Josh Kerbel

You would think by now that these items would be prima facie for online marketers, yet journalist still find fodder in poor website design………

• eCommerce sites urged to clean up content before Google’s ‘Panda’ goes global - Click to Read
• Consumers Call for Businesses to Offer More Product Information on Web and Mobile – (OK, so this is a little bit of PR for some company’s product, but even still…) – Click to Read
• Why e-commerce sites need a clear checkout process – Click to Read

Now, back to sleep….I mean the gym………….yes, back to the gym…..finish off that 10, no 15KM on the treadmill…….

If, you have just stumbled across this post, you may want to check out these previous posts (here, here, here and oh ya, here)  if you want to bring yourself up to speed.

Ya,  so I made you suffer through all that smut for a purpose – to get a good understanding of the direct marketing model.  I could have done it with online florist, Amazon or www.buyoldshoes.com, but I thought the porn guys actually had the process down best.

But now you need to see how it comes together.

Collectively, these sites have spent millions of dollars refining their marketing and customer acquisition strategies.  They know their numbers cold.  They know how much it costs to acquire a lead, how many leads will turn in to customers, and how much money each customer will spend with them over the lifetime of the relationship.  They have taken sex and broken it down in to cold hard numbers.

Exactly like you should, well your business that is, not sex.  Most people don’t find cold hard numbers sexy, well maybe accountants and engineers.  Even if you think you never spend any money acquiring customers “cuz ya built your gosh darn websites yerself”, there is still an element of time involved.  And even in a worst case scenario, your time could be spent doing other things, like flippin’ burgers, washing cars, being Prime Minister of England, you know, things that put a price tag on your time…………even @ $4.27 cents an hour.

So you may not have spent a dime landing that new client, but you did spend 100 hours building that website that brought in that new client, so there you go……….the client cost you $427.00

Now back to the matter at hand…….

These sites are sooooooooo confident about their money making potential and conversion rates, that they know exactly how much to pay you (you, being the owner of a website who sends them traffic) for every single person that becomes a customer.

You know how the know this……..it’s because they spend hours a day looking at pictures of hot naked people know how to calculate the value of every visitor to their website.  Do you?  Did I just repeat myself.  Yes I did.   I did it to make a point of how important these numbers are.  They know that the combination of their unique selling proposition (created through the use of well written copy and appropriate, yet inappropriate pictures) breaks down into a certain mathematical formula that tells them how much to spend on a new client or prospect.

Want to see how much some of these sites will pay for new business?  No, well tough luck, I’m showing you anyways.

Click on the images if you want to read for yourself, but these companies are paying anywhere from $30 for a trial sign up to $120 for a sale.  What gives?  Do you think theses guys provide a more useful service than you do?  You build stuff, you put people in houses, you educate, you finance.  These guys, they just satisfy some carnal urges……

Take away point

I bet if you sat down and figured out how much your business really spends on bringing in new customers and the true value of each qualified prospects, you could spend………..and make money like a porn site too.

If you thought I was going to get you all worked up, you were right.  But  it isn’t going to be with pictures of men and women in hot and sweaty compromising positions.   It’s going to be by showing you that while you are missing the obvious, an entire industry group that is branded by some as immoral, corrupt and destined for the 7th circle of hell has you beat hands down when it comes to running a business.

So say your “Hail Mary’s” in advance, hold on to your favorite religious tome and see what you can learn from the rouges of the Internet.

Putting all the lasciviousness aside, can you answer the fundamental question of  “What problem does porn/smut/adult entertainment/online dating/’insert your own term for it’  here solve?

Well without getting to deep into the sociological and psychological aspects of it, you can put forth the argument that it solves any of the following problems people may have:

• Boredom;
• Loneliness;
• Sexual curiosity;
• Want for adventure;
• Sexual education;
• Need for sexual gratification;
• Satisfaction of a sexual fetish that cannot be satisfied in other ways; and
• Many others that probably haven’t even crossed my mind and trust me, my mind is usually in the gutter, that is of course when I’m not thinking about my clients (Wow, I have some smoking hot clients, but I digress).

The take away point here is that the privacy and anonymity makes the Internet makes the sexual revolution of the 60′s and 70′s seem like an awkward first kiss.  The market is huge.  Estimates on the size of the online adult entertainment segments ranges from 20 to 50%   A quick search of Google Insight for industry related terms (sex and free sex)  and comparing them to the search terms (religion, god and Jesus) should give you an idea of the size of the market.

So if you can withhold your moral judgement, what this should drive home is that this industry knows how to market.

And you know how they do it?

By testing their marketing message over and over and over again.  They develop targeted messages – UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITIONS (and my how they know how to proposition) and segment the hell out of the market.  They are constantly testing ad copy, landing pages and follow up methods in order to maximize conversions and extract money from prospects in such a way that they practically have a formula for doing so.  Let’s see this process in action.  We are going to sign up for an adult orientated dating site and see how they attempt to convert us to a paying member.

Before we do so, let’s set the stage.  First off, I am going to blur out the name of the site that I use for this experiment.  I want to make it clear I am not promoting any particular site.  Second of all, I am going to leave in all the language and copy that I am sent.  This is important.  It’s how they hit your hot buttons, your pain and pleasure spots.  You have to learn to apply these concepts to your business.  If the occasional off color or X rated word makes you blush or offends you, then don’t read any further.  If you can look at it as an academic exercise, then you should.

Let’t build the persona first.  Who is going to be looking for love, lust or some tawdry action online.  Let’s call him Robert.

Robert is 42 years old, lives in a metropolitan city, say Toronto, has been married for 20 years, has 2 kids, a mortgage and is a little bored at home and while he’s not looking to end his marriage, he is looking for some excitement.  Curiosity has got the best of him and maybe if he can learn a few things, he can spice up his love life at home or maybe he just wants to see what its like on the other side of the line.  He isn’t blatantly looking to engage in flesh to flesh carnal lust, maybe just some email/web cam stuff.

He’s a relatively good looking guy, may have a few pounds to shed, but isn’t an unshaven fat slob in a stained white tanktop looking to get lucky with some girl who has a preference for guys who are not as familiar with soap as they should be.

If this sounds stereotypical, its’s because it is and the reality is that for some sterotypes there is some truth.  But the marketing world calls these sterotypes something else.  They call them personas.

Up next, how Robert gets pulled into a site………..

Or if you are a little more conservative/uptight  in nature, you can call this article “Learn the Art of Conversion From the Masters of Perversion”.

Whether or not you want to admit it, pornography and adult entertainment drives Internet innovation – everything from streaming video, payment technologies, website optimization and marketing.  If your business is online today, you really should slip a $20 bill under the g string of the next stripper you see as a show of gratitude for all the adult entertainment business has done for you. (Ask not what your stripper can do for you, but what you can do for your stripper)

And while the front end of the online adult entertainment business may seem quite titillating,  its backend is so silky smooth  (in a systematic and numbers orientated kind of way)  as to make an Accountant or MIT physics major salivate.

So join along as I strip away the facade of bustieres, thongs and garters to reveal some hardcore Internet marketing action that leaves nothing to the imagination (and allows me to work in all the double entendres that I can).  At the end of it all,  hopefully we popped your Internet marketing cherry made you wise in the ways of the world and a  love making marketing machine.

Let’s take a walk through the red light district of the Internet and see what sort of venereal diseases information we can pick up.  I can promise you that these segments will not be family friendly, but will help your business procreate  customers left, right and center.

Part I  gets all hot and sweaty on the front end of the business,  Part II looks at the conversion process and Part III cools us down with a proverbial cold shower of marketing statistics and numbers.  So join me on the part of the Internet where the morals are loose, the lights are low and the money flows like water.

AKA You need to know how much a customer is worth in order to determine how much to spend to acquire them……

As mentioned by both Jim Novo and Seth Godin in there posts regarding the lifetime value of a customer, you need to know how much cash the average customer generates for your business over a set duration of time.

SG then goes on to suggest that:

Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it’s important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.

Write it down. Post it on the wall. What would happen if you spent 100% of that amount on each of your next ten new customers? That’s more money than you have to spend right now, I know that, but what would happen? Imagine how fast you would grow, how quickly the word would spread.

The problem with Seth’s approach is that it ignores some fundamental basics like “That’s more money than you have to spend right now, I know that, but what would happen?” What would happen is that most companies would probably go broke because they haven’t figured out their marketing formula first.

Even ignoring the fact that most companies/businesses don’t have the resources for that sort of upfront spending (Ignoring that fact is kinda like saying, Let’s pretend gravity doesn’t exist when I jump of this cliff – regardless of whether or not you think gravity exists, it seems to be a pretty real phenomenon) or the consequences of spending huge amounts to acquire some customers vs others (Don’t you get annoyed when your bank offers free computers or ipods to people who open a new account when you have been with the bank for 20 years), most companies and by most, I don’t mean Fortune 500 companies, I mean Fortune 500,000 companies (you might even be a Fortune 2,000,000  company)…..don’t know their customer acquisition costs or have a systematic marketing plan, so suggesting that you just go out and spend the LTV of a customer on the next 10 prospects that walk in your door is a little Utopian.

So what’s the moral of the story here……..

Before you go out and spend big bucks to acquire a customer, you should actually have an idea of what sort of bucks you should be spending in the first place

Jim does a much better job of operationalizing this concept into a usable form for business………..3 cheers for Jim!!!!

Chances are that if you have tried search engine marketing and been burned (I.E. – not made any money after spending a lot of your own) it was because whoever ran your program went out and spent a pile of YOUR money advertising your head key words and key phrases, the words that are already closely associated with the company and probably driving a lot of organic traffic anyway.

On top of this they probably focused on getting the top positions on the sponsored listing. This means that all you are doing is promoting your business to people who already know your name and are already looking for your company and its products. The end result being is that you are not getting new prospects to your site and any money you spend in this manner is being wasted.

Your marketing should have been set up so that you were paying to get PROSPECTS to your website, not people who already know your products offerings and know how to find you.

You do this by optimizing your SEO and SEM strategies….We will cover this in Part IV

Many people confuse marketing and advertising.  Marketing is not about fancy images and obtuse corporate slogans.  Marketing is about finding people who have problems you can solve and then telling telling how you can solve their problems.

Now explain how these ads do that.  Say you were in market to buy an industrial automation solution.  These are the PPC ads you might see:

Click to enlarge

Do any of these ads discuss customer problems?  Do they address some of the issues a person might face if they are in the process of making a buying decision.  Do they make prospects want to reach out and touch them?  How much money do you think these ads waste because they don’t know how to turn a click into a relationship.

Much like the ever enduring question, to be or not to be, companies must make a decision when it comes to prospecting.

Do you rent a list of names or do you build your own prospect list?

Despite the high quality lists that you can buy or rent from numerous database companies, I’m all about building your own lists in house.

Why?

Well, first of all, it’s yours.  However you built this list, people have come directly to you.  They want what you have.  You aren’t stuck with the risk of possibly working a list of names that have been worked before.  When you rent names, you don’t know how the names were acquired (despite all the reassurances from your vendor rep).  When you acquire the names, you know the process these people went through to get on your list.  You qualified them!  Within the legal limits, there are no restrictions on how many times you reach out to your customer.

Second of all, it’s important that you build up an expertise in generating deal flow.  Deal flow equals business options.  Are you prepared to invest your livelihood in a 3rd party who is selling names to your competition?  Building your competency in attracting qualified leads is your life blood.

At the end of the day, you are better off investing any money you would spend on rented names in learning to build your own lists.  The “you” of 5 years from now will thank you.

Now let take a look at Sungard

Here is their PPC ad.  The were bidding on this term in such a way that they don’t attract the random clicks associated with the top positions.  I would suspect this ad has a high click through rate

They talk about the benefits and offer a free white paper.

And now their landing page

The copy on their landing page could be a bit more compelling, well as compelling as bank software can be, but most importantly, the page is well laid out with very little to distract the user from signing up and submitting his contact info in exchange for the white paper….. and Sungard scores another prospect.

If I was in charge of setting up this program, I would have the information capture visable in the top half of the screen.  In some situations it is not possible, but here it is.  If most companies were as consistent as this in their execution, the internet would be a much cleaner place………

Say, something like………….. “custom plastic manufacturing solution”

Although this is a pretty specific search term in that it is 4 words, that last word solution is pretty ambiguous.  Are you looking for someone to provide you with solution to your need for custom plastic manufacturing services or are you looking for a software solution for your custom plastic manufacturing business.

This isn’t just a matter of semantics

If you don’t get this right, you can end up spending money on useless clicks and end up with an under-performing marketing campaign.

Well, the best way to avoid this is not to bid on keywords that have any ambiguity to them, but the reality is, this isn’t always possible. – This would be the first step in your sales funnel.  Screen out people who don’t want what you are selling.

So now we move down to the second step in the sales funnel – the PPC ad copy.

This is what is going to save you money here and keep your campaign from attracting the wrong people.

So let see how these people deal with the challenge

I guess it is better to be half right………….

All of the ads get it half right…………in terms of getting people to determine if they are selling manufacturing services or software for manufacturers.

But having said that…………….there is still a world of improvement for these ads.

We will tackle that next and see how we can change things up a bit.