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Welcome to the
March 2007 issue of
“Creating Marketing Magic.”
Expectations are
everything….
Have you ever
gone to a restaurant after hearing rave reviews,
only to be disappointed by what might have been a
great meal, had your expectations been in line? Or, have you ever gone to see a movie
after your friends and family all told you how
FABULOUS it was, only to be disappointed?
Unrealistic expectations not only have the power to sabotage
entertainment, they can also derail even the most
brilliant marketing efforts.
If you’ve been attending free seminars put on by any
of the many marketing info gurus out there, I can
almost guarantee you that you’re not getting the
information necessary to set realistic expectations
for your marketing. In general, free teleseminars
don’t get filled by the promoter expounding upon the
joys of realistic expectations.
To give you an example of what “realistic”
expectations look like, I’d like to introduce you to
an internet travel site called Expedia.com.
Did you hear that? The Expedia jingle? I did as I
typed the name. A well written, catchy jingle
delivered repeatedly is worth its weight in gold and
when you can get the public to hear your name in the
form of a jingle, well it just doesn’t get any
better than that! But for now, let’s look at the
role expectations are playing in Expedia’s rise to
success.
The story continues here....
Each year, literally millions of people visit the
state of the art, database driven multi million
dollar Expedia.com website. The ease of use of this
incredibly complex site is a testimony to its
developers. While the Expedia site gets hundreds of
thousands of visitors each month, of those visitors,
only a tiny fraction, averaging less than 5%, become
paying customers of Expedia.
Expedia has built and maintained a multimillion
dollar travel information database which it allows
anyone to freely use despite the fact that 95 out of
100 people never sign up for Expedia’s services.
It’s all about expectations. Expedia doesn’t expect
100% of their visitors to become customers. Expedia
EXPECTS that a large portion of their
visitors will use their site to plan a trip only to
go book that trip with another web site or service.
That’s fine with Expedia. See, Expedia knows that in
the information age, on the leading information
source (the internet) that they’re not going to win
them all. As a matter of fact, they probably
recognize that they’re never going to convert more
than 5%.of their visitors to customers.
However, by creating a free resource used by
MILLIONS, they increase the number of sales
they make by increasing the number of visitors to
the site.
And this is where expectations come in. By
recognizing that 5% is a darned good return on any
direct marketing type campaign, instead of investing
time, money and energy to raise that figure to 6 % or even 7 %,
Expedia instead focuses upon increasing the number
of visitors to the site by running those ads which
have so successfully imprinted the Expedia.com
jingle on my brain (and perhaps yours too). By
recognizing that a 5% conversion rate is realistic
(some sites rejoice when their sales conversion
rates inch up to 1.5%), instead of pouring
bad money after good trying to inch up their
conversion rate, Expedia invests those dollars where
they will have the most impact upon the bottom line.
BRILLIANT!
New business owners usually have the hardest time
with setting "realistic expectations".
I have a client
who has done EVERYTHING right. She tightly targeted
not only her marketing efforts to focus on a
specific target or niche audience. Not only
was her marketing tightly targeted, she even tightly
targeted her product offering. Even though she
began this process long before I had written my
book, she had followed the steps outlined in the
book beautifully.
Her product was not only tightly targeted to a
specific market, it also addressed an issue which
literally CONSUMED her audience.
So, it wasn't
surprising that when we redesigned her web presence
and launched a newsletter, that she had phenomenal
success. After 6 months, she had a 76% sign up
rate for her newsletter on her web site. That meant
that out of 100 visitors to her site, 76 were
signing up for her newsletter. (For the rest of us,
an average sign up rate for an online newsletter is
about 13 %.)
Even better,
those subscribers were actively reading the
newsletter, sending the newsletter to their
colleagues and even writing testimonials for my
client ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER.
Subscribers were also quick to act when my client
offered a special price on her product offerings
over the holidays. Sounds like perfection, doesn't
it?
Now, as someone who has experience in this arena, I
was VERY pleased with my client’s success. She had
tightly targeted not only her marketing materials,
but also her product offering and as a result, she
was seeing outstanding results in a relatively short
period of time.
Unfortunately, my client wasn’t pleased. As a matter
of fact, my client was upset. Imagine my surprise to
get an email from her expressing her displeasure.
Turns out, she had been making the "info guru free
teleclass" rounds and as a result, her expectations
were really out of line.
Fortunately, she had an experienced guide on her
side and I was able to help her adjust her
expectations. I ran some traffic analysis reports,
which revealed her incredible sign up rate. I was
able to convince her that changing the content
wasn’t the solution, that more traffic to her site
was the answer.
Our new focus
became driving more people to the site instead of
spinning our wheels, making changes to copy to
increase an already “unrealistic” sign up rate. I
would be MORE than happy to have the sign up rate
actually drop as a percentage of visitors as long as
the overall TREND of more subscribers continues....
and better yet, if her conversion of subscribers to
purchasers continues to climb as well!
As a result of this experience, now when I begin
working with a client, the first few sessions are ALL about setting realistic
expectations. If I’d had that kind of “intake” with
my client mentioned above, she would have joined me
in rejoicing instead of being disappointed by her
initial results.
If you need help with defining realistic
expectations, feel free to .
Find My Niche and Creating Marketing Magic
are written Kathy Hendershot-Hurd who
is the founder of Virtual Impax, a small business
marketing consulting firm and the author of
"Beyond
the Niche"
available at online book stores everywhere.
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