Category: Marketing

As long-time digital marketers, we’ve become somewhat of a sommelier of marketing tools – and we collect them with the same fervor that many people reserve for wine, pokemon cards or a good cigar.

With all the paid tools out there, it might come as a surprise that the marketing tools that we use the most are almost all free, cobbled together from various sites and sources, and solve a number of smaller needs that no one wants to spend $10 a month on, but nonetheless are a necessary tool in our marketing toolbox.

The biggest issue we’ve found with these tools is that, since they are usually built only for SEO reasons, their functionality always leaves a little (or lot) to be desired. Either necessary features are missing, or the site is hosted on some janky geocities account from the 90s.

That’s why we at SegMetrics have decided to put together a collection of the most important tools that marketers can have access to, and provide them free of charge to anyone who wants to use them.

We’re happy to announce our first two tools in the vault:

AB Split Test Significance Calculator

I’ve used a number of split test calculators in the past, but they are universally hard to use, don’t show correct significance, or don’t show the amount of improvement between tests.

Our Split Test Significance Calculator updates in real time, and shows all the stats you’ll need to quickly make decisions about your split testing. If you’d like to find out more about how to use split testing in your marketing, be sure to check out our article on how to split test, even when you have low traffic.

Personal URL Shortener

I have a love-hate relationship with URL Shortener. Something that I’ve written about before. URL Shorteners are a great way to get pretty URLs that are easy to use in publications, say on webinars, or just anywhere you need a memorable URL. Unfortunately because so many of them kill SEO and strip all tracking information from the links, they’re also the number-one support issue for SegMetrics users who want to track their site usage.

You can get the URL Shortener here. For the ultimate in branded shortening, you can get a custom short domain from a registrar like Namecheap, and point it to one of the redirection pages above. For example, SegMetrics uses the short URL mtr.cx, which we have hooked up to this URL Shortner.

We hope you enjoy theses tools, and look forward to adding new ones every month.

If you have any tools you’d like to see added to the toolbox, leave a comment below!

Success is multi-faceted, with so many factors that can make or break your business. But there’s one factor that’s underappreciated…and super important. That’s the ability to FOCUS your product niche.

Pretend, for a moment, you’re at the doctor’s office. You’ve been told you’ll need extensive open-heart surgery. Uh oh.

Would you expect your General Practitioner to perform the surgery? Of course not. That’s what specially trained heart surgeons are for.

Even your surgeon isn’t planning to do every task at your surgery. There will be an administrator at the front desk when you arrive to help you fill out paperwork. There will be one nurse to put in your IV, and another to assist during the procedure. An anesthesiologist will make sure don’t feel a thing and that you wake up afterwards. (Yay!) Everyone has their role to play.

Continue reading “Focus Makes Perfect: Finding Your Most Successful Niche”

When you’re hungry, you don’t always want to eat the same thing. Sometimes you crave a fancy, five-star dining experience. Sometimes, you want something small, like a salad or a slice of pizza. And other times, you want something in the middle – a nice, normal meal.

The same concept applies to your product offering. Sometimes your customers want a white glove VIP experience. Sometimes, they want something small, like a “light” or “intro” version of your product. And other times, they want something in the middle – your standard product.

This is called The Goldilocks Principle. Remember how Goldilocks tried out all of the bears’ beds? One bed was too hard, one bed was too soft, and one bed was “just right.”

Continue reading “Expand Your Audience with Tiered Pricing and the Goldilocks Principle”

Different numbers tell different stories.

Knowing your measurements, knowing your metrics, knowing your key performance indicators – call it what you will – but if you know your numbers – you can turn failures into wins.

Numbers may not be as shiny as new products, but they DO matter.

If you are running an information product-based business and selling online courses and you want to continue to sell and continue to grow, you need to know your numbers. Unless you’re operating off of your memory and let’s face it, everybody’s memory sucks, especially before your first cup of coffee. If you’re not checking your numbers periodically, you don’t know whether you are growing and you don’t know how things are moving in your business.

Continue reading “Why Metrics Matter More Than Ever For Your Business”

You’ve heard the stats.

All the way back in 1997 Nielsen showed that people don’t read online – they scan. And that’s only gotten worse. Today, you have about 8 seconds to capture a user’s attention on your website.

The human attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish.

Despite this, many websites today fail to give users a single place to focus their attention when they first arrive. People land there and then they have no idea what to do next.

There are lots of buttons and lots of areas on the page… but they don’t have flow, and with social media, chat, and a cell phone never far away, that makes it highly likely that those shiny new visitors are going to wind up distracted and leave, never to return.

I firmly believe most sites start out in a good place. When someone decides initially to create a new website, they usually have a single idea.

Maybe they want people to sign up for their newsletter, or for a webinar.

And that’s great! It’s really simple. It’s clear. But then the main stakeholder has other ideas. Maybe they also want people to be able to find out more about the company’s products; or they want to give visitors a list of their best articles; or share their latest tweets… you get the idea.

Gradually, what was once a great idea for a site becomes the design from hell.

The idea behind the site isn’t bad. It’s that somewhere along the way, the stakeholder started to worry that not everyone would want to join their webinar.

So instead they try to put everything on the site. And put it all above the fold. Because it’s all important, right?

So, if we’ve known this doesn’t work since the 90’s why are we still doing it? And what should we do instead?

Why So Many Web Designs Go to Hell

The reason so many websites wind up in this downward spiral is because ranking priorities is hard. If you create a list of priorities and then try to label them a “1” (must have), a “2” (should have), or a “3” (nice to have), then it’s only a matter of time before someone decides something is even more important that the items labeled a “1” — and then before long, everything has become that important.

Raymond Chen, a long-time software developer at Microsoft (we’re talking since 1992) and blogger, calls this problem priority inflation.

• Priority 1: must have. If you don’t accomplish a priority 1 item, you may as well just cancel the project because it ain’t shipping.
• Priority 2: should have. If you don’t accomplish a priority 2 item, the product is significantly weaker, but you can still ship it.
• Priority 3: nice to have. If you don’t accomplish a priority 3 item, it’s not quite as awesome as it could have been, but it’s still a good product.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen a shift in the labeling of priorities in planning documents. A new priority has been introduced: Priority Zero. Nobody has explained to me what Priority 0 means, but I assume somebody invented it to emphasize that the feature is even more critical than priority 1. Mind you, I’m not sure what could be more important to a project than “If we don’t do this, we’re all fired.” Maybe “If we don’t do this, the earth will explode.”

As you might expect, priority inflation has a trickle-down effect. People whose features had been assigned priority 1 said, “Hey, how come my feature isn’t priority 0? It’s just as critical as that other guy’s feature.” Soon, everything that was priority 1 got reclassified as priority 0. Nature abhors a vacuum, so all the priority 2 items got reclassified as priority 1, and the priority 3 items got reclassified as priority 2.

The problem is that people are naturally bad at understanding what is actually urgent and what’s not. And when everything is important, none of them are.

At its core, everyone understands this problem. And yet almost everyone falls victim to it anyway.

How to Avoid the “Everything’s a Priority” Trap

This problem is so persistent that my team and I developed a system to help people create the information hierarchy of a landing page. We call it the “stair step model.”

Here’s how it works.

Start by identifying up to 5 things you want people to do on your page. The actual number of things you choose depends on how long you want the page to be. I generally recommend most people chose 3-4 tasks that people should do on that page.

Then you rank them from most important to least important.

When thinking about how to rank them, you shouldn’t just think about what’s most important to you; you should think about what’s most important to your visitor.

You may think the “most important thing” is that they buy a product, for example. But that probably doesn’t have a high chance of conversion — and is probably not the most important thing to the person reading the page. Instead, what they’re interested in is the solution they get from purchasing your product.

The second thing you want to consider is the difficulty in completing that action. If the most important action you want them to take (Priority Zero) takes 30 minutes to do, but your second most important task only takes 5 seconds, you might want to prioritize the second, as it has a higher chance of conversion.

Remember the formula: Desire / Time = Conversion

Now that you have your prioritization, let’s look at how to structure them into the page.

Step 1: The Hero Shot

This most important thing becomes your hero shot. Generally, this is the top section of a website, where there’s a big picture of you and a big headline that talks directly to the pain point you’re going to solve.

(In my Japanese marketer days, we called this “Catch Copy,” because it catches the attention of the reader.)

For example, if we were building a page for a health and anxiety website, we might use the headline, “Stop being controlled by your anxiety and take back your life.”

Then, beneath that, there are a few smaller lines of copy that tell them what they can do (ex: We’ve built this assessment to help you determine whether you have anxiety). And finally, below the description is a big button that reads “Click here to take the assessment.”

This is our primary call to action. That means it should be something that someone who has never heard of us, has never visited our site, should be compelled to do based on just that headline copy and some small button copy.

This first section forms the first step of our staircase.

Step 2: Tell Me About Yourself

Below our first step is our second step (let me know if I’m going too fast there).

Anyone who hasn’t clicked on that first button obviously doesn’t trust us. Everything in marketing comes back to trust — an email is not just an email and a click is not just a click. It’s a transaction of trust and value.

So if someone scrolled past that first button then they’re not convinced yet that they should trust us. That means our next section needs to focus on building trust.

Maybe that means they need more tailored content. Maybe they need to understand the results of other people, and we can provide testimonials. Maybe they need social proof, and we can share social proof icons.

Let’s say we go with that third option, so after the first section we have a section with the logos of publications where we’ve been featured. We say we were in the New York Times; we were featured on ABC; we’ve been interviewed by NPR.

We add a bit of copy that shares that we do, what we’re really good at, and asks the visitor to tell us what they’re looking for.

There was something there that was almost blink and you’ll miss it: “Tell us what they’re looking for.” This is a chance to let your visitors self-select into the content that will most likely turn them into leads, and customers.

This self-selection has two powerful points.

1. The visitor is getting content that applies directly to their issue, which is much more valuable than generic content.
2. By looking at our site analytics, we can tell which of the pain points most of our visitors are experiencing. Once they opt in, we can also determine which pain points are the most effective at converting from leads to customers.

This becomes our second call to action.

If they click on it great! If not, then on to stair step three.

Step 3: Share a Story

At this point they’ve missed two calls to action. That means we need to find a way to empower them a bit more. We need to take a softer approach.

This is where we might add in a personal story, sharing the problem we had that we overcame that led us to create our product or business. Or maybe we share a client’s story or testimonial.

This time we don’t ask them to do something right now — instead, we use a button that says something like, “Learn more” or “Find out how…”

We’re inviting them to have a larger conversation; this is good for people who are looking around and trying to figure out what it is they want. They’ve passed the direct “Do this now” and the “Tell me about yourself” steps. That likely means this person is someone looking for a solution, but who isn’t really sure what that solution should be yet.

Step 4: The Final Step

If they pass step three and are still scrolling then I generally think this person isn’t actually looking for a solution — they’re just gathering information. So that’s where I like to include information about you or the business, or a block with a few of your most popular blog posts.

The call to action for that section becomes, “Check out these articles” or “Don’t know where to start? Start here.” And that becomes your fourth and final step.

With the Stair Step Model You Build a Better Website

Using the Stair Step method allows you to avoid the usual problem of “everything is important” by creating a prioritized and logical order for your users to follow down the page.

It allows you to capitalize on different user types without cannibalizing your design. That is, it allows you to build a better website — one that lets you return to the good place you started from.

What’s your top priority — the one action you want users to take — on your website? Share it in the comments.

As a marketer, you have a bucket list of tactics to try — things that you’ll get to one day. The challenge is which tactics will be the most effective, with the least effort. The proverbial “low-hanging fruit.”

You know that in order for a business to thrive, it needs to sell more than one thing to each customer… maybe you’ve even tried to do just that. Or maybe you haven’t even thought about it before.

In either case, there’s a good chance you’re leaving money on the table.

That’s because the truth is acquiring a new customer is hard (and expensive). So wouldn’t it be nice if it was possible to sell them more than one thing at a time, without chasing customers away?

Fortunately, it is — in fact, that’s what upsell funnels are all about.

What is an Upsell Funnel?

When most people hear the word “upsell” they probably think of a McDonald’s drive-thru cashier saying, “Do you want fries with that?”

That line has undoubtedly made McDonald’s billions of dollars, but that’s what we’d call a pre-purchase upsell. For course authors, product creators, and self-funded businesses, trying to sneak in an extra product before you’ve closed the deal may lead a prospect to hold off on clicking “buy.”

So, for these kinds of businesses, what I recommend instead is a post-purchase upsell.

A post-purchase upsell funnel happens after the prospect has already completed their transaction… after they have already paid. This allows you to avoid discouraging them from purchasing that first product, while still creating an opportunity to increase the value of the sale.

Let’s look at an example.

John has been scoping out an online course about learning to launch a podcast. He’s decided to take the plunge, and purchase a course from PodcastingBeginner.com (a fictional site, made up entirely for the purpose of this example).

He adds the course to his cart and goes through the process of checking out. After entering his credit card information and clicking buy, he’s greeted with a thank you page — and beneath a message that says “Thank you for purchasing Launch a Podcast in 30 days” is a note asking him if he’d like to add on a package of 6 interviews with professional podcasters, each making $5,000 or more from podcasting each month — a series full of tips and best practices to help new podcasts do the same, which usually sells for $250 or more — for an additional $100.

That is a post purchase upsell funnel. And when done correctly, it’s a bit like printing free money. In fact, on average, they generally increase revenue by around 30%.

So let’s take a look at why they work.

Using Psychology to Make a Second Sale

I’m fond of saying that Marketing is just applied Psychology. So let’s look at the psychology of WHY post-purchase upsells work so well.

Imagine for a minute that someone knocked on your door and asked you to place a large, gaudy sign reading “Drive Carefully” in your front yard, practically blocking your house. You’d probably laugh in their face — you might even slam the door.

Yet in the mid-1960s, psychologists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser did an experiment that led 76% of homeowners included in the study to agree to exactly that. The experiment was designed to look at what most salespeople consider “getting a foot in the door” and what is more properly known as the consistency principle.

The concept is simple enough: people want to make decisions that are consistent with the decisions they’ve made in the past.

Robert Cialdini talks about the concept in some length in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. We try to be consistent because doing so is a survival skill — it gives us a helpful shortcut. We think about something once, and then never have to think about it again.

Which means that when the consistency principle is triggered, decisions are made almost automatically.

So, how did Freedman and Fraser get 76% of homeowners in their experiment to agree to have a large sign placed in their yard?

They had a volunteer stop by a few weeks before making the request and asked those same homeowners to display a smaller, three-inch sign that read “Be a Safe Driver.”

And, in case you’re thinking people back then were just more willing to do things for the greater good than folks are today, there’s one more fact that I’ve left out.

Like any good experiment, Freedman and Fraser also had a control group. For this second group of homeowners, they only made the second request — going straight for the larger ask of the billboard in their front lawn. Their success rate? A much smaller 17%.

I think you’ll agree that that’s a pretty dramatic difference… and that the consistency principle is a pretty powerful tool.

Getting to Yes: Using Consistency In Your Upsell Funnel to Get More Sales

Of course, putting the consistency principle to work for you, and creating a successful upsell funnel isn’t quite as simple as just slapping up another product and calling it done.

As with all things in life, there are some things that are more effective than others. In my experience, there are three post funnel upsell concepts that work best.

Upgrade at a Discount

Like in our example above about the podcasting course, this type of post-purchase upsell offers another package or product that provides additional value at a discounted rate.

That discount is directly tied to the customer having just made a previous purchase — so you might use language like, “As our thank you to you, we’d like to offer you a discount on…” and then name the item you’re offering as an upsell.

This is the same strategy as the “Super-Size” strategy used at McDonalds in the 90s. For a LOW, LOW price, you can get even more!

Upsell a Subscription

In this type of upsell funnel, the customer purchases a product (or maybe a few products), and you offer them a recurring supply of goods or services for a monthly fee.

Think buying a printer, and having the manufacturer offer to send you ink anytime you run out, if you pay them a few dollars a month for a subscription service. This is also common with products like dog food… but it’s not limited to physical goods.

For those with online courses, this may be access to a forum, a mastermind, or weekly “office hours” where they can ask you questions live.

Selling a Secondary (Related) Products

Finally, the third option for a post-purchase upsell funnel is to offer a related product at its usual price… and that price does not necessarily have to be lower than the price of that first purchase.

You might try to upsell them to a higher level of the course they just purchased, or even sell them on a whole new course that serves a related need. The important thing here is to test your funnels, and use dollars as the key performance indicator (KPI).

One of the most surprising things is that the upsell product doesn’t necessarily need to be cheaper than the original product. In fact, we’ve seen that offering a $1,000 product as an upsell on a $300 purchase can actually bring in MORE revenue than going with a cheaper product.

After all, if you use a $1,000 product as your upsell item, and sell 4 of them in a month that’s more profitable than if you use a $50 product as your upsell item and sell 15.

Getting to Yes — Again and Again.

Finally, I want to leave you with the idea that a post-purchase upsell funnel isn’t limited to 2 steps. If a shopper says yes, and then says yes again, why not ask a third time?

That said, if they say no twice in a row, I usually recommend sending them to a final thank you page without another product. More than that and they’re likely to leave the site… and we’d much rather they stick around and leave the door open for more sales later on.

What are some great Upsell Strategies that you’ve seen, or implemented, in the past? I’d love to hear about them! Let me know in the comments below.