When someone contacts you through your website the chance of a sale goes down the longer you delay a response. If you then sell to a global audience how do you handle time zones etc.

Even if you respond quickly do you follow up with yet further information?

If you are like most small to medium website owners and part time internet marketers, you don’t typically follow up fast enough.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip away from your grasp! This prospect is a potential customer who has already demonstrated they may have been very interested in your products by contacting in the first instance. Sometimes, when the first response gets in they may be too busy to make a purchase and a further trigger with re-instate that interest.

Often, buyers will test a website and purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you show interest. If nothing arrives through a follow up message, they may well take the business elsewhere.

Are you losing money due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process, you need to implement a follow up system! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, personally and in a timely manner, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.
Consistent and timely follow up gets results!

One basic technique often used is to add everyone to a list and then email or broadcast news to the whole list at the same time. Due to the general broadcast the news tends to be generic. You would also write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone on the list. While this technique does help, it tends to return only a small degree of success.  Why isn’t the list technique” very effective?

* It is NOT consistent. You tend to only send out follow up messages when the company has news.
* Sent messages tend to be generic news and don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. They can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter!
* Messages convey a generic impersonal mentality to your potential customers.

What follow up method should you use?

You need to be personal and have the appearance of 1-2-1 communication. Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages. This WILL dramatically increase sales! The only problem is to set this system up, you need to do some planning.

You need to develop your follow up messages. A first informative letter and then a second letter starts the follow up process. This second letter should go into more detail than the first letter stressing the advantages of your products or services!

The next 2-4 follow up messages should be short and specific. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. All letters should be written so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see get the message.

The next couple of follow up messages should place a bit of pressure and create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. For example, make a special offer with an end date, giving a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

The next couple of messages need to try and discover why they have not purchased. Phrase each in the form of a question, asking why they have not placed an order? The aim is to get them to email a response and start a conversation. Typical questions include: if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features. The longer a lead waits it becomes less likely they will order but any feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order.

We now have the mails but we now need to think about timing. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up! Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-4 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Your prospect is now cold and so send the final follow up messages later on at least 4 days apart. As they probably don’t want to buy you don’t want to annoy them!

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

With email marketing tools it is very easy to manage your lists, follow up emails and web forms to capture the emails in the first instance.  Any email tool should also provide reliable non-spam delivery and have detailed tracking of who clicks and signs up etc.

So what do we mean by split testing?

• For every keyword targeted we will create two ads with slightly different content.
• These are then monitored daily by our marketing professionals and we will identify a winner. A winner is where we get the best click rate that converts to a buyer, we have to get the click that converts as this tells us the content of the landing page (product or service) is what the person expected when they clicked.
• For the ad that didn’t win we adjust the text and then start to monitor the two new ads.
• This is repeated continually until we have constant dead heats, or we have an excellent acceptable conversion rate.

When we have finally settled on this winning ad we can then start to execute standard search engine optimisation on the landing page against the winning ads keywords, this can’t be done until we have a stable winning ad. Then as the click through rate increases in organic search results we can reduce our spend on the PPC campaign and re-focus the spending to new areas.

This strategy is often not used as it takes time, but at Praeparo we have the people and tools set-up to handle 100′s and potentially 1000′s of ads per customer based on a split test per keyword, where a campaign can have many keywords. See our Pay Per Click Services page for more information.

What do you need to do?

• Decide how you will track success. Often this is easy…it’s when you make a product sale, other times it can be harder to spot. If you’re a selling high value services, you’ll most likely be tracking leads and not sales.
• Decide how to assign a monetary value to leads so you can determine how much advertising to spend in order to get it.
• Do the keyword research.  Identify the core ones and include people outside of the business, look at the advertisers who already show on the results and then use other tools to expand this core list.
• Build focused landing pages. You may want different potential customers to go to different pages within your site. This is often the case to enable you to highlight the different value propositions to solve their particular problem.
• Set up your adwords campaign using the keywords and landing pages.
• Monitor and test; use split testing, adjust bids and remove non-performing keywords …EVERY DAY.
• Then SWITCH! As soon as a great term is found that returns a high value you must start the search engine optimisation (SEO) process for that term so you get natural or organic search engine results (SERPs). Over time you can then reduce the PPC ads on that term and put your money into finding the next winner.

This probably looks complicated and overwhelming. However, if you know what you’re doing you can get a good return on any investment. Praeparo can help and with just a bit of effort on your part, you can beat the opposition.

Too often website owners believe Page Rank is SEO. Well it is not, with over 200 factors that Google uses Page Rank is only one.

Praeparo believes you need to get your own website in order first! Make sure your URL, page title & description, content headers and actual content should all be good and be targetted at what the user wants and expects on the topic concerned.

Once content on an individual page is good then make sure it is a good fit into the overall website through internal linking with appropriate anchor text.

Now with good content it will start to return results from Google SERPS. To get better results we need people to find it and start talking about the page, viral marketing is the best where other people like the content and so will talk about it on blogs or sites like Twitter and facebook.

In summary don’t spend too much time on getting external links and monitoring your Page Rank until you get your website in order!

Any internet marketing campaign needs to be a partnership between the website designer, website developer, seo expert and business owner. This partnership must have clear boundaries and responsibilities and most important of all needs to be managed by the business owner.

The first step is to recruit and SEO expert this can be by taking on a full time employee, freelance SEO consultant or working with an SEO company or agency like Praeparo. When selecting one of the above options you have to remember that SEO is becoming specialised and whomever is used must keep up to date with all new movements in the SEO field.

Now we have SEO handled clear communication must be put in place as optimisation if done at website design and development stages saves a lot of money down the line. All planned changes need to be sent out for impact and the changes only actioned once all impacts have been received back. This means you get a full view design – development – marketing and business.

To help with communication an SEO strategy and plan should be created that provides clear guidance as to what is to be achieved in the search engine optimisation or marketing campaign. This to include a prioritisation of the existing website and a plan to change or optimise each page. Some top priority pages will need to be modified as soon as possible but others can wait. If this plan is in place then any website change request can also then make a change based on the optimisation plan. This means we optimise the lower priority pages through the standard website maintenance cycles.

Reports should be created and communicated at least monthly so everyone knows how the optimisation campaign is going.

Remember the more successful you are the more you competitors will copy and try to beat you. All search engine marking campaigns need to be continually running to make sure you get to the top and stay on the top.

Praeparo SEO experts can either take on your whole strategy or work on aspects of your optimisation. We are experienced and happy to work at all levels and experts in helping the small to medium business that does not have the time in-house to run and execute a campaign efficiently.

In using our website analysis you can see the market focus for each page which is what the search engine believe the page is about. If this is not your chosen keywords then you need to adjust your content to change the focus. Often you will be surprised that menus and footers can impact your focus.

The internet has lots of articles about Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and its relation to search engine optimisation. Basically this is what we described above, a way to discover what text is about. In our opinion you don’t need to look at the mathematics behind LSI but just stick to the simple rules of:

1. Select a primary keyword phrase for the page.
2. Write content on the page that does include the keyword phrase but also uses other words to describe the same topic.
3. Check what you have written by removing the keyword phrase and seeing if the text left indicates the topic referred to by the keyword phrase

At Praeparo we believe you need to get your website in order before you go for a large off-page optimisation campaign. In a lot of cases the on-page optimisation is all you need to do to get more visitors.

Praeparo thinks this is a good idea as we all should be creating a good user experience. Page load time is critical in a user experience as if we can’t convince the user the site is good in a few seconds they will just bounce.

The only area of concern is that some sites to create a good user experience are rich in content that slows the page down. This is acknowledged and accepted by the users BUT how will Google handle this? In this case we should just accept that these pages will not rank so high and thus create other more focused landing pages that then direct to the slower pages for more information.

Very important for all website owners to evaluate page speed and create an action plan to rectify any pain points. This does not have to be expensive, we suggest find the quick wins and make any changes as part of your usual maintenance or content refresh processes.

But remember DON’T PANIC as content is still the leading factor. Page speed is only a very small element of the overall ranking algorithms.

If you have concerns please get in touch with Praeparo and we can quickly help you find out if you have a problem or not.

By optimised we are not talking about a technical web developer just adding some keywords into the address bar URL or some relevant keyword titles, descriptions based on the page content. We are talking about applying marketing principles to each page.

Praeparo believes SEO is about actually attaining marketing goals. These goals are not just about traffic but more linked to conversions.

So how do we get a marketing optimised website? Website optimisation needs to take the marketing goals and link these to a specific website page(s). Once this is done we have a goal to achieve and the page needs to be worked to meet this goal. Items to consider are:

• Keyword Research: We need to understand the keywords that Search Engine users type that we want to get our website page in front of.
• Sales Pitch: Treat the Search Engine Results (SERPs) as a sales advert. We need to convince the viewer in around 160 characters that our page is relevant – we need to sell our landing page.
• Relevant Page: The landing page needs to clearly match the sales pitch in our SERPs advert, if not the visitor will just leave [bounce].
• Call to Action: The page needs to get the visitor to convert, i.e. achieve the marketing goal.
• Secondary Action: We need to handle a secondary option for the visitor just in case the page is OK but not quite what they were looking for. This is about keeping them interested and on the site by going to a secondary page.

The web site design and development process needs to be tightly integrated into the marketing plan so that as new content is delivered it has a clear objective.

In conclusion, website optimisation is about meeting marketing goals and optimising for those goals. Thus, you can’t optimise a website without having first developed a Digital Marketing strategy or plan.

Praeparo located between Berkhamsted and Aylesbury on the Bucks and Herts border, specialises in creating and marketing unique, exciting and accessible web pages that really allow your business to succeed on the web. Whether you want your website to showcase your business, to sell products online, or to be dynamic database driven, our web designers can provide carefully tailored solutions for each of these. Once you have an exciting website our hosting services ensure it is always available and our marketeers can provide a digital marketing strategy and search engine optimisation service that will ensure you are found within the search engines.

Our SEO Services Guide or Online Marketing Guide below gives details an ideas about what you must be considering in any digital marketing strategy:

Praeparo Online Marketing Services Guide

Praeparo believes one size does NOT fit all so just pick up the phone (01296 320005) and have a chat about your requirements!

Praeparo are offering a 50% reduction on our strategy workshop was £700 now £350.

For this you get an expert on site for a day to discuss your website and internet marketing strategy and help you validate the current plan and discuss improvements and way forwards.

This is not a formal report generation meeting but a real person sitting down with yourselves and talking through ideas. We admit that we may not have all the answers but will either point you at a relevant resource to get an answer or we will take away the question and get back to you.

The agenda can be anything you want but we typically think a discussion around:

• Where you currently think you are?
• Where you think you are going?
• Gap analysis between you current and future state.
• Start to discuss how the gaps can be addresses.

Use our contact form or give us a call on 01296 320005 to start the ball rolling.

Remember, visitors hitting your website and thus purchasing don’t come by accident, as the internet gets more competitive you need to be on top of what your competitors are doing.

Note: onsite visit for UK customer within 150 miles of postcode HP22. Other will be considered but travel may incur a small charge.