Kent 2020 - The Custwin View

2nd April 2009 saw over 4,500 business people pass through the doors of Kent 2020 and many of them spent time talking with the hundreds of exhibitors.  Amongst the thousands of visitors, the Custwin stand saw plenty of activity and we enjoyed hours of providing advice about how to get the best out of company websites. What we hadn’t quite expected though, was the diverse range of scenarios that were holding companies back from being more successful.

Each new Custwin client has different challenges and different needs to the previous client.  This is something we take in our stride.  However, we’ve never really stood back and thought about this in detail.  2020 forced us to do this because instead of a steady flow of website profitability issues over a period of weeks, months and years, we had them all within the space of a few hours in one day.

Some of those issues involved:

• Companies that had created Google Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns but had created them ineffectively.  This gave the perception that “PPC doesn’t work” (which is untrue – PPC does work when done properly).

• Companies that had sufficient levels of traffic to their websites, but hadn’t fully considered how well their websites could convert those visitors into enquiries.

• Companies that had a combination of poor PPC campaigns and poor websites.

• Companies that had ineffective websites, and recognised the fact, but who had parent companies (who had originally supplied the websites) that wouldn’t listen to their needs (but who still expected good levels of sales from their subsidiaries).

• Companies that hadn’t covered the fundamental basics that need to be within websites (such as examples of work done, testimonials, and calls to action).

• Companies that had used ‘experts’ to help with their web marketing but had experienced amateur advice and so suffered through poor results.

That last point though was what bugged us the most because the issue wasn’t that so-called ‘experts’ were deliberately conning their clients who needed website success expertise.  No, the issue was that those ‘experts’ just didn’t have the expertise necessary.  Anyone can go on a ‘web marketing’ course, or read a few books, or research online, but it takes a lot more than that to become a real expert in winning business through websites.

This, unfortunately, is becoming a bigger problem and as the day progressed and we heard more and more stories of companies that had experienced poor advice about their websites, we started to give people our own piece of advice.  This piece of advice was also applicable to the general advice we were providing to people.  This advice was:

“When it comes to getting the best out of your company website, get as many different opinions as you possibly can.  Listen to what we have to tell you today and then go and talk to other people acting as website consultants.  You’ll get many different views of what will and won’t work.  Then, before investing in the expertise of anyone, get confirmation of the results they guarantee.  Any website consultant who is truly confident in their ability to get the best results for you will provide a guarantee that is risk-free for you”.

Never before has this piece of advice been as important as now.  We’re in a recession and companies need as much help to gain business as possible.  For most companies there are huge opportunities to gain substantially more business through their websites but this is only going to happen if receiving the best advice in the first place.

2020 was great for Custwin because we met many people for the first time, signed up several companies to our monthly email newsletter, and gained some new clients on the day and in the following weeks.  The best part of the day for us though was gaining trust from those we spoke to and so hopefully keeping those companies away from the amateurs that would restrict their ability to win business from their websites.

As for 2020 itself, we’ll be back in 2010 and will be demonstrating how all our new clients are benefiting from our expertise since first meeting us at 2020 this year.

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Custwin Competition Winner

At Kent 2020 Custwin held a competition to win three month’s free website consultancy.  There were many types of competition at 2020, most of which involved people parting with their business cards in order to enter.  Bottles of champagne, chocolate, spa breaks, and more – all there tempting people to enter.

The problem with many of these competitions is that they’re not very transparent.  Unless someone is going to publically make the prize draw, or is going to make it public afterwards, there are always doubts about how genuine that competition is.  For example, does the spa break really go to someone drawn at random or does it ‘coincidentally’ go to the visitor to the stand who was most likely to become a client and so would benefit from being buttered up a bit?

We wanted our competition to be totally transparent and although the prize offered didn’t have the usual wow factor it was actually worth far in excess of any other prize on offer at 2020.

Our prize draw offered the very lucky winner three month’s free website success consultancy from Custwin.  

That in itself is a prize worth at least £1,000 of Custwin time in those three months. 

However, it’s a prize that produces so much more because the winner finds themselves at the end of three months with a website that’s generating significantly more business than it was before and the expertise we provide ensures that the business rolls in consistently thereafter.   It would be no surprise to us for that expertise to contribute towards £thousands in additional revenue in the following year and beyond.

The winner, picked totally at random, was Etienne Pradier, who is both a magician and also supplier of quality entertainers.  Within this email newsletter over the coming months we’ll be sharing with you what we’ve been doing with Etienne.  We do this partially to demonstrate that our competition was totally genuine but we also do it because we want to prove that our competition was of more benefit to the winner than any of the other competitions at 2020 that day.

For everyone else who entered our competition, each is a winner because entry ensured subscription to our free monthly email newsletters and the advice within the newsletters will help to win more business through company websites.

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Webstats 101

We’re no longer surprised at the number of people who don’t have an accurate picture of how visitors are interacting with their websites.  Our one day at Kent 2020 further reinforced this and proved just why companies are finding it so hard to win business from websites - they’re simply not properly analysing visitor patterns.

Here we provide a very simple guide to what you should be gaining from the website statistics system that’s running in the background of your website.  And to many of you it’ll come as a surprise that there’s a huge difference between ‘free’ and just a few £££ investment per month.

First of all, let’s clear up a myth.  Google Analytics, while free, is NOT the answer you’re looking for.  Please do have it installed and please do use it in some ways, but to rely on Google Analytics alone will mean that you’re missing out on huge potential from those who visit your website.

For most types of businesses, these are the questions that should be of most interest in your mind when thinking about your website visitors in any given day, week, or month:

1. What company was the visitor from? (this doesn’t apply to all types of businesses but is of high interest to many).

2. How had they found the website?  Did they type the website address directly?  Did they come in via an online directory?  Did they link from an article on another website?  Did they come in from a search engine result?  Or something else?

3. What did they type if they found you via a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo)?  What’s making you visible online?

4. Which pages of the website did each visitor look at, how long did they spend on each page, and did they get to where you wanted them to?

5. Did the visitor get in contact and if not, what could be the reasons for that not happening?

If your website statistics software isn’t allowing you to gain the same view as those 5 points above then your business is highly likely to be suffering as a result.   In our experience, companies are actively losing fortunes in lost business every day purely from not having a good understanding of website traffic.

If you feel that you, or a company you know, may be in the dark about how visitors are interacting with a website, then please do contact us for free advice about how to resolve the situation.  It’ll be the best piece of advice received this year because it’ll highlight opportunities to be capitalised on as a result of spending a minimal amount on the right type of website statistics tracking software and having the knowledge in how to make best use of that software.

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Pay Per Click - Do The Maths

While at Kent 2020 many people said words to the effect of “we spend £XXX per month on Google PPC but get minimal results”.  In many cases that’s true – if you have a poor PPC campaign and/or a weak website then it’s highly likely to get minimal results.  In this case, the basic maths calculated is that an investment in attracting visitors to the website hasn’t converted to revenue that far exceeds that investment.

‘Doing the maths’ is essential in PPC and applies right from the start of a campaign and continues forever.  It’s vitally important to be continually comparing investment in clicks to return on that investment.  For many types of businesses this is easy to do at a basic level.  Let’s look at how easy this is.

Let’s say you spend £100 per month on clicks and that generates you 400 visitors to your website.

Depending on how effectively your PPC campaign was set up, and how strong your website is, you’ll get a certain number of enquiries/sales as a result of those 400 clicks.  Just because you get 400 clicks doesn’t guarantee success – those 400 clicks could be pointless if the PPC campaign/website strategy is wrong.

As long as you’ve got a system that logs every enquiry you get, and you’re analysing the source of that enquiry (e.g. PPC, Yell.com, personal recommendation, newspaper advert), you’ll have a clear picture of how many enquiries/sales originated from your PPC campaign.  If you don’t have such a system then ask us how – the advice is free and will lead to a major boost in your business.

Let’s say that 400 clicks results in 20 enquiries, which translates into 10 actual sales.  If each sale is worth £50 profit to you then 10 x £50 = £500 profit made out of the £100 worth of clicks.

But it’s never quite that simple because if your type of business has repeat business then the maths you need to be doing has to factor in the ongoing revenue.  For example, you may offer a service that has profit of £50 the first time a customer uses it and then adds that profit twice again when that customer uses the service twice more in the following weeks and months.  Then add in the fact that clients may recommend you on to new clients.  So, someone who may be recorded in your enquiries log as a ‘recommendation’ client could actually have originated from a PPC client.  What’s important is that you keep a close eye on this so that you get a true picture of just how much PPC is generating for your business.

Having done the basic maths each month, and assuming that you’re getting at least a reasonable return on your investment in PPC, your attention should turn to making those figures even better. 

So, if you’re spending £100 per month on clicks and it’s generating 400 clicks which convert to 20 enquiries then although that’s reasonable, it’s not as good as getting 30 or 40 enquiries. Therefore, you turn your focus to increasing your level of enquiries from the existing level of clicks you gain.  Of course, you could take the view that doubling the click costs allowance to £200 per month will get twice the enquiries (40 instead of 20) and you’d probably be right, and they’d still be profitable.  However, that’s a shortcut that really shouldn’t be taken and the Custwin recommendation would be to initially work towards a minimum 10% clicks to enquiries rate and only then consider increasing click budgets.  If a website isn’t converting at least 10% of clicks into enquiries then there’s something wrong with either the PPC campaign or the website itself.

This process of ‘doing the maths’ is important to Custwin because we want all users of PPC advertising to get the best results and the only way this can be determined is through doing the maths.

But what if you’re not at the point where the basic maths add up?  What if you’ve been investing £XXX in clicks each month but haven’t even covered that in sales, never mind profit?   When this basic maths doesn’t add up, you’re then in the position where one of the Custwin services will be of use to you.

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Financing New Websites

One of the biggest frustrations we have at Custwin is when potential clients have websites that really aren’t strong enough, but they still want to get a lot more business from them.  In some cases we just won’t take on that work (after all, if a website is that bad then any attempts to promote that website online will lead to mediocre results).  In other cases we do take on the work but on the proviso that the results may not be as brilliant as they would be if the website was redeveloped.  Naturally, we still get great results in such circumstances and the clients are happy to keep paying us, but our own expectations of what’s possible are so much higher.

In situations where clients are reluctant to invest what can be a few £thousand on a fantastic new website (that will then get the best results from the marketing of that website) there has often been a stalemate.
  
However, there are now options for companies to spread the cost of website redevelopment work over a longer period of time, AND to build in the costs of marketing that website.

As an example, a website that may cost £2,000 equates to £166.66 per month over 12 months.  With interest added that comes to nearer £200 per month over 12 months.  That’s a lot more palatable than an initial £2,000 hit in times when cashflow is so tight.

The great advantage of financing websites in this way is that it’s possible to build in some of the costs of marketing that website so that it’s one package financed over a longer period of time (for example, PPC advertising).

As you’d expect, the finance providers would need to run credit checks on potential clients but for the costs of a typical new website, the level of investment required is unlikely to cause any problems.

One big upside to gaining finance for a website in this way is that the website is effectively treated as being ‘leased’ for the duration of the finance agreement.   This brings with it good tax benefits and the end result can be that the website actually costs less than the original price for the work to be done (because of what can be claimed back).

We wanted to bring the concept of gaining finance for website development work to the attention of our subscribers purely because it’s frustrating for us to see companies suffering when it’s so clear that success can be gained from the website being professionally redeveloped and then marketed effectively.  If the route to a business becoming vastly more successful is through a finance agreement spread over a longer period of time and the monthly payments being easy to pay because the website itself and the way it’s marketed are so strong, then we’d consider that to be a useful option for any company to ponder on.

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