Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I'm guessing that your little form results in a form letter back to them with the specific information desired.

But why not simply have the information they desire online to start with, and have them contact you if/when they want more information? That will keep your inquiries further along in the sales process.

Dear Leica

Because of the personally sensitive nature of DNA testing, on this occasion, I have to disagree with Jay’s suggestion. Putting the information you send back to a potential customer on the site raises the bar to someone making a tentative enquiry, especially if they are a little nervous about what they are doing. Replacing the personalised email or letter with a page of web content will only justify itself if the smaller numbers of enquirers. You are essentially filtering out people who are not quite ready to commit to testing, rather than people who are not quite ready to pay your fees.

I think that the key to this is emotional engagement with the enquirer and in order to do this you need to be able to communicate with them on an on-going basis until they are confident enough to purchase as well as being financially willing to pay your fees.

Certainly the form has rather a lot of fields in it for a first time enquirer. When I viewed it, I had to reload the open form to get Google’s auto-complete function to work. You need to look at the coding in this area. In the UK, we can dispense with most address fields as a Postcode will fill in the address fields for you with the exception of the House number or name. I understand that such address databases can be rented or purchased in the USA and that a Zip code or a Zip Code + County / State field will complete the form for the enquirer.

As I believe that you are looking for engagement and commitment, you need to get the visitor to complete something and ideally to make a small purchase. Enquiries which result in no sale at the moment could be down to vacillation or dithering, a barrier which is considerably lowered once they have made some small purchase from you.

I believe that getting the customer to open an account with you for a nominal sum, giving them access to an email based customer service function, prior to making a major purchase is a valid option.

So if your email reply to the simplified form were to include the option of opening an account, backed by very high site security, for £5 or $10 both the emotional and the fiscal bar to the purchase of a test will drop considerably. This type of information could be provided on a separate form on your site, which more confident first time enquirers would be prepared to fill in. To my mind, this combines the advantages of further qualifying the prospect as in Jay’s example, but does not mean that you have no details of people who browsed but took it no further.

Current web-marketing research indicate that once the punter has made a small purchase and gained a positive customer service experience, they are then about 5 times more likely to go through to a sale. Once they have opened an account, this is relatively pain free as they will be able to order your main products without filling in a lot of additional detail. That might occur a week or a month after they have first visited you site. If they have in the meanwile researched other DNA profiling companies, it is likely that your’s is the only one they will have an account with. For reasons which have not been fully explained, they are more likely to trust your company in comparison to the competitors, simply because they have registered with you. You can even re-fund the small charge on the purchase of a full test.
This technique is used by B2C companies where there is an emotional barrier to making a purchase. It is not sufficient to overcome an objection on price.

As a matter of interest it is also used by those scallywags who call themselves “Internet Marketing Businesses” millionaires. Once a visitor to a “Make $$$ by setting up an online business using our products” (i.e. MLM in disguise) has made a nominal purchase and opened an account they are something like 90% more likely to purchase a course on Internet Marketing than people who do not make that small commitment. These figures are from the horses mouth, so I wouldn’t vouch for their accuracy, but as they continue to use the small purchase technique in every new “product launch” it is fair to assume that it works.

Another tip from B2C marketing and the Internet Marketing people is to ensure that when you respond to someone making an enquiry, the reply email, thanking them for their interest also contains a link to an order page, possibly with a discount or bonus as well as supplying the information they wanted.

I see this as a balancing act between the need to establish trust in your service and trust in your security whilst ensuring that you continue to collect the less committed enquirer’s basic contact details. This approach essentially gives you three bites of the cherry whilst moving the prospect towards closing a sale.

Summary:
• Simplify the form for initial contact to name, email and a zip code
• Offer the opportunity to open an account by having the enhanced details on the site and inviting the participant to give more detail.
Charge for this, but make it a small, nominal sum which is refundable
• Include an invitation to set up an account with your reply email and get Google to fill it in for you
• Continue the email dialogue through further offers until a purchase has occurred.

I’m only guessing here, but I would think that it is probably quite important to stop or reduce email contact one a test has been carried out. Unless, that is someone is worried about the paternity of rather a lot of children!

One last idea: In a sale like this, personal referral is probably quite useful. You could offer the account holder an incentive to refer to you, further people. I do not think for one moment that you would receive hundreds of referrals from hundreds of customers, but those which you do receive will be of a very high quality.

By the way; why did you cut back on PPPC with Google? As long as it is profitable it pays for itself. It reminds me of those companies which get rid of their most expensive sales staff (The best sales people because they earn a humongous bonus) and then wonder why their sales go through the floor. If your PPC advertising did not yield a profit, then you were right to can it, but so long as it breaks even, you should keep it going in order to capitalise of the long-tail buyers. By that I mean ditherers.




Best wishes


Steve Alker
Xspirt

Babbsela- Thanks for the input. I tend to agree our distributorship form has far less options. I will get the form shortened down, so it doesn't seem as daunting.

Jay- In a perfect world you would be right but you overestimate customers greatly...we actually have all the information anyone would need on our pages if they would bother to read and take the time. We have a page for every test we offer that stipulates price and a situation that would fit the need for this test. I just updated our FAQ's as well. The problem is no one reads them and I'm not about to refer a customer back to our website to find information. Its informal and cold given the situation they are in.

Mike- We are working on making our FAQ system searchable. (surprisingly none of our other competitors have done this) Regarding pricing you will find others you are cheaper but if you do some research you will find they have been around for no more than 5 years and are run out of university labs. We have tenure and an in-house laboratory. You wouldn't believe how incredibly competitive this industry is though. We are working on partnerships and we have a few law firms in our area who use us quite often.

steve- your response is very long and I need more time to read it in reply....

Thanks guys for your help, but I really need to know what I'm missing here. I have the customer's contacting us they are interested but somehow I can't get them to make the purchasing leap...

First, I would start by asking you some questions. Are you seeing traffic to your site but your conversions have dropped or has the traffic dropped off but the conversions are still high? (Also, if you are not already doing so and if you’re using Google AdWords, then I would use Google Analytics (free) to track traffic and conversions.)

If traffic has dropped, I’d reconsider the cut you made in PPC ads. If the ads worked (i.e. brought in leads at a cost that worked for you) then I’d keep them. However, if it’s the conversions that have dropped off but the traffic is still high I’d look into your landing pages and your calls to action.

I hope all your PPC ads do not take you to this same Contact Us form. If so, I would change this as well. I would make a different landing page and different call to action for each PPC word, customizing it for that specific word.

For example, for those that searched for “Paternity Tests”, I would create a landing page and call to action specifically geared to someone searching for these kind of service (i.e. a headline that draws them in -“It’s time you know once and for all” - or maybe something a little less lame, along with some compelling reasons to get the test and a simple call to action for more information).

Also, consider employing the help of the experts – Omniture, OrangeSoda and SEO.com are all in my neck of the woods and are great.

Good luck!

Steve- I like where you are going. I don't know how asking for them to open an account with us would go because basically we are used once and then happily forgotten about. If you want to contact me off forum and explain it further I would really appreciate it. I do agree that I should start sending them a link to our online forms so that if they are interested they don't have to look for it (though it is rather easy to find).

I would like to go ahead and state for the record that getting rid of PPC was the best idea we had. While I do understand the value, it wasn't working well for us. The fact that our sales were barely affected by this change proves it as well. I do appreciate the concern, but actually our SEO is far more fruitful.

Bill- We get good steady traffic to our page and I repeat DID NOT NOTICE A CHANGE WHEN DROPPING PPC. I do believe whenever we had it however that each PPC ad would direct you to the specific page it pertained to, i.e. a paternity ad would take you to our paternity test page...

Our SEO ranking could be better but we are working on creating more pages, adding more FAQ's, blogging on more sites, and more link exchanges...

I feel this would help everyone here is our site:
www.800dnaexam.com
navigate freely!

Going back to your original question - how can you get people "hooked" in a single communication. You can only "hook" them if you know exactly what they need and why (what is their specific problem). Is it idle curiosity? Are they considering a divorce? A lawsuit (if so, are your results admissible, even though an expert didn't gather the sample?)

There's not a single "hook" because there's not a single need. You need to find out more about their needs. If you can't get that information via an online form (since fewer are filling it out), then better web analytics should help you to find out who's searching and for what.

I do get a good understanding of what they want. I know they are at least interested in DNA Testing many time they will check the box that most applies.
I think this would be easier if you just critique this:



Dear "customer name"

Thank you for your inquiry.

I understand you are interested in "subject here"

To answer your question/address your concern, we do offer "service here" Our standard turn around time is 3-7 business days depending on the test option picked, and our cost begins at ""insert price" and can increase depending on many factors.

If you are interested in our services of have any further questions please feel free to contact me at anytime. My email address and phone number are listed below. Have a nice day.

Sincere regards,

Steve- for clarification that term is only used regarding our immigration cases...and other special circumstances. I apologize for the confusion.

I thought about special offers and I think we may go with a limited time offer...and we already offer comprehensive explanation of the results both online and a copy is included with the result when sent.

To be honest we don't offer the genealogy service, so letting them know their DNA will be in a giant database offers no value to them. We focus manly on Immigration and recently private forensics.

FYI: Immigration varies so much in price but our Forensic starts at $150.00 for basic profiling of a buccal swab...

Jay- so were you looking for something more like this...

Dear "Client Name Here"

Thank you for your inquiry.

I understand this is a difficult and confusing time for you. This is not an easy decision to make and you have questions that you need answered. I see that you are interested in our "insert test". You may be wondering if this is the correct test for you.

"Insert test" has an accuracy up to 99.9999% and can offer you the certainty you have been looking for. If you are interested in this test. Please click the link below and it will lead you to our order form.

If you still have questions, please feel free to contact me further. My email address and phone number are listed below.

Sincere regards,