Marketing Budget
Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing
Yes, it’s that time again!
Recessions are the economy’s little reminder that your marketing needs to be more efficient. Lots of our friends and clients are being asked to produce more sales with less resources. (And if you’re reading this post, that might sound familiar to you.)
Traditionally, in the offline world during recessions, marketers had their advertising budgets cut, then pressure was placed on sales teams to close more sales. But in the online world, marketers are expected to deliver both traffic from advertising and sales from the customer experience.
The math is simple. More sales with the same or less advertising means higher conversion rates. If your conversion rate is higher, not only will you be more profitable but you should also gain market share from competitors.
You may not always be able to control the cost of your advertising — except for when you cut it — but you can control your conversion rate.
In the interactive marketing world, many companies seem confused about what to do in a recession. Companies need to improve their online conversion rates. It seems obvious to most of us, but not everyone.
We want to ask you, our readers, for feedback. Have conversion rate improvements become a higher priority for your organization? If not, is it because you aren’t feeling the effects of the recession yet, or does your organization simply not believe it can control conversion? Or is it something else?
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Read the follow-up post, “3 Steps to Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing“
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Have You Flushed $3K Per Web Page Down The Drain?
Sean Carton does a great back-of-the-envelope calculation of $3,000 to create a web page in his ClickZ column: How Much Does A Web Page Cost?
I don’t disagree with Sean about the absolute costs. Different companies may use a different mix of people so any given page may cost more or less. His point, that it’s more expensive than you think is a good one. Plus you probably now need to pay for traffic to that page; that isn’t cheap either and traffic is getting more expensive all the time.
My concerns are not with what Sean said. It’s what he didn’t say that disturbs me. Should companies include the cost of analyzing the traffic? Where’s the cost of various versions of the creative to test? Where is the entire cost of optimization in this calculation? Where is the accountability built into the process?
It’s 2007 and we’ve been writing about conversion rate optimization since 1999. For years everyone treated us like we were the crazy ones with all our conversion optimization talk . After two New York Times best selling books I assumed ( always a mistake) that our concepts were more mainstream. If in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king then the fully sighted man is court jester. Are we still so “far out there” that building accountability into the entire process is crazy talk?
P.S. Sean does a great job defending agency costs. Why don’t agencies do a better job of defending the return on investment?
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
A Persuasive Online Copywriter is Worth More
How to justify the value of those who understand persuasive online copywriting
Last time I examined the qualities we value in a persuasive online copywriter. The way we look at it, copywriting for persuasion is about significantly more than using power words and devising catchy phrases. It’s also a lot more about speaking to your visitors’ buying process than it is pushing your sales process (that piece of the equation may be your raison d’être, but it must remain transparent to your visitors).
So, let’s say there’s this copywriter who understands and is skilled at writing for Persuasion Architecture. A client asks this copywriter to quote a price for a job. The copywriter tells the client $150 per web page. There’s a moment of silence before the client informs the copywriter she has another quote for $70 per web page.
How would the copywriter justify the higher price - and why would the client agree to pay it? Here’s how the copywriter should reply.
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 119
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Written by:The Grok
