As a teenager, I thought knowing how to kick someone in the head was a skill worth pursuing.
At 14, I got my black belt. I loved it.
But one training day stuck out like a sore thumb to me. It still does.
One of my instructors said, “In a fight, you’ll only use the stuff you learnt in your first few belts.”
I had the misfortune to discover he was right later in life. But here’s the thing: it’s no different with your marketing.
It’s the basics that will punch out your competition – not the latest fad.
That’s why all my stuff is either basic, simple or just plain obvious.
But one by one, add them to your sales process and I promise you’ll see better results.
So let’s start with two favourites of mine.
Here’s the picture. You’ve got your auto-responder plumbed in. You’re giving away a free guide on your site for the prospects that sign up.
But you want more sign ups. What’s the simplest way to do this?
Change the page layout? Tinker with the copy?
Both of these will help if you track the results in a split test. But the easiest thing to do is focus on the offer. Most people ignore experimenting with it because it took them an age to write ‘the free PDF’ and they loath not using it.
If offering one PDF isn’t getting your visitors fighting to sign up, try three.
If that doesn’t work, try adding a helpful video.
Really be creative – what can you give away that appeals to your prospects?
And if none of your ideas bring any joy, try an incentive (or a bare faced bribe as Drayton calls them).
Let me give you an example.
One client pays around £80 per quote on his site through Google adwords.
It sounds expensive but he sells a big ticket item.
He’s tried every possible wording with his headlines and copy – and every possible layout. But his offer has never changed despite me doing my best to cajole him in to trying another.
So let’s play Devil’s advocate.
Imagine he buried in his copy: “£10 Amazon voucher included with every quote we respond to.”
That would take his costs up to £90 per lead, right?
Nope. He’d get a shed load more quotes from prospects who would have disappeared like a shadow in the night beforehand.
Yes, there would be the odd freeloader. But who care about them if you slash your aquistion costs?
Best of all, trying something like this for a week or two is easy – then just look through your results, which brings me to my second blinding glimpse of the obvious:
Get a grip on some basic metrics
It’s easy to know how many people have visited your site in a week.
And with an auto-responder you can see at a glance how many ‘sign ups’ you’ve had in a week.
So with some school boy maths, you can tell statistically, how many visitors you need to get a sign up. This information is gold dust.
Take the example above – say statistically he needed 33 visitors to get a quote. But say he tried his bold offer (the Amazon vouchers) and it dropped to one quote every 24 visitors.
It’s not rocket science to see whether you are on to a winner or not.
So there you go:
Change your offer before you change your page
Work out your hit rate: How many visitors do you need for a sign up?
One small word of caution. You’ll probably get the information about how many visitors your site gets from Google analytics.
Unless you’re a geek, Google Analytics will make your eyes glaze over – and you’ll start to dribble too.
Don’t get blinded by it.
The number of visitors, divided by the number of sign ups is the only metric you need to care about.
With it, you’ll know whether results are going up or down.
Make it the first thing you look at every Monday morning.
Best
Al
PS Course, the next step is to find out how many sign ups you need to make a sale / bag a meeting…