An analysis of the Scottrade conversion path and why they get two thumbs up from Liberty Interactive Marketing.

Their process goes something like this:
1. Searched “scottrade” in Google, they are running PPC for their branded term. Smart. Also, they show up #1 for their own company term. They’ve been awarded sitelinks from Google, those are the links below their listing in the organic – login, branch office locator, etc.

2. Login and open a new account are NOT hard to find! Thank you.

3. One criticism is when you hit “open an account” the form is a popup instead of just opening in a new window or taking you off the page.  Also, there are no question mark links (?) to help you select what type of account you want.  This is where I stopped, but the smart thing is that Scottrade asked for just some brief information about me prior to getting into the details of the account preferences and selection.  Why is this smart? Because this is a friction point. I stopped because I didn’t have the answer.  The next day I received a phone call from Joel, the Branch Manager hoping to help me out with completing my account setup.  I figured out the answer so I didn’t need to call him back.  Two days later I still hadn’t completed my account set up, but in the mail I received a PERSONALIZED booklet from Scottrade offering an offline way to complete my account setup! Wow, A) thanks for reminding me and B) thanks for helping me out if I didn’t feel comfortable completing it online.

4. The next week I finally completed my account setup online, what can I say I was busy.  The only portion I was unable to complete was linking my bank account.  Friction point.  Low and behold, I received another phone call from Joel, the Branch Manager (not a different person, the same person!!).  His voicemail offered to provide me with options for helping me set up my account for funding and  when I didn’t return his call, I received a paritally filled out form so help me along the process WITH A SELF-ADDRESSED POSTAGE APPLIED ENVELOPE! Thank you. It’s like my soccer coach always said “You can’t have control of the ball if you just stand around waiting for it to come to you, you must go to the ball to make things happen.”  Scottrade was bringing the proverbial “soccer ball” to them and it worked.

Why do I feel good about this persistence aka customer service? Because Scottrade found the right mix of online and offlline initiatives. They didn’t bug me until I was blue in the face and turned off from the process.  Their methodology and flow was more like reading my mind because they were aware of the friction points within their conversion process.

How you can get there?
1. Start with your Web site, ask friends, family, strangers to use your site and ask them to complete your desired goal for them, if you are serious about investing in your online customer experience, contact us or  Red Flag Consulting

2. Determine friction points throughout your conversion funnel/process, are they something that can be fixed online or do they require offline operations/interference to get customers to the end goal? Determine solutions, time and effort. Rethink your process if necessary, just because it isn’t broken doesn’t mean it can’t be improved! Raising conversions even .5% can have a serious impact on business.

3. Talk to your customers, listen to your customers, find out what went wrong, what worked, etc. Make changes and test!

4. Keep testing, if you find that your conversion process is half online and half offline find the right mix of phone calls, emails, direct mail.  You’re bound to tick some people off but at least you will learn if you are willing to listen.

4. Implement online marketing strategies, test landing pages and your process from all lead sources.

5. Listen, learn, test, repeat.

6. Feel comfortable with not being able to please everyone; please the majority, the right majority and you will remain on the right track.

Congrats to Scottrade for an excellent example of how to get customers through your conversion funnel, understanding that there were friction points along the way and knowing how to solve those to get customers to complete their desired task, as well as yours.

Now, more than ever it is vitally important to have professional ppc search management company in place for your paid search and ppc campaigns.

A new report by JupiterResearch (commissioned by Marin Software) found that:

• 85 percent of marketers surveyed by JupiterResearch complained that the complexity of paid search management is growing.
• Large scale companies are finding it difficult to resource talent and appropriate ROI tracking mechanisms to scale their campaigns for growth.

If you’re not a company spending $500k/month, you should still have your campaigns managed by a professional.  Here are a few reasons why it’s important to have the right PPC Search Engine Management company in place:

1. Search engine advertising rules change continuously
2. Campaigns must be monitored continuously to maximize performance
3. Testing of ads and landing pages must be done continuously or you are leaving money on the table
4. Competition enters the market daily and increases costs, most noteably unsophisticated competition increases costs
5. Ad writing is an art; creativity is limited
6. Budget needs to be managed wisely; every dollar needs to be tracked

Consider this – Google made $16.4 billion dollars in 2007 off their Adwords platform. If you’re setting up an account simply because it takes 5 minutes and a credit card and Google provides you with recommended keyterms – you should be worried.  This is the same reason why you should not have the IRS do your taxes – they aren’t looking out for your best interest and they aren’t looking for ways to save or make you money.  They get paid per click so if all components (keywords+as+landing pages) are not tracked, measured, optimized, and refined you might as well be throwing money out the window.

Here’s a more in depth article on this topic.

Contact us to dicuss PPC Advice and our capabilities for PPC Search Engine Management. Learn more about our Internet Marketing services.