Real World Computing

Which brings me to my final, and most important, gotcha. As I said at the beginning, traffic isn't everything. I got into AdWords seriously when I noticed that while Passyourtheory was getting many thousands of unique visitors per day, the cost of advertising was eating into our profits. Using the tools in AdWords and Analytics, it became apparent that certain keywords and key phrases resulted in profitable sales and others didn't. So I deployed all the techniques listed above to improve things, the most important being that we reduced our spending on the non-profitable sales so that our adverts dropped down the results list - those who do find us are more likely to buy, even though our overall traffic is lower. For the profitable sales, we make sure we appear higher up so we get a bigger share of that market. Altogether I was able to completely turn around Passyourtheory in the space of a couple of months, and I've spent the 18 months since then continually tweaking and improving.

All of this will seem like a huge amount of effort and work, but that's a good thing because so few of your competitors are likely to bother that any improvement on your part will substantially increase the effectiveness of your ad campaign relative to theirs. As with most things in life, 80% of the benefits accrue to the 20% who are prepared to put in the extra effort.

Autoresponders

The second of the three marketing planks is the autoresponder. Essentially, this is nothing more than a mechanism for sending emails at specified intervals after a user signs up. You must offer something worthwhile in exchange for your potential client's email address, so the subsequent emails need to be relevant and interesting, not merely sales blurbs. In our case, we offer a free trial of Passyourtheory: the visitor signs up and, after verifying their email address (which protects us against any accusations of spamming), they receive an activation code for their membership.

Over the following days, they'll receive a sequence of emails that give useful information on the theory test, hazard perception and also about how to get insurance. Each of these is worth reading in its own right and, of course, contains a message reminding them to join up. In fact, the email our visitors get two days after their initial interest is an effective way of encouraging people to sign up. Why? Because when looking for a service, people tend to research a number of sites but then leave the decision until another day. Hey presto, two days later they get an email from us (and only us) reminding them, and this jogs a number of them into getting on and buying. The process costs almost nothing and involves little more than making the effort to write your sequence of emails in the first place. Of course, you must include an unsubscribe link in every email: in fact, we go beyond this and draw their attention to this in the first line of our emails.

We use www.getresponse.com as our autoresponder service. In the fullness of time, I'm sure we'll move to an in-house solution as that's neater, but I'm so far very happy with the service.

Referrals

Finally, one of the most valuable long-term marketing tools is a good referral strategy. Nothing is more powerful than word-of-mouth recommendation, and you'll often need do nothing more than ask people to recommend you. You probably don't need incentive schemes, especially for low-value products, but simply to give an excellent service. Help someone solve a problem efficiently, offer excellent value for money, and your customers will refer their friends and relations to you quite naturally. You should also build in a testimonials section since, although these are less powerful than direct referrals, a lot of potential clients need to see that others have used your service before they'll buy from you.

Continued....