Weekly Innovation Challenge: Website and Sales Optimisation Masterclass

As part of the Canberra Innovation Network’s commitment to supporting our community of entrepreneurs during the ACT lockdown, we’ve reinstated our popular Weekly Innovation Challenge. The Weekly Innovation Challenge is for every entrepreneur, founder and business leader. If you’re growing a business, developing a product or just want to change the world, our goal is to show you relevant new ideas and challenge you to rapidly try them out. Every Lockdown Monday at 2pm we will introduce a topic, host guest experts, allow room for questions and end by setting a useful, actionable challenge for you to work on.

In the third instalment of the Weekly Innovation Challenge we hosted a Website Sales and Optimisation Masterclass with the always inspiring, immensely qualified Matt Bullock, master of game-ifying data. We’d like to share a video of the event for those who weren’t able to attend.

A big thank you to everyone who participated. And be sure to register now to join us on 13 September for the next challenge — Engaging Investors with Sylvia Tulloch and Nick McNaughton.

NB: Below we share notes taken from the live meeting. This is not a transcript and these are not direct quotes; for those, refer to the video above. 

Welcome to Week Three of our Weekly Innovation Challenge series! These one-hour webinars are meant to help bring you together and bring you outside of your day-to-day, all while giving you some fresh thinking and support. 

This week we’re pleased to be joined by Matt Bullock. He specialises in game-ifying data, getting deep into web stats and making a casual browser a customer with a little help from software providers. And he’s adamant that “quiet times are when you fix things”, and lockdown’s providing us all with some enforced reflection time. So why not optimise our sites since we can’t be meeting for coffees or cocktails?

He begins by posing a serious question — how much is a sale worth? The answer should guide you as he’s about to introduce tons of innovations you can make, but after a trial period they all cost money. Everyone’s answer to this question will be different; for example, Monday.com famously spends more than they make. $50m coming in this month? They’ll spend $60m on advertising / marketing next month. This, obviously, isn’t sustainable or suitable to everyone. So you must decide how much you can afford to spend in order to make a sale of your product or service.

The big problem we ALL face is that 97% of the traffic to your site is anonymous. Those users don’t fill out a contact form, don’t purchase anything, and basically you don’t know who they are or what they’re after.

Why? Because we have forms that suck and no one WANTS to fill them out. Your site might also suck. So look at the traffic and find out — are visitors engaged? And how do you engge with them? How long does it take you to get back to them? If the answer isn’t “immediately” then they won’t convert. It’s basically a lost cause. The statistics prove as much.

We’re now going to poll those on the Zoom and find out what % of us are working according to Matty B’s 10 Best Practices for Online Conversions.

#1 Do you use live chat software? 76%  of you answered NO

This is one of the most important things you can do to increase interaction and increase sales. There are tons of chat providers out there, and most come with a trial. LiveChat, Drift, Qualified, Intercom are all credible ones. Think of these as similar to a form which will lead to a qualified answer.

Be sure to think about your form, and make smart choices about it. You can DISQUALIFY people, which is as important as qualifying people. You also want to watch HOW people use your form. “Speed to lead” = the slower your response, the less likely you’ll close the deal.

#2 Does your site feature online appointment scheduling? 70% of you answered NO

Why wouldn’t you want to circumvent back-and-forth emails and phone calls when someone is already wanting to connect with you? Calendarly, Doodle and others are in this space.

#3 Do you identify your anonymous visitors? 90% of you answered NO

This is a good way to see if competitors are on your site, which big companies looking at you, what countries are sending traffic, what pages they look at when they make it your way, if people you’re trying to do deals with are checking you out, etc. Leaffeeder, Leadberry, Leadinfo, etc. are credible platforms to get this info from.

#4 Sales Intelligence: Do I prospect leads? 73% of you answered NO

This is all about hunting. Find the people you should be talking to and get their contact details. When it comes to sales intelligence providers, there are many. Lusha, UpLead, Lead411 and more. 

#5 Do you send video emails? 87% of you answered NO

Video emails have a 5x better response rate. BombBomb, Drift, and HippoVideo are some of the providers in the space. This is a great way to get someone to answer your email; you can say “Just click here!” and point to where the button is to access your calendar! This is also a great way to engage people you’d want to normally answer a survey. You also look different when your subject line has [VIDEO] in it. There’re thousands of use cases for videos! Sales, onboarding, training — they are simply way richer than regular old emails.

#6 Do you use email automation? 57% of you answered NO

Hubspot, Mailchimp, GetResponse, Drip, Outreach, ActiveCampaign — get on it.

#7 How often do you review your website traffic? Do you make a practice of looking at live traffic to see how a person moves around your site? 58% of you answered I DON’T

Use this data to find out where your system’s busted. Where they read is where they click, so this can also show you where your copy’s bad. Hotjar, VWO Insights, etc. offer this service. And you should constantly be doing A/B testing; it’s the best way to achieve your goal. Keep trying improvements! Remember you can only test one thing at a time — not 8. You need to be disciplined and have clear results. You also need a critical mass of data / traffic in order to read anything into the answers you receive (if you don’t have traffic, use a different solution and either pay someone for traffic or do the five-second-test, where you hold up your site for 5-seconds and see what a person’s response is). What YOU think of your site and its calls to action isn’t important. It’s what the PEOPLE think and DO.

#8 Do you retarget with your banner ads? 80% of you answered NO

They have about TRIPLE the conversion rate as non-targeted ads. And even if it doesn’t work that way for you, it will aid in brand recognition. Matt also uses specific ads to increase communication (you looked at Sales Person Charlotte’s page, you’ll be served a banner with a smiling Charlotte saying “Hey! Let’s chat!”). AdRoll, Google Ads, and Criteo do this. Remember, if you went to my pricing page, I’ll target you with sales messages. If you went to my blog page, I won’t waste my money on you. 

#9 Is your site optimised for speed in the countries in which you’re doing business? More than half of you said NO 

For optimal page speed use something like WPEngine, which will cache your site on thousands of servers so it loads quickly. You can target countries where you’re doing business, and speed things way up there.

Next level (more expensive) — aHrefs and the like let you look at your competitors traffic (to a degree). Work out where they’re spending money, work out what they’re getting traffic to and copy it (same blog title, different text). Are they running ad words? What’s their copy look like? Where are the people coming from?

Outreach: Emails on a drip. But remember to turn the sequence off once you’ve converted! You’ll be surprised when you get actual apologies from people — to a bot — because you’ve guilted them into responding!

Gong: Organizes who called who and talked about what, etc. It’s a funnel of the deal. You can easily visualize what’s going on with each call, see when competitors are mentioned, etc. Jump into any call and use it for training and refining.

#10 Did you learn something from this? 100% of you said YES!

Q: How much time do you analyze the data?
A: How long is a piece of string? Mostly, look at it when you have a problem in order to identify a solution. Don’t start by looking at your WINS. Look at your LOSSES, because remember the beginning of this chat? We started by LOSING 97%! Change that to 96% and your business will experience a boom. It’s all about conversions.

Q: What mistakes did you make along the way and learn from?
A: All of them. All of this stuff can fail. Let’s start at the beginning with chat functionality. Say someone’s on your pricing page and Mr Chatbot fires up and says “Hello!” That’s a FAIL. If you’re on the pricing page it needs to say “Do you need help with the pricing?” You MUST make all of the mistakes to get to the thing that people will respond to. 

Finally, don’t spill all of these secrets to everyone you know. Instead, use them yourself!

Remember to join us next week when Sylvia Tullock and Nick McNaughton will join us to talk about Engaging Investors. See you on 13 September at 2:00 PM!

Weekly Challenge: Sign up for one of the free trials mentioned above and test it out on your site. If you’re averse to that, identify a friend who isn’t familiar with your site and give them the five-second-challenge, then implement a change you learn is necessary from what they spot.

Last Week’s: Identify the ONE thing you can do better for your customers, and just bloody do it!

The Previous Week’s: Realise one problem I have and share it with someone I trust (“I’m not sure what to do about XYZ” or “I’m worried about ABC”). Saying it out loud is sometimes all I need to do! But other times the input from my team, a friend or another member of the innovation community with an understanding of my industry is just what I need to solve this.