Categories
Conversion Optimization

How to determine how well your website is doing.

Have you ever wondered how to determine how well your website is doing? Randy Kauffman, the Founder and President of SuperCoolSites.com shares how to use the data from your website to help you determine the effectiveness of your website to increase your traffic, leads, and sales.

This post is number 3 of a 3 part series with the purpose to help you get more traffic, leads, and sales. 

The simple goals of your website is to get more traffic, convert that traffic to leads, and convert those leads into sales.  This is what we call The 3 Simple Website Goals. 

This is part of a 3-part series on how to help your website convert more. 

The first article was on setting up Google Analytics on your site so you can see what percentage of visitors you are converting to take action on your site.  Google Analytics also tells you how many visitors you are receiving daily.   There are other programs you can use for analytics, but we think Google is the best because they give very detailed information. 

The second article was on how to create a value proposition, which is a great way to increase your conversion rate.  We had one particular client that made over a million dollars off of one value proposition in a period of 18 months. 

The Reason It is Important To Know How Well Your Website Is Doing

The reason you’ll want to know how well your website is doing is mostly for advertising purposes.  If you know how much each visitor is worth, you can spend less than that in advertising to get them to your website. 

The problem with businesses spending money on advertising that doesn’t work is that they don’t know how well their website is doing in the first place.   They spend thousands of dollars to drive traffic to their website without knowing if their website is helping them convert that traffic to leads. 

How to determine how well your website is doing.

Let’s start out by assuming you’ve followed along, and you have Google Analytics set up on your website.  When you know how much traffic you have and how much you are converting that traffic to leads and those leads to sales, it is easy to calculate the value of a single site visitor. 

How to calculate the value of a single website visitor. 

We’ve made it super easy for you to calculate with our Website Conversion Calculator

For this example, we are going to use the following numbers:

Gross revenue per sale:  $1000.    We have clients that range anywhere from $20 a sale to well over $20,000 for a single sale.  This example number makes it easier to see how the calculations are done.

Profit Percentage:  50%.  Fifty percent is an average profit percentage for our clients.  You can calculate your own profit percentage by taking the difference between your gross revenue per sale ($1000) and the cost ($500) and then dividing the gross profit ($500) by the revenue ($1000).  In this case it gives you a profit margin of .50.  Multiply that number by 100 to get the profit percentage 50%.

Website Visitors Daily:  20.   This number comes directly from your Google Analytics.  To get the most accurate number to use for your daily visitors, take an average of the past 30 days of visitors. 

Conversion Rate:  .25%     As a reminder, the conversion rate is the number of people you get to take an action from your website.  Those actions can be anything from clicking on a coupon, filling out a form, calling your office, or clicks on something that is for sale on your site.

Percentage of Contacts Sold:  50%.  If you are in the service businessand you sell to half of the people who took action on your website, your percentage of contacts sold would be 50%.

Repeat Business $2000.    Depending onthe type of business you are in your repeat business will vary.  A criminal defense attorney may not have any repeat business; however a carpet cleaning business may have quarterly repeat business from a single client.   It is a lot less expensive to keep a current client than it is to attract a new one.

So let’s calculate this and see what we get. 

Website Conversion Calculator

Consider The Lifetime Value of a Customer

In our example the lifetime value of a new visitor is tripled.  That is because we are taking the gross revenue per sale ($1000) and adding the value of their potential repeat business($2000).  In this example this triples the lifetime value of each new site visitor. 

This is important to know because a lot of companies are willing to lose money in the first year in order to have a client they can keep.  This is less expensive than attracting a new client.  So the value per visitor goes up by 3 times. 

The Infinite Possibilities for Increasing How Well Your Website Is Doing

Let’s change some of these numbers and see how we can increase our profits! 

Imagine if you were to increase your conversion rate from 0.25% to 2.0%.  You could do this by working on your value propositions on your website as we talked about in a previous article. 

With just that one change, you can increase your sales per week from 0.175 to 1.4 sales per week giving you a revenue of $1,4000 per week.   That’s a huge difference from $87.50!  

Determine how well your website is doing.
How well is your website working for you?

Planning For Your Future

Now you are getting to the point where you can start doing some advertising. 

Let’s say you are doing a 5-year plan and you can now see that a new visitor is worth $15 in lifetime value.    You might be wiling to invest $7.50 to attract a new client.    

Let’s look at another example.  Let’s say you really work on your site and you get your conversion rate up to 4% which increases the value of each new visitor to your site to $10.  Most of our clients do convert at about 4%, so this is a reasonable number to reach towards. 

Using Data Driven Advertising as A Business Tool

So you have your conversion rate up to 4% which brings the value per visitor to $10 per visitor to your website, now you can start advertising. 

In this case it is easy to see that investing $5 to attract a new client would be a sound idea.  But let’s check with our website conversion calculator to be certain. 

Let’s see what happens when we purchase 30 new clients at $5 each in advertising dollars.  Your investment in advertising increases the number of visitors and increase the number of sales.  So you can see that your profit per year is $182,000, your Revenue per year is $364,000 and your lifetime values go way up. 

You’ll want to make sure you calculate your Advertising costs into the equation to make sure your numbers are going up.  In this case your profit per year went up to $182,000 and your advertising expenses were $54,750.  This makes your simplified gross profit around $127K for the year.  That is still a heck of an increase from the $72,800 that you would have received without advertising at all.    

Paying for traffic.
Paying for traffic increases how well your website will do.

Now It’s Your Turn!


When you know your numbers and you see your conversion rate is 1% you can find out what each visitor is worth and you can use that number to invest in more traffic, so you can increase the number of  leads you get,  and you can get more sales! 

Step 1 in increasing your conversion rates is to Determine What Each Visitor To Your Website is Worth.

Step 2 is to add value propositions to your website.

Step 3 is to determine how well your website is doing using this post in combination with our Website Conversion Calculator

Watch Randy explain this article in this YouTube Video.

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Categories
Conversion Optimization

How To Add A Value Proposition To Your Website

In this article we map out what you need to include when creating a value proposition for your website This is Step 2 of “The Ultimate Guide to Increase Website Conversions.”

In the first article of this series we showed you how to get analytics set up so you can see what is happening when visitors come to your site.

Once you have analytics on your site, it is time to start doing things that make your website convert higher. 

First of all, you want your site to be interactive. 

That means you want your visitors to be easily able to navigate through your site and meet each and every one of their needs.  You want them to be able to call you from a mobile device, submit an email to you, sign up for specials, buy a product, or download some information.  Having  them be able to can easily interact  with you is what you want.

One of the goals of interacting with your visitors is to at least get an email address. This will help you market to them in the future.

We’ve done a lot of conversions for a lot of businesses and the one thing I like to do more than anything else as a start is to have a good value proposition on your home page that lets people know they are in the right place for what they want.   You can do value propositions on several pages and that is a good idea, but you have to start somewhere. The best place to start is on your homepage.

Screenshot of a YouTube video where Randy walks us through creating a value proposition.

Let me give you an example.

A Good Value Proposition Consists of the Following

An attention-grabbing headline –You want a headline that evokes emotion, something that get’s people excited.    “Protect Your Car From The Summer Heat With Window Tinting.” That is pretty good, but we might be able to do better.  

A 2- 3 sentence paragraph that expounds upon the headline.  

Then you have 3 bullet points.  It must be 3.  Don’t put 5 or 6 or 7.   Three is the magic number for some reason on websites.

A double opt-in call to action button and form.

A call to action button.   In this example, the call to action is “Request a Quote Today!”  This button is a part of a double opt-in form.

A nice form attached to the double opt-in button that let’s the visitor interact with you.

A nice graphic.  You also want to have a nice graphic to go along with the value proposition.   The graphic draws attention to the value proposition so your site visitors can read it and know whether they are in the right place for what they are looking for or not. 

Easily viewable on mobile devices.

People will fill out the form twice as much if there is a button leading to the form compared to just having the form included on the page with the value proposition.   There is a perceived choice involved when there is a button leading to the form.  How easy is that to do. Do you need a question mark here or is this a rhetorical question?  All your visitors must do is decide if they want to request a quote and when they click the button a form pops up so they can simply fill it out. 

Once you start to do something on a website, it is easier to do more.   On some websites, you’ll see they have a button that says, “Put in your birthday” and when you put in your birthday you think, “That was easy.” And then they ask, “Where do you live?”   and they keep stepping up further and further for more information.  But once you get started, it is easier to keep people going. 

So, for any business you are in, you’re going to need a value proposition.

Let’s Take a Look at Value Propositions in the Plumbing Industry

Oops! It looks like the CSS is malfunctioning. No value proposition can be seen on this site!

Benjamin Franklin Plumbing

This is not too good.  First, the design is not too good.

It looks better on mobile, but it doesn’t give you any way to interact with it.  There is no phone number on the site until the very bottom of the page and it is not clickable. 

This site’s CSS was wacky when we looked at it while recording the accompanying video. When we looked at it the following day, the site looked much better! And some of the problems with their value proposition seem to be fixed.

Let’s look at another one.

Another screenshot from our YouTube video, this one look a tiny bit better.

Accurate Plumbing

Well, at least you know what they do, it says, “Accurate Plumbing.” 

Again, there is no value proposition.  When you scroll way down on their page you see, “Efficient Plumbers.” 

It is a good thing to have as a value proposition right at the top.  But there is nothing to do on this site.  There are no interactions, other than the phone number. 

The point I want to make here is the very first thing you want to do is have a good value proposition on the home page.  

Now, let’s look at one of our websites.

Koenig & Owen have a nice looking value proposition on their website!

Koenig & Owen, LLC – Columbus Criminal Defense Attorneys

Their Value Proposition has all the elements needed to help site visitors know that they are in the right place for what they want.

A good graphic with the people on their team.   It is always nice to see smiling faces.

An attention-grabbing headline.  Value proposition that evokes emotion. 

A 2 to 3 sentence paragraph expounding on the headline

3 Bullet points.  No more.  No less.

A double opt-in call to action button and form.

Their value proposition looks good on mobile too!

We’ve increased their conversion rate by 4 times just with this value proposition.  

Can you imagine doing one simple thing to your website and it quadruples your business! That would be pretty nice!

Add Value Propositions to Each Service You Offer

After you have a Good Value Proposition on your home page and you are using Google Analytics to tract your conversion rates, you can work on other pages. 

You’ll want to add a value proposition to each page that lets your visitors know what services you offer and give your site visitors a place to interact.  Especially if you are in the service business, you want people to contact you.  A value proposition let’s them know that they are in the right place for what they want. 

If you are selling things online, it has to be a little different.  You must show the product, share all your information about the product, plus make it easy for them to buy the product.  I’ll cover that in another post. 

We hope this help’s you understand what a value proposition is and what goes into creating one so you can get started right away helping your website convert higher.

Now It’s Your Turn!

Step 1 in increasing your conversion rates is to Determine What Each Visitor To Your Website is Worth.

Step 2 is to add value propositions to your website.

Watch Randy explain this article in this YouTube Video.

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Categories
Conversion Optimization

How to Make Your Website Convert Higher

If you want to know how to make your website convert more, you need to dive into your data.

Step One – Determine What Each Visitor To Your Website is Worth

Its difficult to know if your website is producing the results you want, if you are not looking at the data. 

(Would you rather watch Randy explain this on YouTube? Click here! )

Before you look at the data, you need to find out what each visitor to your website is worth to you.  That way you are informed about whether investing in ads on Google, Facebook, or somewhere else is a good idea.  And if it is a good idea to place ads, you can clearly see the value of each new visitor to your site and decide how much you are willing to pay to attract more visitors each month.  

Knowing what each visitor is worth helps you get started and fine tune what you are doing online.

A good website should be designed for the single purpose of producing more for your company. 

  • More clients
  • More sales online
  • More contacts
  • More people contacting the business
  • More awareness about the business

You’d be surprised by how many businesses don’t know if their website is producing more of anything!

First and Foremost – Make Sure You Have Google Analytics Set Up On Your Site

Before you can determine what a visitor is worth, you need to know how many visitors you are getting.  And you need Google Analytics set up so you can clearly see how many people are visiting your site each month. 

It doesn’t do any good to start playing around with your site, unless you know what your numbers are. 

You might be getting phone calls, but you don’t know what percentage of them are coming from your site.  You might be getting 5 calls a month and what you don’t know is that you have 2000 people a month that are going to your site.  And if you were converting at 1%, you’d would be getting 20 calls.  Or 4 times as much as you were getting before.  If you’re converting at 3% you would be getting 60 CALLS OR 12 TIMES THE CALLS!  Think of the difference this would make in your business!

If you have a brand-new site or a site that has been around for a while and you want to get around to making it better and get it to produce at a much higher rate than you are now.

The very first thing you must do is have Google Analytics on your site, if you don’t have it already. 

Google Analytics Can Tell You A Lot About Your Site Visitors

Google Analytics is a program that will tell you a lot of interesting things about your site visitors. 

Within the analytics platform, you can find a lot of data about your site visitors. 

  • How many people are visiting your site each month
  • What pages are they looking at on your site
  • Where they are coming from.  (search engines, links from other sites, etc.)
  • What part of the world they are in when they visit your site.

You can see where your audience is coming from, and you can drill down into what country and then what state, and even what cities they are in when they visit.    

To help you determine what each visitor is worth, you need to set up Goals within GA. 

Goals Are The Gateway To Visitor Value

You want to set up goals in Google Analytics that help you see the value of each visitor interaction. 

Here is an example from one of our sites that already has goals set up.  Each goal has a different value based on their success in converting visitor interaction into a sale.  

Visitor interaction that you can track on Google Analytics:

  • When a visitor clicks on your phone number from their mobile device to call you.
  • When a form is filled out on your site.
  • When someone signs up for a free offer.
  • When someone clicks on a coupon.
  • How many products did you sell online
  • And more…

There are many more types of visitor interaction that Google can track.  These are just a few. 

An Example Of How Goals Look Inside Google Analytics

In August of this year our client has 20 goal completions.  Three of them were from visitors filling out a contact form.  Twelve were from mobile phone clicks, and 5 were from visitors signing up for free consultations.   

The total goal value for the month is $4900.  Google Analytics calculates the goal conversion rate automatically and shows that it is .45%. 

An example of the analytics we can see for one of our client websites.

What Is The Value Of A New Customer?

To determine the value of a new customer, you’ll need to determine the revenue per customer minus any costs that are involved in servicing that customer, including costs of goods, and cost to service.  

Each business is different so each business will have a different new customer value.   You may sell custom golf carts and the average price of a golf cart is $7,000 and you net $2000 on each new cart you sell.  A new customer is worth $2000 to your business. 

This is a simplified example. 

Great businesses can drill down their customer values and calculate the lifetime value of their customers.   One business we worked with had a weekly class they taught for $15 each week, and the average student showed up 30 weeks a year and the class was still going after 5 years.  She calculated the lifetime value of a new student to be about $2,250.  

The new student/customer value was $15.    

For the purpose of this article let’s say that your business’s New Customer Value is $1000, to keep it simple.

Once you know your new client value, you can get excited about setting up goal values in Google Analytics.

Calculating Goal Values in Google Analytics

So let’s look at how to set up goals and determine how much each visitor interaction with your website is worth.   

Let’s say that you’ve tested it with your team and that from 10 new calls you get one new client. 

That is 1 of 10 new callers becomes a new client.  So that is a 10% sales conversion rate.  And you know this because you’ve tracked it over the past few months.  

It is easy to see that each new caller from a mobile phone click is worth $100

You’ve already determined the value of a new customer to be $1000 and the percentage of new callers that turn into customers is 10%, or 1 out of 10. 

So the goal value for a phone click is $100. 

Here is how it looks on a spreadsheet:

Spreadsheet showing conversion rate.

You can apply this to any visitor interaction on your site.

If you have coupons on your site, you can see how many people clicked on the coupon from your site and how many coupons were redeemed at your place of business.   

If you are selling something online, you can see how many people went to see the product and how many people bought the product. 

What you want to get down to eventually is determining how much each visitor to your website is worth. 

Determining How Much Each Visitor Is Worth

Let’s say you have 1000 people visiting your site each month.  You know this is true because you can see it on Google Analytics.   You also know that 5 people called your business from interacting on your website.  That is 5 calls in one month. 

Since you’ve already calculated that each new caller is worth $100, and set up the goal value for each new caller at $100, the goal value for phone clicks for the month of August is $500. 

One More Step

There is one more step you need to take in order to determine how much each visitor to your site is worth. 

We know that you have 1000 visitors a month so your website should be making $500 a month from those 5 phone clicks (visitor interactions). 

Then, each site visitor is worth 50 cents. 

$500 /1000 visitors = $.50 per visitor.  This is a .005% conversion rate.  If you can get the conversion rate up to 3%, the value of each visitor is $3.00.  At this rate you can easily spend $1.50 to get visitors to your site and make a nice profit.

Expanding How Visitors Interact With Your Site

If you are doing it right, you will have visitors filling out contact forms, asking for free quotes, signing up for specials, and downloading coupons.   And let’s not forget about the visitors that buy things from you online. 

There will be many ways visitors interact, and many paths to help them convert from visitors to paying customers.   You can use this same formula for each customer path. 

Two Ways To Help Your Website Convert Higher For Your Business 

So how do you make your website to convert higher?

  1. Increase the amount of traffic to your site. 

If you increase the number of visitors to your site, you will increase the amount of sales if all else stays the same.  So if your monthly traffic increase from 1000 visitors to 2000 visitors, you’ll go from making $500 a month to $1000 a month. 

We will share some tips on increasing website traffic in another post. 

  • Increase your conversion rate. 

If you increase the conversion rate to 2% from 0.5%.  You’ll get 20 Calls a month instead of 5.  We already determined that each new caller was worth $100.  You’ll go from $500 to $2000 a month from phone calls.  And each new visitor is worth $2. 

We will share more about increasing conversion rates in future posts.  For now, know you

Spreadsheet showing results of increasing traffic and increasing conversion rate.

This is a quick lesson on how to determine what each visitor to your website is worth and how to determine the value of your goals so you can set up Google Analytics, so you have accurate data each month which is the foundation for increasing the effectiveness of your website.  

This is step number one.  Do this before anything!  Good Luck!

Now It’s Your Turn!

  1. Check your analytics on Google Analytics.
  2. Visit our Conversion Calculator to plug in the numbers from your website.
  3. Watch Randy explain this article in this YouTube Video.

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Categories
Fun

Possibilities For A Deck Of 52 Randomized Cards

Is This Possible?

I was reading something about the possibilities in a deck of cards once shuffled. The person claimed that once properly randomized, it’s most likely that they have never been in that position before in the history of the earth.

Since I love numbers, I thought I would check it out, doing the math myself.

We are trying to reach the number of seconds to match the mathematical possibilities for a shuffled deck of cards.
Here is how it was stated to reach the number of seconds to match the possibilities.

Walk around the earth taking one step every billion years.

I figure a normal step is about one yard. So, it would take about 43,825,760 steps to get around the earth, and it would take 43,825,760,000,000,000 years to get it done.

Once you make it around the earth, take one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean.

Then start all over again, walk around the earth, 1 step each billion years, then take another drop water out of the Pacific Ocean.  Do this over and over until you have emptied the ocean.
The Pacific Ocean has about 14,152,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 drops of water, so it would take 620,222,155,420,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to get the ocean emptied

Once you have the ocean emptied lay down a single piece of paper, flat on the earth.

Then fill the ocean back up and start all over again. Take one step each billion years until you circle the earth then take a drop out of the ocean each time you circle the earth until it’s empty again. Once you have emptied the ocean again then stack another sheet of paper flat on top of the last sheet.

Continue this process, stacking one piece of paper each time you have emptied the ocean until the paper reaches the Sun!  Are you kidding?

I figured the number of sheets of paper to get to the Sun was about 1,472,500,000,000,000. This was figured using 250 sheets per inch.
So, we take this number times the years to get the ocean emptied.

Now guess what?

We haven’t even come close to matching the number of possibilities in a shuffled deck of cards.

So, to pass the remaining time, deal yourself a 5-card poker hand once every billion years.

Each time you get a Royal Flush, buy a lottery ticket.

The odds of getting a Royal Flush in five cards is 649,739 to one.  Since you are dealing once every one billion years, it would take 649,739,000,000,000 years to get one.  Once you get a Royal Flush, buy a lottery ticket. Keep doing this until you win the lottery.

Once you win the lottery, head to the Grand Canyon and throw in one grain of sand.

Then do it again, deal yourself a 5-card poker hand once every billion years until you get another Royal Flush.  Then buy another lottery ticket and continue until you hit the Grand Prize.  Then one more grain of sand in the Grand Canyon.

Now, once you get the Grand Canyon full of sand, head over to Mt. Everest
and take away one ounce of earth from it.

You guessed it, start all over again, deal yourself a hand once every billion years until you get a Royal Flush, buy a lottery ticket for each Royal Flush until you hit the main jackpot, then throw a grain of sand into the Grand Canyon for each jackpot until full, once full get another ounce from Mt Everest.  Repeat over and over until you have leveled Mt Everest.

So, after walking around the earth at one step each billion years, taking out one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean until emptied, then laying a single piece of paper flat on the ground each time you empty the ocean, until the paper reaches the Sun.

Then dealing yourself, one 5-card poker hand each billion years until you get a Royal Flush.  For every royal flush you buy a lottery ticket until you hit the lottery.  Once you hit the lottery, throw one grain of sand into the Grand Canyon, repeat until full.  Once full take one ounce from Mt. Everest – repeat until Everest is gone.  And guess what?  According to the article you are still short.  You would need to repeat this whole process another 255 times to match the number of seconds in the possibilities of a randomized deck of 52 cards.

According to the article we would still be short on time, but according to my math, we have finally made it. We are now at 4,568,027,063,769,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Since there are about 31,540,000 seconds in a year, we should have reached the number of possibilities in a randomized deck of cards.

That number is: 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

The blog post that I was looking at, can be found here.

Odds of winning the lottery are 13,986,816 to one.
Using these numbers, it would take 9,087,779,841,024 years to win one lottery
I figured it would take 88,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of to fill up the Grand Canyon.
It would take 799,724,626,010,112,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to fill up the Grand Canyon
Per sources, Mt Everest weighs 5,712,000,000,000,000 in ounces.

A side note:  I got to thinking last night of all the different casinos around the world and how often they shuffle the cards.  Then of all the people that play cards all around the world.  Surely with everyone in the world shuffling cards constantly there would be several duplicate shuffles.  So I decided to do the math.

Cards have been around for about 500 years and there are about 7,530,000,000 people on earth.

Let’s assume that there have been that many people for the last 500 years and every person in the world shuffled a deck of cards every second.  There are 86,400 seconds in one day and 31,536,000 seconds in one year.  If you take that times the number of years since cards have been around, you would get 15,768,000,000 seconds for a period of 500 years.

Now take that times 7,530,000,000 and you get 118,733,040,000,000,000,000.  That’s how many shuffles you would have if everyone on earth has shuffled a deck of cards every second for the last 500 years.

The odds of anyone shuffling an exact duplicate deck are 1 in 679,323,760,016,115,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

So it’s almost a certainty that no one has ever shuffled a deck of cards randomly and came up with the same order of cards that someone else has ever done on earth for all time!

To take it a little further, let’s say that everyone on earth has been shuffling for every second since the beginning of the universe 13.8 Billion years ago.  In that case the probability of having a duplicate shuffle would only be one in 24,613,179,710,728,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Let’s go a little deeper.  Let’s say that there are 10 Billion galaxies in the universe.  Each galaxy has about 100 billion stars.  Let’s say that each star has 10 planets and that each planet has 7,530,000,000 people.  Now let’s say that all of these people have been shuffling cards since the beginning of the universe 13.8 Billion years ago.  You would have 75,300,000,000,000,000,000,000,00,000,000 people shuffling cards 435,196,800,000,000,000 times.  That would equal a total of 32,770,319,040,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 shuffles.  The odds of any two being the same would be one in 2,461,317,971,072,880,000.  That’s over 2.4 Quintillion.

Still No One Has Shuffled A Duplicate Deck!!!

So just remember, every time you shuffle a deck of cards, they have never been in that exact position before.

You Are Making History!!

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Uncategorized

The Best in Mobile Marketing APPS

Mobile apps seem to always get into our marketing conversations these days. A recent report by the analytics firm, App Annie shows the total IOS and Google Play app downloads topped more than 260 billion in the year 2014. So what’s in these apps for us? The marketer’s role has evolved dramatically over the years and is still changing. You need to be constantly forming new strategies and campaigns that will attract your audience. The problem is that you have too much competition.

 

It is important that you make sure it’s your voice being heard, every time, no matter where you are. This is where mobile apps can give you a much-needed advantage and make your life much easier.

 

Whether you’re an Apple, Windows, or an Android fan, apps can assist you in every step of your marketing activity. With a few touches, you can have all the information you need — what’s trending, how people are responding to your messages, what are the latest best practices. The right apps are truly the marketer’s best friend.

 

But which apps to choose? Here’s a list of the top three apps for each of the four key marketing areas.

 

Content distribution

Making sure your content appears at the right place, at the right time can be a tedious process. These apps will simplify this part of your job.

1. Buffer

An app that helps you share content to social media channels by letting you schedule posts to be published at ideal times. You can even let Buffer decide what time is best.

2. PixxFly

This outbound marketing app automates the distribution and syndication of all your content to various channels across the web with one simple click. PixxFly also provides analytics for each post.

3. Pagemodo

Used primarily to set up Facebook business or organization pages, Pagemodo helps you create engaging visual elements and customized features that encourage fan interaction without professional help. It allows you to schedule posts and finds the most relevant content for your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

 

Social-media management

Managing social media can be a tall order. Most marketers either spend too much time on social or fail to give it the attention it deserves. To strike the right balance, you need the right tools.

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social media accounts, analyze traffic, track brand mentions, schedule posts, messages and tweets–  all from one interface.

5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social allows you to schedule, publish and analyze posts across all your social platforms from a single window.

6. Tint

Though not strictly a social media management tool, Tint is an exciting app that can create social hubs to engage audiences. You can pull content from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest onto your dashboard then embed them as custom feeds into websites like WordPress, Wix, or Tumblr, or on mobile apps, social pages, digital displays and video walls.

 

Social listening

When it comes to marketing in today’s social-media environment, it’s important to listen to what people are saying. This helps you measure your reach and keeps you informed on what’s trending. Social listening also helps you know when you need to act promptly. For example, if not acted upon immediately, a negative comment by an unsatisfied customer can spread like wildfire and damage your brand’s reputation. Here are the three top social listening apps to keep you well informed.

7. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo helps you take a deeper look at what’s popular or trending on social media and who’s sharing.

8. Mention

Mention helps you easily keep track in real time of what’s being said about your brand so you can react quickly. It will send you alerts showing your mentions each day.

9. Cyfe

Social listening can get overwhelming with so many different areas to track. Cyfe makes it easier by allowing you to customize your dashboard to monitor your data all from one place.

 

Employee advocacy

One of the most powerful marketing strategies is creating brand advocates inside your own company. These apps are designed to help employees share content across their own social-media profiles. We are seeing new players in this space such as social-media giant LinkedIn. There are also up and comers like TrapIt. However, based on experience and time in the market, here are three that you should be using right now.

10. Dynamic Signal

Dynamic Signal is a tool that lets you distribute either your own content or some you’ve curated from the web to employees who can then re-share it on their personal social-media profiles.

11. SoAmpli

SoAmpli encourages employees and co-workers to be brand advocates though social sharing.

12. EveryoneSocial

With its clean and simple interface, EverySocial is designed to amplify your brand presence by building a team of employee advocates to share your content on their social media accounts.

 

The following are  apps introduced in 2016 solve a variety of challenges, from data management, to message testing, to marketing automation.

 

Marketing Attribution by Bizible

B2B marketing attribution helps you make the best marketing decisions, and this app integrates with your online marketing channels from AdWords to Salesforce. Now you can optimize your campaigns and revenue with a quick app install.

 

Calendar for Campaigns by Bracket Labs

This interactive marketing calendar has inline editing, enhanced color-coding, filterable, drag-and-drop functionality to make working with campaigns easy and intuitive.

 

Lead Enrichment by Clearbit

Ensure fresh, accurate information to quickly target the leads that will convert into the highest value deals. This app searches dozens of sources in real-time to push fresh data into Salesforce automatically. Then you can prioritize top leads and guide sales to more wins.

 

Next-Generation Data Management by Krux

Zero in and connect with your customers more efficiently, no matter the channel or device. Interconnect your own data, enabling you to activate and control your marketing activities across any consumer touch point.

 

Real Time Email Response by Liveclicker

Bring email relevance to a higher order by enabling marketers to respond to each recipient’s needs and interests, in real time. Bring messages to life, amp recipient engagement, and increase clicks and conversions with a real-time email system.

 

Mobile Marketing by Localytics

25% of apps used used once are then uninstalled (source). Engagement is the key to bringing that percentage down. This app brings together user insights, smart targeting, and marketing automation to power personalized mobile engagement, such as push engagement, increased app usage, acquisition targeting, and more.

 

Message Testing by Persado

Use this app to experiment with message variations in order to determine the most impactful message. This will help drive the highest rates of engagement for your campaign. You can also randomly split your audience to test message variation performance.

 

Tactile Marketing Automation by PFL

This app works within your campaigns, and automates direct mail in conjunction with your digital efforts. Create personalized and triggered multi-channel campaigns that increase operational efficiency and drive results.

 

PopUp Alerts by Riptide

Make sure your team members are alerted to important information with popup alerts. This app gives you the ability to easily display that crucial popup alert message in Salesforce.

 

Data Quality Dashboards by Salesforce Labs

Leverage custom formula fields on many of the standard objects to record data quality and record completeness, the formulas are then depicted through dashboards to identify deficiencies in record data.

 

Mobile Engagement by Swrve

Design, deliver and measure mobile campaigns of all types, including push notification campaigns, in-app messages and conversation. Collectively, these campaign types help build brand-consumer relationships on mobile, and drive engagement, retention and revenue.

 

Apps can help marketers be more efficient, higher-performing, and goal-achieving.  Whatever may be lacking in your marketing strategy, you will certainly find an app to help fill that gap.

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Spring Cleaning Your Online Marketing

We are now in the month of April which means spring flowers, spring clothes and spring cleaning.  Not only does spring cleaning apply to your closets, but it also applies toward your business.  You will always want to clean up, clean out and refresh.  How often do you look at your website, google yourself and really look at your marketing strategy?  Has your once well-organized marketing strategy, come to resemble the jumble of stuff in your closet (not to mention the garage and the attic)? If you are like most people, each time you come across a new marketing strategy you try to adopt it and add it to your existing approach.

Strategies and tactics tend to accumulate and linger even when they may not be working as well as you’d like. Like the ill-fitting clothes that accumulate in your closet or the broken tools still in the garage, they are hard to get rid of, whether because of habit, emotional attachment or just plain not getting around to cleaning them out.

To improve your marketing, you’ll need to clean out some old ways of working. While I don’t want to get anywhere near your closet, and in fact I could use some help with mine, I can show you how to clean up your marketing so you’re ready to take advantage of the New Year to grow your business.

You may not want to review your marketing five times a week, but it is a good idea to do it at least once a year. So take out your pencil or fire up your computer and access your marketing:

Your Marketing Strategy

  1. Is your plan working to generate leads and increase sales?
  2. Do you have a well-defined marketing strategy that helps you achieve the three phases of marketing; Getting Attention, Positioning, and Selling?
  3. Do you need to write or rewrite your business plan?
  4. Do you need additional information or coaching to complete your small business marketing plans?
  5. What are you going to do to improve your marketing?

Getting Attention

  1. Does your marketing message prompt prospects to contact you?
  2. Do your ads, letters, and web site motivate prospects to contact you?
  3. What are your conversion rates?
  4. What steps can you take to improve them?

Once you have considered each of these questions, consider revisiting your website.  Are there older photos, reviews, or coupons lingering on your site?  Freshen it up with new content.  The hardest part about cleaning out your closet, attic garage or your marketing is getting started.  It may be time to straighten up or throw out some of your old marketing strategies and tactics and replace them with new and improved ones.  New leads will spring up and your sales will blossom.

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Top Marketers

Frank Kern

Frank Kern is a well-known internet marketer.  Frank has several items that can be bought online to teach you how to market over the internet and hold webinars.

This is from his website:

“Frank Kern is known as the world’s highest paid direct response Internet Marketing copywriter and consultant.

He’s famous for creating some of the highest grossing Internet Marketing sales campaigns in the history of the Information Marketing industry.

He has customers and clients on every continent and regularly acts as marketing advisor to celebrities, best-selling authors, and celebrity entrepreneurs.”  Found here.

I have been following Frank for a few months and have read a lot of his material.  He really likes Infusionsoft and uses it to create a non-stop automated marketing process.

Frank has done several product launches.  His most successful launch was the StomperNet launch which generated $18.3 million in orders in less than 24 hours.

Frank has made millions teaching other people how to market on the internet.  To learn some of his techniques, I signed up for some of the free courses and videos.  He does give you a lot of good information, but basically they are just to sell some of his internet marketing courses.

I did read one complaint on a scammer site.  They said Frank was supposed to write several emails for their business and set up an email marketing campaign that would help energize their company.  His cost was 3 payments of around $1,900.  They were not satisfied with the work and Frank did refund their money.

I tried to find the offer, and after looking around some I did.  But the cost was now 3 payments of over $5,800.  It seems like a lot, but maybe it’s worth it.  The video is HERE.  At the end when he mentioned the cost, it looked like it was redone.  So the price might vary from day to day.

Frank started out in Macon, Georgia as a door-to-door salesman for credit card processing systems.  This is while he was living in a single trailer.  He borrowed some Tony Robbins tapes from his step-father and changed his mindset that would propel him into a top internet marketing guru.

He now lives in La Jolla California and will be 43 on August 30th.  When he started his internet marketing profession, his look was that of a California surfer.  Now he has cut his hair and looks like more of a businessperson.

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Ryan Deiss – Digital Marketer

You might not have heard about Ryan Deiss, but we ran across him and his goal of helping 10,000 businesses double their revenue, which he wants to achieve in 5 years.  I am not sure how far along he is, but his information can be very valuable to almost any business.

Ryan has a company called Digital Marketer, which can be found at www.digitalmarketer.com.  Ryan offers several on-line courses in just about every aspect of marketing on the web.

Digital Marketer has over 130,000 Facebook fans and 664,680 subscribers as of March 21, 2016.  He has a following for a reason.  His information is pretty darn good!

Ryan does a lot of testing to see what works and what doesn’t.  This information can save businesses a lot of time and money by using the test results.

Check out some of what you can use.

Free Marketing

Here are a couple of places to start using his free information for your business.

Start here: Customer Value Optimization.  This is a free 7 step process for determining exactly what you need to do in order to market your business.  There is a PDF flow chart that is included, which can be downloaded here:  Click Here.

The flow chart can be used to make sure you are following the examples that Ryan Deiss suggests.

According to most sources, email remains the most cost effective way to advertise your business.  But most businesses use this very little or not at all.

I have noticed that Ryan uses Infusionsoft for email marketing, as do a lot of the other top Digital Marketers.  This program is very sophisticated and can be hard to get started with.  But once it gets going, it’s like a 10 ton flywheel, it’s very hard to stop and will keep generating revenue for a very long time.

Ryan also has a free six week course that is sent via email.  You have to give your email of course, and you will be subjected to a lot of marketing from Digital Marketer, but this is a good opportunity to see “How the Pros” do it.

Check out Ryan and Digital Marketer, I think you can learn a lot of valuable information there.

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The Importance of Data

The Importance of Data: Before,
During and After an Ad Campaign

With so many advertising choices available to small-business owners, it’s important to test and track a variety of options to see which work best for you. Using a mix of print, radio, TV, website, billboard, direct mail and other media options can be too expensive for local companies, and relying on one or two methods for more than a year can lead to diminishing returns. Tracking your response through your staff, coupons and sales data will help you make more effective advertising choices.

Follow these five easy steps:

Step 1

Compare your sales before, during and after the campaign begins if your advertising campaign has a specific start date. Take into consideration that your sales won’t spike the day the campaign begins or drop the day it ends when you analyze sales reports. Test an ad campaign in a particular location to see if your sales rise in that area during the campaign, letting you know if it will likely work if you roll it out regionally or nationally.

Step 2

Use unique contact methods. Track the response to one ad or an entire campaign using a special toll-free number, website address or coupon code you use only with that ad or campaign. This is one of the easiest methods for tracking results directly to an advertisement, promotion, direct mailing or other marketing effort.

Step 3

Make personal queries of customers to determine if a particular advertising method is working. Ask your customers how they heard of you and make it a requirement that your sales staff gather this information from customers. Have them submit a weekly report to the marketing manager. Include this question on any website forms you have that customers and potential customers submit. Compare the traffic to your website and in your store before, during and after the ad campaign to determine if you see a rise in customer activity during the campaign. These visits, especially to your website, might not result in immediate purchases but can increase brand awareness and lead to future sales.

Step 4

Use coupons, discounts and rebates to track how a specific promotion performed. Include a coupon in a print publication, ask broadcast viewer or listeners to mention a particular promotion for a percentage discount or offer a rebate on a purchase when the consumer redeems a form. Don’t assume these methods represent your total response to the campaign. Many consumers might respond to your advertising but forget to use the coupon, think the amount of the coupon is not worth the trouble to clip and save it or not remember where they saw your ad.

Step 5

Use website traffic statistic tools, which come free or at a low cost with many websites or hosting packages. Track how much traffic you generate during specific times, which sites referred users, which pages were most viewed, how many unique visitors you had and how many pages they viewed while at your site. Free social media programs such as Facebook business pages also provide helpful visitor and traffic stats.

Tip

  • Don’t assume that just because your sales rose in response to an advertising campaign it means the campaign was profitable. Calculate the net profits you made from the campaign if you’re able to track the sales you generated from an advertising effort. Subtract that from the cost it took to run the campaign, which includes media buys, ad creation, discounts and staff time. Determine if increase in sales justified the expenditure, and what else you might have done with your money and staff time instead of using that advertising method.

References

 

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5 New Year’s Resolutions for Marketers in 2016

 

It is always refreshing to start every new year with an optimistic outlook for the future.  Of course, many begin each new year with new resolutions.  Rather than focusing on the failures of the past year, it’s always better to set new goals for the new year.  Those new goals may involve regular exercise and a healthier diet.  For marketers, it is important to establish a set of professional resolutions.  Here are five New Year’s Resolutions for Marketers that will set your professional path toward a very successful 2016.

  1. Coordinate and collaborate with your sales staff on a regular basis.

This should include scheduling regular meetings with all aspects of your sales department.

  • Create a survey asking sales reps to measure the effectiveness of the content of their sales pitch.
  • Plan out a comprehensive content audit to figure out what you have, how it’s used and where it can be found.
  • Create and update the content that is driving the best results and eliminate what is not needed.

2. Create More Data-Driven Content

  • Look at your internal Act-On dashboard to see the status of current campaigns.
  • Keep a list of the top-performing content on your white board and update it weekly.
  • Make a habit to check out industry trends to find out what is working best for today’s marketers.

3. Focus on the Entire Customer Lifecycle

  • Gain more insight into your buyers’ personas as well as what a genuine, qualified lead looks like.
  • Get a better understanding of the kinds of content that moves prospects through the middle and bottom of the funnel.
  • Track the conversion rate at each stage of the funnel.
  • Throughout this process, watch trends and determine how to improve the overall performance. You will also be aware of how individual actions contribute to results.

4. Become More Social

Creating content on social pages only gets you so far.  To succeed, you need to promote it, and social media is a great way to do just that.

In addition to the usual link sharing, try one new way to promote your blog posts every week.

Spend more time reading, sharing, liking and tweeting other posts to built community.

Start commenting on more blog posts.

5.  Make Time for Self-Improvement

It is obvious that all of these resolutions will demand more time, energy and resources for you and your staff.  Take the opportunity to educate yourself on the latest and most effective marketing trends.  It takes time and effort, but there is a big payoff.  Here’s to a bright new year of marketing success for all.

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