Permission Marketing Experience

Regular visitors will notice that the Waller homepage no longer has the heavy selling of Want a Website, and Evaluation. These services still continue but not promoted so strongly now that the three-month experiment has ended. Here is the report of my findings.

What we did
The Waller website serves as a marketing front end for my Internet website design, training, and consultancy business. In October 2000 I highlighted two services on the homepage for some Email marketing:

• addressing businesses who wanted a website,
• addressing businesses that have website who would like a free evaluation.

The Free Offer
Key to getting response forms filled in is to offer something free. The word Free is reported to be one of the most used search keywords. In this case the evaluation service was labled as free, and in retrospect I see that the Want a Website offer implied free too.

Statistics of the project
We have been actively promoting the website for three years now, and we are getting about 7000 unique visitors a month. This generates about one new client a month, which happens to be about the number that I can absorb into my current client base. The new emphasis generated 83 responses. This is 0.4% of the unique visitors during the period. As a comparison I would have hoped for around 4% from a targeted direct mail shot.

Want a Website
The Want a Website thrust attracted 25 replies and was not very satisfying and the easy-access form is no longer shown. Most of the people who responded to this invitation had no clear objective, no budget, ill-defined target audience, no idea of the problems, but big ambitions to to produce the worlds best website. All I could send them was a standard reply that said that if I was to create a site for them it would cost money, and as an alternative pointing them to a do-it-yourself page on my site.

Please Evaluate The Please Evaluate thrust generated 58 replies and was from my point of view much more satisfying and introduced me to some excellent websites. And for each I sent a full reply with 3-5 good points, and 3-5 things which I would have done differently. This took me about 30 minutes. Six of the sites I looked at were quite excellent and I told them so. Four have asked for a quote, of whom two have now given me business. Another ten I shall be following up.

It seems that many of these points will be applicable to the Email promototion of any product. Here is the list anyway:

• Automation There has to be a quick way of identifying the respondents who I cannot help, and sending them an immediate, standard, but helpful reply
• Wrong Email Six of the respondents did not give me a valid Email reply address. Having composed a careful reply it was frustrating to have the message not deliverable. This is a problem with website response forms; the address has to be keyed, where-as an Email form it gets the built in address automatically.
• Duplication In one case two people from the same organisation sent in requests on the same day.
• Lack of detail Respondents were generally not very forthcoming in their requests. A more fulsome response would have helped me give a better answer.
• Number of Questions Having had a rush of evaluation requests, I added three more questions to the response forms and this reduced the number of requests I received. I understand this is typical - if you want a lot of requests, ask the bare minimum of questions
• Thanks Very few people took time to thank me. There are two possible reasons: The evaluation I sent them was typically an A4 page of text, and I expect that they would print this and study it at their leisure. It then becomes a separate challenge for them to chase back in the Email package to find my message and reply to it. Or second, perhaps they absorbed the praise about their website, but then took exception to the list of things which were not so good.
• Follow-up Offers A third answer could be that I should have offered a larger free offer in the reply I sent them. They would have been by that time qualified prospects and I should have done more to retain their interest. I offered them a more detailed crit; obviously this was not enough.
• It all takes time This sort of Email marketing takes dedication and time. But then marketing always takes dedication and time, and of course both these things interfere with work! The free gift has to be less time consuming than this one, and serviced without intellectual effort. But even so humans have to vet these things, and in most cases someone has to do a quote, or at least seize the good prospects.

In summary, it was a useful exercise by a small business, and one which I shall be using on client websites.

• Big images with slow loading on the homepage,
• Name, address and contact details not shown or difficult to find - without at least name and hometown the site has little credibility, and if you want customers to contact you why make it difficult for them,
• Objective not clear - what is this website trying to show me,
• Not 640-friendly - would not degrade elegantly for users of smaller displays or those who choose to surf in a smaller browser window,
• Entrance Tunnel - very fashionable at the moment but almost always counter-productive,
• Frames - which were normally good for navigation, but ruined the access by search engines, concealed the page title line, and used up too much space on the display,
• Not Search Engine-friendly, poor METAs, Title, inappropriate text on the homepage (see also frames above),
• Started a new browser window without warning and for no apparent reason,
• Banner advertising, usually on freebee webspace,
• Over-complex - trying to sell too many things on one homepage,
• Big ambitions on a small website - one wanted to list all the free events in Scotland, UK, and then apparently the world,

Not because I am lazy, but because web authors who are beginners would be discouraged if I gave them a long list of all the things they could have done better.

The key conclusion is that most of the comments I make come under the heading of Usability. So taking these headings and putting them in a special checklist seemed a good idea, and this is now on a separate page.

Your comments are invited waller@waller.co.uk