principles included in the review. Having great five-star reviews is a system and as such should have the following:
• A headline taken from the comments in the review that clearly shows the benefit they received from using your products or services so that others who are experiencing the same problem can relate to that review.
• What their problem was and how it affected them on an emotional level. Remember people make decisions based on emotion and then justify with logic.
• The reason why the prospect chose you vs. your competition.
• Their full name and occupation. If I am a fireman, and I see a fireman wrote a testimonial, then I am more likely to have an affinity with that occupation, the review is now more believable, and there is a greater chance a person will do business with that company.
• Reviews should be in italics with “quotation marks” at the beginning and end of the review. By doing this, you differentiate the copy from the rest of the website copy so the website visitor physically sees the difference on the website page.
• There should be at least one review on the main page of your website with links to a page that has more reviews on it. If you have reviews on other sites, there should be a link, with the logo, to those sites.
• Videos of Five-Star Reviews are great; however, if you have them on your site, they still need a headline and you should transcribe the copy for those who do not want to hear the audio as they might be in a public place or at work.
Since this is a system, as with most systems, you can leverage technology to automate the procedure of getting and posting testimonials online. Having Five-Star Reviews online provides social proof and is another step in the direct response selling process.
Make Your Websites Work, Not Just Show Up
Be honest with yourself when you evaluate your website. Is your website currently converting leads and/or sales at the highest rate possible? Does it currently pass the direct-response test?
Hoping, wishing, or praying the site will somehow magically get much better at conversion will not do the trick. You must step—no, jump—into the digital realm with a strong direct-response digital footprint.
Online marketing trends are ever changing, but you can be certain that the direct-response marketing system will remain evergreen. Implementing the direct-response principles into your website will systematically move your site from a brochure to a money-making machine, converting visitors to leads and leads to customers for life.