Quick Wins that Drive Revenue

To drive revenues, the marketer has many options. Some types of marketing have a high ROI benefit but also have a long time-to-value (e.g. re-platforming your site). Some are inexpensive and have a very short time-to-value but offer a relatively low ROI (e.g. alternative payments). And of course others have different variations of these characteristics.

The guerrilla marketer focuses on low investment levels, quick time-to-value, and a high ROI benefit. In fact, beyond ROI, the guerrilla marketer focuses on any activity that can have an immediate impact on sales. To do that in the digital world, you need to understand who your online visitors are, and facilitate the acquisition process by serving more personalised content.

1. Understand who your visitors are and what they really want
2. Observe your traffic funnel
3. But stay focused on your sales funnel
4. Look closely at your competitors’ websites and at their search campaigns
5. Don’t be afraid to base business decisions on qualitative data
6. Use testing and usability tools with moderation
7. Don’t accumulate mountains of data if your time and resources are scarce
8. Define your personas and map out your engagement scenarios
9. Align your communication channels with the value of your interactions
10. Personalise your calls to action and create urgency

Why Don’t Most Visitors Do What I Want Them To?

Let’s face it: most visitors don’t convert. Here’s why:

• They were unqualified to begin with and aren’t worth your time
• The content presented to them is irrelevant or inadequate
• There is insufficient trust and connection
• They don’t feel a sense of urgency
• They are not yet ready to make a decision

The guerrilla marketer does not waste time with unqualified visitors. He or she focuses on delivering relevant messages to the qualified visitors, thereby building a sense of trust, which leads to greater connection with his or her customers, and a greater ability to personalise a customer’s experience around his or her needs and desires.

Let’s take a closer look at the guerrilla marketer’s approach to digital marketing in the age of the connected customer and what that means for you.

1. Take the time to understand who your visitors are.

You know your customers, but how well do you really know your online visitors? You probably have access to a lot of data: web analytics, CRM data, voice-of-customer data, and operational statistics. Are your online visitors different from your traditional customers? What is their gender ratio? Their age distribution? Their geolocation? What are they interested in? All this aggregate demographic and psychographic information is vital to creating segments and delivering personalised, relevant marketing messages. There are many free tools available to help you answer these types of questions, including DoubleClick Ad Planner and Alexa.

2. Observe your traffic funnel…

Many marketers make the assumption that the overwhelming majority of their visitors come in from the home page. So while you naturally want to look at where people are dropping off, remember to also look at where people are dropping in. If you place important messaging on your home page and if a lot of your visitors are actually connecting through your product pages, category pages, or customer support pages, you might be missing out on a lot of opportunities to communicate your brand and value proposition, or to engage your target audience.

3. But stay focused on your sales funnel.

Look at your sales funnel to identify where in the purchasing process visitors are dropping off, as well as the series of events that precipitate the drop-offs, both on the exit page and on previous pages. Once you’ve identified those issues you can do a better job of addressing them. For instance, visitors might abandon shopping carts for a variety of different reasons: prohibitive shipping costs, lack of product information, hesitation to provide personal information, etc. Can you find common threads among the groups who abandon for each reason? If so, you can address the issue in a personalised fashion, proactively delivering content and messaging to the specific group of people at the right time and place, thereby lowering cart abandonment.

4. Look closely at your competitors’ websites and at their search campaigns.

Identify your competitors—all of them. Generally, there may be sites that you don’t specifically consider as competitors, but are you sure your customers’ needs can’t be solved through alternative products or services? For instance, if you sell helicopter tours in the Grand Canyon, would you consider the skydiving operators as your competitors? Once you’ve identified your competitors, look at their websites.

Your competitors’ websites can be an extremely valuable source of information. For instance, certain browser plug-ins such as Ghostery or Firebug can tell you that a particular website is using a service to identify visitors’ employers. Or perhaps that they’re serving online surveys to collect customer satisfaction metrics, or that they’re delivering dynamic content to increase conversions or analysing ad effectiveness. If your competitor is using a service that you’ve never heard of, it may be worth investigating and seeing if it can bring you value as well.

Just as looking at your competitors’ websites can be a smart way of discovering untapped opportunities, you can also look at their search marketing strategies. You can use free search monitoring services such as iSpionage or SpyFu to find out information such as what keywords are popular for your competitors, what web copy they’re utilising, what search volume they’re getting from their ads, how much money they’re spending for each keyword, and where they’re investing the bulk of their search marketing efforts. You just might detect some trends—you might find that your competitors are focused on particular search terms. Perhaps you’ll want to explore niche keywords or long-tail keywords. Or perhaps you’ll want to focus your marketing dollars less on search marketing and more on the visitors already on your site.

5. Don’t be afraid to base business decisions on qualitative data.

There is a tendency among marketers to focus on quantitative data—they want to make business decisions based on hard numbers. They want to predict an ROI. They want to estimate with a high degree of certainty the impact that a particular campaign would have on the incremental conversion rate

But for the many organisations that are not receiving millions of site visitors per month and do not have a team of web analysts, acquiring meaningful and useful data is often a challenge, if not an impossibility. And even when there is enough data, it’s not always readily available or accessible. Or you might not have the tools or the skills to interpret the data. Or more often, you might just not have the time.

Don’t be afraid to base business decisions on qualitative data such as consumer surveys, emails, and chat transcripts. (For LivePerson chat clients, LP Insights can be used to conduct sentiment analysis based on all types of structured and unstructured data.)

Remember that it’s important to pay attention to not only what customers are saying about your brand or your services, but also to what they are doing at the time, where they were on your website, where they were in the purchasing process, what pages they viewed, and who they are according to your CRM systems. Surveying tools can also be very effective, but make sure you time the survey invitations with consideration of the other invitations, offers, or overlays that might appear on a given page.

6. Use testing and usability tools with moderation.

There are site testing and usability tools that can record aggregate visitor sessions, generate heat maps, and/or provide form analytics. These tools can really help you look at your site in a different way and uncover new customer trends.

Be careful, however, about investing too much time and money in site testing tools if you do not have a strong quantitative or technical background. You will also want to work closely with IT to change the code of your pages for each of your tests. The reason for this is that for every test you decide to run, you need to define the business case, tag the site, write the rule, create the content, measure the impact, and then run another test. This can consume a lot of your time and IT resources, often to simply confirm your original hunch. What these testing tools typically say is that the vast majority of your visitors see only a minority or a small fraction of your site. So while you may wish to use these tools, you don’t want to overdo it because you might be spending a lot of time performing exercises that don’t drive business results.

7. Don’t accumulate mountains of data if your time and resources are scarce.

As much as it’s great to have both quantitative and qualitative data, a savvy guerrilla marketer will not accumulate mountains of data, because he knows his time and resources are scarce. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Figure out how to solve for 80% of your visitors and once you’ve done that you can take care of the remaining 20% later. Prioritise revenue-generating or buzz-creating visitor segments, and adopt a “benign neglect” approach to lesser-value market segments.

Techniques like multivariate testing are very powerful but at the same time they’re very time-consuming—you often have to wait for statistical significance* before you can build a solid business case on that data. But as a guerrilla marketer, you can’t always afford to wait before taking action. Marketers often find themselves in time-sensitive situations, and you might not be able to achieve statistical significance prior to launching a campaign or addressing an urgent need. An experienced guerrilla marketer won’t ignore the need for valid data, but will probably use his/her hunch to get something deployed quickly, and then get someone else to do the multivariate testing and wait for a negative test result to disprove their hunch. Time wasted is money lost.

8. Define your personas and map out your engagement scenarios

Armed with your knowledge of your visitors, you are now in a position to define your marketing personas and map out your engagement scenarios for each of those personas. A persona (often referred to in the online world as a segment) is a group of customers who share common characteristics and aspirations. For instance you might have a persona that you’ve defined as the “Hipsters” or the “Seniors” or the “Neophiles”—people who are addicted to novelty and are primary concerned with your latest products or services. You intuitively know who your site’s personas are—the greater challenge lies in mapping different online engagement scenarios to those personas. An engagement scenario is a “decision tree” of the different calls-to-action that you send at every stage of a given persona’s experience with your brand. What is it that you want to tell a persona about your services the first time they visit your website? Or what specific follow-up message would you send them after their first purchase, or when they come back to your website for support, or when they share their experience on Facebook or other social media sites?

A well-tried and proven customer segmentation strategy is to distinguish “high value” customers from “low value” customers, just like an airline distinguishes “business class travelers” from “economy class travelers”—for each segment there is a different level of service and corresponding price. While for the “economy class travelers” an airline may want to emphasise affordability and availability, the airline may want to message the quality and reliability of its services to its “business class travelers”.

9. Align your communication channels with the value of your interactions.

In the digital world, the guerrilla marketer will instinctively know his personas and align the communication channels to the expected value of a particular interaction. For instance, a gold card customer who is on the credit card company’s website and has questions about his account might be offered the ability to engage in a video chat with a personal advisor, while a debit card customer might be offered self-service tools such as FAQs or community forums. Since in the short run a video chat costs more than providing access to a community forum, this may just be common business sense. But it’s not just about aligning the expected value of an interaction with the cost of a communication channel—it’s also about aligning the communication channel with the customer’s expected experience with your brand. For instance, while it may make sense to offer 24/7 telephone support to VIP customers only, it may not make sense to force a VIP customer to call you every time he wants to reset a password or update a billing address. So aligning your communication channel with the value of your interactions isn’t just about minimising your operating costs; it’s also about optimising your customer’s experience and building trust with your brand.

10. Personalise your calls to action and create urgency.

Once you’ve clearly understood what your visitors are about, defined your personas, mapped out your engagement scenarios, and aligned your communication channels, you’re in a much better position to generate some big results by only making small changes to your website. Human beings have an innate tendency for procrastination. The more complex the product or service you are selling, the more consideration is required and the higher the tendency for procrastination. The guerrilla marketer will strive to create a perpetual sense of urgency. Urgency can be a time condition such as “This offer is only available for the next 24 hours”. Or it might be “Hurry—there are only three seats left” or “Get a month free if you book before the end of the month” or even “Buy it before your neighbor or your competitor buys it.”

Further, consider adding a personal and local element to the messaging that’s specific to each persona. Also examine how you can further personalise your calls-to-action with consideration of the customer’s history, past purchases, and preferences. Don’t over-promise, and be mindful of the difference between major relative gains and minor absolute gains. Sometimes a 5% lift in a conversion rate for a traffic segment that contains several hundred thousand visitors can lead to millions of dollars.

Conclusion

To thrive in the “age of the connected customer”, the guerrilla marketer will use all the tools at her disposal to paint an accurate picture of her visitors. Once she’s done that, she will be able to map engagement scenarios that connect with each persona through each stage of the customer lifecycle. Finally, she can quickly produce spectacular results by personalising the calls-to-action on her site and creating deep connections with her customers.

Where marketers have traditionally had to manage a trade-off between short-term sales and the customer experience, guerrilla marketers are now able to enjoy the best of both worlds, creating win-win situations for all stakeholders.

The Guerrilla Marketer’s Three Elements of a Powerful Call to Action

1. Relevant - Is your message relevant to your visitor’s wants/needs/ desires (search query, clickstream, location)?
2. Valuable - Does your visitor see the value and know why you are the right solution? What’s in it for him?
3. Urgent - Has a sense of urgency been created? Is it obvious what the visitor needs to do next? Have you given her the confidence to take that action?