The Power of Free Trials

This week I was surfing the web looking at different types of offers and couldn't help but think about all of the different approaches to getting prospects further along in the purchase decision funnel. This is one of the most important areas that we, as marketers, can focus on.

One type of sales/marketing promotion that I'm seeing quite a bit of is the free trial. Online, the way this generally works is to offer a 7 day or 30 day free trial.  When signing up for the offer, you are asked to enter your credit card information. Upon trial expiration, you're charged the full amount for your product or service.

Many services are subscription based too, charging your credit card a recurring fee. Subscription sites are a great way deliver information and provide a great deal of value. These sites, and others like them, are using free trials to allow you to experience the product or offering. Those who continue on with the product or service are more loyal and better informed about what they are buying.

I know a number of Internet marketers who offer subscription based services and they claim a much higher level of engagement among customers and higher degree of satisfaction. The question I have to ask myself as a marketer is how I can apply this methodology (free trial) to my own products and services?

This week, think about the products you're marketing or selling. Is there a way to give your prospect a sample of what you offer? If you are offering an informational product, can you share the first chapter or first couple of pages (..as I have with my book, SEO Made Simple)?  Can you offer a small sample of your physical product? If you are a retail store, can you construct product samples that would allow prospective customers to take something home and try it out for a short period - charging them if the item is not returned or returned late?

I realize that free trials aren't ideal for everyone or every product.  None-the-less, they force us rethink how we expose our prospects and services to our target market.  If free trials aren't viable for your business perhaps they can encourage you to rethink the payment model for your products or services.  Can users buy a basic service (sample) and then pay for the standard or platinum service?  What type of upgrades can you offer - adding features beyond an initial purchase.

By rethinking the value of a trial you can take your marketing to the next level.  The key is to experiment with different offers.  Measure how many prospects take you up on the initial offer and then the upsell or ongoing subscription.  It's important to focus on life time customer value, not just the initial purchase price.

Let me know if you're usin free trials and how successfuly they are for you!

The Most Powerful Form of Marketing: WOM

I'm often asked, "What is the most effective form of marketing?"  To which I respond, "word of mouth."  Nothing is as effective as word-of-mouth marketing.  The real question is how to generate word of mouth from your customers on a regular basis.  There are a variety of ways to generate word-of-mouth marketing and many are overlooked by companies large and small.

One of the best ways to generate a referral is with a strong customer advocacy campaign.  Do you honor and reward your best customers?  When customers are celebrated, there's lots to talk about.  You can share their honor with others in their segment or group.  Additionally, you can repackage the information in the form of news or video, easily distributed throughout the Web.  This creates awareness and interest for your product or service.

I personally like using surveys to get at the heart of what your customers like and don't like about your products or services.  By utilizing open ended questions like, "Who do you know who could benefit from our product?"  Experiment with different ways for generating referrals from surveys that are personalized and based on customer insights.

Another great way to create word-of-mouth is through a customer referral campaign.  Referral campaigns are simple to implement but require a solid understanding of your audience.  By asking and rewarding your customers for referrals, you can have them do the selling for you.  This type of personal selling is one of the most effective.  Consider low cost methods of rewarding your customers for referrals.  This could be a discount on existing services or added bonuses.

Other word-of-mouth campaigns may be effective in utilizing testimonials.  Today, with the help of blogs, video, and web sites, when customers have a good experience they have lots of ways to share it.  The challenge is to direct your customers to promote good experiences, not bad.  Although I've tried to solve this dilemma for over a decade, the only discovery I've made is that you have to take the good with the bad.

There's actually a silver lining here.  Research has shown that when customer comments contain both positive and negative feedback, they are more believable.  The key is to encourage your customers to speak up about positive experiences and downplay the negative ones.  When you receive or come across negative comments, respond to them - work with your customers to make things right.  After that, let them go.  The balance of positive and negative works in your favor.

Word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.  Think of ways to elicit positive feedback from customers.  If you focus on generating word-of-mouth, you'll quickly find a number of methods for encouraging referrals from your customers. 

Making Money With Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Whether you've been using AdWords for years or have never even heard of pay-per-click advertising (PPC), know that it's an essential part of any Integrated marketing program.  I recently provided some of my most valuable pay-per-click advertising secrets on an interview with Jonathan Taylor and Russell Portwood at Blog Talk Radio (listen here).  During the interview we discussed how to get started with Google AdWords and some valuable secrets for making money online.

If you're not running any campaigns on Google AdWords, I suggest that you open an account.  The beauty of PPC advertising is that you only pay when an individual clicks on one of your ads.  You might have tried PPC in the past and generated a lot of clicks but no conversions.  Perhaps you tried it for a short while and found it too complicated to manage.  I know how you feel...

The Long PPC Road

When I started in Internet marketing, pay-per-click was just coming on to the scene.  The premise was great, only paying for an action, but the results weren't so good.  Over time, as the tracking become more sophisticated and the quality of analytics improved, results started to improve.  I've spent over 5 years making small distinctions in pay-per-click advertising campaigns that have dramatically improved my results.

Many people believe that to get quality traffic you need to spend a ton of money or always be in the #1 paid position.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Some of my highest converting keywords cost the least.  Additionally, and here's a free tip, I often get higher conversions when my ad shows in positions 3 - 6.  I find that prospects clicking in the 'sweet spot' are more buying oriented than just doing research.

To be effective with PPC, you need to run a number of campaigns on your own.  I attended at least half a dozen workshops on pay-per-click advertising and spent close to $1,000 on so called PPC courses only to find that there wasn't a lot of "new" information designed to improve the effectiveness of my campaigns.  What I learned through trial and error was certainly more valuable.  Always seek hands-on experience if you wish to be success.

PPC Made Simple

In a couple of months, I'll be sharing everything I know about PPC advertising in my next book, "PPC Made Simple."  Until then, I wanted to share a few tips you can use right away to start improving campaign performance.

1.  Set a budget of $10 - $20/day.  It doesn't take much to determine if a particular type of PPC campaign is going to be profitable.  Start with a small budget to generate clicks and watch your campaign closely.  Usually, for around $100 you can determine whether or not you'll be successful.

2.  Do your keyword research.  Start with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find frequently searched upon terms.  In addition, do some competitive research using any one of dozens of tools that reveal what terms your competitors are bidding on.  Once you've compiled a list, focus on buying keywords.  Use the Microsoft Commercial Intent tool to optimize your keyword list.

3.  Use a tool like the Google AdWords Editor to help manage your campaigns. The tool costs nothing and can help you stay on top of the performance of your campaign.  Additionally, you can easily manage multiple campaigns simultaneously.

4.  Use the AdWords Dashboard.  As usual, Google AdWords comes with it's own resources for evaluating campaign effectiveness.  Learn the value of your AdWords dashboard.  This gives you information about your click-through-rate, cost per click, and overall campaign metrics.  The more you understand the data being provided, the more effective you can make your campaign.

5.  Implement Google Conversion Tracking.  When you implement conversion tracking, you can quickly and easily see which keywords and ads drive sales.  This is the most important aspect of any PPC effort and essential for long term success.  If you know which keyword/ad combination is most effective, you can optimize your PPC budget.

These are just a few tips to help you improve the performance of your pay-per-click marketing campaigns.  Again, it's essential that you start using Google AdWords in order to learn how to implement successful campaigns.  Even though you may have four or five campaigns that don't generate a favorable return, one profitable campaign can more than make up for it.

Once you launch your campaign, utilize the metrics provided by Google to refine and improve your campaign.  By learning the ins and outs of pay-per-click advertising you are improving your overall knowledge of Internet marketing and finding new ways to promote your products or services.  In addition to generating sales, PPC is a great tool for lead generation as well.

Watching the Super Bowl...

Each year I look forward to watching the Super Bowl.  Even though my favorite team wasn't playing this year, there's just something about seeing one of the year's biggest events.  I suppose the real reason why I've always tuned in to the Super Bowl is because I'm simply interested in the commercials.  In addition to watching the ads, I'm equally curious as to whom the new advertisers are as well as who continues to spend the big bucks year after year.

This year was a combination of movie previews and some new advertisers as well as the traditional advertisers like GoDaddy and Budweiser.  Although I saw more station programming ads than ever before.  I guess the network had a little difficulty selling out all of their ad space!

Is it worth the price of advertising?

I thought a number of this year's commercials were pretty underwhelming (which seems to be more true each year).  Personlly, whether Dockers is showing a bunch of men walking through a pasture without their pants or Careerbuilder gives us an office tour where employees have nothing but their underwear on, I could care less.  From my perspective, most the advertisers just don't get it.  The only exception is perhaps Bud Light where their audience is the exact segment that's watching the game - those who attend or watch sporting events.  Because of their significant presence, I'm sure they got a pretty favorable price for all of their exposure.

Even so, the purpose of advertising is to engage, brand, and create awareness.  Effective advertising is also capable of measuring a result.  Other than GoDaddy, who gives some of their target audience a reason to go online, there was no real direct response vehicle on any of the ads.  Can you say "missed opportunity"?  That is, if you're trying to reach millenials or even thirty-somethings.  Maybe I missed it, but no references to social media (Facebook or Twitter) or even texting.  Although I'm sure that plenty of people were texting during the game.

The Super Bowl is also a decent platform for new product launches from my perspective.  FLO TV was completely new to me and I didn't even realize that such a device existed.  But without any call to action that was personally relevant to me, I'll probably forget about it in morning.

I guess the advertisers who are spending the bucks are so certain of the effectiveness of their ads that they don't need to measure their results-although I find that impossible to believe. If advertising is still based on impressions, and not action, then it still has a very long way to go.  This is why TV advertising continues to slow and more marketers are taking to the web. Not only is it measurable, but many advertisers only pay for action. 

What's the real challenge?

Without direct response, how do these advertisers know if their advertising is generating the result they're looking for?  I wonder if they even thought about the goals of their campaign.  A house made of full cans of Bud Light - cute.. but was it worth the $1M Budweiser had to pay for it?  Personally I like to know if each dollar I spend delivers a positive return.  I guess that's why I spend most of my money on online advertising and little else.

Part of the reason why I don't quite understand Super Bowl advertising is because I don't understand the target market.  It seems to me that everyone from 8 - 80 is probably watching the game.  That's probably why the Who was the half time entertainment.  The Who were big before I was born but I still thought they were pretty good.  I'm just surprised they weren't wearing Pepsi T-shirts, although the drummer's cybals seemed to be painted with Pepsi colors. 

As long as there's TV, on the tube or your computer, there will be advertising.  You wont see any of the companies I consult for advertising on the Super Bowl.  But then again, when everyone is watching TV on their computers, I might not be able to avoid taking the plunge.  And that day is soon upon us.  It's already begun and the next few years will likely complete the transition.  Super Bowl here we come!