Cisco Adler, in his new eBook "The Landing Page Bible", offers an answer to the "Internet age"-old question of who controls a company's website: IT or Marketing. Rather than involve technical resources and attempt to revamp a section of the corporate website (or the entire thing!), Cisco suggests companies focus online marketing initiatives on landing pages, which can be more agile than a company's main website.
The Landing Page Bible
Adler's argument is a good one. Landing pages, whether they are the result of a click from a PPC campaign, an email blast, printed advertisements, or other sources, need to be written and rewritten, designed and redesigned, all based on significant analytics and testing of their conversion and ROI. A good landing page can stand on its own and be tweaked ad infinitum to achieve its desired goal. Even if it passes traffic directly to the main website, the initial page a potential customer sees needs to do a good enough job of selling the product or service to convince the customer not to immediately go elsewhere, or "bounce".
Convinced yet? If so, it's time to take Cisco's advice on building the best landing page possible. Cisco is an expert in landing page design, providing optimization services to clients through his firm Adler Interactive. Prior to founding his company, he was vice president of marketing and communications for Belmont Abbey College. During his tenure he completely rebuilt Belmont Abbey's online initiatives. He has developed landing page strategies for companies throughout numerous industries and is a passionate believer in the value of high performance landing pages.
The number one thing to remember, according to the book, is to STAY FOCUSED. The landing page's headlines, imagery, and copy should all focus on the single most important benefit the user can receive by purchasing the product or service you're advertising. Beyond that, you should also address your writing to a single person. Don't focus on a group of users; instead, have a one-way conversation with the exact person reading your page, to convince them to make a purchase. From there, make sure your page addresses common objections to purchase, backs up its claims with statistics and facts, and avoids hype.
Once you have the landing page designed and written, read back through and then get it out there! According to Cisco, "If good is the enemy of great, then perfection is the enemy of online marketing." You can spend hours tweaking the copy, changing the image, and playing with position and color. But the longer it takes to publish the page, the more sales you are losing. The maneuverability of a single landing page allows it to be tweaked as needed after you publish it.
What other nuggets can you glean from the book?
- How to organize your bullet points
- How to increase the number of visitors that submit your landing pages' forms
- What to put under your form's button
- How to choose an image that conveys your message, instead of distracting from it
The best part is that the book also gives more cutting-edge ways to improve your landing pages. Cisco effectively discusses the use of video, prospect segmentation, content creation, and testing strategies. A bonus section at the end of the book gives you 5 Ways to Improve ROI.
Overall, "The Landing Page Bible" is an easy read, with a topic that is both well-covered and clearly explained. Cisco leaves you with the enthusiasm that you CAN actually increase your conversion rate, and a roadmap for finding the sweet spot on your landing page design. For those who don't wish to handle landing page optimization in-house, Cisco's firm Adler Interactive offers landing page optimization services to help you increase lead generation and conversion rates.
FREE DOWNLOAD - Read the first 5 chapters for free by downloading the sample from http://a.adlerinteractive.com/LPBReviewNetblazon
If you've been running an e-commerce site for awhile and been lucky enough to watch it grow, one of the things you may have noticed is that your workload doesn't stay fixed as sales increase. In fact, there are times when doubling sales may triple (or more!) your workload. This is the time when you should start looking at ways to increase your productivity, or the productivity of your website itself.
To that end, here is a list of some of my favorite add-on software that goes beyond the shopping cart. As you review features and costs, consider how much money your time is worth. Can you better spend that time on tasks that can't be as easily improved by software - for example, sales or marketing? If so, these tools may be great investments.
- Order Management Software - If your sales have grown beyond a few orders a day, or if you have to manage backorders or drop-shipped orders, you may benefit from order management sofware. I covered this briefly back in February in the post titled "Using Order Management Software". Once integrated, this can be one of the easiest ways to stay organized. It also helps with data mining (for example, to see how much you make or lose on shipping costs).
My favorite? Shipworks by Interapptive is simple and powerful.
Shipworks Main Screen
- Site Search - No matter how many card sorts and usability studies you perform ("yeah, right?" you might think!), the categorization on your e-commerce site will never been good enough that some customers don't find the need to use your search form to find products. Most shopping cart software packages offer basic search capabilities. But when you need to do more, look outside - to hosted search solutions. They tend to offer more features and do a better job converting sales.
Read more about Site Search packages in "Hosted Search Solutions for Ecommerce Sites".
Recommended: SearchSpring for being incredibly feature-rich while remaining reasonably priced. They also offer a 30-day trial.
SearchSpring on PennStateInd.com
- CRM Software - Getting a new customer is much harder than keeping an existing one. So don't run the risk of ruining your reputation - even among an audience of one - by failing to follow-up on customer service requests. Handling customer service by email can be dangerous. If multiple people handle service requests, they may not know who's covering which problems, or what has been done in the past by a different CSR. Add on a CRM system to handle these issues.
I offer two recommendations in this category: InverseFlow, a helpdesk ticket system, which I love for its simplicity; and SugarCRM for all of the features it offers.
InverseFlow
- Email Marketing - Often, email blasts can have a great return on investment, as you have a targeted list of people who are either previous customers, or who have not bought yet but have already shown interest in your site. But it's good practice to outsource this task, not to handle the email distribution in-house. Email marketing companies specialize in using best practices related to email handling, staying on top of important issues such as CAN-SPAM compliance. You also don't want to run the risk of having your own email servers blacklisted if you do something incorrectly when sending out your newsletters.There are a number of hosted solutions for email distribution, at a number of price points.
The two I've known about the longest are Vertical Response and Constant Contact. However, the ones I've used more recently are actually among my favorites in this section. For lower budgets, I like iContact. It's easy to use, fairly easy to integrate, and reliable. For those who have a larger budget, I recommend Bronto.com for their additional features, particular their reporting and analytics functionality.
Bronto Email Marketing
- Accounting - Most of us probably started out handling our "books" with nothing more than our checkbook register and Microsoft Excel. But once is enough when you have to prepare your income tax statements based on nothing more than these tools and a box of receipts and statements! This is when it becomes a really good idea to invest in an accounting package (and a file cabinet). For most small businesses, this means Quickbooks. Quickbooks tends to be one of the easier accounting packages to get used to, and because it's so widely used, there are often "connector" software tools that can get data from your shopping cart into Quickbooks. In the software, you can reconcile your accounts, send invoices , issue credit memos, and so on. And come tax time, it makes life so much easier. Businesses that go beyond the "hobby" status - especially if you're looking for investors or want to sell the business down the road - should consider Quickbooks Enterprise due to its audit trail and additional security features.
Day two of the 2009 Shop.org Strategy and Innovation Forum got started with brief talks by Fiona Swerdlow, Head of Research at Shop.org, and an overview of the eCommerce Forecast 2009-2013 by Brian Walker of Forrester Research. After these discussions, the keynote for the second and final day began - and it turned out to be one of the most inspirational business and marketing talks I've ever attended.
Bob Thacker, OfficeMax.com
Bob Thacker is the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Advertising for OfficeMax.com, and he overflows with creativity and enthusiasm that is surprising and fresh. His talk centered around phrases such as his "cornfed philosophy" and "be mature but never act your age", and he followed up each saying with substance, stories, and in many cases, video. Prior to OfficeMax, Bob spearheaded several wildly successful partnerships and campaigns with Target, such as their Michael Graves' partnership and their "It's a Wonderful Life" Christmas theme that was Jimmy Stewart's last appearance (a voice-over) before his death.
"If you don't have big bucks, you better have big ideas." When OfficeMax began to market their printer ink refill station, they waffled over a conventional approach and one that was riskier - bus stop images of women's tattooed backs. The tattoo approach was chosen and it was a huge success, leading the way for the world's largest rubber band ball and their teenage reality show "Schooled" on ABC Family.
"Look before you leap, but then LEAP!" was the phrase Bob used to introduce a segment about their ElfYourself website. The website reached the high-water popularity mark of the 55th most popular website in the world, due primarily to viral marketing and the phenomenal reactions people had to faces of themselves and their loved ones pasted onto dancing elves. But the most inspiration part of the talk was based on the idea that "brands are like people; they have to have heart". OfficeMax launched a campaign to provide school supplies to teachers, in a drive to "erase teacher-funded classrooms." When an idea has the ability to both promote a brand and alleviate a problem, you know you have found something great.
The State of the Economy: The VC Perspective
To be honest, I expected to be texting and twittering throughout this talk, since I'm not in the place to personally care about venture capital...however, the discussions were fascinating. The session was moderated by Brett Hurt, CEO and Founder of Bazaarvoice, and the panel was made up of Tom Ball of Austin Ventures, Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed, Satya Patel of Battery Ventures, Amanda Reed from Palomar Ventures, and Cyriac Roeding of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Brett admitted to tossing out a softie question to the entire panel but got great results to the question "How bad is the economy going to get?" Fortunately Tom believes that the economic downturn will have less of an impact on the online sector than it will for traditional retail. Satya, however, thinks it's time to hunker down, as it will take time to loosen the credit market, and we probably won't see an upswing until 2010. Cyriac echoed Bob Thacker's idea that fear kills creativity, and reminded us that this is a time to drive change, and that although retailers may need to streamline business, it's still a time to think big.
When asked whether 2009 will be the year of mobile retailing, Amanda explained that this was true in the capital venture world, where investors are extremely interested in mobile technology ideas. But she believes that we're at least a year out before mobile retailing becomes an action item for retailers. During the Q&A session, a conference attendee asked what Amazon's optimistic Q4 numbers indicated for the rest of us, and Jeremy responded with an inspiring idea that all of Amazon's wonderful technology is currently available to those of us without R&D departments and was likely present in the Expo Hall of the conference!
Case Studies
After another excellent lunch, three panels of retailer case studies were on the schedule. The first, "Innovation in a Downturned Economy: Pure-play Retailer Case Studies", gave attendees several core ideas to think about. The panel was moderated by John Squire of Coremetrics and included presentations by Marc Katz of CustomInk.com and Tomima Edmark, President of the Andra Group, with the complementary websites HerRoom.com and HisRoom.com.
Marc began with a joke that his company not only has no research and development team, but that he doesn't even own a mock turtleneck or iPhone! But his website showcased brilliance in simplicity. CustomInk.com sells custom-printed t-shirts, and their design application is beautifully simple. They are also brave enough to show "uncensored reviews" of their company and service right on their homepage. They also do a fabulous job of telling their company story (straight down to a photo of the green couch that has been with them since day one) and engaging customers in a community with idea such as a photo contest.
Tomima described how women hate to shop for lingerie, citing factors such as unhelpful salespeople, and then gave her sites' goals of developing a shopping experience that is better than the one in a store. Her site features lots of photos, including extra shots of bras in larger sizes, overlays of different shirt styles to see whether a bra is compatible, and even video bounce tests for sports bras! She is very focused on protecting the company's intellectual property, but the most astounding fact that stuck with me was that the sites are entirely self-funded and were profitable after only eighteen months.
"Driving the Living, Breathing Store: Retailer Case Studies of Innovations in Delivery Dynamic Content" was up next, moderated by Kelly O'Neill of ATG Commerce with panelists Ronit Weinberg from Diane von Furstenberg and Kate Forbes of QVC. Ronit described how the goal of the DVF website was to develop content that engaged customers and developed an online community. They added a news feed, two blogs, and a 9000-fan FaceBook page. They also connected with fashion-oriented bloggers, developing relationships within the blogosphere, while generating content that helped secure brand equity, instead of focusing solely on selling as part of their site. Kate discussed QVC's marketing strategy relating to Fashion Week, one of the "POW Events" they do once a month. Because QVC was originally a TV-based medium, and still maintains that as a large part of their sales, they felt the need to maintain a consistent theme across multiple channels. QVC also utilized FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, and blogs to create a sense of urgency among its customers.
The last panel of the session, "Leveraging Your Most Valuable Asset: Creative Ways that Retailers can Make Consumer Information Actionable", featured Jennie Carlson from Levi Strauss & Co. and Sam Taylor of Oriental Trading Company, and was moderated by Nick Pahade of GSI Commerce. Jennie showed videos and information about the eye-tracking and other usability studies that Levi's did prior to their 2008 site redesign. After finding that users were very focused on images, they redesigned their leaf category pages to be image-intensive. They then took satisfaction surveys to prioritize other planned improvements and to establish a baseline prior to the redesign. Sam showed the attendees some terrific ways that negative customer reviews have positively affected their business, after reestablishing the use of customer reviews after his predecessor canned the idea. They take the reviews further, offering a top-rated products promotion on the homepage, and even featuring content from the reviews in their printed catalog. Oriental Trading Company took the time to read every 1- and 2-star reviews to improve their service and product line. Sam said that if a site "disappoints a customer, they will never come back and will tell ten people about their bad experience." He ended the conference with the following "Top 5 Recommendations" for all of the retailers of the Shop.org conference:
- Commit the necessary resources to do customer ratings and reviews right.
- Embrace the negative review.
- Leverage online data in other retail channels.
- Personalize your content by customer segment.
- Let your best customers generate your content for you.
Well said and done! Thanks to Shop.org for a wonderful conference.
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