There is so much meeting and conference space around the city today. Each competing on price, location and extras.

What if one of the extras included a ready made audience…. I would pay extra to book that venue.

If you are a Venue letting space it is pretty easy. Ask every person through your door for their details and permission to contact them about similar events in the future. Ask them what else they might be interested in.

Pretty soon you have a high quality database of people who have shown they will pay for a conference and have told you what they are interested in.

You want to hold a conference on Email marketing solutions? We have 5000 people in the local area interested in Email Marketing Solution conferences. Would you like pay by credit card or cash?

While staying with my wife’s family over the holidays I heard a great story about a very canny business man.

Old Mr Feeney ran Feeney’s bar for over 30 years in the small village of Williamstown in the west of Ireland. While various pubs in the area would move in and out of popularity over the years, or even within a single year, his bar always attracted a good crowd.

Old Feeney knew what made a great bar.
It was not the great product; every where served the same beer.
It was not the interior design. He would describe it as a country pub, no more special then any other.
And he would laugh if you suggested it was the great staff. As a widower he ran it himself and no one expected a quick pint as his years advanced.

Mr Feeney knew it was the people that made a bar great. Which brings us to the vicious circle that all pubs have. Without people in your bar, you cannot attract people to your bar.
If you were first into his bar, you were unlikely to walk in and walk straight back out again in case you appeared rude. Feeney would chat to you, find out how your day was and before you knew it you had a drink in front of you and it was on the house. That immediately meant you would stick around for a second you could pay for yourself. And he would keep you there until someone else arrives.
The next person in would be sure to be introduced to the first one and Old Mr Feeney would be sure to find some common interest to start the conversation flowing.
And before you know it the bar is full, conversation is flowing and the craic is great.
He may have lost (a little) money at the start of the night but more then made it back by the end.
It is the original freemium business model.

Old Mr Feeney eventually sold the bar and retired with a very tidy sum. The new owners kept the bar, the location and the product but do not seem to be doing that well. I wonder what they are missing.

Lessons Learned:
Your business is more then your product.
Look at the lifetime value of your customer, not just the immediate transaction.
Can you facilitate your customers getting more value from each other?

Image: John Picken

From a snow covered Ireland we would like to wish all our Toddle users a very Happy Christmas and all the very best for 2011. We have had a fantastic year in 2010 and have lots planned for Toddle in the New Year.

Our offices will be closed from December 23rd and will reopen on January 4th. As always we are available via email if you need any help or assistance. We will be taking some time out in the beautiful West of Ireland over the holidays. Make sure to recharge those batteries for another exciting year!

See you all in 2011.

From Alan, Mary and the Toddle.com team

The excitement is building. Decorations and Christmas Trees are being put up all around as I write. Lists are being written for Santa and Nana is making her very special Christmas cake. Yes, the festive season is nearly upon us! Time to send out your Holiday newsletters.

To help you with this task; we have launched our beautiful Christmas newsletters today. Choose from four really pretty Christmas and Holiday themed designs to promote your great seasonal offers and gift ideas.

Christmas Wrapping Christmas Gift

Santa and his Reindeer

As always, these templates will look fantastic in Outlook, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, Gmail and many others. We hope you love them as much as we do. Of course, you can add some Christmas cheer to any of our existing newsletter templates. Simply insert some seasonal images from iStockPhoto.com (for as little as $1 an image) or Flickr. Just search for ‘Christmas’, ‘Santa’ or “Holidays”.

Our Christmas newsletters work really well as eCards too. Why not send some to friends and family, colleagues and clients, to wish them well this Holiday season.

And finally, here’s a selection of beautiful images we found to inspire you. Log in and get started now.

Happy Holidays eveyone!

We were delighted to win Best Microsite at the Irish Web Awards last month. The site was the Christmas campaign for safefood.eu the Irish food safety body and was brilliant fun to work on. The campaign needed to work across multi channels to get the message out on how to cook your Christmas dinner and not poison anyone over the festive season!

The integrated Christmas campaign featured a Microsite, Facebook and Twitter integration and a three part email marketing campaign to tie it all together. TV Chef Neven Maguire came in and produced a series of 6 cooking videos and we also included a cool competition to add to the subscriber database. It was terrific fun developing the project from initial concept right through to final launch. We even found an innovatiove way to make the most of that leftover turkey with the “I still love turkey” campaign on Twitter and Facebook!

See all the designs here.

Big thank you to Deirdre (Pictured with Alan) and Fiona and all the team at safefood. Thanks to Damien Mulley and his brilliant awards team for making the event so enjoyable.

Can we help you with this years Christmas campaign?

An email Christmas card.
Facebook page greetings.
A sales campaign for the Christmas rush.
Or a full marketing campaign like safefood.

Contact us now for a chat.

Do you know how much a marketing campaign will make before you spend a $1?
Is Twitter earning you money? What about Facebook?
How much is an average lead worth to your business?

We have put together a very easy ROI (Return on investment) calculator for you to use with every campaign. Very quickly you will know where is better to spend your marketing budget and which campaigns are wasting you money.

This works for Email, Adwords, Twitter, Facebook, Offline, Advertising and even your website.

Download the Excel Template

Guerrilla marketing: an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget.

-Wikipedia

Mashable pulled together a great set of videos showcasing some really innovative and clever campaigns.
Watch them here and look for ideas that you can use for your business.

Two that stood out for me are below:

SIXT

What do you do if advertising is expensive and there is no physical room for any more ads?
Advertise via Wi-fi and target the right business people who use it.
Car rental company SIXT made use of an existing and very affordable platform at their disposal. What i especially like is that people do not need to connect with the network to see the advertising message.
This is thinking outside of the box.

VrijVerzekerd.nl

Novocortex used guerrilla marketing tactics to build brand awareness for an online insurance company. They placed stickers with huge scratches on expensive cars. Stickers could be easily removed, because they were printed on Static Paper. This paper has no glue on it and sticks due to static electricity.
What i really liked is how they then offered the stickers for free for friends to put on mates cars. Essentially creating a huge viral distribution team at a tiny cost.
As well as the real word distribution of their ad i am sure they also captured the details of people ordering the stickers add to their marketing loop and turn into potential sales leads.
Total cost €1000

View the rest on Mashable and think about what you can do.

A quick post for a Friday afternoon.
Declan Kennedy shared an interesting link to Altimeter with a list of Social Media Policies from around the web.
Here is our Social Media Policy document you can download and use for free.
This is actually our document for all staff. Feel free to print, use, edit in any way you wish.

Here is part two of my landing page optimisation post. If you missed it, part one is here. I am happy to receive your comments and suggestions and thanks for your feedback so far.

To recap: A landing page is the webpage you direct traffic to from a specific email, ad or piece of marketing. Its goal is to convert that traffic into sales or sign ups.

Be Personal

When designing your landing pages the golden rule is to be personal. People like to buy from people, not computers, or websites. It’s inbuilt in all of us to relate better to other people. The more you personalise your message and offer, the more you increase the connection with your visitor. Why? Because it increases their comfort and trust when buying from you. A great example is to add your phone number to your site, as Brandon Eley points out.  Once a visitor realises there is a person on the other end of the phone to help, IF needed, conversions increase. The knowledge that someone is there to help is enough to reasure the user.

Likewise, if there is any way you can make your message more personal and targeted for your page visitor the better. At the most basic, you need to know where in the world they are coming from and what site or advert they are visiting from. Are they an existing customer? Do you know their name?  Can you tweak your message to include these details?

Link the landing page to the advert

Here is an example of an ad for Eircom Broadband on Google. Note the wording and information contained. Yet when you click through to the landing page, pictured underneath, where is the mention of the “Value Business Bundles”?

Repeat the Promise

You need to repeat the wording of the original ad and give a clear call to action. Repeat the wording and the graphics. It should be obvious to the visitor that they have come to the right page, with the offer they were expecting. The key point here is, you made a promise in the initial advert so you must fulfill that promise on the landing page.

Scantastic

Make sure your pages are scanable. Here is the text from the first third of an Amazon product page for Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow.

This amount of information should be overwhelming but Amazon didn’t become the leading online retailer by confusing and overwhelming shoppers. Here is the designed Amazon landing page for Purple Cow. What a difference.

You can see now how design and formatting of the content makes information much clearer and easier to find. This example highlights one of the misunderstandings of landing page optimisation. Your pages do not have to be short to be effective. It doesn’t even have to be that simple.  Your landing page needs to be long enough, detailed enough and clear enough to make the sale. It can be 1 page or 5 pages. No one size fits all, so you will have to test what works for you.

An interesting side note regarding the addition of review on Amazon. You have probably heard how reviews increase sales. But recent data from Amazon has shown that products with both positive and negative reviews sell better then ones with positive reviews alone.

The reason attributed to this is twofold. First, we are a suspicious bunch and we don’t trust something that everyone gushes about. The second reason is that negative reviews are not necessarily bad. A bad review from a large corporate CEO might tell a small business CEO that this is the book to buy.

Wording

Simple word changes can have a huge impact. 37 Signals wrote about some of the wording variations they tried on their Highrise CRM  sign up page. Here are three types used with the percentage increase in conversions for each one.

Their original wording had the worst conversion rate “30-day Free Trial on All Accounts.”  Variation no. 2 – “Sign-up takes less then 60 seconds. Pick a plan to get started!” gave a 30% better conversion rate. When you are attracting the level of traffic that 37Signal products do, 30% means a significant jump in revenue.

How to increase conversion with four amazing words.

Jason Fried said that they tested various phrases on the Highrise homepage for the call-to-action button. They had originally used various permutations of “Free Trial” and “Sign-up for Free Trial”. Then they tested the phrase “See Plans and Pricing” this resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups. That’s right. 200%.

Fried believes it’s because people are afraid if they click a link that says “Free Trial” then they’ll somehow automatically sign up for something and be trapped. However, “See Plans and Pricing” encouraged them to explore, without the fear of commitment.

Euocottage Case Study

This landing page from Eurocottage highlights a common failing for websites where they ask for too much information upfront. Ask for the least amount of information and at each step and clearly explain why you need this information in the first place. Explain to the user what the benefits are by imparting this information.

We redesigned this new landing page for Holiday Cottage search site Eurocottage.com. We simplified the process and gave users the information they needed to trust the sign up process. The new page is clearer and easier to use. It’s friendly and welcoming and is much more inviting to users. We are testing the new landing page at the moment. It will be interesting to see the performance rates for the new page. We will keep you posted.

Tools for testing

There are a few must have tools if you decide to try and measure and optimise your landing pages. Website Optimiser is a specific tool from Google for doing A/B and multivariate testing. If you use only one tool for testing this is it. Use Google analytics of course for basic numbers and tracking goal funnels.
5 Second test is an interesting site for checking what parts of your page people actually notice.

Be a pirate!

Be a pirate for your user. Sites like Amazon spend millions of Euro in usability and conversion tracking every year. Look at what the successful sites in your market are doing and copy them. No need to reinvent the wheel but try and make your own improvements. Landing page optimisation is not rocket science it is just a series of small simple tests. Devote an hour a week to it and track your progress.

Why bother?

You can spend 6 months building a level of traffic converting at 1% and to double that turnover, you can spend another 6 months.
Or you can simply test and tweak the landing page to convert up to 2% or 3% in a fraction of the time.

Recommended Reading

Seth Godin The Big Red Fez
Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
Landing Page Optimization – Tim Ash
eConsultancy
Marketing Experiments
Google Website Optimizer
Which Test Won

Image above from Scurvy Pirates

This is why email marketing is so great. Great video from Microsoft of all people.