If you’re segmenting your list (and if you’re not, you NEED to be), aweber just made the job even easier.

They’ve come up with something called Quick Stats that lets you see, with a click of your mouse, awesome statistics on the open and click rates for messages that you send out to your list or a segment of your list.

And here’s the really cool part:   You can click on a button in Quick Stats to see a list of the folks who opened your email and a list of the folks who didn’t.  Then, you can send a message to those who didn’t open (creating a “segment” that you can use either now or later).  How cool is that?

These kinds of data are absolute gold for marketers and being able to segment your list this way, to reach out directly to people who didn’t get your message or didn’t take action is huge.

If you aren’t harnessing this kind of power in your business, we can help you get started.  If you don’t have a good autoresponder company yet, that’s a BIG problem you need to solve, right away–and it’s an inexpensive fix.  Just go here to sign up with aweber (full disclosure: This is our affiliate link.)

And if you need help understanding what segmentation is all about, how you can target your messages and offers more personally, join our all-new, free webinar tomorrow, because that’s just one of the powerful strategies we’ll be talking about.  You can sign up here.

See you there!

There’s a hot new tool that offers HUGE opportunity to ramp up your marketing results, by linking social media with surveys.

Today, we’re going to fill you in on the new tool and show you EXACTLY how you can capitalize on it.

Pay close attention because this kind of geographic targeting promises to be the next big thing.

Here’s the scoop:  a small (1%) group of Twitter users now has access to a new service, Local Trends.  It’s a new twist on local search that lets you measure trending topics in a geographic area.

With this tool, you can do 2 very important things.  First, you can target your own area (appears you can change it when you travel).  So if you market locally, this gives you a huge opportunity, because you can

• stay on top of hot topics in the local market and keep your brand in the conversation,
• follow up on these topics in your surveys, to get more systematic information, and
• use these topics in your marketing messages and offers.

The second function of Local Trends is where it really gets cool for those of us who market nationally or nternationally.  Local Trends lets you click on a list of cities and countries to find out what the trending topics are there.  Right now, the list is small, but you it will grow.

Once this list does grow, this gives you a HUGE opportunity to really increase your conversions.

We’ve told you for a while that segmenting your list and personalizing your offers could skyrocket your conversions but this can put it on steroids.

Here’s an example:  Let’s say you’re getting a lot of prospects and customers in Vancouver, BC.  With Local Trends, you could find out about issues, hot spots, trends, controversies—all sorts of things going on in Vancouver so that, when you send messages, offers, or invitations to your customers there, you can connect with them in a much more personal way.

How do you do that—how do you KNOW if a lot of prospects and customers come from Vancouver?  Use surveys.

Use super-short surveys of your prospects and put a customer profile survey in place, as we’ve been teaching you, and include location information in the data you collect.

As your database grows, look for cities, regions, areas where you have “clusters” of customers.

Where those segments are big enough, create a list segment.

Use Local Trends to periodically see what’s going on in that area, so you can use those trends in your messages to that segment.

It’s just as simple as that.  Location-based targeting, like Local Trends and Foursquare, is just the beginning, so stay tuned for updates and get ready to ride the next big wave.

]]> http://mysurveyexpert.com/blog/603/twitter-segmentation-strategy/feed/ 0 http://mysurveyexpert.com/blog/436/why-do-people-visit-your-site/ http://mysurveyexpert.com/blog/436/why-do-people-visit-your-site/#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:02:07 +0000 admin http://mysurveyexpert.com/blog/?p=436 Traffic is pretty much the “Holy Grail” of online marketing.  But traffic is useless if you can’t CONVERT it into SALES.

To do that, you not only need to know “who they are,” you need to know why they came.  Because if you give them what they came for, you increase dramatically the chances that they’ll buy.

Enter the “intent index,” which measures EXACTLY why people go online and gives us an awesome opportunity.

Here are some of the things the “intent index” tells us and what they mean for us, as online marketers:

• People are more than twice as likely to go online to be entertained (82%) and to learn (88%) than to do business (39%) or to shop (31%).   Which means that if we entertain them, we increases the chances they’ll buy.  So try putting a quiz on your site–they’re fun and highly entertaining AND they educate people, which is why they can up conversions by as much as 80%!
• At least 72% go online to find a community.  So give them one!  Give folks a chance to connect on your blog or in forums.  Better yet, create a special community for them by starting a membership site!  We have a survey template for creating a membership site to order, in our new product.
• Seniors are a HUGE group that is increasingly going online.   Like younger visitors, they come online to have fun (82%) and to socialize (80%).    So you can expand your market by targeting quizzes SPECIFICALLY at senior prospects.

Increasingly, then, intent is a “new demographic.”

Do these statistics apply to YOUR customers and prospects? Do you know WHY people come to your site?

Find out!  Do surveys to find out why people are coming so you’ll know how to keep them coming back!

“how many people do you need for an accurate survey?”

The answer isn’t simple, but I can boil it down for you, with some basic principles that should meet the needs of most businesses.

First, what do you want to do with the data? What questions do you need to answer and how complex do you need to get?

• For certain kinds of data analysis—for example, if you want to do complex analysis and “cut” the data lots of different ways–you need at least several hundred respondents.

• If you just want to look at frequencies, though–in other words, if you just want to know how many people are interested in a particular product or service–100 or so might be enough.

Regardless of how many responses you get, the CRITICAL issue is representativeness.

• That means that you hope the characteristics of the people who respond, as a group, “look” as much as possible like the people in your customer base, as a whole.

• So you hope, for example, that you get roughly the same % of men or women that you have in the customer base, the same age distribution, and so on.

• One of the things we’re going to do in our new membership site is show you how to get this.

Sometimes, though, you don’t want to know about EVERYONE. Instead, you really want to know about a particular group, or segment of our customer base.

• Maybe you want to know if the frequent buyers are interested in a membership site.

• In that case, if you’ve already segmented your list (using surveys and data from your shopping cart) to segment your list properly, you can go in and select that group, then send the survey invitation JUST to that group.

• That’s just one of many reasons that segmentation is so powerful.

The bottom line? Anytime we do surveys, we want to get as high a percentage of customers as possible to respond.

And it comes back to the mantra we give you over and over: The best way to get good information from your customers is to show them “what’s in it for them.”

• You do that by giving them an incentive to take the survey (a free report and a chance to win something cool, such as an iPod, for example) and by
• showing them clearly, in the survey and the invitation, that we’ll use the information they give us to give them more value.

To get a quick, easy SYSTEM for doing surveys this way, go here.

Several of you asked,

How can I get people to respond  to my survey?

That’s a REALLY important question, because it’s ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to get as many responses as possible to a  survey.

Why?  Because it increases the chances that your sample–the group of people who respond–will be representative.

In other words, you want the people who respond to look as much as possible like your customer base as a whole.  The more responses you get, the better the chance that you represent your customer base well.

So how do you do that?

Some of the videos we’ve put up will give you some useful information about this, but here are some of the key things.

To get response:

1. First and foremost, you get response by showing your customers “what’s in it for them” in taking your survey. It needs to be ALL about them, so that they see why they should spend time and effort to give you information.
2. You do that in many ways, but 2 of the key ways are to (a) offer incentives for taking the survey (such as, everyone who takes it gets a free report AND a chance to win something cool, like an iPod) and (b) designing the survey so that it reads as if it’s about THEM, not about YOU and how YOU can make more money. If you do that, you WILL make more money, because you’ll get the information you need.
3. Write a good survey! If you learn how to write clear, effective questions, to make your survey a conversation, and to report results to your customers and show them how you’re using the data, they’ll learn over time that your surveys are worthwhile. That takes some skill, but you’ll be surprised how fast you can learn to do good surveys, particularly with the simple recipe we’ve put together.
4. Send multiple invitations to do the survey.
5. Show your customers how you put the information they give to work to give THEM more value.

There are just some of the techniques we’re teaching.  To get the whole system, go here.

It will give you a great overview of the awesome system that will let you put surveys to work making money for your business, with a minimal investment of time and money.  To get the system, go here.

And although that seems incredibly obvious, many online marketers ignore that fact, missing a HUGE opportunity to ramp up their marketing results.

If you don’t think it’s important to target your messages differently to men and women, then think about some of the differences between men’s and women’s Internet use that have cropped up in recent surveys.

Men represent about 48% of Internet users, according to marketing estimates. And according to eMarketer, there is a “gender gap” not only in use but also in patterns of behavior.

Lisa E. Phillips, a senior analyst at eMarketer, says that “Men spend more time online, conduct more searches on a daily basis and do not mind seeing ads . . . They are as engaged in social media as women are, and are not put off by the companies and brands they find there.”

Gallup data support her claim that men use the Internet more frequently: They estimate that a majority (53%) of men spend more than an hour on the Internet each day, whereas only 42% of women do so.

But data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project suggest that the gender differences in search behavior may be bigger and more complex than Phillips recognizes: Men search more than women for SOME kinds of things, but not others.

The Pew data show that men who use the Internet are more likely than women to get many forms of information online, including weather, news, do-it-yourself, sports, political, and financial information. They search for jobs online at higher rates than women do; download software and music more frequently; use webcams more often; are more likely to rate products, services, and people; and take classes more often.

What do “wired women” do more frequently than their male counterparts? Send and get e-mail, seek out medical and health information (not surprising, given that women are likely to be the health care “point people” in their families), get religious information, and get support to deal with health or personal issues.

And, consistent with the old stereotype that men “won’t ask for directions,” women are more likely than men to get maps and directions online.

But we may see changes in these patterns soon, because the growth rate for women’s use of government websites, watching video or listening to audio clips, and researching products are higher than the growth rates for men.

Think for a minute about how many differences we just identified in what men and women do online.

And these data are in the aggregate; we know that the patterns differ by race and ethnicity, for example, and also by age.

What does this mean for you and your business?

You’ve got to know what % of your target market, your prospects, and your customer base are men vs. women.

You need to segment your list by gender, in almost any niche, so that you can target your messages differently to men and women.

Just another example of why you need to have a segmentation strategy in place and why any type of niche marketing needs to target men and women differently.

Before you go into a keyword coma, though, recognize that you’ve simply GOT to know what this is all about and how to put it to work for your business, if you’re going to survive in this economy.

A new survey shows that marketers and small businesses increasingly “get it” about how important these things are and they’re changing their ways, rapidly and radically.

This survey, which asked 50 “leading marketers” and 741 small businesses about their marketing and research plans for 2009, showed several interesting things:

First, marketers are rapidly moving their efforts online, indicating that they would increase efforts in EVERY online tactic mentioned in the survey–including social networking and webinars.

Second, small businesses are doing more segmentation research so they can better target their customers.

Third, small businesses will be doing more surveys–which is what will give them the information they need to segment their lists so they can reach out to their customers in a meaningful way.

And here’s what’s really important: Online surveys and focus groups are ONLY types of research that small business marketers plan to INCREASE in 2009.

What does this mean for YOU?

Bottom line: If you aren’t doing surveys in your business, you need to start now–because your competition IS doing surveys.

The simple fact is, niche marketing is absolutely critical in this economy. And to do niche marketing effectively, to reach out to your customers in a more personal–and more effective–way, you have to know who your customers are, so that you can personalize your messages to them.

If you don’t know what % of your customer base is women, if you don’t know what % holds a college degree, if you can’t say how many make more than $75,000 per year, then you don’t have the information you need to come up with a segmentation strategy for your business.

Want proof of how important a segmentation strategy is? Here you go:

• In the first 30 days of an e-mail campaign, open rates for e-mails sent to lists that are targeted or “segmented” like this are as much as 20% higher, on average (Marketing Sherpa, 2008).
• In the first 30 days of a campaign, click rates for a campaign that uses segmented lists are double those for non-segmented lists (Marketing Sherpa, 2008).
• Segmenting your list can quadruple conversion rates (Jupiter Research, 2006)

This means that you need to do demographic research–which is just another term for answering all those questions I just mentioned.

You need to do psychographic research–marketing jargon for understanding the values, attitudes, and lifestyles of your customers.

You need to do customer loyalty research–so you understand how to keep customers buying, over and over again, once you’ve converted them.

And here’s the good news: You can do all of this, quickly and easily.

Put a customer profile survey in place and you can answer all those pesky questions about demographics and psychographics, so that you can connect with your customers and prospects in a completely new way.

It’s quick, it’s easy, and at MySurveyExpert, we’ve developed templates that will get you up and running, right away.

You don’t have to be left in the dust. We’re about to put a survey product on the market that will let you get a customer profile survey up and running in less than a week.

What’s more, you’ll have a survey system in place that will give you ALL the information you need, in all phases of your business.

You’ll generate testimonials and referrals, produce case studies, measure customer satisfaction–the list goes on and on.

If you’re ready to get started, if you understand that surveys are THE hottest marketing tool among small businesses right now, then sign up for our free e-course today to get started.

And if you want more information about what we’re up to with our new survey system, just leave a comment for us!