Faucets and Hoses

Tricks of the Trade and
Rules of Thumb
to get the bottom of things fast:

There is NO math involved here:

Within our series so far on DEEP MARKETING, we’ve looked at the psychology of your prospects and how their minds work, and in finding ways to enhance what you do with techniques that harness these truths about people.

Today, we turn the tables and focus on YOU.

Often when we have a situation or a problem, we resort to what we already know. And of course, this works most of the time.

Psychologists call this reliance on what’s familiar “functional fixedness.” That’s when you say, “It’s always worked, so I’ll apply it here.”

These are our Tricks of the Trade and our Rules of Thumb. (Psychologists have their own fancy name for these: “heuristics.”)

We all fall prey to the “heuristic” or Rule of Thumb of what’s conveniently available: using what tools you have rather than expanding your toolbox by adding some new ones to it.

Today, we specifically focus on ways you may be psyching yourself out and missing little bits here and there, create a downward spiral that reduces the effectiveness of your marketing.

By reduced effectiveness, I mean something like this (remember, no math here):

5% x 5% x 25% = 0.0625% or one-sixteen-hundred (1/1600).

That means for every 10,000 visitors you start with, you only have 6.25 customers at the end:

   10,000 visitors come to your website …
   500 sign up for your email subscription …
   25 open your emails …
   6.25 ever buy anything.

If you spend $10,000 to get those 10,000 visitors, you need each of your 6 customers to buy $1600 just to get back your advertising money. That’s fine if you’re selling cars or homes or exploding oil rigs. It’s disastrous if you’re selling a $79 eBook or $500 online study course and don’t sell them anything again.

So, how are you possibly psyching yourself out?

By stumbling and learning through blind trial and error … rather than looking at your situation and applying new marketing Tricks of the Trade and Rules of Thumb.

Later in the post, I give you a Trick of the Trade that turns those numbers around:

FROM: 5% x 5% x 25% = 0.0625% or one-sixteenth-hundred (1/1600).

TO: 5% x 100% x 25% = 1.25% or one-eightieth (1/80)

This means you have 125 customers instead of 6. You need to sell each one only $80 to break even – such as your $79 eBook. In short, you do 20 times as much as before. And it costs $0.00.

And, a second Trick of the Trade below builds further on that improvement:

FROM: 5% x 100% x 25% = 1.25% or one-eightieth (1/80)

TO: 5% x 100% x 66.67% = 3.33% or one-thirtieth (1/30)

This means you have 333 customers instead of 6 or 125. You need to sell each one only $30 to break even – such as your cheaper $29 eBook. In short, you do 2.7 times as much as before – on top of the prior trick that got 20 times as much. And it costs $0.00.

So, if you’re interested in making your existing marketing 53.33 times more effective (from 6 customers to 333), continue reading …

Let’s look at one relevant marketing example:
Is this your situation?

You want to boost revenue, but whatever you do, it doesn’t seem to be working. Sound familiar? Frustrating?

Are you opening every email from every online marketing guru promising you the golden solution to your problem, sold like miracle wrinkle cream in a jar that returns youth and beauty – or your money back? Are you plunking down your hard-earned moolah for your own jar of heavily hyped hope?

Let’s talk about absolutely FREE stuff for you,
because you’re my subscriber:

You may have heard of filling the sales funnel or filling the pipeline. You put leads in one end, cultivate them, and over time, you supposedly get a growing number of new customers multiplying and spreading like a bad rash. Simple enough concept. But does it work simply enough for you?

Instead of a funnel or pipeline, let’s find something you can relate to in your ordinary experience: a garden hose.

Often, our marketing efforts are like simply hooking up a garden hose to the faucet and turning on the water: We know the faucet works and the hose is connected correctly, but we don’t see much monetary water coming out the other end.

And if we’re paying good money for that water flow, we tend to be super-duper-quick in turning off the faucet if we don’t see enough results coming out.

If traffic or visitors instead of water goes into the hose, we only know two pieces of information so far:

What went in: a certain number of visitors
What came out: a certain number of sales dollars or subscription signups

We might have a little more information by using a 1-2-3 prospect ranking system for those visitors entering the hose, ranging from hot, warm, and cold.

Is this where you are at in your marketing intelligence? Even if you aren’t, continue reading on now:

With the physical garden hose in front of us, we can easily see if the hose has leaks and exactly where.

With our marketing, we cannot easily “see” if our hose has leaks UNLESS we know what to measure … how to measure it … how to analyze it … and how to improve it.

It’s as if the hose is running under the house in total darkness and comes out the other end: if there are leaks, we can’t see where they are.

Instead of turning on the faucet to full-blast (and psyching ourselves out by doing the same things as before) . . .

This is where we add some new tools: We plug into other people’s tricks of the trade and rules of thumb to guide us in knowing what and how to measure our results, then how to analyze and improve them.

So here’s a checklist for your hose – from faucet connection to the revenue flowing out the other end.

It’s TODAY’S TIP. In fact, you can DOWNLOAD not only this but the complete and entire posts — including TIPS — for the past 3 weeks – as Part 2 of DEEP MARKETING:

TODAY’S TIP:

By improving a number of steps in the process that visitors travel to flow out as sales, you can substantially increase your marketing results.

We look at it through the example of hooking up a garden hose to a faucet:

FAUCET CONNECTION: The traffic you’re attracting, and
THE HOSE ITSELF: Your communications (email and website)

Although we talk about online efforts, these work for your offline efforts, too!

FAUCET CONNECTION: Traffic:

TRICKS OF THE TRADE: For your online efforts: Make sure you have both Google Analytics installed … along with email services that give you detailed reports, such as AWeber:

Volume: Do you have enough data to analyze — or is it too small to draw any conclusions? At bare minimum, you need several hundred visitors. Are you even collecting this data?

Geography (if a factor): Do you know by looking at your data where they come from? Do you know if advertising in New Jersey is like pouring money down the drain – or if they’re the golden folks who respond better than any other US state and pay back 10 times your cost to advertise to them?

Age Range (if a factor): Are you reaching too far too fast, such as appealing to cartoon-watching kids for a purchase long off in the future, while you sell $30,000 cars today? Or maybe you’re trying to harness “Nag Factor” marketing to get the kids to drive Mom and Dad insane until they buy that Cap’n Crunch SUV? Make sure you have penetrated your primary segments first, such as adults with money. After that, you can work on currently green markets and cultivate the kids over time as new segments.

Interest or Appeal: Are you making too broad of an appeal and wasting money or time on non-buyers of your product – such as “books” when you sell “gardening books”? Or too narrow – such as “gardening books for Texas Panhandle homebound seniors”? Or the same appeals as large entrenched competitors – “only better”?

Buying Stage: The “One-Call Close” Trap: Are you assuming that everyone is ready to buy your product – and just needs to receive your message as they put their lives on hold and wait patiently for you to advertise or email them? Do they understand why they should consider what you offer? Do they even understand what you offer? For example, although everyone eats food, why should they consider 100% all-natural, organically grown sustainably farmed produce? Do they even know what “100% all-natural, organically grown, sustainably farmed produce” is? Why should they care?

Competing head-to-head with entrenched highly branded competitors: Although this overlaps with Interest or Appeal (above), we focus here on separating yourself from The Big Guys in a real way. Without distinguishing yourself with something substantive, you can quickly find yourself faced with a credibility gap here. Or end up competing merely as a commodity solely based on price, which means a quick race to the murky bottom.

For example, How would you choose an email marketing service provider? Don’t they all seem more or less the same, each offering new and exciting templates and great responsive service? With an interesting tagline? In the end, do you end up choosing based on price?

Media: Are you putting all your chips on the Twitter and Facebook roulette wheel numbers? True, print and newsprint are going south and will continue to do so. True, email is no longer new and the vast volume is spam and even messages copied to yourself end up in your spam folder. And true, the Twitterverse and Facebook and YouTube are huge and growing rapidly and already are recognized as significant and permanent.

BUT: Direct mail still works. Phone calls still work. In fact, the personal touch has been one of the most reliable ways in the last 100 years to cut through the clutter – and continues to be reliable today when anyone who can type can send a tweet or email to a thousand people. And advertising in boring old-media magazines and newspapers and TV and radio and outdoor still works. If boring old-media didn’t work, you would not see or hear ANY advertisements – certainly not from large corporations.

THE HOSE ITSELF:
Your email followups, blog, website,
store, or brochure:

You got some people to visit. And using your Faucet Connection checklist, you now know something about them.

Your Big Goal is: To get as many of these visitors to flow out the other end of the hose as paying customers.

And The Big Question to answer here is: What are they doing once they see your ad or email or other message? What are they doing once they enter your hose?

TRICKS OF THE TRADE:

Again: For your online efforts: Make sure you have both Google Analytics installed … along with email services that give you detailed reports, such as AWeber:

And install the intermediate tracking page I talk about below, in Website Product Page: 2. Order Page

From your checklist in the FAUCET CONNECTION:

You will know which media produce which visitors, including what % of your 5000 Twitter followers ever click on your tweets and on which tweets …
You will know how long visitors spend your site – and from where exactly – either carefully examining what you have to offer or merely “scanning and scooting” in less than 10 seconds …
And for offline efforts, by coding how prospects reply, you can track which ads or brochures they respond to – including asking them to tell you

CAUTION:
Don’t Fall Prey to the SUPERMAN FALLACY:
“Leaping over buildings in a single bound”

In the final analysis, where you look at the hose and see if something comes out, you make an “EITHER-OR” decision:

“Either it works or it doesn’t.”

That puts a lot of pressure to be perfect with your early versions. Even Superman started as a baby, grew into a boy, and then a man was still learning and getting tripped up by hidden energy-draining kryptonite as he went.

So, instead … Take the “BOTH-AND” attitude:

In an ideal world, your first web page or email gets you the maximum response you want.

Meanwhile, in the world you and I live in and market to, we often need to go back and adjust, tweak, improve, then try the new version again, measure, and analyze, adjust, tweak, improve, then try the new new version again, and …

So, instead of swinging for the fences and tossing out every baseball bat or batting technique that doesn’t hit a homerun on your first swing, keep your bats and techniques and build on them. To do so, you need to have that info we talked about in the FAUCET CONNECTION:

Email List Building:
Do you know where you’re leaking people?

What % subscribe? Is it 1%? 5%? 10%? 20%? Which sources give you the best opt-in rates? Can you expand your presence there? If you’re batting less than 5%, then you need to do one of two things:

Work on making opting in more appealing: through better design, a better free bonus, or a more intriguing reason to sign up
Eliminate distractions: Isolate your opt-in form on a page solely dedicated to capturing emails, get rid of all other links, and send people there

What % confirm their subscription? Is it 25%? 50%? 100%?

Across all my lists, I’ve consistently get 98.5%. How? With a proven sequence of words: I simply repeat that they must confirm their subscription, what they’ll get for doing so, and how they go about confirming

This is the trick I showed you at the beginning, going:

FROM: 5% x 5% x 25% = 0.0625% or one-sixteenth-hundred (1/1600)

TO: 5% x 100% x 25% = 1.25% or one-eightieth (1/80)

Email Marketing:
Do you know what your lists respond to?

What % open your messages? Which messages? Can you see what’s doing the trick: The subject line? The relevance? Tie-ins to commercial or cultural or political events or news? Anticipation built up from your prior emails, like promotions leading up to Grand Opening Day? Are you using these?

Do certain people consistently open your messages and click through? Can you segregate them and focus on them separately to cultivate them more closely as preferred prospects?

Are all your messages just a variation of “I want to sell you something. Buy this now. Sale ends tomorrow” or you are also offering value for free through your expertise or other information?

Website Product Page:
Do you know what order buttons they click on?
How about your shopping cart abandonment rate?

Web page variations: Trick of the Trade: Regardless of how well your first page does, you need to test with new offers, new copy, new headline, new formats, new layouts, new calls to action

Perhaps you have too little information. Or too much. Or it’s presented ineffectively. Or in the wrong order. Or you’re not asking for the sale enough. Or too soon. Or too late. Or with weak closing words. Or not stating your money-back guarantee enough times.

AND: If you MUST have a lot of information in order to sell – because your product is new or different enough that people need to know more in order to make a buying decision – such as buying specialized organic food instead of supermarket Frankenfoods — you need a solution to the 100-foot-long sales page that scares everyone away except the pre-sold.

That solution? Break up your page into two pages in a Report Format and offer it as a Free Report. The first page intrigues them and evokes their emotions about what’s not working in their lives, then invites them to continue with you to dig deeper on the second page where you present facts and details and persuasive copy to win them over. And using Google Analytics, you can pinpoint your top prospects by tracking who clicks through to that second page, coming from which keywords, which geographies, how long they stay, and who goes the distance and produces a sale and magically transforms into a customer.

Order Page: Rule of thumb: General shopping cart abandonment rates are about 80% — that means 4 out of 5 in the shopping cart phase don’t make it out the garden hose as flowing money. Solution to lowering this? Set up a pre-shopping cart Order Page. With it, you will:

Know which product’s order buttons get activated, if you offer more than one product or variation (such as 30-pack, 90-pack, 180-pack):
This can tell you that your Google AdWords traffic clicks on the 30-pack version, while Yahoo organic search traffic clicks on the 180-pack version, and 10 other paid and unpaid sources never click any order button and are complete wastes of your money and time

Going one step further, and especially for paid keyword campaigns like AdWords, you can see which geographies and keywords click on order buttons – and which are merely wasting you money.
Provide calming reassurance by restating your money-back guarantee, shipping cost, estimated shipping times, contact information, and anything else so you squash those doubts that kill your sales in this most crucial stage

This is the trick I showed you at the beginning, going:

FROM: 5% x 100% x 25% = 1.25% or one-eightieth (1/80)

TO: 5% x 100% x 66.67% = 3.33% or one-thirtieth (1/30)

With these simple Tricks of the Trade and Rules of Thumb, you can methodically improve your results 53-fold and beyond:

FROM: 5% x 5% x 25% = 0.0625% or one-sixteenth-hundred (1/1600).

TO: 5% x 100% x 66.67% = 3.33% or one-thirtieth (1/30)

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

1. Share them below
2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

DEEP MARKETING: Part 2 (last 3 posts):
. . . as a downloadable PDF for you:

WHAT’S NEXT? We give you some tips for using psychology to harness really peculiar human behavior profitably … revisit Eternal Marketing’s social engineering in understanding peer groups and peer pressure and you can harness some deeply imbedded desires common to us all as humans … then focus on psychology applied to the online world.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

And if you missed downloading
DEEP MARKETING: Part 1 (first 5 posts):