But the iPad may change that. We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Meanwhile, aren’t you curious to see how your website renders on an iPad? I was. Pad Peek is an easy tool to help you do it. Just type in your URL and that’s it.

It’s not perfect though. Flash apparently works on this tool but it doesn’t work on the real iPad. If you’re using flash on your website and you want to know exactly what visitors will see there are a couple of technical hoops to jump through. Mashable gives instructions for what to do on this post.

Or you could just buy an iPad.

I’m wrapping up results which will be published by the end of this week. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek to whet your appetite.

First, some context.

In total, 163 people took my survey.

My target demographic was business professionals, which I found through press releases, blog posts, and social networking groups on LinkedIn, CIO.com, and BizSugar, to name a few.

The majority of respondents came from the U.S., although bit.ly tells me the survey reached folks in 16+ countries (and I can personally track some respondents back to their homes in Canada, Australia, and India).

So what did 163 business professionals say when asked if they have ever factored writing errors into a decision to NOT do business with a company?

It seems unlikely — almost crazy — that someone would dismiss a prospective company because of writing errors on their website or in company literature, right?

Well, check out the chart below:

The overwhelming majority of people that responded to this survey admit they have indeed written off a company — in part because of writing snafus. Ouch.

On April 20th, I’ll post the entire survey results in this blog. If you can’t wait until then, drop me an e-mail and I’ll let you know when the report is published on my website.

Two weeks should give you plenty of time to proofread your marketing material.

Sue Anderson-Lenz
Marketing Lure, Inc.

TechTarget & Google , in a recent report on Search Behavior of IT Buyers Online During the Purchase Process , clustered keywords into four groups: brand, issue/opportunity, solution and comparison, and studied how and when these words are used.

Like many studies, most of what they found on this subject is fairly intuitive if you take the time to think about it but it’s always good to have some solid data behind the assumptions.

Why does it matter how and when the keywords are used? Because the searchers’ choice of words can tell you where they are in the buying process. When you know that, you can craft a much more compelling offer, ad and/or landing page.

The study confirmed “Issue / Opportunity” keywords are used more in the Awareness (initial) Stage of the buying process than at any other time. This group includes:

• Issue
• Resolve
• Risks
• Upgrade
• Improve
• Optimize
• Prevent
• Troubleshoot.

When you see these words in a keyword phrase you can be fairly sure the searcher is early in the buying process – having identified a pain point – and is trying to learn more about the problem or opportunity itself.

In other words, they are unlikely to be interested in a product demo right now. But they will read eBooks, newsletters, editorial articles and whitepapers on the business issue.

“Solution” keywords are more common in the Consideration Stage. This group includes words such as:

• Provider
• Service
• Vendor
• Supplier
• Tool
• Device
• Software
• Appliance
• Solution

In the Consideration Stage, buyers are more familiar with their issue and want to know more about the kinds of solutions available to address the problem or opportunity. In this phase, according to the study, they are the most responsive to wide range of content types – everything from ebooks, whitepaper, podcasts, online videos, newsletters, and virtual tradeshows.

By the time buyers reach the Decision Stage, they are looking more for specific brands and product/solution comparisons. Brand words are obvious:

• EMC
• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Your name
• Your competitors’ names

Comparison words include

• Versus
• vs.
• Review
• Test
• Pros and cons
• Benchmarks
• Compare

When searchers use these words they are getting serious about making a decision. They’re more likely to be interested in your trial software, online demos and even product literature.

Now that you know this what do you do about it?

By clustering keywords in your PPC campaign into ad groups according to buying stage you can increase both your click-through rate and your conversion rate. That’s because you can make educated guesses about what will appeal to the searcher and produce more relevant offers.

Similarly you could create landing pages on your website that are optimized to show up in organic listings according to buying stage.

Search marketing is one of very few marketing tactics where you are allowed this much understanding of what’s going on in your prospects’ minds. It would be a shame to let that go to waste. Listen carefully.

Here’re some of the most interesting points in the report:

IT buyers want to see vendor comparisons – especially in the final stage of evaluation but marketers resist offering them. When comparisons are not available IT buyers make their own. Isn’t this a great opportunity for marketers?

IT marketers are lagging behind demand in the availability of trial software. We’ve gotten better but not good enough. 35% of software companies were offering trial software in 2008; but 54% of IT buyers were looking for it. By the way, IT buyers (70%) say they spend two weeks or less evaluating trial software downloads. Does this surprise you?

Just because your product is expensive doesn’t mean buyers won’t appreciate a trial. True – most IT buyers (83%) are downloading trial software that has a final cost of less than $25,000, but some that are using it to evaluate software costing more than $500,000. 68% of all trial users are somewhat or very likely to purchase the solution after using the trial.

In the not-so-surprising category, 64% of IT buyers always use the internet to research information on technology solutions, 31% use it frequently, 5% use it sometimes (who are these people?); nobody never uses it.

While marketers tend to overrate it a little, white papers ranked the highest as the most utilized online content – used by 70% of IT buyers. Product literature came in second at 62%.

Email newsletters and e-books are useful to IT buyers during the awareness stage of the buying process. Trial software, vendor demos, case studies and comparisons are favored more towards the decision stage. This is important especially for those of you who are ignoring prospects in the early stages. Email newsletters and ebooks are a good way to hook these folks.

IT buyers prefer your videos or webcasts to be on-demand versus live. This is probably a convenience preference. The 10% who prefer a live performance do so because of the Q&A opportunities.

Search engines are the most used information source during the buying process (83%). Vendor website came in a number two (75%) followed by testimonials from peers and colleagues (65%) and IT publisher websites(64%). Interestingly online social networking groups were used by only 11% of IT buyers.

You can download a copy of the full report here: TechTarget 2009 Media Consumption Benchmark Report 2.  You’ll have to give up some contact details but the info is worth it.

Does any of this surprise you? If so, let’s hear about it here.

“The best thing is to do the right thing. The next best thing is to do the wrong thing. The worst is to do nothing.”

I have no idea who originally said that. I once had a boss who used it frequently. And boy is it true with conversion optimization.

Since our recent release of an e-book on How to Increase Profits from Current Website Traffic, we’ve received a lot of enthusiastic response – much of which can be summarized in the words of one software company owner:

“This sounds awesome! Where do I start?”

Here’s how we how we approach this question at Clicks ‘n Conversions. I’ll use a recent new client as an example. I hope this will help you get your own efforts going.

Shawn’s company has a specialized web application for a certain type of small business. He sells his application online. He came to us for help in getting more customers.

The first thing we noticed was that Shawn wasn’t using a web analytics program and we showed him how to put Google Analytics on his site. Website conversion optimization without analytics support is not impossible, but analytics makes it much easier to find and fix problems areas — especially as you get into more detailed tweaks.

Next we looked at Shawn’s marketing process, which – as is typical for web applications that don’t require a sales person – looked like this:

1. Send people to the website
2. Get them to sign up for a free 30 day trial
3. Convert them to a paying customer.

Each of these steps offers opportunities for improvement and to decide where to start we needed to answer two questions:

1. What percentage of Shawn’s trial users become paying customers?
2. What percentage of his website visitors take a free trial?

In Shawn’s company’s case, 5%  of trial users actually ended up as paying customers while less than 1% of website visitors were signing up for the trial. This information led us to focus first on getting more website visitors to try the application.

In reality, we could have chosen either place to start. The question is often which is more efficient. By doubling the visitor-to-trial ratio from 1% to 2%, we could double the number of new customers each month. To accomplish that same thing we would have to double the trial-to-customer ratio from 5% to 10%. Shawn had enough traffic to make the 1st option a better starting place.

But the bottom line really is that it’s impossible to start at the wrong place. Just by taking action and improving something, you will improve your sales – assuming of course that all else remains the same.

If I could get you to do one single marketing-related thing in 2010 it would be to start actively measuring – and acting on – the performance of your marketing program. If you’re already measuring, start holding people accountable. And if you’re already doing that, call me. We probably have some valuable data to share.

It doesn’t matter what size company you are. Setting objectives, measuring progress and holding yourself – or someone else – accountable may not be sexy, but it will make a huge difference in where you are this time next year.

I’ll admit my interest in getting you to start measuring is not without a self-serving factor. I know you and your company will get great benefit from it, and I also know the more aware you are of your marketing programs’ performance the more likely you are to turn to Clicks ‘n Conversions for help when the time comes.

You don’t have to take my word for the power of measuring. Just try it for yourself.

Over the next few articles, I’ll give you a little peak into how we measure things at Clicks ‘n Conversions.

What we measure

At the highest level, we track our progress with a weekly report that shows us the following:

• Deals in progress. Chances are good many of you already track this metric. We define a deal being in progress when an opportunity has been defined and we can put a potential revenue number to it. Ours is a complex sale and our website is a lead generation site. For those of you with a simpler (I didn’t say easier) sale and an e-commerce site, this metric might be something like free product trials.
• Warm prospects in the pipeline. This metric separates the casual inquires or simple website visitors from the people who really may have a need for our services and the resources to work with us. If you have a conversation with us by phone or by email and we agree there is something worth pursuing then you become a warm prospect.
• New business secured. This one is easy. It’s a sale. Who doesn’t track that?
• Website Visitors. This metric is important to me because I know how much traffic we need to be driving to our website under our current conversion efficiency to ensure we’ll have enough opportunities to hit our sales objectives. You can figure this out too (if you haven’t already done so) by using our Website Traffic Calculator.
• Current conversion rates. There are a bunch of these. At the top, we look at the percentage of website visitors who eventually step forward and want to communicate directly with me. You might call this a sales-ready lead. For an ecommerce site, this metric would be the percentage of website visitors who become paying customers.

There are also multiple sub-conversion rates we pay attention to. These metrics track how many people took the action(s) we wanted them to take – such as downloading a report or whitepaper, subscribing to a newsletter or contacting us.

• Deals lost. A sad metric but an important one as well. This tells us how well we’re doing at closing deals. We track not only those we lost to a competitor (fortunately a consistently low number) but also deals that were lost for lack of a decision (much more common in our world).
• Performance of individual marketing programs. At a more tactical level we also track how each of our marketing programs is performing.

Lots of companies track at least some of the information listed above – especially the ones that are closer to the point of sale. But most companies I’ve been exposed to fail to do the one thing that makes all of this meaningful In my next post – next Wednesday – I’ll reveal the secret.

See you then.

Recently I sat in on a presentation by Ronny Kohavi, GM for Microsoft’s Experimentation Platform. The talk was called Top Seven Testing Pitfalls.  Among other things, it gave me some good ammo to share with you on the subject of why constant testing is so critical.

As a lifelong marketer, I am thrilled – thrilled – that we can now track, test and measure visitor movement through a website and use that data to improve how well a site turns visitors into paying customers or sales-ready leads. And we get to do this without even once having to sit through a 3-hour meeting to discuss the color of the logo or where it should go on the webpage.

But then I’ve spent most of my career working with engineers, scientists and other logical thinkers for whom statistically significant data ranks right up there with oxygen. The need to quantify decisions rather than going with mere opinions has rubbed off on me. I also like being able to prove that our work produces good results.

I admit, though, when faced with the opinions of a room full of “experts” – especially if you’re one of them – it’s tempting to make decisions based on intuition, instinct or experience. That’s okay as long as it’s just a starting point. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my decades of marketing it’s that you just can’t be sure what people will do. No matter how positive you are you are right – people will regularly prove you wrong with their actions.

How often are we wrong?

Ronny Kohavi had some very good data (yes, data) on that subject from some of the world’s great testing companies. These are companies that test EVERYTHING and each test clears a number of hurdles including web designers, usability experts, copywriters, marketing geniuses and executives before it is run. Everyone believes the challenger page in the experiment has a good chance to deliver better results than the existing page.

Amazon finds that half of the experiments they try fail to show any statistically significant improvement.

Microsoft finds that about one third of their experiments have a positive effect while one third have negative effects and one third have no significant effect at all.

Why test if most tests won’t give you positive results?

Because you don’t know where the positive results lie until you test! If the experts gathered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft guess wrong most of the time, far be it from me to be able to tell what works by just looking at it.

And I prove that to be true over and over again with our own experiments.

Keep testing.

Make your marketing messages pop tip #2: Avoid the intimidating term paper look-and-feel by keeping your paragraphs brief.

I don’t know about you, but I make an unconscious decision to set aside any reading material that (at first glance) looks heavy or academic. Of course when I set it aside, it’s with the full intention that I’ll read it later when I have more time, but somehow for me, later never comes.

When you give your prospects “heavy” marketing collateral, you’re essentially adding another chore to their to-do list. Worse yet, you just might be scaring off a percentage of your audience by giving them literature that looks too  intimidating to read.

An easy trick to avoid the term paper look is to keep your paragraphs short, my personal rule of thumb being:

No more than five lines per paragraph.

(Of course you might be thinking it’s easy to abide by this rule by shortening up your margins, but let’s put a pin in that thought until the next tip.)

Here’s a really quick example that demonstrates my point. Take a look at the following paragraph, which I randomly pulled from a website that sells an enterprise software suite:

Businesses running on SoftwareCo ProductSuite can populate a single charts-of-accounts across subsidiaries, or use separate charts-of-accounts for each company with postings between subsidiaries such as expense allocation managed via inter-company journals. Local taxes are readily handled across subsidiaries thanks to an embedded tax engine that allows for multiple tax schedules for everything from GST, to VAT, to consumption tax or general sales tax. Revenue recognition, local financial reporting and compliance are also built-in components of SoftwareCo ProductSuite.  And ProductSuite allows for global order management and sourcing with the ability to manage inventory and fulfillment across multiple locations with product items represented globally or on a per subsidiary basis.

Do you find it hard to extract the key messages from this text? I know I did. Now let’s look at this same text, broken out into multiple paragraphs:

Businesses running on SoftwareCo ProductSuite can populate a single charts-of-accounts across subsidiaries, or use separate charts-of-accounts for each company with postings between subsidiaries such as expense allocation managed via inter-company journals.

Local taxes are readily handled across subsidiaries thanks to an embedded tax engine that allows for multiple tax schedules for everything from GST, to VAT, to consumption tax or general sales tax.

Revenue recognition, local financial reporting and compliance are also built-in components of SoftwareCo ProductSuite.

And ProductSuite allows for global order management and sourcing with the ability to manage inventory and fulfillment across multiple locations with product items represented globally or on a per subsidiary basis.

By turning this one big paragraph into four bite-size chunks, the reader can more rapidly scan the content to see if there’s anything in this product that will address their own personal hot buttons, e.g. inventory management, revenue recognition, or tax management.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t make your prospects work to learn about your product. Make it easy for them to skim, scan, and skip, and they’ll thank you with cash.

Next year I’ll continue the skim-scan-skip discussion with more copywriting tricks that will make your marketing messages pop.

Until then, I’d like to wish everyone a peaceful holiday season and healthy and prosperous New Year!

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

I’m fortunate because as I writer I learn so much from the people I interview. A few weeks back I had the pleasure of speaking with an incredibly down-to-earth CEO for a SoftwareCEO exclusive that’s in the works. Clate Mask runs Infusionsoft, a company that helps small businesses increase sales through automated follow up.

During our interview Clate told me one of his biggest mistakes was not recognizing the value of a good website. Using the Wayback Machine one can follow his company’s evolution from a custom development shop to a software firm who first targeted the mortgage industry before realizing they could go horizontal with their offering.

Clate said he didn’t really understand how much a website said about his company so he didn’t really invest in his site for the first five years.

Many companies, I believe, still think like Clate did, but here’s a few statistics that might make you re-think your strategy:

A joint study conducted by Enquiro Research and MarketingSherpa revealed that 63.9% of B2B buyers start their search online with general-purpose engines like Google or targeted B2B engines.
A Forrester Research excerpt published during 2007 reported that 78% of CIOs and IT decision makers rely on websites when making product decisions.
Clate’s website isn’t pretty, but it doesn’t have to be.  What makes his website effective  is content. It’s a leadgen machine that reads like you’re talking to Clate — so much so — that by the time him and I met via phone, I felt like I already knew him.

Online prospects get to know you long before you get to know them, so put your best foot forward. Create content that shows your personality and starts a conversation.

Many B2B sellers tell me their goal is to get prospects to call, but if all you have to offer is another “me too” website filled with marketing buzzwords, what reason have you given them to pick up the phone?

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.

Following up on the blog entry I started on January 6th, today I’d like to wrap up my e-mail marketing tips with six ideas to help build a loyal e-mail following.

Build a loyal e-mail following tip #1: Be practical.
How many times have you read an article in an e-newsletter and thought “OK, now what do I do with this information?” Too many people stay at the 50,000 foot level with their content, which presents an opportunity for the rest of us.

Anybody can say, for example, that it takes great talent to make a great company. Very few actually show us how to find, hire, and retain them. It takes more effort to do, but figuring out how to solve problems and sharing your tips with others via e-mail will make readers clamor for your content… and your business.

Build a loyal e-mail following tip #2: Demonstrate leadership.
Another way to build a loyal e-mail following and gain respect is to demonstrate thought leadership through your e-marketing messages.

Provide context around current events. Offer up a different perspective. Or analyze recent trends. Then take your observations one step further and really help your readers with practical tips and advice they can put into practice.

Build a loyal e-mail following tip #3: Respect your audience.
Don’t pollute their Inbox with a never-ending supply of gimmicky material. I’ll tolerate one marketing message per week from any given source, but when I start receiving the same (or similar) messages three or four times each week I begin to tune out.

Figure out what’s tolerable for your audience and stick with it. In many cases I would suggest two e-mails per month is sufficient to build a relationship without getting in your reader’s face.

Build a loyal e-mail following tip #4: Don’t push your agenda.
Or to be perfectly blunt, don’t sell.

In most cases I believe it’s  unrealistic to think you can convert a B2B prospect into a customer through a series of e-messages.

That’s not to say e-mail doesn’t work to stimulate sign-ups for a webinar, or to promote an upcoming conference or special offer. They work, but I recommend you use them sparingly, and in conjunction with other non-sales messages.

The key is to nurture prospects through e-mail with educational literature, perspective, and practical advice. If they like what they see, they’ll approach you when they’re ready to buy.

Build a loyal e-mail following tip #5: Be different.
Even though marketers are taught to differentiate, somehow we all seem to get trapped in messages that are indistinguishable.

Part of this, I think, has to do with how we communicate. One easy way to show you’re different is to reveal some personality in the messages you send.

I’ve seen some e-mail marketers take this to the extreme, sharing their CEO’s weight loss challenges, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Instead, I suggest you think about your audience as a single person when you’re creating content. By keeping your focus on the person (not the crowd), you’re bound to end up with messages that reveal the real you.

Build a loyal e-mail following tip #6: Test.
I read somewhere (sorry but I can’t recall where) that very few e-mail marketers actually take the time to test. That’s a shame. Yes, testing takes time, but it provides valuable insight into the psyche of your reader.

And if my January 6th assertion rings true this year — e-mail marketing is going to get a whole lot harder during 2009 — testing will be the best way to tackle the challenges that lie ahead.

Sue Anderson
Marketing Lure, Inc.