It seems like my inbox is flooded with promises of “ninja ways to increase conversions” from some guru who got a special insight from a drunk guy in a Russian bar that generated an extra $100k in profit. B.S. radar going crazy yet?

Besides the obvious problems with this kind of nonsense, is that even if these tricks DO work – it never lasts. The name of the game should be sustainability of income.

Worst yet, the refund rates from people who feel duped by whatever method you used to get them to buy feel taken advantage of and even betrayed.

And in case you haven’t noticed, a customer who feels betrayed is not only a high PR risk but they are next to impossible to keep around with their wallet open.

People hate to feel tricked. (DUH!)

So while there are thousands of things you can do to make a sales page better such as better copywriting, split testing images, better explaining your value proposition etc there is one thing that blew ALL of those out of the water for me.

I found that changing one little thing in the way I approached sales pages created a massive 381% increase in sales conversions and historically low refund rates for my product.

It completely blew the doors off of my business and I’ll never be turning back.

Treating Your Customers Like Humans

This is going to sound silly when you say it out loud, but the biggest flaw with 99% of the marketing advice out there is that people can easily forget that you have to treat your customers like humans.

Have you ever wondered why there is a massive difference between “warm traffic” (clicks you send) compared to “cold traffic” (clicks that any external source sends) in terms of conversions and earnings per click?

People buy from people they trust, be a stellar resource and the customers will flock to you in the masses. [Tweet This Quote]

It’s almost sad how shocked and amazed most people are when you put just a little more effort into customer retention and being accessible to their needs. Luckily this gives you a drastic advantage that will create lifelong customers who will go bonkers for what you do and even be willing to pay more money for the same product if you’re the one selling it.

How To Earn Customer Love

Be super accessible to your potential and existing customers and be available for contact across every major communication channel.

Your potential customers want to know they are going to get the support they need before they buy, and people who have bought need to be blown away with how hard you are willing to work to keep their business through stellar support on all channels.

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but you need to ask yourself something.

“If I worked THIS hard to get a sale in the first place, how hard should I be willing to work to keep it?”

The answer to that should be that you are willing to work AT LEAST as hard to keep someone as you are willing to acquire them in the first place.

Think about how much energy went into getting that customer between capital expenses, media budgets and leaning on the credibility of your affiliates. It’s a massive effort to get someone to trust you enough to open their wallet the first time, so it’s your obligation to make them feel great about their experience even if they end up wanting a refund.

The Secret Sauce for 381% Improvement

Wondering what I did differently that completely blew my (already good) conversion numbers out of the water?

I installed a live sales and support chat service on my sales and documentation pages.

Now, when I have my regular messenger up and running anyone on the site can instant message with me to ask my questions from pre-sale to support.

The results (sales increases aside) have been stunning. Not only will you sell way more product and shrink your refund to near-zero ranges, you are going to learn SO much about your customer base.

People will tell me the exact use cases they are thinking about using my stuff for, or at the very least gives them an authentically awesome first line of response for any issues they might be having.

Everyone works their tail off to make sure that there is as little friction as possible to get a customers money, but what about a no-friction communication strategy?

How To Do It

There are several to kill it with live chat, but two services in particular stick out as the market leaders. These are the same people who are being used for major brands like Salesforce.com, Hipmunk, 99designs and many more.

One thing both of these services have in common is that they tightly integrate with support ticket and CRM systems for a complete customer cycle solution.

1. Olark

This is the exact service that I use on Contest Domination for the huge gains mentioned above. It’s a breeze to install and even easier to use, when someone shows up to your site you can set an in browser chat window to pop-up with a custom message that gets the conversation started.

If your chat is set to away or you aren’t logged in, customers can still drop you a note and Olark will send you an email with the message so you can follow up right away.

I love how the messenger name is filled with all kinds of customer information like location, browser, page they are currently viewing and how they go there (Facebook, Google search etc)

To get started with the Olark, my favorite live chat service click here.

2. Snap Engage

Snap Engage is impressive in it’s own right and has an a-list roster of current customers.

The functionality and feature set is pretty similar to Olark, it basically comes down to personal preference and what feature set you need.

Differences here are primarily that Olark starts at a lower price point, however with Snap Engage you can get an SSL certificate on a much less expensive plan.

Trial Snap Engage by clicking here.

How do you plan to wow your customers with amazing availability and prove that you aren’t just another vendor that is easily replaced?

Merchants, listen up. There is a good chance that traffic blip you are getting from Pinterest isn’t just “free user generated” traffic like you were so excited about.

You are actually paying for it without ever authorizing Pinterest as an affiliate, here’s how.

The hot new startup Pinterest is getting tons of press, and rightfully so.

After reports of generating more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube combined, and recently surpassing 10 million visits they are a force to be reckoned with.

Much like Tumblr and others, the velocity of this growth has to do with the repin function just as the reblog and the retweet were big contributors to the growth of Tumblr and Twitter.

These platforms allow different sizes and types of content to move sideways, and quickly.

More To The Story

Let me be very clear, I have no problem with companies making money and profit is not a dirty word, so long as everyone is on the same page.

Creating a beautiful product that people actually respect and enjoy is incredibly hard work the needs to be compensated.

But where do you draw the line between generating revenue and transparency?

I’ve been saying for years in private conversations, that consumers have been left in the dark when it comes to affiliate marketing.

Shouldn’t there be some upfront communication when dollars are changing hands? The U.S. Government sure seems to thinks so.

What’s Going On

It appears as though Pinterest is actually modifying the links of images to merchant based websites.

When a user Pins something from a website, Pinterest automatically makes the page which the image came from the link people go to when they click on the picture. This makes for lots of referral traffic, and the analytics support exactly that.

But what’s happening here stems from a relationship that Pinterest has with SkimLinks, which is technology that turns regular merchant links into affiliate links.

SkimLinks pays the publisher a healthy share of the commission and keeps a bit for themselves. It’s generally a win/win scenario for smaller publishers who don’t want to sign-up for a million affiliate accounts and go through all their content to update to something new.

The only issue with this particular implementation is that it just plain feels dirty that they are doing this without any user education. Just ask Dave Morin, CEO of Path how things go when users feel betrayed.

In full disclosure, I have developed similar technology that has not yet been implemented for my charity oriented service called MyBigGive, but someday that might come to market.

A Proposed Solution

I’m one of the first people to tell you that a business has to make money.

Whenever Facebook does a redesign of their user experience in order to maximize the metrics that are important to them, and users inevitably make a bunch of noise I can’t help but laugh.

What price did Facebook charge you again to use their service?

That’s right, absolutely nothing.

But I can’t help but think that this oversight will come to bite Pinterest right in the tail as they continue to grow and build themselves into a full blown, legitimate business.

Even if you are a free service like @Pinterest, you must keep the trust of users or you’re sunk. [Tweet This]

My unsolicited two cents is quite clear and easy, be honest with the users.

Pinterest doesn’t even really have to stop this practice if they don’t want to, but people should know that the sharing site is profiting from the hard work of user generated content.

However, if they really wanted to cut out the questionable linking practices they could axe it all together and just offer a “promoted pin” section where advertisers (read: merchants) could pay to have user generated content float to the top.

This would be more in line with the industry accepted sponsorship practices and help keep the trust with their user base.

Why This Matters For Your Business

We can all walk away from this though enlightened, because this will eventually get out to the masses.

It always does, and people seem to think things are a certain way even long after they have changed.

So what does that mean for us though? A few things.

First, regardless of how much we charge our customers or how we generate revenue we must always be open with our audience about why and how we do the things we do.

Secondly, there is almost always a better way to generate cashflow without trashing the trust relationship you have with your audience if you are just willing to be upfront with them about it.

What do you think of Pinterest turning your links into affiliate links? Does it change what you think of them, or how you plan on interacting with the service?

I had the pleasure of speaking with the twins from HasOffers during SeattleTweetup and they had some seriously interesting things to say about the affiliate world in general, how messed up it all is. Affiliate marketing right now is much like the world of SEO where it is considered black art and shrouded with people who are “scamming the system” to make a few bucks, lease a Ferrari and look like they are making it big.

Since this is the reputation that the industry has, many large advertising agencies who hold the real purse strings have been hesitant to drop the big dollars on affiliate/performance marketing and the beginners are all that is left standing because the big dogs need to move the needle more than a few hundred thousand. So how do you get more money infused into the industry? You give it transparency and make people accountable for their performance. An advertisers worst nightmare is spending X dollars to acquire a sale or lead that they would have nailed down anyway since it just increases their expenses and the customer ends up taking on the burden. They want nice, tight efficiency in their advertising spend and I think HasOffers may just have something to show for it.

Check out the press release below to read more about the latest Beta on how HasOffers hopes to shake things up by shinning a light on those who have been using shady practices to skim commissions off the top of the affiliate pool and sign up to see what’s new. I think you are going to be pleasantly surprised with what they have come up with, one of the things that Lucas mentioned to me is that this was the hardest decision they ever had to make because they had to “burn the house down and start over”. If someone is willing to take a successful ramp and burn it down to completely change the game, shouldn’t you at least check it out?

Full press release below:

HasOffers Admits Online Advertising Is Broken

Tracking technology provider announces development of “Adtribution”
(www.adtribution.com)

SEATTLE – June 14, 2011 – HasOffers (www.hasoffers.com ), a two year old technology company tracking more than $300 million dollars in ad spend per year, admits online advertisers are forced to operate in a broken model. The industry is completely reliant on direct response campaigns which have no way of compensating the millions of other publishers providing valuable brand engagement before the user’s last interaction.

Today, HasOffers announced the development and beta application process of a new cookie-less technology enabling advertisers to see the true influence of multiple affiliate and publisher relationships on a single user. Apply to be among the first of a select group of advertisers, networks, and publishers with access to the AdtributionTM Beta (http://www.adtribution.com ), coming this summer.

“Everyone realizes buying habits are changing as users spend more time online, yet advertising platforms have stayed the same,” said John Marsland, User Acquisition at Zynga. “Each user influenced by multiple publishers, and advertisers need the ability to compensate those publishers based on the part they played. That’s why I’m excited to see what HasOffers has come up with.”

Performance advertising, also referred to as affiliate marketing, has become an $8 billion industry in the U.S. alone, making it the fastest growing advertising channel. Yet the disparity between increasing Internet usage and online advertising budgets remains tremendous. Even though performance advertising has laid the sales foundations for companies like Amazon.com, Netflix, and even Groupon, it is still very limited by the tracking technology available to support it.

“We hear from people all the time – my affiliate program sucks,” said Lucas Brown, CEO of HasOffers. “Frankly I’m not surprised. That’s the real reason we entered into the performance advertising space, because we believe technology needs to fill a gap. Advertisers have no transparency, and they are often double and triple paying for acquisitions while some of the most valuable publishers are losing out big on commissions. This makes it really difficult for advertisers to increase their online advertising budgets and allow the industry to grow. We’ve been working on a new way to measure influence on buying decisions and can’t wait to unveil the beta this summer.”

To support long-term growth in performance-based, online advertising, HasOffers is currently in production on a second edition that targets the need for more reliable, more transparent tracking technology to support advertisers, networks, and publishers in a quickly changing Internet landscape. Apply for access to the AdtributionTM Beta at www.adtribution.com

About HasOffers

HasOffers ( www.hasoffers.com ) currently provides a software as a service for online businesses to track and manage their own affiliate programs. With more than $300 million in annual ad spend tracked by HasOffers, they positioned themselves as an industry leader in less than two years, being named “Service Provider of the Year” for 2010 by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). For more information, visit www.hasoffers.com or follow us on Twitter @hasoffers.

Illuminate Public Relations

Minou Nguyen Partner

E: minou@illuminatepr.com

P: 206.779.4559

Steve Stratz Partner

E: steve@illuminatepr.com

P: 206.300.913

Just as when you are identifying your clientele, you must break down your advertising efforts into fragments to boost the success within each segment. Those who plan on advertising anywhere and everywhere are most assuredly doomed to losses, because while advertising can drive sales and is necessary to garner attention for your product or service; a poorly implemented advertising strategy is going to cost you more than you could make back. That is the unfortunate truth for most early marketers.

So how do you decide which advertising strategies will work best for your brand? The decision is highly dependent on the type of product that you sell, or if you provide a service. One of the basic rules that you will learn in any promotional management class is that you do not stretch your promotional budget to meet your objective, you make your objective fit your budget. So with an emphasis on startups, here is the generalized breakdown for promotional strategies.

Affiliate

The biggest draw for startups towards an affiliate model is that it requires little to no upfront cost to start moving products, or gathering clients. The most involved part of this model is setting up the program and adding to the catalog.

Affiliate systems work by have a vendor or service provider sharing either a set dollar amount, or percentage of their sale (also pay per lead is considered affiliate). This usually works out for the vendor because it hedges the amount of money they need to spend in order to gain additional sales and grow their customer base. Affiliate marketers also like these kinds of programs because they are typically very in tune with what type of traffic they can channel and at what cost. For the marketer, these programs are essentially arbitrage.

{A great way to start your own affiliate program for free is through Has Offers [link] }

Pay Per Click {PPC}

PPC advertising is a great way to get traffic as quickly as possible, especially if you are using a major search engine to deliver the ad inventory. The idea behind PPC is that you create ad copy, select keywords to bid on, and pay each time somebody clicks on the link to go to your website etc. Click fraud is a known problem that many ad networks are combating daily, however if you know how to leverage the metrics that decide your cost per click, PPC can be a great way to drive sales.

{Google AdWords is certainly the market leader right now, and has the highest search volume thanks to Google}

Cost Per Thousand Impressions {CPM}

Impression based advertising is more for the major brands, or for particularly large promotions where a firm wants to raise awareness of their product or service (typically a particular line within a series). This type of advertising usually yields lower returns on investment for direct sales; however this type of advertisement can be attention grabbing if you have a great designer. The goal here is to really reach the magical 3 real impressions per user so the message sticks with them.

{Yahoo! has a very dynamic impression based network, at least until Bing replaces Yahoo! search[link] }

Cost Per Day: Take Over

Arguably one of the most effective forms of advertisements, cost per day also carries the highest ticket price. From a consumer perspective, these ads typically “take over” an entire website, or an entire category (often home page) in order to saturate the advertising impression with the customer. I feel that this is better for the consumer because while you can’t escape the message at hand, the ads are often thought out to much more detail, more creative and reduce overall clutter on the affected website.

The advertisers like these take overs because they know that each and every person visiting that page will see their promotional message and often times has the value added ability to make large portions of the site clickable for the consumer to find out more information. A great example of this is illustrated above from dictionary.com using its backsplash as a type of digital billboard.

MG Siegler from TechCrunch finds this approach appalling stating that is “God-awful” and “greedy”. What he is missing is that these condensed take overs result in a cleaner advertising experience for the consumer and a higher quality experience for both parties. {article}

The bigger the firm, the more diversified your promotional strategy can be, but while you are still small you should be focusing on narrow casted promotion with affiliate and ppc promotion. It isn’t until your firm requires large scale brand recognition (read outside of your local area) that cpm and take over’s are a logical step within your promotion.

What do you think about large scale take over advertisements from both perspectives? Is MG Siegler from TechCrunch.com correct in describing these digital billboards cancer to the internet?

Definition {Arbitrage}: Profiting off of the imbalance within two markets.

Example {Arbitrage}: It costs me an average of $15 to produce a buying customer to site X using my e-mail lists. Site X value’s each paying customer at more than $20, and therefore pays out an affiliate commission of $20 per new lead. The arbitrage in this case would a market imbalance of $5.