Price Test Flowchart for an Undeveloped Product

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What’s the best price to charge for a product? How about, what’s the best price to charge for a product that’s not even developed yet?

Market price-testing is a simple concept: It’s mostly about finding the price that makes the most money.

For example, if you market test the prices of $50 and $100 for the same product, you might expect to make more money on the $100 price.  However, if you sell more than twice the amount of the same product by charging $50, then the lower price would be the most profitable one.

Of course, you really have to analyze this against all your costs, to reflect your overall return-on-investment (ROI) of producing, marketing and delivering the product.

Although in another example you may very well sell less of the same product at $100, as long as you make more overall profit than selling a larger quantity at $50, then the $100 is the way to go.

Oh! Of course, from a business perspective, sometimes it’s best to select the price that creates the most customers, regardless that it may not generate the most profit, simply because more first-time customers means greater opportunities for increased sales later on.

And just to make things more interesting, there are examples of selling a product at a higher price that results in a larger volume of sales than offering it a lower price.

Still, the more pertinent question for this article is how do you determine what’s the best price for a product that’s not even developed?

Market Testing For The Best Price

The accompanying flow chart illustrates a simple way to test 4 different prices via online pay-per-click advertising (in this case, using Google Adwords). This particular example is also constructed to determine if the product in question should be developed at all. (In this example, what is being tested is a potential information product).

An important purpose here is to spend a small amount of advertising money upfront – before creating the product – to determine if the product will be profitable enough to bother developing in the first place.

Another important purpose of this test is to determine the response levels of four different prices. The responses are then evaluated to determine which price is the most profitable.  Of course you would also evaluate the results against your business intent:

• Do you want to use the price that generates the highest ROI?
• Or do you want the price that generates the greatest number of responses with an acceptable ROI?

Price Testing Flow Chart

In this flow chart the four prices are rotated and displayed to searchers looking for the keywords specified for this product. (The same keywords are used for all four ads).

Google Adwords allows rotation of the ads to searchers and provides good metrics to evaluate the responsiveness of each ad. (Which, in this case, is simply how many clicked on the product landing page).

If this were solely a “Price Test,” this campaign could be simplified by ending the test at the landing page to reveal which ad generated the greatest response. However this flow chart depicts a test which goes further by also seeing how many respondents would click on the “Buy” button.

If you were testing different prices with a product that was ready to be delivered, then anyone who clicked the “Buy” button could be charged the indicated price and the product delivery would be executed.

However, in this flow chart example, the product has not been developed.

Hence, each visitor who clicks “Buy” is directed to the Registration Page, informed that the product is not ready, and is given the opportunity to be notified as soon as the product is available.

Of course, not everyone who lands on this page will enter their name and email.  For example, those who would want the product immediately will probably continue their Internet search to buy what they’re after. However, any visitors that do add their name and email would be categorized as “hot prospects” in a database.

So in addition to using this test as a way to determine the best price, it’s also a way to generate potential buyers. (Of course a number of the hot prospects will have been introduced to the offer by any of the other four prices than the price they originally clicked on, so not all “hot prospects” will buy the product in the end with a different price).

From a testing perspective, the amount of visitors who click the “Buy” button represents an important metric, since it would be the best estimate of what percentage of visitors would result in a purchase.

Once the results of the test have been evaluated and the price determined – and in this case, the decision made to even develop the product – then the hot prospects can be sent a series of emails offering them the opportunity to buy the product when it is ready.

In this way, some of the advertising money may be offset by some initial purchasers.

This would also be the time to ramp up all of your marketing efforts to sell this product in volume at the best price.

Future Price Testing

Once a product is developed, price testing for the exact same product can be repeated from time to time, as the market evolves and changes.  Some of the conditions that might indicate an opportunity for a higher or lower price could be accounted for by more (or less) competition, an increase in your brand’s prominence, a greater (or reduced) demand for your product, or even a different business intent for the product itself within your company’s overall business goals.

Of course if the results of the test demonstrate that it won’t be profitable to develop the product at all, then the next step is to abandon this product and test your next product idea.

By the way, it’s worth emphasizing that this article is about “Price Testing,” especially to determine the viability of developing a product. However, there are other types of testing. In fact, testing is an ongoing proposition. For example, once you have determined to develop a product and have determined the best price, a larger body of testing would be directed towards improving various aspects of the ad copy and the landing page presentation, to make the sales process MORE profitable. For more information on this topic visit this link on Internet marketing testing.

Marketing: The Big Picture in Two Sentences

Your marketing efforts need to be:

♦ Driving LEADS into your business

♦ Converting LEADS into SALES

♦ Turning SALES into PROFIT

And it all needs to be continuously refined for greater efficiency and affluence.

#1 Copywriting Tip

There are many important elements and guidelines for effective copywriting. And there are different viewpoints on which would be the most important.

In my experience writing and executing large direct mail and email campaigns, “the offer” is the most vital. The offer is how you are presenting what it is you are selling (product or service). Although some might argue that the headline is the most important element of copywriting because it is the first point of contact with potential visitors, in my experience, no matter how many individuals you drive to your offer through an effective headline, you will not capitalize on that traffic without an effective offer.

Conversely, if you have a weak headline for an email or direct mail piece or print ad, you can still convert the visitors that do arrive to your offer – as long as you have an effective offer!

Of course the headline is very important, and it would not make sense to craft a weak headline and a strong offer. The point is that focusing on and testing different headlines for their value in determining which is the best headline to attract visitors, should be done in conjunction with testing which offer is the most appealing to your visitors. In fact, a heavier emphasis should be given towards testing the offer.

Here are a few traditional components for crafting an offer:

1) Presenting Something New
Rightly or wrongly, consumers are more interested in “new” stuff as opposed to old stuff, even if old stuff might be better. What can you present as “new”?

2) Sale
Positioning any product or service for a reduced cost is the surest way to boost sales.

3) Premium or Bonus
Including bonuses for “buying now” are an effective way to sweeten any offer.

4) Limited Time Offer
Making any offer available for a limited time will inspire some potential customers who are sitting on the fence to “Buy Now,” which is always a good thing, since so many transactions that don’t occur “now” will simply never occur.

5) Free Trial
If you can introduce people to your products or service for free, so they can experience the real value you are presenting, you will eliminate the major obstacle that potential customers have when considering a purchase: “Am I going to get ripped off?” Of course, a percentage of those users who take advantage of your free trial will never become clients or customers anyway, but the percentage of those that DO give you money for your offer will be higher overall.

6) Buy Now, Pay Later
“Multiple payment” options, and “buy now, pay later” also lower the barrier of uncertainty among potential customers. This tends to work best for large ticket items: the perceived cost is reduced by breaking up an expensive purchase into multiple smaller payments.

Of course, the best offer includes many of these ingredients. In fact, whenever I write a sales letter for a client, I will attempt to include as many as possible to craft a number of powerful offers, and then test them to see which is the best!

6 Basic Mistakes for Ecommerce Sites

Are you selling something on your website and not generating enough sales? You already know it takes effort and resources to drive traffic there. Perhaps you’re generating visitors and potential customers/clients via online channels such as pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, joint ventures, email marketing, social media marketing, display advertising, webinars, etc. And/or, perhaps you’re using offline channels such as direct mail, radio, seminars and infomercials to gain visitors.

Regardless of how you get potential paying customers to arrive at your website, the following six basic mistakes reduce the likelihood those hard-earned visitors will buy your products and/or services.

1. No prominent phone number. Displaying your phone number prominently not only provides a way for potential purchasers to get questions answered when they are read to purchase, in some buyers minds, it’s a credibility assurance knowing the phone is readily available, just in case they have a question after they buy.

2. You’re not attempting to gain email info from visitors who are “just looking.” Most visitors are not going to buy now. But if you offer something of value to these visitors in exchange for their email, you can send them marketing messages into the future to inspire them to buy with a sale or to stay on their radar screen until they are ready to spend their money. (Check out What Are YOU Giving Away For FREE?)

3. Your pages are text heavy instead of visually enticing. Pictures, graphics and videos can convey the benefits of your products and services more effectively and more interestingly than words – and are less boring to boot. If you are trying to sell stuff with too many words and few images, you are losing sales.

4. Your call-to-action buttons, such as “BUY NOW” or “ADD TO CART” blend in with your site and do not pop out with contrasting color to make it easy for visitors to get the goods instantly when they are ready to buy.

5. If you sell a lot of products, and your navigation bar is not segmented into logical and instantly recognizable categories, then you are forcing visitors to read every link to find what they want. Which means some percentage of your visitors are clicking away to another site where the pickings are easier.

6. You don’t implement cross selling and/or upselling for your products, which means your average sale amount is considerably lower than it should be.

What Are YOU Giving Away For FREE?

Stated another way, “How much potential business are you turning away every single day by not maximizing what value you give away?”

Because you are so busy with life, family, business, social activities and learning more about Internet marketing, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the basics of using a website to help you make money.

Let’s say you’ve created an Internet marketing engine to drive traffic to your website:

• You’ve got a blog
• You’re adding new content to your blog every day
• You’ve got a professional email service pushing visitors to your site on auto-pilot
• You’re using photos, and graphics
• You’re optimizing the photos and graphics to generate traffic for your site
• You’re using video
• You’re creating a series of videos and optimizing them to generate traffic to your site
• You’re taking advantage of local search opportunities
• You’re using social media to drive traffic to your website
• You’re delivering great products/services which results in a stream of happy customers and clients and positive testimonials
• You’ve established an excellent reputation and word-of-mouth referrals from your happy customers, which is also driving traffic to your site
• You’ve established a growing network of incoming links
• You are using offline marketing actions, such as direct mail, print ads, radio, and TV, to drive even more traffic to your website

Jeez! Your Internet marketing engine is really pumping a lot of visitors to your website. How come you’re not turning more of those visitors into customers and clients!?

Before diving into a hefty evaluation of your entire Internet marketing machine, simply review what you are giving away for free.

A large percentage of those visitors are only coming one time. And they are visiting for a remarkably short period of time.

You’ve only got a few seconds to engage them and help them in some meaningful way, so that you can develop a relationship which will yield a greater benefit for them, and more business for you.

Many people who land on your site are looking for specific information: some need to solve a problem or to get an answer RIGHT NOW. Others are gathering info to support buying decisions that may be made sooner or later.

Even if some of these visitors determine very quickly that you are providing something they want, if you do not engage them, you will lose a number of your most interested visitors – every day.

And an easy way to engage visitors is to offer them something for free that is relevant to why they arrived on your site in the first place.

On top of that, you should present that free giveaway like you were selling an expensive diamond, because that’s how valuable it is for your visitors and for your business!

When you give away something for free – in exchange for their email – you have an opportunity to help them and of course, as a result, you are building a relationship, which is further developed through an automated email campaign.

In short, no matter how much (or how little) traffic you have coming to your site, if you are not engaging your visitors and offering something valuable enough to capture their imagination – for free – you have lost an opportunity to help them because the likelihood that they will ever return is very low.

If should be emphasized that whatever you are giving away better be GOOD, so that it will genuinely help your visitors, which will result in building a relationship that will be mutually beneficial.

Oh! One more thing. Giving away something valuable is also useful for building incoming links, which is just one more reason to really make sure your giveaways are REALLY GOOD!

Simple Email Lead Generation Flow Chart

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There are many ways to generate leads. Heck, there are many ways just to take advantage of online lead generation, which is only one component of all the channels that can be used to drive leads to your business. (Check out Ten Lead Generation Models).

In the world of online marketing, incorporating email into a lead generation campaign would be considered a mature practice, since it’s been so thoroughly and routinely utilized going back to the 90’s. (I began my email marketing career back in 1995 and have never stopped.)

The accompanying graphic of a simple email lead generation flow chart depicts the flow of a stream of Internet visitors moving through a website, getting sorted into segmented databases and leveraging those databases to maximize marketing leads and sales.

Free Offer in Exchange for an Email Address

It all begins with some kind of offer – and it’s typically a free offer. This can be as simple as a free download that would be valuable to the targeted market segment. The download could be a PDF, or an audio program or a video, or even a multi-part email educational “course.”

The offer should be something desirable for your target audience. As an example, if you were generating leads to cultivate financial service clients, you would offer something of value to those types of clients. If you were offering leads to potential students for educational products or services, you would need something that specific target audience needs, and it should also relate to the product or service you are selling.

Regardless of what the offer is, it should be emphasized that it needs to be valuable. Over the years it’s gotten harder and harder to inspire visitors to part with their email address in exchange for downloadable information, and if what you provide is not truly deemed valuable by the recipients, then you will have lost the opportunity to convert those visitors into new customers.  In fact, they might not be interested in anything you have to offer at any time thereafter.

Conversely, if you truly delight them with your offer, they may be inclined to consider that if you provided that much value for free, you’ll probably provide even more value for your paid products or services.

Do You Really Need More Info Than Your Visitors’ Email?

By the way, the more information you ask of your visitors, the less of them who will respond. Of course all marketers typically want as much information as possible from their potential leads, but that’s not always the best practice. In other words, if you ask for more info than their name and email (such as their phone number, and address, etc.) many visitors will decline your free offer.

It’s more acceptable to simply ask for name and email.  Some marketers only ask for an email (and no name), knowing that the more visitors that they convert into their database, the more FUTURE opportunities there will be to get more contact information, and more importantly, MORE SALES.

Lead Generation: Quality vs. Quantity

Some marketers are willing to accept less potential leads, and instead, ask for as much information as they believe is necessary to qualify a lead upfront. This is simply a business decision. Do you want a larger volume of leads? Or do you want a more qualified stream of leads?

However, this particularly flow chart highlights a process that attempts to gain a higher quantity of leads AND a higher quality by guiding visitors through an initial two-step process.  It’s simple and gives visitors more control over their experience while gaining more demographic information for the marketer.

More specifically, the initial offer in this example only requires name and email. However, once that is provided, an optional survey is presented, which has several qualifying questions, and also makes an optional request for a phone number. Since a visitor can choose whether to provide their email or not, most that do enter their phone number, can be considered to be amenable to a sales call. (Especially if you make it clear that someone will contact them if they leave a phone number).

By the way, if you want to make this simple flow chart even simpler, then the survey can be dispensed with.

Database Marketing

This flow chart represents a simple, rudimentary and initial aspect of database marketing. In this example, ALL emails that are exchanged for the offer go into a central “All Prospects Database,” and those that give their phone number are segmented into a “Hot Prospects Database,” whom are immediately contacted via telephone as part of a sales process.

Of course, not all the prospects that are included in the sales process will be reached by phone and of those that are contactable, not all will turn into customers.

However, by way of the ongoing email follow-up campaign, which integrates more information about the topic that is of interest to the visitors (as well as additional marketing email messages), these follow up emails represent the crux of this campaign as they can continue on indefinitely until the subscriber buys a product or service or unsubscribes from the database.

Bear in mind that most prospects will “not” provide their phone number, which means the majority of conversions from inquiries to actual hot prospects will be a result of the ongoing email marketing efforts.  It is only then, after those who are reading the emails get to know your business better, that they will select themselves into the “Hot Prospects Database” by contacting you to ask questions or to buy your product or service.

And the best part is that the entire lead generation process is automated up to the point that prospects enter the sales process.  (If interested, you are welcome to contact me about which email services may be best for your business).

Email Lead Generation Conclusion

There is certainly more that one can know about online email lead generation, including testing the offers and landing pages, testing which survey questions yield the best results in terms of prospect engagement and qualifying the leads. Furthermore, there is more that one can know about tuning the variables of quantity vs. quality of leads. And there is definitely more that can be known about database marketing and lead segmentation, especially as it relates to gaining more demographic information from your email database as time goes on and as your readers receive more of your mailings. But this simple flow chart does serve as an example of one method that can be used to construct an email lead generation campaign to increase your business profits.

The Basics of Link Building for SEO

One of the most fundamental aspects of utilizing search engine optimization to push your website higher on the search engine results page is to establish more and more links to your site (and specific pages) from external sites. And not just any links, you want inbound links that are high value – the higher the better.

Get Links From External High Ranking Web Pages

So, what’s “high value”?

Google’s PageRank is a scale that ranks web pages from 0-10 (10 being the best). Although all links have some value, the best links are PageRank 3 and higher. Each ranking up the scale is 10x the value of the one below. So, a PageRank 3 is 10x more valuable than a PageRank 2. A PageRank 4 is 10x more valuable than a PageRank 3.

Get Links With The Right Keywords

One more important point is that the anchor text (underlined blue text that makes up the link) should contain the keywords you are attempting to rank higher. In short, that text is a description of your page from an external site and the search engines consider that description when determining what your web page is about. And if the link and anchor text is from a high value (high PageRank) external site, then that inbound link has even more SEO weight.

Examples Of How To Get Links With The Right Keywords

In years past, the way to get links was to plead with other webmasters to link to you.

Then, and especially now, a better way is to create content that is of such value and usefulness that other website owners and bloggers would “want” to link to your site to share your content with their readers.

However, this can be easier said than done. In short, it involves work: More specifically, it involves research and creativity to provide something valuable that is better than, or at least different than, what’s already readily available to your visitors elsewhere.

Here are some examples of how to get links for the keywords you need.

1) Research, write and publish some type of valuable content for the audience you are targeting. This could be some kind of review or comparison of products or services that are of interest to your potential and actual visitors.

It could also be timely research, such as quarterly or annual reviews of your industry.

Heck, even explaining and/or presenting complex or technical concepts in simple ways to make the material more readily understandable to others can be very desirable to visitors.  This can include presenting graphics, charts, videos, and other content that is uniquely instructive to others.

Such types of content could be a separate web page, or a downloadable report. (The latter having the benefit of building an email list, since giving away freebies in exchange for email addresses is a common occurrence).

If you are simply re-writing what’s already out there and readily available to your audience then you won’t create the impact you are hoping for. But if you provide content that is truly unique, relevant and valuable, then you will be rewarded with links from other sites.

And what anchor text will they use?

Although you cannot control the text others will use when linking to your site, it is likely that if you name the title of the content with keywords that are relevant to what you are targeting, then you will get a good portion of links with those same keywords.

2) For top-ranked sites that you want links from, you can suggest content to those sites that you’ll provide for free.  Alternatively, just ask what content they might suggest you provide. If you write blog posts or articles that they publish on their sites, this will help them to raise value for their readers. And you’ll minimally be able to include at least one link back to your own site – but more likely you can structure the content to contain more links.

3) Interview industry leaders over the phone, or in person and/or with a video camera. Publish the interviews as valuable content for your readers.  Furthermore, the person who is the subject of the interview may very well post links to your content, too, from their company website. As you establish more prominent interview subjects, you will be able to leverage those contacts to get even more prominent interview subjects.

4) Write an ebook that will be valuable to your readers and give it away for free. If it’s truly useful, then you’ll gain incoming links.

5) Linkbait is content specifically designed to generate inbound links. Although it could be stated that any content published with the intent of generating inbound links would be linkbait, this type of content is often characterized as sensational, controversial or provocative, specifically presented to move visitors emotionally and get them to react (positively or negatively) and write their own responses with links to your content.

Note On Building Inbound Links

Any of these examples need some initial promotion to get the link building started. If you have an email list, that’s a great way to get some publicity established.

Additionally, generating press releases about your content is another way to attract interest (and you don’t need an email list to do so).

If you can cultivate partnerships with other website owners and/or owners of email lists who will promote your content, this is great way to maximize the potential impact your content will make.

The point is to generate as much initial publicity as possible, which will get others to start linking to you, which of course will begin to drive new traffic to your content, and ideally, a percentage of the new traffic will also link to your site.

In an ideal world, you’d hit a home run with your link-building campaign, and this endeavor would result in an ever-expanding stream of natural link building and achieve a viral aspect.  The reality is that you will likely need to keep going up to bat to hit singles and doubles over and over to generate a large quantity of inbound links.  Regardless, these are tried and true strategies for growing inbound links and increasing your search engine results, which I have used for numerous other sites for more traffic and profit.

For more info on how link building fits into SEO, check out this short video on Driving Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle.