I know! Boring stuff. 🙂
I hear ya! Just give me a few minutes and you’ll thank yourself for sticking with me.
If you implement this concept into your business, you’ll make more money in less than 30 days. Promise!
Let’s say this above graph shows how engaged each group of customers are with your product relative to how much they spend. If people from Finland are the most engaged and spend the most money with your company. Then  it would probably be a good idea to put more effort to connecting with people in Finland.
Your marketing results are only as good as understanding what you do well and how to improve on your results.
If you try to connect with potential customers for a few weeks on Facebook and give up you’ll never see any traction. You are essentially wasting your time and money.
This is why most small business owners fall short in their connection campaigns. They do a great job of connecting and building trust, but they don’t measure and refine what is working for them and what isn’t.
Measuring your success is so very important to a well run business. Once you see what is working your internal drive will encourage you to keep taking action on your outreach efforts (marketing).
Review Results
You need to review what is growing your business and what is giving you a poor return on investment. As your business grows you must put systems in place you will be able to more accurately figure out what is working and what isn’t.
For example I write a weekly article (blog post) around the topics that frustrate, excite and intrigue my audience, I send out an email to my email subscribers, I update my social media accounts and I answer every question that comes in.
Is this a lot of work?
Yes.
Does it turn lookers into buyers?
Yes.
This is the main part of my connection system that works for me. I’m constantly adding in other layers that work and don’t, but it’s an ongoing process. The more I test the better results I get.
That’s why I’m a big believer in marketing campaigns. They spice things up when you feel like drawing attention to something in a fresh way.
Measure Results
After you’ve tried something for a certain period of time, take a look at how much it costs you to do this marketing and what is the gain you see from doing this work.
The key is to keep track of this data. It’s important to keep everything relatively simple for small business owners, so you can easily track your results.
For example I have a client that has an email list of 5,000 people. He gets about 300 new subscribers a month and 3.2% of them buy his premium product at $197. This doesn’t count his consulting and lower priced items.
He can guess within a fews sales or two that he will make $1,891 from each new subscriber. Over the last few months this has been increasing as we do more testing out different copy, layout and images.
His #1 focus is adding to his subscribers each month because that’s where he sees the best potential for long-term growth.
Once you see what is working for you then you can do the next step.
Keeping Track of Your Results
Many of my clients keep a simple Word or Excel document for each of our campaigns. We review this on a monthly basis. Once we know the campaign is working we can then focus on improving conversion. This will lower our costs and increase our ROI.
You may even want to try a good old pen and paper. Remember you have to do what works for you. They key is to be consistent with how you keep track to make sure you are getting the most out of your marketing.
Refining Results
The next step is refining your results so you incrementally keep growing your business. This process shouldn’t be over exhaustive easier. The easier you make your refining process the better.
I believe every business owner who has a website should be split testing different aspects of their site. I explain split testing here. The idea is to have 2 versions of one page and split the web traffic between them to see which page people like more. When you know certain words or colors work well for your customers you can try this out on other parts of your site as well.
I suggest to my clients that they try to improve one aspect of their website or connection process each month. Pick one thing to refine for the month, test it and see what happens. The more data you collect the easier it gets to make improvements that keep people on your site longer.
- Where on your website could you make an improvement that would get people to take action on your site?
- What could you change to help improve your results?
Then test it out and see what happens.
If you are testing out how to get email sign-ups. Make sure you have website tracking software in place to check out your current numbers and where you are at when your test comes to an end. The length will depend on unique pageviews. The higher your traffic volume the shorter your test should be. If you have any questions about what software to use. Just send me an email with your goals and I’ll recommend the best software for your business.
Perspective
Your end goal is probably more sales, but you also have to measure quality of client that comes in, how referrals are improving, or even how much more enjoyable your business has become. Not every website should collect email addresses to deepen relationships and not everything you measure should just be about sales.
* If you are visiting because a friend referred you to this page. You should check out the whole Close Your Connection Gaps and Reach More People Course. You can sign-up here.