Letters From Dan

I was over at Kyle Nelson’s blog reading about bounce rate today.

I agreed with his clinical definition of bounce rate. But our opinions diverged there.

I don’t agree that a high bounce rate is something that needs to be fixed. That’s painting with a broad brush and contributes to the myth of “bounce rate” that plagues so many. Let me start by saying:

• A high bounce rate by itself does not indicate anything.
• A high bounce rate does not signal website problems
• A high bounce rate should make you think, not take action.
• A high bounce rate just may be an indicator of great profitability
  more Bounce Rate Failure is (…)

I got asked today if I’d made any mistakes in building my  FreeWeeklyMastermind community. The answer to that is yes.  Darren and I have definitely made mistakes.  I wouldn’t even say their obscure mistakes – but probably common marketing mistakes many people make.

The first mistake we made was altering the schedule. I made the mistake of switching nights for the weekly webinars.

Some of our audience was also pretty active in another community that met Wednesday nights. It never bothered me that some of ourcalls would be lightly attended because they attended the other call that night. It didn’t bother me because not everyone needs what we’re talking about right now. Maybe the other subject was more appropriate for them. Besides ours are recorded.

In all fairness, how can you expect to maintain a community if you are commanding them to be present? Their presence and attendance should be because they really, really wanted to be there, right?

It’s possible to make money the wrong way. You would think that money that goes from my wallet to your wallet would be a good thing. But sometimes you need to make the tough decision to cut bait and start over.

Let me give you an example. The TV infomercial world isn’t easy. You spend oodles of money building a product, fashioning the brand, creating a show and paying money to get on TV. And that’s long before you make $1 from those efforts. When you finally get to the point that you’re spending money on advertising, the pressure is on. The show has got to work or you lose thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) before you can retool.

That pressure affects decisions. For instance a couple tweaks there and a couple tweaks here could mean the difference between a profitable show and bankruptcy. With money on the line, any evidence that revenue is increasing is met with cheers. Since shows are taped with on-air talent, tweaking a show is difficult to say the least so changing the offer is often the first test. The good news is once a show works and sales pay for the marketing, you can effectively market forever.

That’s when the mistake can happen. That’s when you can start making money the wrong way.

I went and saw a movie this weekend and was excited to see a Mayonnaise commercial featured before the previews even started.  Let me re-word that. . . I was excited to see what the Mayonnaise folks were doing in a commercial before the movie started. I can’t say I cared one way or the other that the commercial was about mayonnaise.

So just as the commercial started an icon floated into the bottom right corner of the screen that said “Shazam for Free Sample” I looked at it for a second and realized that the commercial wanted me to use the Shazam app at which time I would redirected to a webpage where I could order myself a free sample of mayo.

What do I mean by bounce rate mistakes? The bounce rate is typically what analysts note as the percent of people that come to your website and then almost immediately hit the back button.  When they “bounce” off they’re considered part of the bounce rate.

But most people look at the term incorrectly and start talking about bounce rate mistakes if your bounce rate is too high. Some even think Google cares about the bounce rate. 

One common marketing mistake small businesses seem to make is not leveraging operations activities for marketing purposes. As I highlighted in my “Dog the Bounty Hunter” story, the average, ordinary things that you do can be used as marketing.

I recently took a trip to Costa Rica, a fabulous country, and had opportunity to zipline with the Titi Canopy Tour group in La Foresta (outside of Manual Antonio National Park). The ziplining was fantastic. It wasn’t the scenery as much as the ride that really makes ziplining cool. And the crew at Titi Canopy Tours make everyone comfortable and safe each and every time. They are a class act.

But, they’re not making as much money as they could be. . .

No one wants to make a pricing mistake. Small business owners often have to order pricing labels so getting it right the first time seems crucial. Lately I’ve gotten some questions about how to price things, both products and services.

Fortunately, yes I say fortunately, there are no rules. That holds true especially if you provide a unique service or one that requires a great deal of expertise. However, if you’re offering the same service or product someone else is then you’ve got something concrete to look at.

Make sure everything you do results in actionable information. One of the big survey marketing mistakes is asking questions no cares to know the answer.

Honestly, I would love to stop that here. That alone is all you need to keep in mind moving forward. But a picture with color is so much easier to imagine. Here are a few examples of actionable information that should clarify this discussion.

The Survey Question

You’ve surely taken surveys that ask your age, income and marital status – have you not? I have too, several times and I’m eager to give that information. But I wonder, and I hope you do too, what are they doing with that information?

When you ask survey questions to your audience, role play the answers that might get returned. Suppose 65% said they were male and 35% female? What would you do? Suppose it was 50/50 or the reverse, would that change your marketing in any way?

One of the biggest survey marketing mistakes is failing to understand the value of the information.

The #1 website shopping cart mistake isn’t one that you make when you’re building your shopping cart. The mistake was made back in college when you decided that Psychology 101 was so easy you could skip half the classes. Because it’s what you would have learned in psychology that will drive more sales to your bottom line.

And ultimately – this is a really simple fix to a common mistake.

To fully understand why you need to do this you can either read Frank Kern’s new book, which I don’t even think has a title yet, or read Influence by Robert Cialdini. Both of them cover this concept quite thoroughly.

John Morgan’s book “Brand Against the Machine” is really a full length definition of branding itself. Sure, there are examples of small business branding mistakes and a whole lot of what you should be doing. But as a whole, it’s what the dictionary should reference when you look up “branding”.

Blockbuster is an example of a company that didn’t see it coming. Coincidentally in Chapter 13, titled Extra Ordinary (not Bankruptcy Court), Morgan talks about the rise of Netflix and Redbox in the wake of Blockbuster’s meltdown. He makes the point that it wasn’t Blockbuster’s failures that made Netflix great. In fact, Netflix became great because they did something “extra ordinary”. They took something mundane like renting a video and added a spin no one had ever tried before. Redbox is now doing the same thing.