(Editor’s Note: The Start-up Chronicles is a weekly feature giving an inside view of the trials of a bootstrapped start-up – The Cost Savings Guy. CEO and founder Bruce Judson is also the author of “Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building A Successful Business on Your Own” and a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management.)
I have concluded that there are at least seven deadly sins that cause marketing efforts on the Web to under perform. My company, frustratingly, was guilty of five of them.
As you might recall, the traffic at The Cost Savings Guy (CSG), exceeded expectations, but the resulting sales weren’t where we expected them to be. A conversation with a friend, who is a successful web marketer, ended up lasting five hours and uncovered a number of problems.
Pretty much every Web site is a form of direct marketing. And entrepreneurs that work to convince visitors to take some kind of action—whether it’s trying a service or joining an email list—are direct marketers. As a consequence, much of the analysis of my site was based on ideas about good and bad direct marketing practices.
In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, I created two highly focused businesses. In contrast, CSG encompasses a far larger range of activities – including customized cost comparisons for a wide range of services, product recommendations based on the needs of an individual or entity and delivering a “Weekly Report” by email that details the newest money-saving services we have added to the site.
With all of this activity at the site, the first question my friend asked was: What is the one thing you want people to do? Do you want them to buy a specific product? Do you want them to compare costs? Do you want them to join your e-mail list? When he said, “This [lack of a clear goal] is not how you built [your previous companies] into successful businesses,” I knew he was right.
There are several reasons why focusing on a single goal increases your chances of success. First, it forces you to set priorities and to think through every aspect of how users transition from visiting your site to becoming paying customers. All of your efforts can then be aligned to pursue this objective.
Second, it forces site owners to recognize that no matter how valuable their service may be, today’s consumer is jaded and rarely jumps to do anything. As I wrote in an earlier column, inertia is a powerful force that can only be overcome by an equally powerful effort. It’s almost impossible to provide a sufficiently powerful call-to-action if you have multiple objectives.
Finally, good direct marketing typically limits the options available to users. The reason for that is each choice provides another opportunity for the user to lose interest. With a highly focused effort, each step associated with achieving the end goal can be simplified and constructed to maximize its effectiveness.
Here’s an easy way to analyze your own efforts. Without stopping to think, answer this question: What is the single goal of your Web site? Is your site designed to promote a free trial, to generate a paid sale, to add a visitor to an email list or to do something else? If you have more than one answer, or every aspect of the site does not support this goal, then you have committed—to a greater or lesser degree—the First Deadly Sin.
We’ll explore the others in the weeks to come.
Previous Start-up Chronicle columns:
- Learning to listen to unpleasant truths
- Newton was right: Inertia matters
- Who is invested in your success?