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Feature #1 - Know Your Customer Value

A web site isn’t just a digital brochure with some nice pictures and a few sentences about your product.  It is a tool that should generate new customers or clients and help you sell to them directly.  Whether your client is a customer who buys directly from your website or a client who you have to develop a relationship with, your website should be a system that will help you market and sell to these clients on a 24/7 basis.  A system that will generate a continuous flow of motivated, interested,  and qualified customers. Pre-disposed to do business with you.  Profitable customers that will pay, stay and refer.

Your web site should be a system that works year round, in any type of economy, in any type of market.  A system that requires almost none of your valuable time and energy.  Once you discover how to set up this system, your life and your business will change forever!  And guess what?  There is no complicated learning curve here.  I’m literally going to give you this system on a silver platter.  Even if you are the laziest small-business owner on earth - you can easily get phenomenal results.

Skeptical?  I expect that.  After all you’ve either had a website that hasn’t done much or know of your competitors who aren’t making much money from their website.

What’s so different about what you I can show you?  Good question.  I’m going to lead you to the answer right now with the first feature of an effective web site SYSTEM.

“Lifetime revenue” refers to the total amount of money a customer will spend with your business.  “Customer household” refers to the fact that sometimes you will have more than one customer per household.  While most businesses should know exactly how much is customer is worth to them, most businesses don’t.  This is a killer when it comes to your web site.  The only way you can truly judge how effective your website is to know how much money it is generating.

Let me give you an example.  I worked with a furniture manufacturing company recently and after I prodded them for this information, they were able to determine that the average client was worth about $900 in profit to their business.  They were also able to tell me that about 33% of the leads that they get turn into sales - so each lead is worth $300 in profit to them.  Based on this information, I knew that if their website generated a lead (usually just a call or a request for a quote) and it cost them less than $300 per lead, it was a money-making situation for them.  Therefor, everything that we did was focused on getting their cost per lead to as low as possible and absolutely everything had to be under $300.

I’ll provide you a bit more detail later on how we used this information when designing their web site but the important thing to take out of this is that we were able to determine this information and make all future decisions off the knowledge that each lead we generated from the site was $300.

So, before you set up a web site or redesign one that you already have, determine how much a customer or lead generated from your website is worth over the lifetime that they’re a customer to you.  This is the most important piece of information that should drive every future decision you make about marketing online and about setting up and designing your website.

I’ll provide you some more concrete examples on how that can be used in the next feature - “Why Pretty Sells (and it’s not why you think)”.

If you need help determining your customer lifetime value and how that applies to your web site, please e-mail me or call me at 1-877-316-5166 and we’ll provide you with a free assessment.

 

 Feature #2 - Get the Visitors

This might seem like the most obvious piece of information but it tends to be the most overlooked.  You need visitors to come to your web site for it to be successful!!!

Most people know that inherently but they seem to live under some sort of hope that visitors will just show up on their web site and become customers of theirs.  People often just focus on the web design and when that’s completed, figure that everything else is done as well.  Surprisingly, the web design is probably the least important factor in attracting new customers through your website.  I have seen some real ugly sites that are wildly successful while there are other beautiful web sites that no one sees.

When the Internet was in its infancy, the number of web sites was a fraction of what it is now.  It was very easy to bring visitors to your website if you had anything closely relevant to what your potential customers were looking for.  Since them, the number of web sites has grown exponentially and the competition for traffic has increased by just as much.  For example, I was recently looking for a Chinese restaurant in our town (Bedminster) so I typed “Bedminster Chinese Restaurant” into Google.  There were over 29,000 results returned and I know there aren’t that many Chinese restaurants nearby.

What that story highlights is that there are over 29,000 different web pages Google could have chosen to show first and while most of them are pretty obviously discarded, even 1% of that number is still 290 relevant sites.  Google won’t just send people to your site unless you are making it abundantly clear that you are offering what people are looking for.

There are many ways to bring people to your site but one of the first things you need to do well is optimize your site for the search engines - also known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  There are many techniques to implement this effectively, including having other people link to your site and making sure the search terms show up in the actual page.  No matter what you do, there is no way this is done automatically when the web site is created.  It is something that needs to be done in a conscious effort and constantly maintained.  So when you are first building a site, make sure you spend just as much time (if not more) coming up with your search engine optimization strategy.  Otherwise, no one will ever see the great site you designed.

In some of the later features, I’ll give you some more ideas on how to attract people to your site, easily and inexpensively.  In the next lesson, I’ll tell you what you’re supposed to do once you get the visitors to your site.

 

Feature #3 - What To Do With All These Visitors

If they work hard enough at it, most small businesses can attract visitors to their website.  Unfortunately, this is where the majority of websites fall short.  These are the digital brochure web sites that don’t provide the content that future customers are looking for.

Direct response marketing, is by its very nature, designed to evoke an immediate response, action, phone call or seek more information.  It compels readers, viewers, or listeners to contact you or get more information before they call any other dentist.

This type of marketing is ideally suited to the Internet and much more effective than just having a great looking web site.  People love to use Internet because it offers them an effective way to easily search for information without being hassled or having to even talk to another person.  They can do this searching at their own leisure, whenever they want.

By providing them a means to contact you, you are letting them do their browsing until they are ready to contact you.  The best way to do this is to provide them a reason to contact you.  If you provide free content to them in exchange for their contact information, interested prospects will be more than happy to do this.  This is a win-win for everyone because hot prospects will get the information that they want and they won’t mind giving up their contact info because they are very interested.  You’re not as interested in “tire-kickers” at this point and they won’t be willing to supply their contact information.  The website automatically sifts through the visitors and supplies you with the information of those most likely to be your customers.

Dollar for dollar, when done correctly, direct response marketing is by far the most cost effective tool available to help a small business grow its sales and profits.  And it becomes even more effective on the Internet in our new on-demand world.

Feature #4 - How Not to Miss out on

60% of Potential Customers

Of all the potential customers who inquire about products or services on the web, 20% will buy from someone immediately, 20% will not buy at all, and 60% will buy from someone within 12 months!

By not following up with leads, businesses are missing out on 60% of their potential new customers.

In creating an effective follow-up program, you can help ensure that visitors to your site today, will turn into new customers 6 months down the road.   By following up with your website visitors, you position yourself as a trusted expert in the field, and when they do decide to buy, the vast majority of them will come to you.

The most effective way to follow-up with the prospect is to contact them through a variety of different mediums with different messages.  One of the most simple ways to do this is to set up and automated e-mail responder sequence.  You create the messages and they are automatically delivered to your prospects on a time-sequenced basis.

You should be sending them a variety of material so that everything is knew to them.  You could send them your brochure, the FREE Report, e-mails with specials and nuggets of information for them.  It would take some time but you could also call them personally one time.

All of these methods allow you to create the relationship and educate them through the media that they purchase through.  Plus, you are giving them the choice as to what media they’d like to respond to.

Feature #5 - Pump Up the Traffic

This is very much like “Attract the Visitor” but it’s really the key to turning your web site into a profit machine and dramitcally increasing the number of new patients to your practice.

It’s all based on some basic math.  Once you have implemented the other steps, you will start seeing how effective your web site is.  One thing that you will learn is the average number of visitors it takes before 1 becomes a new patient.  Let’s say you are able to convert 3 out of every 100 visitors to a new customer using the methods described above.  And let’s say that each new customer has a lifetime value of $500.

That means that every 100 visitors to your website will bring in $1500 additional dollars in revenue!!!

Your numbers may be a little bit differently but this examples shows you the value of every visitor to your site.  In this case, each visitor is worth $15.  If I told you that I could bring each new visitor to your site for just $1, doesn’t that sound like a good trade off?  In fact, if you only converted 1 out of every 100 visitors to a new customer and they were each worth just $200 in new revenue, you’re still paying $100 to make $200.

This is the real power of the Pay-Per-Click method described in “Attract the Visitor”.  Once you determine how valuable each visitor is to your web site, you can pay a much lower rate for new visitors.  You decide how many new customers you want a particular month and set the budget accordingly.  If you are overrun with new patients, you can simply dial it back.  If you would like a big influx of new customers, you just turn up the amount.

In fact, you can pinpoint the market even more specifically.  Let’s say you want to increase a specific component of your business.  You can attract visitors specifically for those services using the Pay-Per-Click model.

Feature #6 – Measure and Test

I know it sounds so boring, mathematic, and tedious but measuring and testing are the most important things you need to do before you make any other changes.

I was talking to someone recently about adding some audio to their website and they were on the fence about it.  I told them that we could always do it on a trial basis to compare the results against the site as it is today.  They said the site was successful but when I asked what type of metrics they had to measure it, they said “well we get calls so we assume they were at the website”.  They had no other form to test the website.

While it’s good that they were happy with the results, the problem is that there is no way to know whether any change was truly worth doing.  If you can’t get a baseline, there is no way to determine if a design change or adding a new feature like audio is helping or hurting your site.  In fact, I was talking to a colleague recently who was all excited about a new design on one of his sites.  Like a good online marketer, he had been measuring the results.  What he found with the new design (which was definitely more impressive than the previous) was that it was far less effective than the old site - so they switched back.  He believes that the new design took away from the great content that they had.

Bottom line, you need to be able to measure the success of a website so you know what changes are working, and how well.  There are a bunch of products out there that we could recommend to help track the effectiveness of your website.  At the very least, just track the stats without doing anything with it.  That way, down the road, you have a long term data view of the performance of the website to measure.

We also provide a service in which we measure the stats for a month and even track incoming calls to give potential clients a baseline of their website.  From that info, we build a recommendation on what they need to work on to improve their website.  If you’re interested in that program, please feel free to e-mail me back and let me know that you’d like that analysis.

Feature #7 - The Power of Social Networking

A fundamental law of human nature that the best and brightest minds in advertising have never been able to overcome.  It’s simply this - when you promote your business, what someone else says about you is 100x more credible than what you say about yourself.

What does this mean for building a website?

It means that you need to implement tools on your website so that your visitors can use their social networking power.  It could be as simple as creating a “Refer a Friend” link so people can forward information you have to their friends who would be good leads to you.  Maybe it means creating a blog that people can read.  The relevant and helpful information would be passed quickly and easily among different people.  You’re just using a powerful form of viral marketing.

I can’t tell you what would work best for your web site - every business is completely different.  But the important thing is that you’re using the new and powerful tools that are becoming available everyday to make your site more unique and informative for your visitors.  Whether it’s streaming an informative video from YouTube, creating a MySpace account that links to your site, creating a blog, or just something like a message board.  You need to differentiate your site from what everyone else is doing.

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