MarketingSherpa Blog

Whenever I can do business online, I’m thrilled to do so. In fact, I picked out the realtor I’m buying my new house through online, and decided which houses to view in person after glancing over emailed digital photos. Naturally now that I need a moving company I went online to find one.

There I was late last night, so happy that I could post my request for estimates using a handy online form instead of having to call a bunch of moving companies individually on the phone. What a relief the Internet age is! Naturally I carefully checked the box saying “please contact me via email” to make sure I wasn’t bombarded by phone calls during my busy working day.

I got up, went to work this morning, frenzied on deadline, when I was bombarded by phone calls from almost a dozen moving companies who saw my online request. After call #3 (when I lost my temper and yelled at the salesman. Did I mention I’m frenzied on deadline?) I unplugged the phone and swore not to give my business to any company that called.

Please, if you work for any type of company that uses online sales lead generation forms, make sure your sales and telemarketing teams respect the “prefer to be contacted by email” button. Thank you very much.

The best way to ask for a referral is to be prepared to do it. In order to be prepared, you should take a few simple steps to think about when you will do it, how you will get comfortable with the idea, how you will ask, and what you will do once you get the referral.

1. Evaluate your audience.

Are they really sold on you? Have you established your value? Do they understand what you do? Have you positioned yourself, your services and your right to have a relationship with the client or referral source? Have they given you the “high sign” that it is ok to ask?

For example, signs to look for:
“I really appreciate the work you’ve done.”
“Others should know how great this is!”
“I wish I’d done this a long time ago.”
“We are so happy with the way things went.”
“We are so happy with the way things turned out.”
“I think what you do is just great. I’d like to know more about your business.”

2. Consider the occasion.

Timing is important. The best time to ask for a referral from a customer could depend on the quality of the relationship that you have built with your customer.

One good time to ask for a referral is right after the sale is closed and your product and service is being delivered or installed. Perhaps the best time to ask a customer or client for a referral is after the product or service has been successfully implemented.

This is also the prime time to ask for a written testimonial to use as a sales tool. If it is a referral source, I will just say: never ask before you have established your value and have offered something of value to your new referral relationship. Remember to put favors on deposit in the “bank account” of your reciprocal relationship before you make withdrawals!

3. Determine the length and purpose of the meeting and your approach.

People are busy. How long do you anticipate the meeting will take? What is the purpose for the meeting where you will ask for a referral? How do you plan to approach your “ask?”

It is best in person, no doubt, but if you plan to meet over the telephone be prepared to let the person know how long you will take, the purpose of your call and what you would like to happen by when.

4. Gather facts.

If it is a client, what is the value of the work you did? If it is a network contact or referral source, what have you done for them lately? Where do you stand in your “balance sheet” on the Law of Reciprocity? Have you earned enough value in your business exchange relationship to be able to ask?

5. Make the script your own.

Nobody’s script will work for you. There are many different approaches and suggestions for asking for a referral. You have to find the one that works best for you and that seems most appropriate for the relationship you have and the style of the person you are asking.

Regardless of how you do it, the key points to convey are this:

a. Tell them you enjoy working with them.

b. Tell them you are interested in growing your business.

c. Ask them to describe the value of working with you or the benefit they or the company derived (if a client). Ask them to describe how they understand the benefit of your products or services (if a referral source).

d. Ask if they know of anyone else that would need or want similar benefits by working with you.

For sample scripts, please contact me personally:
karen@rainmaker-pro.com. Thanks!

Tip submitted by:
Karen Bergh
RainMaker Pro Inc.
http://www.rainmaker-pro.com

Just got an email from David Spiselman, CEO CyclopsMedia.com, in which he referred to “pBooks.” What are they? Print Books. Ohhhh.

Two ContentBlog readers, Adam Gaffin, Executive Editor Network World Fusion, and Shirl Kennedy, self-described Writer, librarian, and online copyright whiplash victim, have written in to say there are common work-arounds to break the No Right Click DRM function easily.

However, as my Tech Editor Alexis Gutzman says, “Yes they exist, but the majority of people are like you Anne, too technically clueless and/or just plain honest to use them.”

I still think the no right click DRM is an idea worth exploring for publishers worrying about copyright online. Let’s face it, every type of DRM is breakable by someone. Maybe perfect DRM is not a rational goal. Good enough DRM is. For many purposes a simple solution will be ok 80% of the time, so why not use it?

If you’re involved in fundraising, definitely check out this brand new DonorDigital.com Case Study which reveals details of how EarthJustice (the Sierra Club’s Legal Defense Fund) acheived these results over the past 18 months:

– More than 500% growth in their online constituent list

– More than 300% growth in online giving

– Influenced environmental policy with thousands of faxes and e-mails sent by constituents

Please feel very sorry for Michael Zimbalist, Executive Director Online Publishers Association, right now because when the poor guy called me up for our scheduled 4 P.M. chat about their (free access 17-page PDF) Online Paid Content Report I was far too caffeinated and coming off 3 different editorial deadlines (plus dealing with realtors all day) which equals an obnoxiously hyper, fast-talking, aggressive Anne. In heels.

The fact that he and Dan Hess of comScore were unremittingly pleasant is entirely to their credit.

My notes:

1. For a while Zimbalist didn’t quite get why it’s a problem to lump B2B content and personal finance stuff into a single category. (Little veins popping out on my forehead.) But he agrees to divide the B2B from B2C for future reports if at all possible. Part of the problem is that while B2B is a gargantuan category, it’s largely the hidden end of the iceberg. Most paid B2B titles have so few subscribers in comparison with the masses subscribing to B2C stuff, that comScore’s panel may not catch a representative sampling.

Also, there’s some understandable confusion over whether WSJ.com is B2B or B2C. They straddle both categories, but I believe consider themselves B2C because most subscriptions are paid for by individuals (vs. companies) and they publish news of more mass-interest than the typical super-niche B2B title.

Why am I so passionate on the separation issue? Well traditionally personal finance titles (and all other b2c topics) tend to have very different subscription-related metrics than B2B titles do. Roughly, consumer stuff sells vastly more units at lower prices with lower renewal rates and profit margins.

However, “vastly more units” doesn’t equal “vastly more important” unless all you care about is mass eyeballs. The subscription biz is about profitable eyeballs. Which is completely different. OK, rant over for now.

2. “Single purchases accounted for 15% of content sales” – everybody I know said “Wah? Are they talkin’ about ebooks?”
Zimbalist says no, he’s talking about electronically delivered reports, collected archives, research papers… I said, “i.e.
eBooks.”

He admitted there’s a big honking grey area here. We both agreed that it made no sense for future reports to expand to cover all ebooks because that’s a different industry. At the same time I didn’t think he should cut single sales out entirely because in the print sub world, these single sale items can add up to 40% on average of your total gross, and are often much more profitable than subscription sales. (In fact some publishers rely on them for all their profit. The subscription is a loss leader to get people involved with your brand and amenable to buying other stuff.)

In the future, they’ll probably continue to limit single sales counted to just stuff sold by subscription sites to subscribers (if that’s possible). Also Zimbalist says the whole including gift certificate purchases associated with ecard subscriptions was a mistake and won’t happen again.

3. Trial conversions. The excessive-sounding 17% conversion cited in the report was the result of mainly (but not all) B2C sites getting an up-front credit card to start free trial. Zimbalist agreed it would make better sense to split out this number based on whether the cc is gotten up front or not in future reports, because the conversion rate can vary so dramatically that it makes a merged number semi-worthless.

He also agreed to look into whether they could track conversions from free email newsletters. He hadn’t realized this was the #1 way many, many, many online publishers market subscriptions to prospects. Obviously this number is critical for projecting business success.

#4. Tracking newbie content buyers versus people who’ve bought content before. Call me greedy, but if OPA has access to comScore’s research talents I absolutely hope they’ll expand tracking to see if people who’ve bought online subscriptions before are more likely to buy again than the average newbie. In the ’90s, loads of reports showed that after people finally cracked and bought for the first time online, they then became much more likely to convert into buyers at site after site. I hope comScore can collect similar numbers, newbies versus oldies, for future reports that will in turn give us a much better sense of how high content sales in general can soar.

Link to OPA report PDF (17 pages)

http://www.onlinepublishers.org/opa_paid_content_report_final.pdf

http://www.comscore.com

My link for the week is this utterly fabulous article “ 21 Truths About Generating Qualified Leads” by Lee Marc Stein. If you are a B2B marketer who has to generate sales leads for your sales team, this is the 101 basic article for you. Handy, reality-based, and fun to read.

Color me technically incompetent, but I never realized until 5 seconds ago that you can stop people from cutting and pasting content from your public site. If you didn’t either, check this cool function out at copywriter Lee Marc Stein’s site. Just highlight a bit of text in the article there and then right-click with your mouse to begin copying it. Whoops! Up comes this little grey official-looking box that reads “(c) Protection. The RightClick function has been disabled. Please contact Lee Marc Stein for authorization to use this material.”

Here, unfortunately the glory of this as a content licensing marketing tool ceases, at least for Stein, because when you click the ‘OK” button, instead of sending you to an authorization request or purchase form, the darn thing sends you back to the article. Hey iCopyright.com and CCC (Copyright Clearance Center) guys, this is something you should build in to feed to your online article buying systems. I bet for some publishers it would
be a nice little ancillary revenue generator. Ooh, ooh, do you think it could work for people who try to hit print too?

http://www.leemarcstein.com/truths.htm

Last week we started adding “typos” to commonly filtered words in our issues, such as s^pam and f^ree, but it’s turned out to be tougher than you might think just because training yourself to spell that way and remembering to check for it when proofing isn’t second nature yet. Now I guess I have to ask our writers and editors to add auto-change to Word so when they use the correct spelling, it uncorrects it for publication.

Interestingly, our bounce rate of subscribers’ email went down 2/3, from an average of 3% to an average of 1% as soon as we implemented the typos. There were other factors at play, so this number isn’t based on a pure lab test.

I just got an email marketing campaign with the subject line, “Friend, your dog can be smarter!” This reminded me that in this world of getting HTML versus text, and rich media such as Flash or audio in email, and all the gizmos we can do as e-marketers, when it all comes down to it all that matters is picking the right list, having an offer that your target audience will immediately be enthralled by, and writing hits-the-spot copywriting.

Old fashioned skills still rule.