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1:19 Have a clear headline
2:44 A clear call to action
3:20 “Above the fold”
3:57 Show me proof
4:32 The right time for a testimonial?
6:08 Developing trust
6:50 Graphics and branding
8:08 Your phone number is turning people away
9:54 One step, two step…
10:38 Make em an offer they can’t refuse
12:02 Do this by midnight or else
12:54 Conversion reality
13:18 Recycling is good
14:22 Measuring profitability of follow up activities
15:15 Using opt-in forms
16:13 Use of pop-ups
17:25 Recycling traffic through social media sites
18:30 Stealth re-marketing
19:58 Testing your strategies
21:55 Tip of the week
Hello everybody! Welcome to the HVAC Business Growth podcast. I’m your host Nick Bielawski. We’ve got a big show planned ahead today, so let’s get stuck to into it.
This week, what we’re going to do is talk about direct marketing for your HVAC website. Last week, we spoke about direct marketing 101. We went through a few of the basic philosophies and fundamentals. Now what we’re going to do is to actually apply those basic philosophies, that we discussed last week, to your website. So we’re not going to worry about off-page marketing or anything like that. It’s really about getting the direct marketing elements on your website.
So let’s get stuck into it.
So, I want to start by firstly saying—a lot of the things that I going to mention is to consider these rules for your website. If you don’t have them, the only reason why you shouldn’t have these elements is if you’ve actually tested the software and you actually understand that something isn’t for your website.
Sales Page: A Clear and Unique Headline (1:19)
So we’ll start off by talking about the sales pages. And what we’re going to do is pretty much go from the top of the page down. So one of my direct marketing rules for a business website is that all sales pages need to have a clear headline or unique selling proposition—again, unless you’ve tested otherwise.
A CLEAR HEADLINE.
Top of the page: You should have a headline that actually outlines your unique selling position or your unique selling statement to the market and the number one or the overriding benefit that the customer will get from choosing your service business. So, a clear headline is super super important.
Think about it like a page hierarchy. If somebody lands on your page, almost like in a newspaper, you want them to see the headline first. The headline is going to draw their attention in and actually direct them on what to do on the rest of the page. So, you really need a strong, attention-grabbing headline that actually hits on “what’s in it for me?” in terms of the question that the prospect is asking when they visit your website.
Right now, we’re actually in a bit of inattention age. So, what I mean by that is, people have really short attention span. It’s getting shorter and shorter. So, if people come to your website, they’ve really made up their mind, in probably less than 5 seconds, on what they’re going to do. So you really have to use a headline or something similar to grab their attention when they get on to your webpage so they can actually stick around.
CONSISTENT CALL-TO-ACTION (2:44)
So, following on from that, one thing that you need to also have on your website is one consistent call to action. So, if you’re actually after a phone call or after an email address or whatever it is – whatever the call-to-action is, ideally you’ve only got 1, you may be able to get away with 2— it has to be really really clear what you want the person to do when they come to your web page. It has to be strong as well. You have to really tell them what to do—“call this number now” or “fill in this email address to receive”, “fill in this web form to receive”. Just make it really really clear.
ABOVE-THE-FOLD (3:20)
So, one concept that we’re going to be talking about a lot in this podcast is above-the-fold. Above the fold really came from the newspaper days. When newspaper where on the newspaper stands, they’re actually folded in half and you’d always have the headline and the main points about a particular article, facing upwards. So the newspapers were actually folded over.
So this above-the-fold term, if you use that in internet terminology, what it actually means is when somebody comes to your website, “above the fold” is everything that they can see on their screen without having to scroll down any further. So it’s really important that you get some of these elements in there above-the-fold.
Testimonials and proof elements (3:57)
So just on that testimonials and proof elements are really really important to have on your website. Testimonials can come from the form of maybe some customer endorsements, from some good dealings that they’ve had with your business.
I’m sure if you’re doing with business in an ethical way, you can go back—you may receive these unsolicited from people but you can actually put this in your marketing from now on. Collect testimonials from people. You know, if they’ve had a good experience with your particular company, then you need to find out what the experience was that they actually had.
When to ask testimonials (4:32)
The best time to ask for testimonials is actually straight after the sale has been transacted or shortly after. People are going to be really really happy with the new heating and cooling system that’s been put in and with all the services that they got to get an existing unit up and running again. They’re going to be really happy post-purchase, hopefully. If you’ve done a good job, that is. And that’s the best time to actually ask for a testimonial.
It’s not too late if it happened 6 months ago or 12 months ago—you can go back. But just be aware that you’re probably going to get better result straight after the service or the product is actually been used.
From a proof element perspective—you’re starting to see this a lot more now. So instead of using people testimonials on the website, you’re actually starting to see things like “as seen in”. They have a list of magazines or newspapers or publications or radio stations that they’ve been endorsed by.
So, if you’ve been featured in the New York Times or a particular HVAC magazine or something like that, then you can actually use the logo or you can just write down the name of the business if you want. But I think using a logo actually works quite well.
So, you can put the logo of the New York Times or the local newspaper of your particular city or the magazine publication. If you’ve been interviewed by somebody, you might credit that interview on the front page of the website again above-the-fold. That actually helps with the proof elements on your website. People are going to go there and they’re going to feel that you’re a trusted source or a trusted business.
Adding trust seals on website (6:08)
Another great way is to actually put trust seals on your website. If you’re actually asking for payments up-front or anything like that, then you can actually put trust seals.
Say that you’re approved by this or Mastercard or anything like that or it might be the local Chamber of Commerce. You might be able to get a trust seal from them.
All these things – these testimonials, these proof elements, these trust seals – are really important to have on your website.
Again, I mentioned it earlier, you might have 5 seconds. When somebody actually lands on your site, they’re going to make up their mind in actually 5 seconds. So you better have some testimonials, proof elements, trust seals on there just so they feel that you’re actually trustworthy and they can move forward from there.
Branding through the use of good graphics (6:50)
On this podcast, we don’t really talk about branding a lot. But here is where branding really helps to the direct marketing side of things. And this is really an online shift that’s really happened in the last few years, I feel, on the internet. And the shift is, to having good graphics on your website. So, you still see it now. But it was really really prominent a few years ago when people just have basic floppy web pages up there. And people would land on them and it was just basically like a word document but it was on the internet. So, it didn’t look all good.
Now as a way to build trust and a way to make it that seem you’re a real reputable business having good graphics and having good branding on your website is really important. So we don’t need the branding to take over; we just want really clean, sharp and professional designs.
So, if you’re getting around with the webpage design or a site design that’s any more than, maybe, 3 years old, you want to have a good look at it and make sure that the graphics and the level of professionalism is actually up to the standard that’s required in the marketplace now.
People, unfortunately, do judge a cover by its cover. So they land on your website and if it’s a bit of a stinker, if it’s a bit of an odd one, they’ll just hit back the back button and go search and for something else. It’s pretty unfortunate but that’s the way it is now.
1-300 and 1-800 versus local phone numbers (8:08)
So the next item that I wanted to talk about is, a little bit of a psychological one, for the prospects and it’s on the topic of phone numbers.
Most business owners think that having a 1-300 or a 1-800 or some sort of toll-free or free-call number is actually really good for business. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Again, it’s something that you have to test. But from a psychological perspective for the prospects, whenever they see a 1-300 or a 1-800 number, they probably that feel that when they ring they’re actually not going to speak to somebody with any authority; that they’re going speak with somebody on a switchboard or a system; and they’re going to get a really hard-sell type of phonecall; they’re going to get asked and bombarded with a million questions; and they’re probably going to feel a little bit uncomfortable doing that. So, one thing that I’d actually like you to consider is actually putting your local phone number on the website.
Don’t worry about the 1-300 numbers or the 1-800 numbers, just the local phone number. So, again, it probably adds to the trust that you’re going to get.
When people come to the website, people are going to look at it and actually feel that when they ring up, they’re going to speak with a real person or somebody who’s at least really close to the business owner or not to far removed in terms of somebody that could make a bit of a decision.
Test and actually just put yourself in the shoes of your prospect for just a second. Have a think about what they’re feeling when they’re actually visiting your site.
Do they feel that if they see that 1-300 or the 1-800 number. If they call it, are they going to get bombarded? Are they going to speak with somebody with any level of authority? It’s pretty important when people are visiting the website.
Providing people with step-by-step instructions (9:54)
So if we just double back for a second and actually start talking again about call-to-actions. I think it’s actually really important that “the response that you want people to make”, I want you to make it really clear.
So, a great trend that I’m seeing on websites more and more now is actually giving people the instructions for what to do. Give them the next step. So we’re seeing a lot of websites now that have, “Step 1: Do this”, “Step 2: Do that”, “Step 3: Now this will happen”.
Have a 3-step approach for people; it might even be a 2-step approach. I think it’s really important that you spell it out for them to make it really really clear what you want them to do. Actually hold their hand through the whole process. I think it’s really really important that you do that.
Always make an offer (10:38)
Now we’re going to get stuck into some things about “the offer”. Now on your page, particularly your home page or your sales page, it’s really important that you have an offer all the time.
Remember if we’re branding, we’re just basically putting out logo out there, putting out your name out there and hoping that one day, sometime in the near future, somebody will come back. If you’re like me, I think it’s a pretty weak way to approach a business.
You actually want people to do something. You want to give them an offer. You want them to get hungry and get them really really motivated to do business with you.
So every page, or every sales page I should say, should needs to have an offer of some kind.
So I don’t mean to actually beating down the price because we spoke about it last week. Playing the price game is probably one of the worst things that you can do. But maybe even look to package or bundle the services or the products that you’re actually doing. And again make it really really hard—we spoke about this last week—make it hard for people to compare apples to apples. We want apples to oranges or apples to any other fruit—which is what I mentioned last week.
Put an offer on your website. Make it really hard for people to compare. If you have a particular system that’s been done by a certain manufacturer, you don’t want people to look at that and start price shopping you at all. You want to be able to bundle in different service elements or different guarantees or just something. Just make an offer. Make it an outstanding offer.
Attach a deadline to offers (12:02)
Another way to get people take actually take action is to have some sort of deadline. So when people see your offer, they know that by this Friday or the end of the month or whatever it is, this offer expires.
So, you can actually be constantly changing things up on your website. You might have, maybe a deal of the day, a deal of the week or deal of the month or something like that. Just make deals and make offers to people and let them know that to capitalize on a particular offer, they have to do it by a certain date. If you don’t give people any sort of deadline then they will just, basically, go on their own programming and they’ll buy whenever they’re ready.
Ethically, you can get people to buy a little bit more, when you’re ready, by putting a good offer together and saying that they need to do something by a certain date. It’s a great way just to tip people over the edge just to get them off the fence that they’re sitting on.
The reality of direct marketing conversions (12:54)
So what we’re going to do now is really discuss some of the realities about marketing, direct marketing and conversions on your particular website.
So, unfortunately, conversions for a standard website, they might only be 1%. So, again, I’ll spell it out for you. If you get a hundred people visiting the website, only 1 of them is going to take the action that you want. That’s for 1% conversion rate that is.
Recycling the traffic to your website (13:18)
So it’s really important that we find ways to either recycle the traffic or build some sort of follow up sequence.
It’s been bandied around but, you know, some people might take up to or more than 7 times to actually decide to transact business with you. So, they might come across your website 7 times and they might receive 7 pieces of mails or 7 emails or 7 phone calls or a combination of all of the above before they actually decide to do business with you.
So you could have the best campaign out there in the world, you could have the best radio ad running with a fantastic offer. People come to your website or they might call up and they’re not quite ready to do business, you can’t just let them go. You have to obviously take some of their details or have a way of contacting them and following up. You can leave it to the sales team to do that. And then be systematic and ruthless without being disrespectful to your particular prospect and just keep following up until it’s no longer profitable to do that.
Measuring profitability of follow up activities (14:22)
So, you can actually measure how much follow up you should be doing in terms of how much cost for you to acquire customers.
So if a customer is worth to you, say, they’re worth 2,000 dollars lifetime value. By that time you add up the profit from all the products and services that they consume over x amount of time over a lifetime period. How much are you actually willing to spend on advertising and marketing in follow up to actually secure that person?
I’m sure it’s going to be worth more than just one dollar that an ad might be worth per person to see it. It might be more like 100 dollars or it might be 500 dollars. So you can see there’s a lot of time, there’s a lot of phone calls, mail pieces and catalogs and those sort of things that can actually be sent out to the person to fit within a budget to acquire a new customer.
Using opt-in forms (15:15)
So, some things that we want to have on our website to make follow up possible are opt-in forms[Y1] . So instead of actually asking for a particular action straight away, instead of asking somebody to buy something, you might ask them to join some sort of membership or some sort of list. Something where you could get their name and contact details and you might give them something in return. It might be a small gift. It might be some sort of a consumer awareness guide –just a way that you can get their details and then follow up from there.
You might want to follow via email or direct mail, that’s totally up to you—whatever works best for your particular business. But you need to set up some sort of a systematic follow up. Again, in a couple of ways, you can do this. Have some sort sign up form or a web form on your particular web page. You might put it in the middle, you might put it in the right hand sidebar, you might put it in the left hand sidebar—just something that you can test.
Use of pop-ups (6:13)
If you’re really aggressively wanting to go for the sale straight up, you might have some sort of pop up.
So, what a pop-up basically is this: when somebody comes to your website, you might be asking them to buy a particular unit just upfront. But you can see, you can put a code on your website where it looks like they’re going for maybe the cross or the back button or they’re motioning to move away from your site. Or they might actually be staying your site for a long period of time. You might then code a pop-up to come on. A pop-up may basically blacken out the whole screen and then a small box comes up on the screen with some sort of offer on there. So, you might offer some sort of a free gift or a free service and in return, you get their name and email address.
You might actually have—instead of a pop-up—a redirect to a particular page or offer on your website. So, again we’re trying to get the maximum amount out of every person that comes to the site. So, they’re not buying straight away, ideally we try and get contact details of some kind.
Recycling traffic through social media sites (17:25)
Another great way of doing this and it’s a little softer, I guess you could say, is actually to use social media.
So, it’s not the primary drive or the primary thing on your site. But if you have Facebook or Twitter or LinkdIn or YouTube or something, they actually urge people to follow you or like you through those particular medium.
So if it’s Facebook for example, you might have a little Facebook widget on the side of the page. If they hit the like button, now you can start to contact them indirectly—not talking about direct messaging here but just putting little posts that add up on Facebook where you’re marketing to them, indirectly in a way. You’re not going a hundred percent at them. You don’t have their address or anything like that but you still have contact with them.
And that way, you can actually recycle the traffic. So, what that means is they come to the website once, if you get they get to like you on Facebook or follow you on Twitter, any other special offers you’ve got, you can actually get them to see by posting these offers on Facebook or Twitter. And hopefully they see that from there.
Remarketing (18:30)
Another great ways is—it’s almost a whole episode in itself and we’ll talk about it I think in another episode, we might even get a special guest to talk about it— re-marketing. So, again, this is a pretty stealth thing to do. But setting this up in Google AdWord—with the content network, you could actually put a re-marketing code on your site so when people visit your website, they’re actually tagged for a certain period. It might be 30 or it might be 90 days, it just depends maybe on, how specific you want to be. You might have an offer that only expires in 2 weeks so you might put the code on the computer for maybe 2 weeks.
Anyway, the premise of it of how it works is actually this: They visit your site, they have a little code. And then when they go around the internet in their spare time and just visit some other sites where you’ve actually created some banners that actually get positioned on those other websites—these aren’t your websites—they get positioned on other websites with an ad and if they click the ad, and they are returned back to your site.
So again, it’s a way to build a little bit of a mailing list or an email list almost. So, it’s a way to build a stealth list. They don’t actually know that they’re on but you can contact them in a little bit of a sneaky way just by putting some really targeted banners up that’s relative to the offer that you’ve made a little bit earlier. So that’s a great way of following up and also recycling the traffic.
Testing marketing strategies (19:58)
So one of the biggest lessons from this particular podcast that we’ve done is to: test..test…and test! You want to get really really at good testing your business.
So, for your website, you can actually use a tool that’s called Visual Website Optimizer. It’s really easy to use.
So how Visual Website Optimizer works is, basically, you can create another webpage that is almost an identical clone of one that you’re want to test. But you might put some particular element on there.
So let’s go back and recover the discussion that we have about phone numbers: You might test different phone numbers. You might test the 1-800 number versus the local business phone number. So everything on the page is exactly the same except for those 2 phone numbers and you can run a test against each other.
You could also test a headline on the page versus no headline but with a video. Then, just see which one is the winning page from the conversion perspective.
Again, testing is really really important and it’s really cheap to do. You can set up Visual Website Optimizer for a couple of hundred bucks and start running tests on it. If you’re driving really good amounts of traffic to your business—so you might be driving a couple of hundred visitors a day maybe more depends on the size of your business and what you’re offering – you can do some tests really really quickly.
The good thing with testing is this: Just say you might test 3 different elements on a page quite often– you never really take a massive step back but quite often— one element will actually be far and away better than another. I’ve seen it time and time again.
One thing that’s probably worth testing, and it’s not the same for every site and it’s a bit of disclaimer, is that videos seem to be working really well. I’m talking double digit improvements in conversion from having videos on the website. So that’s something that you really need to test.
Tip of the week: (21:55)
Okay, now it’s time for the HVAC Business Growth tip of the week:
So, the tip of the week this week is to actually test one thing that you’ve learned from this podcast. So I’m just going to do a really quick dot-point recap of what we’ve actually covered today. So we talked about:
- Having a clear headline or USP
- We also talked about call to actions. Having 1 consistent, if possible, call-to-action above the fold.
- We talked about testimonials and proof elements
- We talked about phone numbers
- We talked about asking for a clear response and actually laying it out for them in a Step 1, 2 and 3 type of format
- We talked about creating offers and always having offers on your pages
- We talked about deadlines
- We talked about ways to follow up using pop-ups and redirects and ways of recycling traffic
- We talked about the Google content network and remarketing
- We talked about good graphics on your website
- We talked about testing and using the Visual Website Optimizer
So, again the tip is: pick one thing from this podcast and actually try and implement it this week. So, why should you do this? Well, here’s some food for thought:
If you can increase your conversions from 1 to 2%–Wow! It doesn’t sound much does it?—well, the news is, you’ve actually just doubled your conversion rate, going from 1 to 2%.
So, this might be the difference between breaking even and making a substantial profit. So, I think it’s really important that you implement at least one of these things and actually see if you can double your conversions.
Even if a few tips in improvement of conversion that could be quite a substantial chunk on your profit. So I think it’s really important again that you hone in on one particular thing and actually try and get it implemented this week.
If you can double you conversions or you can get a 10% increase on your conversions, I think it’s going to be fantastic for your business. Again, if you’re successful with it, let us know by the email or Facebook or Twitter or come to the website and just let us know. I’d love to hear any results that you get from implementing anything from this podcast.
So that’s all we’ve got time for today on the HVAC Business Growth podcast. I hope to see you next week. Bye for now.