MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

“The first step in exceeding your customer’s expectations is to know those expectations.”

-Roy H. Williams, Author and Marketing Consultant, Wizard of Ads trilogy

One way to know your customers’ expectations is to set them yourself. Recently, as we’ve been looking for speakers and case studies for Lead Gen Summit 2013, I’ve come across a few different lead generation pages that failed to meet the very expectations set by prior stages in the funnel.

For that reason, I thought it would be helpful to review six steps you can use to set expectations for your customers. But first, let’s look at a three-part process an insurance website requires to receive a quote on home insurance, and how it incorrectly sets customers’ expectations.

On the homepage, visitors see three main objectives: auto insurance, home insurance and business insurance. Each call-to-action promises an instant quote, and that message sets a certain expectation in the minds of customers.

Clicking on that button with that expectation, and prior experiences, I expected to fill out information about the home, myself and my desired coverage. I also expected to either receive the quote on a follow-up page or to receive it in an email immediately after I submitted the form.

Anything other than those two options and the process would come up short of my expectations. What else would you expect with a word like “instant” in the call-to-action?

The second step in the quote process includes a simple form, from which I immediately deduce a quote will not be coming from – despite the CTA’s promise. There is not enough information gathered to calculate even a basic quote.

Frustrated by the misleading CTAs, I went back to Google and continued my search on another website. But, to show you the full process, I returned to the form to see what hid on the other side. And, no surprise here, it wasn’t a quote. In fact, the subsequent page tells me a representative will contact me, which is the first time I’ve learned of the required contact to receive my quote. I wanted an instant quote, not a sales pitch.

The company sets customers’ expectations on the homepage and reaffirms them with “Get My Quote” after the form. However, customers find themselves without a quote and are left with anxiety over a looming phone call they didn’t want or expect.

Now that you’ve seen a subpar example of setting expectations, I’ll use that example to illustrate a better way to meet customer expectations, using these six steps:

Step #1: Know the expectation you want to set

You can’t properly set expectations if you don’t know what you want them to be. Like Stephen R. Covey’s second habit, you must begin with the end in mind. What will visitors gain from filling out your lead gen form? When will they receive that benefit? How will they receive it? Through email, phone call, mail or something else?

For example, if you want to provide leads with a free special report, you need to determine when and how they’ll receive it. Will they receive a hard copy in the mail in two weeks? How about in an email within 24 hours? Or, can they instantly download a PDF version?

When, what, where, why and how. These are factors potential leads will weigh to determine if the cost of their personal information is worth the value you are offering in exchange.

Once you know what your customers will experience through your lead gen funnel, then you can begin to set expectations based on that experience.

Step #2: Establish expectations using calls-to-action early in the funnel

You want to use any calls-to-action early in the customer decision-making process page to begin setting expectations. That could include a button on the homepage like the above example, a PPC ad, an email hyperlink, a Twitter post, and the list could on and on. You want to have continuity between all parts of your conversion process, so each part the customer interacts with should promote the value of converting.

Look at the example homepage. The yellow call-to-action (CTA) buttons provide direct value, which is a good practice to follow. Many consumers looking for a quote to compare to others don’t want to wait, and they’ll find high value in an instant quote.

This would have been a great way to show the value of the click and the value of the rest of the quote process if the website carried through with the promise.

However, because the quote is anything but instant, customers now have incorrect and misleading expectations.

The button could leave out the word “instant” and still follow through. This leaves out the required phone call to receive the quote, which could cause some visitors to feel misled.

You want to use as much real value as you can to entice the click. So, if the company wanted to accurately set up customers’ expectation and earn the click, it might use call-to-action copy such as “Request a Quote” or “Learn How to Get a Quote.”

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In our recently released MarketingSherpa 2012 Website Optimization Benchmark Report, we asked about average conversion rates …

Q. Please write in your organization’s average conversion rate.

Click to enalrge

It’s human nature to see a number and to instantly think of it as a fact, so let me first briefly mention the limits of numbers. Just because you see the numbers above, don’t assume that all of your, for example, media and publishing competitors are getting 10% conversion rates for every offer.

These numbers are simply meant to give you a general idea of how certain industries are fairing as you work on your own conversion rate optimization efforts.

“Where ever you are, you should also try to figure out how you can improve your conversion rate 5-10% monthly,” is how Bryan Eisenberg, Managing Partner, Eisenberg Holdings, put it in “Average Conversion Rate by Industry 2012.”

  Read more…

According to the 2012 MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report, 54% of marketers use content marketing as a lead generation tactic.

Join Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS, this Wednesday for our next free Web clinic with – 5 Steps to Effective Content Marketing: How to extract the maximum revenue from your content – to learn from our recent discoveries about optimizing content marketing.

But before we shared our content marketing discoveries, we wanted to learn what content marketing tactics have worked for you. Here are our favorite responses from your peers …

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Website optimization helps you get a better return out of the money you’re already spending to drive traffic to your site.

In Wednesday’s free Web clinic at 4 p.m. EDT – “See the Research Applied Live: Dr. McGlaughlin personally optimizes your landing pages” – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin will offer live optimization suggestions for audience-submitted webpages to give you ideas for improvements you can make to your own website.

First, we asked your peers what website optimization tactics worked for them. Here are a few of the responses that we thought were the most helpful …

Keeping offers to just the action we want the prospect to take

Any more than one available action leads to confusion. One other thing we find important is having a “take action” button above the fold on a webpage as well as one at the bottom, and depending on the length of the copy, we may add another somewhere else. Of course, even with multiple buttons, they all go to the same offer.

– David Hawke, Lead Generation Specialist, Marketing Velocity

Address optimization over a series of steps so that you can appropriately manage the flow on effects of each change as it impacts the business

We manage a website and online strategy for an organization that provides vehicle transportation services. From the outset, we worked with this company to determine their target market (married professional women with a young family who are having to relocate due to a change in job, most often their husband is the reason for the relocation) so that it would be designed and built to best match their target as much as possible (a pseudo-Agile approach was used).

The call-to-action for the website started out being: ask visitors to ring for a quote. After the business began getting too many calls in their call center, we were asked to change the call-to-action.

The website call-to-action was redesigned to focus on getting visitors to complete an online quote request form (this was a legacy solution with a few problems that was utilized until something with a more appropriate user interface and user experience could be implemented).

After this change, there was a drop off in calls to the call center and some increased traffic to the quote form. However, the call center began to report more inquiries from people not knowing where to find the online form when going to the website (something we had also observed in the analytics).

Rather than continue on with looking at problems with conversion for the call-to-action, we focused on the conversion problem that was problematic for the business.

To make access to the quote form more visible, we first changed the menu item in the nav to be a contrasting color, which marginally increased the clickthrough rate to the quote form.

Next, a new 300 x 100 button was added to a right-hand sidebar on all pages of the website. This created an almost immediate increase in the number of people visiting the quote form, though the call center was still reporting people who couldn’t find it.

Testing then began on color and font style, changing from white text on a red button to the most successful combination of black text on a yellow-orange colored button.

The improvement from this testing showed up first in analytics and then from the call center.

By keeping optimization aligned with the impacts to the business, we have been able to increase their trust in our ability to get them outcomes they want. It has also given the client confidence that their online marketing is actually working, as well as the data, information and insights that they had been missing previously so that they could make informed business decisions.

– Indra Chandon, Director of Research and Internet Marketing Strategies, Semantia Pty Ltd

Lead generation strategy reduces cost per acquisition from $9.46 to $1.10, nets 26.7% conversion rate

In the past, I’ve set up a system that is able to update dynamic text in multiple areas on a landing page through WordPress, so you can create hundreds of pages with dynamic text really easily. It’s great for targeting specific keywords on AdWords and improving quality score.

You basically create the page and have all the elements that you want dynamic. So once all the code is set up, you’d just write the keyword or phrase into the post title and it updates the whole page automatically – page titles, headline titles and all other dynamic inserts you choose. You can even do it with images if you want to take it a step further.

I made a short YouTube video about it.

I found this to be really successful in targeting specific keywords on AdWords and converting new leads.

There is also usually such a lag in dev time inside companies to keep up with marketing requirements. I found this to be a great way to be able to optimize and test new ideas faster without getting stuck in slow dev cycles.

– Daniel Kohn, founder and Marketing Director, The Crown Agency

Related Resources:

See the Research Applied Live: Dr. McGlaughlin personally optimizes your landing pages — Wed., Sept. 19, 2012 at 4 p.m.

Website Optimization: How you can improve conversion by finding your buried treasure

Conversion Optimization for Content: Publishing site decreases bounce rate 43%

Conversion Rate Optimization: Your peers’ top takeaways from Optimization Summit 2012

Marketing Research Chart: What are the most prevalent website optimization priorities?