Spring 2009 – Direct Response Marketers: Achieve Your Online Potential!

Some multichannel marketers—especially those with roots in DRTV—tend to approach their web presence with an emphasis on cost management. By instead focusing on the following 10 fundamentals of online marketing, these marketers—in fact, all marketers—could enjoy web revenue that far exceeds their expectations.

By Bob Greenstone

Just 10 years ago, if you had a successful product on TV, you didn’t really need a website. That’s because less than two percent of sales came from inbound web traffic generated by DRTV media. Just five years ago, almost any ol’ website would’ve been sufficient to handle the 10 percent of sales being processed online. My how things have changed!

Today, you need a carefully designed, expertly managed website to capture the 50 percent of sales (or more) a successful DRTV campaign can deliver. To put that in perspective, if you were foolish enough to run your business like you did 10 years ago, your CPOs would be twice what they could be. Moreover, the gap between a good web services provider and a great one has increased just as dramatically. These days, you could be doing 50 percent of your sales online and still be leaving another 50 percent on the table. I’ve seen it happen.

I can’t blame DRTV marketers. They come from an industry where campaigns hinge on a dollar or two per order, so squeezing pennies from suppliers seems like the surest strategy for success. But the web is a totally different animal, and marketers need to realize that cost management alone is insufficient to realize a campaign’s full potential. For example, while it’s true that you take orders in similar ways on the phone and on the web, the similarities end there. While you can usually only squeeze small improvements out of your inbound telemarketing process with better or more aggressive scripts, on the web you can literally double or even triple your sales through dozens of well-executed changes managed in real time.

Yes, that’s right: Most DRTV marketers have the potential to double or even triple their web business. “How is this possible?” you may ask. “Isn’t a website just a website? If they come to my website, no matter how poorly optimized it is, won’t the customers just buy anyway?” No, no—a thousand times no!

Consider a small change, such as to the headline of your site, the positioning of the order button or the color scheme. In statistically valid experiment after experiment, we have demonstrated that changes to these elements can increase or decrease sales by as much as 20 percent—per factor! I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.

Now imagine what years’ worth of findings like these could do if applied to your website, and you’ll see why the quality of your web services is so important these days.

Not only that, but the supplier you select can bring you amazing benefits or incredible grief in other areas as well, such as data security, website uptime, the flexibility to make quick changes or even the ability to predict the potential success of a DRTV product before you invest in commercial production and media.

With this in mind, here is my checklist of the top 10 things you need to achieve your full web potential, whether you’re using an outside supplier or managing an in-house team.

The Best Possible Conversion Rate

A conversion rate is defined, simply, as the percentage of website visitors who place an order. If 100 people visit your site and 20 place an order, that’s a 20-percent conversion rate. So how do you maximize that number? In today’s online world, where consumers are used to amazing visual experiences, the old techniques aren’t working as well as they used to. Take streaming video. It’s not what it used to be. In fact, I’ve even seen it lower conversion rates. These days, sophisticated animations and well story-boarded websites do a much better job of driving sales. So how do you know what’s optimal? Simple: Test, test, test. If your web team doesn’t have A/B split testing capability or, better yet, multivariate testing capability, you are most definitely leaving money on the table.

The Highest Average Sale

The average sale is calculated by dividing the number of visitors who place an order into the total revenue generated by the site. Most DRTV websites today imitate the phone experience by using the exact copy and flow from the campaign’s telemarketing script. Not a bad place to start (provided that script is working), but that’s usually as far as most marketers go. Simply testing one set of copy, one image and one presentation of these elements is a strategic relic from an earlier time. Modern multivariate testing technology can test dozens of copy points, images and other combinations to identify the recipe that delivers the highest average sale. You may need a team of talented graphic artists and copywriters to get there, but help is available at no incremental cost to you if you outsource to a competent web services provider.

Solid Data Security

Poor data security could destroy your business overnight. Most suppliers tout PCI compliance, but this is a very minimal standard that provides virtually no protection against data loss. Your web solution needs to involve not only basic protections, such as PCI compliance and HTTPS secure web pages, but also a complete data security plan with proper supervision. Most DRTV marketers have no idea how their data is stored and handled. Yet if their supplier loses a batch of credit card numbers to a cyber-thief, they will be on the hook, potentially for millions of dollars. Some questions to ask: Does your provider have an SAS-70? Do they even know what that is? How many millions of dollars of data loss insurance do they have?

Adequate Support Staff

Testing offers and keeping your website current are critical to executing your marketing plan effectively. There’s nothing worse than getting a distorted read on a new offer because your online team failed to update the site properly. Here again, there are several important questions to ask if you’re outsourcing. How many graphic designers and animators do they have on staff? How many IT support personnel? How many account executives?

“Five Nine” Server Uptime

The expression “server uptime” refers to the percentage of time your website is available to the public. This is important for obvious reasons. Just as you can’t sell from an empty shelf, you can’t process orders without a live website! However, unlike brick-and-mortar stores, keeping a virtual store running 24/7 involves a lot of technical details that can prove daunting. Most times when your site goes down, you’re probably not even aware of it—unless you happen to be trying to access it at that moment. In order to ensure the ideal maximum uptime of 99.999 percent, known as “five nines,” you need to have a minimum of two data centers online with your websites on both of them. These data centers also need to be “load balanced,” which means that if the primary data center has any issues at all, the other data center can automatically kick in and handle the extra load. It is rare for a provider to have this capability, but it does exist in the marketplace. The provider also needs to have 24/7 monitoring and alarm systems in place that notify tech support staff of impending or existing hardware, routing or connectivity issues, as well as attempted intrusions by hackers.

Real-time Reporting

Next-day reporting is not acceptable in our “on demand” world. For myriad reasons, you need real-time reporting. But this is not as easy or as trivial as it sounds. The type of servers that accept orders are different than the type that crunch mountains of data and turn it into meaningful reports in real time. Do you or your supplier have access to both? If not, you’re at a competitive disadvantage.

Sources for Incremental Sales

In addition to helping you manage your paid search advertising, your supplier or web team should also be able to help you get massive amounts of incremental orders from affiliate, search and e-mail campaigns. Competency in this area cannot be overemphasized. Proper affiliate management can increase web sales 25 to 50 percent! These sales aren’t free, of course, but most are paid for on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis. That means your ROI is locked in at 200 percent or better. Here’s a quick way to find out if your web team is maximizing this opportunity. Go to Google and search for your brand name. If you and your affiliates don’t own the top paid and natural search listings, you are once again leaving money on the table. As for e-mail, look for a provider that has a highly seasoned program at least five to 10 years old and that aggregately e-mails a billion or more pieces each month.

A System for Saving Sales

It’s an unavoidable fact: Even on the highest-converting websites, the majority of visitors leave without buying. A well-known technique to help address that problem is a pop-up chat window. As the name implies, when a visitor tries to leave the site without buying, a window pops up and encourages them to chat with an artificial intelligence or a human that can answer questions and present better offers. These pop-ups are sophisticated enough to avoid most pop-up blockers and can increase sales by 10 percent or more. A no-brainer, right? The only problem is that the third-party solutions on the market take a large chunk of the “saved” sale. On the other hand, a first-rate web services company should have this capability built into its system and offer it free of charge to clients.

Flexible Pricing

If you’re using an in-house web team, this one doesn’t apply. But if you’re outsourcing, you should know that pricing has really come down in the online space. In fact, it is now common to find vendors that offer services related to inbound traffic for free. Such vendors (my company is one) earn their compensation from various types of third-party offers made after your transaction is completed. This model is significantly improving campaign break-evens by eliminating a cost center, especially with campaigns where web sales are in excess of 50 percent of total sales. It’s even being applied to the telemarketing side in a new packaged offering of web and IVR for free.

Great Attitudes

IT departments are notorious for their difficult attitudes. They can be rigid in their thinking and reluctant to accept new information, especially from more creative personalities. To achieve your full potential online, you need to overcome this common barrier. As a wise man once said, the only constant is change. That’s especially true in the online world. As I mentioned earlier, being a few years out of date in your thinking can mean the difference between campaign success and failure.

Bob Greenstone is CEO of Permission Interactive, Inc. in San Diego. He can be reached at (619) 708-7456 or at bob@PermissionInteractive.com.