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BenRamsden

Gravatars are for your business today, not just nerds.

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Ben Ramsden

Would you buy a used car from this man? Yes I must have heard that quip a thousand times, but I just thought it was a joke. Until yesterday.

A couple of weeks ago the sales via one of our websites suddenly accelerated. I initially put it down to the New Year effect of people returning to work after Xmas (that product sells mostly to small businesses). But the trend continued. The sales rate has outstripped anything that I have ever seen in the past. So I dig into the analytics. Traffic is up, but only slightly. There’s increasing interest from the Indonesian market, but US sales are also up. Bingo – there it is – our conversion rate of visitors into sales has virtually doubled to 8.2%. Wow! But why?

To cut a long story short, a couple of weeks ago I set my gravatar on WordPress. To the non-nerd that means that all the comments that I leave on almost any website anywhere in the world, now have a small photo of my happy smiling face beside them. Including on that sales site. Whilst I cannot be entirely certain, it appears that the addition of my face alongside my comments has encouraged more visitors to buy from me. Many more. There’s now a human face that they trust behind all the text and technology.

Just think how many sales I have missed by not having a quality photo. Are you missing opportunities too?

Even if you don’t live in nerd-land yourself, I highly recommend that you ensure that your own digital footprint presents the image that you want. Have you Googled yourself and seen the images it finds? What does your LinkedIn photo look like? If you want a digital cosmetic upgrade and you’re based in Sydney, Australia, then go see my friend Nina Beilby. She took the picture of me that skyrocketed sales, and she could sure do the same for you. She’s very affordable and based at a major transport hub.

No, don’t buy a used car from this man, but please don’t waste another unseen opportunity. After all, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And in the digital world most of the judges are unseen and unknown to you, there are literally millions of them, and it’s 24×7.

Special – eggs discounted by 1c

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The end of summer sees tree leaves turning yellow. At our local supermarket the price tags on the shelves turn yellow on a daily basis. Yellow means special – look at me – hey this is great. But your intrepid correspondent has discovered that all is not what it seems.

After our right-brain sensory channel was engaged by the colourful tag in the egg department yesterday, the left brain analytical function swung into action. Bracing ourselves for a complex volume vs. size vs. origin vs. price decision, we were surprised to discover that the eggs had been discounted by a massive 1c from $3.99 to $3.98!

Our initial disappointment at discovering that the ‘special eggs’ were out of stock, was replaced by a warm smug feeling of superiority over all the shoppers who had gone before and been fooled by this apparently phoney bargain. We have never before experienced such a wave of emotions in the supermarket egg department!

But that’s the point. Behavioural Science is a little understood but incredibly powerful skill in business. Because emotions are a much stronger driver of behaviour than thoughts, intentionally creating the right emotional reaction is crucial for great business. To learn more about this powerful and crucial business discipline check out Bri Williams from People Patterns. Bri (pronounce like the French cheese) is a captivating public speaker, author and blogger. A subscription to her free monthly newsletter is highly recommended.

We’re off now to buy some organic water and cholesterol free toothpaste.

Transform online sales revenue with ‘try before you buy’

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We increased our sales conversion rate from 1.7% to 5.3%. That’s the percentage of visitors to our online software sales website that make a paid purchase.

On 15th September we introduced a new ‘try before you buy’ software demo on that website, and its sales performance transformed virtually overnight. In the following month 22% of site visitors used the demo, and of those who had tried it, 24% went on to purchase.

The beauty of online sales is the ease of experimentation. We are currently testing the price elasticity of demand, and look forward to sharing lessons from that in a future post.

How much Klout do you have?

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He walked into the American Airlines lounge at JFK airport in New York and showed the receptionist something on his phone. With a smile and a greeting he was welcomed. Nothing amazing about that eh?

This wasn’t some sort of online ticketing app. Our traveller was demonstrating his level of social media influence to gain access to the lounge. Klout is a service which looks at the way that individuals use social media, and calculates an influence score for them on a scale of 0 – 100. Your correspondent has a score of 12 which is way below the level required for lounge access! Brands know that the most powerful promotion is via word of mouth, and hence are targeting people with high ‘Klout’ scores. Similarly stars and personalities are working hard to increase their score so that they can attract more lucrative sponsorship deals.

Joe Fernandez, Co-founder and CEO of Klout was one of a stellar panel of speakers at the Telstra Digital Summit in Sydney today. Was this a line-up of nutters with zany stupid ideas, or an energising yet entirely sober glimpse into the future? Neither, we are talking about the reality of today. Wake up corporate Australia!

The statistics give an idea of scale: 67% of customer journeys start online, PayPal have 5.7m active accounts in Australia – that’s equivalent to around one quarter of the population. Twitter has 200 million users who send over 400 million tweets daily, around 2/3rds of which are from mobile devices. The average person unlocks their phone 110 times per day. And believe it or not Microsoft Word is 31 years old this year.

David Thodey, Telstra CEO, demonstrated both his enormous excitement for the potential of digital, and a lack of clear insights about how his corporate monolith of 40,0000 staff was going to succeed in its ambition to seize the opportunity. That said, he has a smart team who will succeed if anyone can – his Digital ED Gerd Schenkel demonstrated enormous wisdom in several of his comment including that “we recognise we destroy what we buy”. A panel discussion chewed over the challenge of ‘reinventing the core, without betting the company’. No magic solutions were presented, although there was agreement that:

  • you can’t build a new future on old technologies;
  • digital is not enough, it must be customer centric;
  • culture is crucial – trust not control.

Brian Solis, internationally acclaimed author, digital anthropologist and futurist, challenged the audience to find the courage to lead true transformation. “Today we are all very busy, yet in reality we have the same amount of time available to us as Leonardo Da Vinci had”. Maybe his most impactful moment was an image of a TV remote control to demonstrate the lack of innovation in that industry sector. “We’re going to have to empower ourselves”. Well said Brian.

Troy Malone from Evernote delivered an impressively honest critique of their work to “discover who we really are”. Whilst their purpose to “reduce the amount of ambient stupidity in the world” is not likely to win marketing awards, their ability to create explosive growth driven by word of mouth without a social networking dimension to their product is impressive.

Jeff Clementz from PayPal demonstrated cultural and demographic differences in the audience with their ‘Venmo’ service which allows you to share your money repayment history within your social circle.

Carl Hartmann from Temando explained that the logistics side of ecommerce has a long way to go in Australia compared with overseas. Karen Stocks from Twitter shared some very interesting insights from the Boardroom of traditional corporations trying to grapple with the concept of twitter. “We try to make that ambassador successful”.

A significant conclusion from the day was that Australian consumers are, compared with the rest of the world, very digitally savvy and heavy adopters of the technology. Corporate Australia, however, is not.

How much Klout does your company have in this digital revolution?

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Laura Riding and Robert Graves 

Can corporates Growth Hack?

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We learned afterwards that he had suffered a cardiac arrest. All we knew at the time was that we had a patient not breathing, with no pulse, and and a large crowd of anxious onlookers, one of whom was his wife.

We must have practiced CPR hundreds of times, but this time it was for real. Someone’s life depended upon it, literally. It wasn’t beautiful, looking back afterwards I realise that we didn’t follow the book. Something else was different too. There was no inspector watching us giving feedback, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. In a less dramatic way, I see Growth Hacking as the same.

Growth Hacking is “all about finding scalable, repeatable and sustainable ways to grow your business” to quote Kelly Tagalan – City Manager, Sydney, Elance-oDesk. It’s very popular in the digital business start-up community apparently. Last night I joined their session at Fishburners a co-working hub for Sydney’s Silicon Beach start-up community. The expert panel of Jason Allan, Ryan Wardell and Aaron Beashel provided some great perspectives. I learned that ‘Growth Hacking’ basically doing anything and everything possible to grow your business at minimum cost – a sort of digital version of ‘Duct Tape Marketing’.

If these magicians can conjure up massive growth in the start-up community they serve, can these same principles be applied to corporate Australia I wondered? My sad conclusion is – no. Growth Hacking is edgy, it risks brand damage, it comes with no guarantees and it doesn’t follow the book. Corporates would love the potential results, but could not accept the associated risks, and I absolutely agree with them. But let’s not entirely throw the idea away.

There is infinitely positive and optimistic energy to great Growth Hackers. They succeed despite the hurdles, and must have a ‘never ever give up’ gene in their DNA. I have never met a group so proud of their own failures – not due to the lack of success, but because of their ability to learn and move on strengthened from the experience. And they have a relentless focus on understanding their customers and how to add further value. Now corporate Australia how about a dose of that?!

And our patient? The defibrillator re-started their heart, and after a period in hospital they went on to make a full recovery. It just shows you don’t always need to follow the book to get a totally awesome result.

Image on this post courtesy of Venturesity.

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