Speed Dating and an Evening of Marriage Proposals

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Tim_Huntley

Let me set the scene: It’s 8pm on a Thursday evening and you make your way to a row of tables set up at the back of a local bar. After plunking down three $20 bills, you grab a name tag and take a seat. Over the next 90 minutes you will go on 30 “dates,” each lasting three minutes each.

For some of your “competitors,” the goal is simply to meet someone interesting and schedule a more meaningful second date – but for you, you have a plan and a purpose: to leave the bar with a new fiancé. I mean, a 3% conversion rate seems possible right, and with a cost-per-date of $2, you can definitely afford to cast your net wide.

Can you say “reeks of desperation?” Seriously do you think anyone would try and find a marriage partner this way? And if they did, do you think they would be happy with the result?

So tell me this – Why do so many businesses use EXACTLY the same method, the “I know we just met, but I’d like to get in your pants, err I mean I like to have your credit card number please?”

A Better Approach

As I was thinking about this article, I came across an excellent post from Lee Odden called Is a Rush to Revenue Hurting Your Marketing Innovation & Domination? I especially like the diagram that Lee put together (shown below) which outlines a solid approach to customer acquisition.

Does this mean that each of these steps is a necessary checkmark before moving along to the next? Absolutely not; however it does suggest that there is a process of earning trust before a business should think about a selling proposition.

John Jantsch (a frequent contributor to the Spring Metrics Blog) seems to be singing from a similar hymnal when he talks about “The Marketing Hourglass” in his new, free eBook called “How to Build a Remarkable Business by Focusing on the Total Customer Experience.” In the book, John outlines a process of Know, Like, Trust, Try, Buy, Repeat, and Refer.

If you are selling cheap widgets, the speed dating approach might be right for you. But if your business has a higher value proposition, be patient and appropriate with each individual prospect.

Increasing Social Engagement at the Time of Purchase

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Peter

Here at Spring Metrics, we’ve been helping our customers increase their social engagement and we’ve been seeing some noteworthy results. After gathering data for a few months now, we’re able to share some early and surprising figures.

While the public debate about the impact of social media on your online business continues (our data shows they are clearly positively correlated, and the only question should be how much a Like or Follow is worth to your business), many e-commerce merchants and retailers are quietly getting on with the business of adding social media to their toolkit.

Looking at the question from a different perspective, we have seen that catalyzing your following at the time of purchase by enticing buyers to become advocates has increased social engagement, as measured by the total number of Likes, by 23% in an average of six weeks. That’s a stunning result, and we humbly believe only partly due to our product and our awesome support team; the rest is due to simply leveraging the opportunity at the right time, when the visitor is at the point of purchase and feeling good about their decision.

Also captivating is that in early results we’re seeing that more than half of the visitors will Like or Follow, but then not purchase… yet. It’s too early to show stats on how many of those social advocacy actions turn in to purchases at a later date, but we can see that it’s not zero. And looking at the infographic we released today you can see that 54% feel more likely to purchase after Liking. So rather than simply losing the momentum of that visitor after the non-converting visit, you have preserved on average 54% of the time and money you spent attracting that visitor. And of course there’s the indirect effect, again too early to quote stats but it’s not zero either; customers are seeing a clear increase in sales from social media channels.

Social Media Campaigns: Valuing Tweets and Likes

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Peter

Social media campaigns are one of the hottest ways for companies to promote their products and services to potential customers. It is becoming the hallmark of many branding efforts. Everyone agrees that social media marketing is important.

But, what nobody is sure about is exactly how important it is, and what parts of a social media campaign deliver the most value. Data is beginning to emerge, but there has yet to be any consensus as to the real value of a tweet, a Facebook “like” or a Facebook “share.”

The problem is the methodologies being used to determine the value of a social media connection. Companies are looking at the value for their own business – but each business is different. For example, if your company is selling toys that cost $2.99 each, the value of a like or retweet that results in a purchase will be lower than if you are selling $75,000 sports cars.

There has yet to be any data that is valuable across various industries. And, it would seem that the ROI in a given social media campaign is still something that has yet to be quantified over the retail market as a whole.

For example – imagine a gas station that simply puts up a sign telling people to follow them on Twitter or Facebook. This costs them nearly nothing. If they sell two tanks of gas from that effort, they have made a profit. Now, imagine that a car company spends $10,000 on Facebook ads to direct people to like their Facebook page. Which company is going to get the better ROI? This has yet to be studied.

In addition, the methodologies used to generate data are focused on the primary marketing goal – making an immediate sale. But every retailer really has three goals from a social media campaign. The top priority is making a sale, the secondary priority is getting contact information, and the third priority is to at least get a like or a follower so that you can use future marketing efforts to accomplish one of the first two priorities. Until data has been analyzed showing how social media affects all three of these goals, then the data is not giving companies a complete picture.

At Spring Metrics, we are gathering our own data to measure the effectiveness of tweets, likes and Facebook shares over the next couple of months. Our goal will be to demonstrate exactly what kind of return on investment companies can expect from different social media actions – and how to measure the effectiveness of different campaigns.

We are doing this because we believe that social media is an incredibly valuable marketing tool. After all, since the beginning of time nearly all commerce has been social in one way or another. Long before the existence of social media or even the Internet, people have been much more likely to purchase products that were popular or liked by their friends.

Social media therefore simply streamlines the ever-present social aspect of commerce – meaning that its effects will not be a fad. It is here to stay, and must be understood.

When our results are completed, we will share them on this blog. In the meantime, we thought it would be helpful to talk about some of the data that is out there so that companies have a baseline to work with when thinking about social media campaigns.

The ticket sales company Eventbrite did their own internal study on the value they got from people sharing links to their events on both Facebook and Twitter. What they found was that each Facebook “share” resulted in $2.52 in ticket sales. That was a far better result than the 43 cents worth of ticket sales that were generated for each retweet on Twitter. However, that gap is closing, very interesting data here.

There are a few thoughts out there as to why this may be the case. People who share an event on Facebook are more likely to be actually going to the event which makes it more likely that their friends will want to but tickets to go with them. People on Twitter, on the other hand, are less personally involved with the people they “follow” and less likely to know the person in the real world. This means that a retweet is less likely to spur a ticket sale.

This study is, of course, very specific to the event industry. It is highly probable that companies in other industries would see different overall results.

A similar study of their own metrics was recently released by ChompOn – an online coupon company that competes with Groupon. Their study also showed that Facebook shares seem to have more value than retweets but at a much larger scale. There are infographics from the study, but a more complete look is here.

ChompOn said their data showed that a Facebook share had a value of $14 while a retweet only had a value of $5. Their metrics went further than Eventbrite. They determined that the value of a Facebook “like” is roughly $8 and a Twitter “follow” is roughly $2. I wonder if that gap is closing since the study as well?

Keep your eye on this space while we continue to examine this emerging science. We are dedicated to helping our customers get the most out of their social media efforts, and will have the data companies need to make the best decisions about where to concentrate their campaigns.

5 Ways to Make the Most of Real-time Data

Posted on April 24, 2012 by John Jantsch

Every businessperson knows that good data makes you smarter. Well, a truer statement might be that an accurate analysis of the right data can make a company smarter, but lack of any data can be fatal.

Today’s reliance on the web and social media requires real time tracking and analytics that are delivered in real time. This isn’t just a way to feed the obsession over traffic and other sometimes meaningless stats, this is a valuable way to view and react to business opportunities as swiftly as they arise.

Speed may indeed be the most important competitive business advantage.

With real time data tools you can:

React to mentions of you brand more fully – you’ll know the minute your business has been mentioned by a blogger or other online publication and the implication that mention may have in terms of traffic and potential reciprocal reactions. You may choose to go comment on every post that mentions your brand, but you may really make it a priority to comment on a post that is sending buckets of traffic your way.

Interact with site visitors live – you’ll get a view of who is visiting your site in a live mode and witness where they came from, what paths they take and where they exit. Some real time stats packages actually allow you to launch a browser chat session with a specific visitor that, say, clicks on several links like they are looking for something.

Watch your test in real time – You can track A/B split tests and see immediately not only what page is getting conversions, but what visitors are doing and not doing on each test page. I think this might allow you to make your testing adjustments much faster and more accurately.

Test your PPC campaigns in real time – Google AdWords data is often hours old and, in my experience, not terribly accurate. By monitoring a new ad campaign you real time you can know immediately which ad version or which landing page version is a winner in a matter of moments.

Understand the impact of your blog posts – I’m still puzzled sometimes by the reaction to my blog posts. I find it very hard to predict when something I’ve written is going to catch fire. With real time stats I know within minutes of publishing if I’ve happened to spark a reaction with readers and that gives me the cue to get proactive about promoting the post in bookmarking sites and social networks much more aggressively. I don’t like to promote everything I publish in this manner, so this gives me the filter to know when to amplify big right away.

There are by my guess dozens of packages available that can help you get web site data in real time. Some are free and some come with monthly fees.

For some, the idea of a monthly fee for the benefit of stats in real time may feel excessive, but in the increasingly competitive web world, the businesses that react the fastest win.

Instagram Acquistion – No Revenue, No Problem

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Tim_Huntley

Maybe you missed the big news (4/9/2012) of the Instagram acquisition by Facebook for a billion dollars.

Perhaps Facebook has a plan and a strategy – but so far, public opinion hasn’t been, shall we say, enthusiastic. Check out this headline in Forbes:

Honestly it’s pretty difficult to wrap your head around spending a billion dollars for a company that has 13 employees, is less than 2 years old, and has zero revenue. That’s right, in spite of having 30 million users, Instagram has no revenue, and let alone profitable revenue.

Perhaps in the Facebook pre-IPO world, the world where Instagram represents a real threat to a $137 billion valuation, an Instagram acquisition represents a great insurance policy.

But more than likely you live in a world where your business needs to generate revenue and profit. If you are spending significant dollars getting people to your ecommerce site and doing a good job getting people to put items into a shopping cart, doesn’t it make sense to do what you can to improve the rate that they actually purchase those items?

You bet! But according to an industry report by Coremetrics, the percentage of items in a shopping cart that are purchased isn’t very impressive.

If you are seeing results similar to those above, are you satisfied because you are within the industry averages? If not, take a look at the Spring Metrics Smart Offers Page. By understanding who is coming to your site and what you can do to target their buying behavior, you can increase your conversion rate and your revenue. You can influence shoppers in real time to proceed through the checkout with their carts, closing the sale BEFORE it becomes an abandoned cart.

You don’t have to be average.

Selling in Social With Call To Action Content

Posted on March 28, 2012 by John Jantsch

Everyone knows you can’t sell on Facebook and Twitter, right?

Well sure, it’s a little tough to tell your entire story in 140 characters, so that “click to buy” tweet might be met with little success and maybe even a little scorn.

But, if you want to entice folks that are following you in social media to become customers you’ve got to offer up something of value and give them a self motivated reason to act – then you can earn the right to tell them your full story.

The heart and soul of this kind of thinking is the tried and true call to action. Marketers have been using the simple act now, buy now, call now language to get prospects to take all manner of action since the dawn of advertising.

Everyone talks about the need for content these days and while it’s absolutely true you need to think about content that converts and a call to action and special offer is just that.

As Internet use has become the primary way that even local shoppers find information and make buying decisions, it’s become essential for local businesses to integrate local calls to action into their websites and drive people in all the various social outposts to come take advantage of these free offers.

Once you build compelling reasons for people to take action, you can promote those pages in social networks.

It’s easy to think this is something that only restaurants and salons can take advantage of, but with mobile and search use so high almost any type of business, even professional services, can benefit from this idea.

Example calls to action that you can promote in social channels.

Free pass

Let’s say you have a membership type of offer like a gym. Put a “get a free pass” button and form on your site so that you can put a free trial offer in their hands before they come to your door.

A financial planner could use this same approach for a upcoming seminar on investment advice. Or you could allow customers to grab a “bring a friend” pass for an early bird sale.

The easiest way to handle this would be a button that linked to a print friendly web page, but you could also use a form so you could capture a little info and send the pass to their mobile device.

Coupons

People love coupons and coupons certainly drive sales. This is an approach you can update and rotate with all kinds of new products, sales and sample offers.

A restaurant could place a coupon for a free appetizer on Tuesday night, but an insurance sales person could also place a coupon for a free iTunes card with every rate quote.

You can create your own trackable coupons through services such as Coupontank and don’t forget to use the coupon feature on your Google Places page as well as locally focused networks such as Local.com and Craigslist.

And of course, Smart Offers right here from Spring Metrics.

Schedule now

Businesses that run primarily by appointment must start making it easier for today’s mobile enabled customers to book a time on the fly. This means adding appointment booking functionality to your website so that prospects can schedule when it’s convenient for them and see that you have that perfect spot open in two hours when they are free.

There are a number of click to schedule tools like ClickBook, GenBook and Schedulicity. Or use the tool set from a service like Agendize that allows you to add call, chat and schedule options all from one tool.

Your marketing efforts require many forms of content – content that builds trust, content that educates and certainly content that converts.

Behavioral Targeting And Social Media

Posted on March 13, 2012 by Ron

Behavioral marketing is going to continue to grow in the immediate future, and one of the core reasons for this is the explosion of social media. Social media has created an opportunity to target people with the most potentially effective ads in the history of the Internet.

Facebook alone has more than 750 million users, and Twitter attracts more than 300,000 new users a day. People spend an average of 15 minutes a day on YouTube. Most importantly for someone marketing products on the Internet, all three of these sites collect information from their user base that can be used to created incredibly targeted ads.

These ads are seen over and over again during the average consumer’s day. People check these sites nearly constantly using their cell phones – so you are not simply advertising to people when they are using their laptops, but you can also hit them with messages they are likely to respond to all day long.

Facebook is a particularly compelling tool to use with behavioral marketing. It not only collects information about people’s stated interests; it also picks up information from their status updates, likes and instant message conversations.

Have you checked out the available ad targeting options on Facebook? As a marketer, I love it. As a Facebook user, I find it downright creepy.

This means that you not only can find out what general topics prospective customers are interested in; you can also target based on specific interests exhibited on a given day. For example, you can know if they have recently bought a new home and might need furniture. You could discover if they have just bought a Blu-Ray player and might want to buy movies – and you’ll even know what genre of movies they like.

Perhaps more importantly, it keeps track of who their best friends are. The people they interact with most on a regular basis are likely to influence their buying decisions and have similar interests. By seeing what their best friends are interested in, you can create even more targeted ad campaigns based on their actual day-to-day behaviors and changing interests.

Twitter can also be very effective because it keeps track of what people follow, what links they share and what they tweet about. You can figure out what is on their mind and know their interests, and create special links to special offers that they could retweet to their friends, allowing your social marketing campaign to “go viral.”

Even YouTube has great potential for behavioral marketing. The site tracks what videos people watch, which ones they share with their friends, which ones they “like” and “dislike” and how they comment on various videos. This can help you figure out their given mood – and predict what they will look at next, so that you can place an appropriate ad on their next video.

Social media is going to continue to grow in the long term – and along with it, behavioral marketing will become more and more effective. Because your ads will be targeted to what is on the potential consumer’s mind in real time, these ads will become much, much more effective than traditional Pay Per Click or paid search online advertising.

Social Media – The Future Of Effective Business Marketing

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Brandon

One of the main challenges with Internet marketing is that effective sales channels are constantly evolving. Marketing efforts that worked well before may produce far fewer conversions today. For example, five or six years ago, ezines were a cost-effective and fairly powerful marketing channel. In 2011, however, ezines are producing less and less of a return on investment.

Therefore, businesses need to keep up on the current trends in effective Internet marketing, or they’ll see their conversions steeply decline. This is one of the many reasons companies need to study their metrics constantly – so they can determine which marketing channels are no longer working and focus their efforts on developing new marketing channels and reinforcing ones that are still performing.

Today, one of the strongest developing forms of Internet marketing is through social media channels. When used effectively, social media has the potential to increase conversions dramatically, help you take control of your branding efforts and put a personal face on your business.

The financial returns of social media have been difficult to measure in the past, and advocates have settled for secondary metrics such as followers, likes and fans within these channels. But with Spring Metrics it is easy to track actual revenue generated through your social media campaigns.

The benefits of using social media in your marketing efforts.

There are many reasons why your company will want to leverage the marketing potential of social media. Here are just a few:

People spend more time on social media sites than on traditional websites.
There is a greater level of trust in messages people see on social media than when they see the same messages on traditional websites or in emails.
Creating social media campaigns are nearly cost-free.
Social media encourages readers to share your information with other people, so you can reach a large number of potential prospects without having to track down the leads yourself.
All social media campaigns are opt-in by their very nature, so your readers are more likely to be pre-qualified contacts.
Social media allows you to shape your brand to the image that best suits your market.
The medium allows you to interact easily with customers and potential customers.
When done correctly, people will identify with you as a “real person” and not a faceless company. People like to do business with real people. That’s why brick-and-mortar businesses remain popular. They trust people they can interact with more than they do an anonymous web page. By having the chance to interact with your customers, you generate the same level of trust as if you were talking to them face to face. This makes it much more likely they will want to purchase a product or service from you.
Social media keeps your company “top of mind” so that when people want to make additional purchases, they think of your company first – since they’ve been voluntarily seeing your messages for long periods of time.

Facebook – Where To Start Your Social Media Campaign

A successful social media campaign should start with Facebook. It’s easy to create a page and updating your message is simple and not particularly time consuming. It gives you a platform to send people information about your business or industry that you think would be relevant to their interests and needs.

It also allows people to comment on your message, so you get real-time feedback about whether you have hit the mark or need to refine your message further. People are generally bluntly honest with their Facebook comments, so you get feedback that is unfiltered and direct. This can help you shape your ongoing campaign.

When people add you or like your page on Facebook, the system notifies their entire friends list of their action. That can generate interest in your Facebook page, because friends often share common interests. Therefore, you’ll get more people looking at your page – and people who are interested will then add you – which notifies their friends, and can create a viral effect. In other words, you get other people “working” to bring pre-qualified clients to your message.

Beyond that, Facebook allows you to see the interests of the people who come to your page. By analyzing the common interests of people who have added or liked you on Facebook, you can figure out if there are additional products or services your company could develop that would be of interest to the people who are seeing your message.

Twitter – The Backbone Of Your Social Media Campaign

Once you have set up your Facebook marketing campaign, your next step is to join Twitter. Twitter is a more difficult medium to use than Facebook, but has even larger marketing potential.

With Twitter you get a limited number of characters with which to express your message. This means that you will almost always have to include a link to a page with your full marketing message.

Sending targeted Twitter messages is a three-step process.

Write a short sentence that makes people intrigued about the link you are offering them.
Use a URL shortener such as bit.ly to make your link take up as few characters as possible.
Identify the general subject of your tweet. This is done by putting a hashtag (#) before the name of the subject matter. For example, say your tweet is about a new Firefox plug in. You could add “#firefoxplugins” or “#firefox” to your tweet. Then, anyone who searches for or tracks information about Firefox or Firefox plug-ins will be directed to your tweet and encouraged to click your link.

What’s great about Twitter is that the system encourages people to retweet messages that are of interest to them and to their friends list – which can snowball into additional contacts very, very quickly.

Additional Social Media Channels

New social media channels are being developed all the time. Some of them are general – like the newly introduced Google+ or the long-established LinkedIn. Others are industry specific. But, no matter which additional social media channel you choose, they all work pretty much the same way as either Facebook or Twitter. You simply need to select the additional channels that you think would be applicable to your target audience and then provide compelling information and links.

Remember, it’s all about quality content. Be sure to provide content that’s compelling and relevant to your audience. Social media is here to stay, so embrace it and learn as much as you can so you can leverage this channel to help grow your business.