How to Open Your Online Store with WooCommerce + AWeber

Let’s face it: online shoppers have lots of buying options, and, with all of the technology that exists today, their expectations are higher than ever.

If your ecommerce site doesn’t meet their expectations, it could mean the difference between a sale and fail. In fact, 43 percent of consumers visit a competitor’s site after a negative mobile experience, and 51 percent of online shoppers say site slowness is the top reason they abandon a purchase.

To grab shoppers’ attention in a crowded online marketplace, you need a feature-filled, lightning-fast, mobile-optimized and beautiful online store.

But building and maintaining an awesome online store can be difficult, especially when you have a limited budget.

The solution to your ecommerce frustrations: WooCommerce

If you lack the resources or time to create a winning ecommerce store, WooCommerce could be the perfect tool for your business.

WooCommerce is an ecommerce store WordPress plugin. With the WooCommerce plugin and a little help from WooCommerce’s knowledge base, anyone can configure their own ecommerce site.

Just download the WooCommerce plugin, install the plugin on your WordPress site and customize your new online store.

What will you need to open your WooCommerce store?

• WordPress
• A website hosting service
• The WooCommerce plugin

If you don’t have a hosted WordPress site yet, WooCommerce partnered with Bluehost to offer you a simple package deal.

What makes WooCommerce stand out even more? The plugin is free. That’s right. The plugin is free.

With your free WooCommerce plugin, you receive all the essentials of an ecommerce store – like a payment gateway, customer geo-location for calculating shipping costs, product listings, discount and coupon features and much more!

While the WooCommerce plugin itself is entirely free, WooCommerce does charge fees to add certain advanced features (called extensions). The prices, however, are reasonable. And the features you get? Way cool.

For example, Supercrown Coffee Roasters sells weekly and monthly coffee subscriptions on their WooCommerce site.

Since the WooCommerce plugin doesn’t include a subscription payment option, Supercrown Coffee Roasters purchased WooCommerce Subscriptions, an extension that adds subscription functionality.

The extension allows Supercrown Coffee Roasters to automatically and securely collect recurring payments from customers’ credit cards or bank accounts each month or week.

An inside look at a WooCommerce store

If you’re feeling some slight skepticism at this point, I don’t blame you. It seems too good to be true, right? An inexpensive, customizable, upgradable, easy-to-set-up ecommerce store? What’s the catch?

To dispel your skepticism, here’s a WooCommerce store in action. It’s a really sweet store (sorry, pun alert).

Asheville Bee Charmer, a small-batch, artisan honey store, sells its honey and honey-related products on its WooCommerce store.

Features on their ecommerce store include organization by product categories, a search field, a cart total on the right-hand side and product listings.

After you click on a product, you’re redirected to a product page with a larger picture, a product description and product reviews.

When you scroll further down the product description page, you see related products that you make like. This encourages site visitors to view other products and potentially buy more.

On the checkout page, you can login if you’re a returning customer, which means you won’t need to retype your billing information. Time-saving features like these can make the difference between a sale and lost opportunity.

The sweetest part? Asheville Bee Charmer leverages the WooCommerce coupon feature to grow its email list.

On its homepage, it greets every visitor with a pop-up email sign up form. As an incentive, site visitors receive a 10 percent off coupon on their first purchase when they subscribe.

How to Connect AWeber + WooCommerce

Easily create an online store and build relationships with your customers when you connect your WooCommerce and AWeber accounts today.

After you’ve connected WooCommerce and AWeber, your WooCommerce customers will join the AWeber email list of your choice as soon as they purchase.

Already have an online store? How are you using email marketing to boost sales? Share your story in the comments below.

The post How to Open Your Online Store with WooCommerce + AWeber appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

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Stop Neglecting Analytics in Your Customer Engagement Strategy

Customers desire experiences, not transactions.

In a world full of distractions, engaging customers beyond the typical purchasing routine is vital for SaaS success.

And B2B consumers crave unparalleled engagement. They want personalized advice, solution-oriented features, and revenue-generating products.

An IBM annual survey noted that “as many as 65% believe customer engagement will be the primary driver of growth going forward.”

Analytics is one of the few ways to gain insights to meet your customers’ needs. It helps bridge the gap between providing a service to solving real challenges.

Enhance the experience between your brand and consumers. Build data into your customer engagement strategy.

It Starts With Value

Studies show that “86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience, but only 1% of customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations.” That’s a major disconnect for SaaS companies striving to improve customer engagement.

B2B customers aren’t concerned about aesthetic features. And they aren’t amped to hear how your team worked around the clock to fix a bug.

Your consumers want a service dedicated to solving their problems in an efficient manner.

Natalie Chan, an expert handling customer retention at Outbrain Amplify, writes:

“Businesses that focus on customers engagement are focused on value creation, not revenue extraction. These are businesses that know how to engage their customers by providing them with real value whether it be through an exceptional end-to-end customer experience, great content or strong customer support that are about delivering more than the traditional sell.”

Offering value means addressing your customers’ desires. And it’s all about how they perceive what’s important.

For example, if a prospect is concerned about increasing open rates in email campaigns, it’s not in their best interest to discuss layout designs.

Image Source

Value requires laser-focus. And that’s where analytics steps in.

Monitor usage data to assess the customer experience. Track acquisition channels to observe where customers are coming from and if they’re converting.

Interview customers and ask them why they chose your product. Figure out how they expect to use your product and what business goals they want to achieve.

Create and deliver unprecedented value. Connect with the customer.

Know Your Buyer

In order for customer engagement to work effectively, your team must know your buyer. And that goes beyond the usual demographics, like annual revenue, company size, and location.

More importantly, for B2B companies, your team must not only focus on the business itself, but also on the employee of the business. Learning about the decision maker is crucial to your sales.

“Leveraging big data to better understand and act upon customer behavior, forces you to think differently not only about what data to keep (all of it!) and how long to keep it, but also which data you should begin capturing,” states Duane Edwards, Co-founder and Senior Vice President of Globys.

Analyze your primary behavioral data to create in-depth customer personas. Understand the decision maker’s goals and challenges. Also, know how you can provide short-term and long-term guidance.

Image Source

Bruce Swann, Sales and Marketing professional at Adobe, suggests applying predictive analytics:

“Once you’ve compiled data attributes to create a panoramic view of customers, you can begin to understand and predict customer behavior, which adds depth to that view. Examples include using a range of analyses, including customer value analysis, market basket analysis, customer profitability, response modeling, and churn analysis.”

Use data as an indicator of future behavior. If you know your client’s customers, it may lead to helping your client differently.

For example, NoWait is an app that simplifies the process of waiting for a table at a restaurant. Instead of having a guest tote around a clunky pager with a range of 50 feet, restaurants only need the person’s cell phone number.

When the table is ready, the guest receives a text. Plus, after dining, restaurants can text customers additional discount offerings.

Moreover, with the app, restaurants learn “who their patrons are, what time they come and go, which patrons come back the most frequently, who purchases more.” This data can be used to create messaging that appeals specifically to each customer.

Know your buyer and your buyer’s customers.

Content That Resonates

Content is more than just blog posts. It includes everything from checklists to webinars.

Research shows that “64% of visitors who watch a video are more likely to buy a product online.” Therefore, content isn’t just helpful for your brand awareness; it’s a vital part of your customer engagement strategy, which leads to sales.

Examine heat map data to improve your content. It will help you learn what content is important to the consumer. Then, your team can focus on content placement and how different images and colors in your content affect your website visitors.

Pete Mehr, Principal at ZS Associates, says, “By quantifying which content the customer engages, and how frequently, it becomes straightforward to continue to provide content back to the customer. This continuing content consists of an ongoing series of messages to a customer.”

Moreover, analytics will uncover which type of content matters to your customer. Is it eBooks? Or maybe 30-second video clips?

Mention understands their audience. They produce content that resonates.

The social monitoring company creates webinars highlighting experts in the field. For instance, Mention invited Sujan Patel to talk about ways to create content for “boring” industries.

Study your data to find content that speaks to your customer. It’s an effective way to boost engagement.

Multi-Channel Customer Service

In America, “the cost of poor customer service is $41 billion per year.” That’s a heavy burden for most companies.

Moreover, a report found that “retailers are not listening and responding to their audience enough. Some 89% of consumers’ comments are left unanswered.”

Approach customer service differently. Think beyond phone support and Q&A forums.

Social media has presented another solution. Now, SaaS businesses can provide Twitter and Facebook support.

Under Armour created a Twitter handle solely for the purpose of answering customers questions about their products.

From your analytics reports, determine what channels of support satisfies your customers. What works for your competitor may not work for your SaaS.

“It’s not about deploying on all channels, but deploying the right channels that align with your business. Only deploy on the channels that make sense for your business,” says Kate Leggett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

In addition, you must streamline your processes when using multiple channels. For instance, phone support data for a specific customer must also be available to your Twitter service reps.

At ComputerWeekly.com, Lisa Kelly suggests that “organisations need an accurate knowledge base where companies can link information from other channels, including peer-to-peer interactions, web self-service and communities, to share with customer service agents.”

It’s not enough to offer various customer service routes. Your team must work together to use data to enhance the overall customer experience on each channel.

Respect The Data

Customer engagement isn’t anything new. However, your SaaS can approach it differently with the help of analytics.

Add unmatched value to the customer’s experience. Use data to gain insight on your buyer’s habits and preferences. And provide customer service from a multi-channel perspective.

Stop neglecting, and start respecting your data.

About the Author: Shayla Price lives at the intersection of digital marketing, technology and social responsibility. Connect with her on Twitter @shaylaprice.

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Google Maps Joins the Search Network, and Other Top Stories From April

Aside from the sadly defunct Google Reader (a loss I and many others grieve to this day), Google Maps is my favorite Google application. Although many people take the near-continual improvements to Google Maps for granted, something that many marketers did not expect was for Google to incorporate Maps into the Search Network, a move that the search giant made to many people’s surprise earlier this month.

 

The news of Google Maps’ inclusion in the Search Network made waves on the WordStream blog in April, but it was far from the only topic of conversation that had marketers talking. Check out our 10 most popular posts from April and catch up with everything else that’s been going on in the world of digital marketing.

1. 5 Keyword Search Tools All Online Advertisers Should Be Using

Despite all the ad formats and features advertisers have at their disposal, it always comes back to keywords (especially in PPC). Fortunately, advertisers have more ways to perform exhaustive keyword research than ever before, but many people don’t realize that new tools are continually being developed that can make their lives easier. In our most popular post from April, Erin highlights five tools you should be using as part of your online marketing strategy.

2. Google Maps Now Considered Extension of Google’s Core Search Site

Google has made several major improvements to Google Maps during the past couple of years, including the addition of new advertising formats aimed at location-based businesses. However, few marketers saw the news that Maps is now considered an extension of Google’s core search site coming, and the move raised more than a few eyebrows among the digital marketing community. Check out Erin’s post to learn everything you need to know about this development.

3. 5 Ways to Optimize a Small Marketing Budget

Despite the ROI that platforms such as Facebook offer to advertisers, making the most of a modest advertising budget is a constant challenge for millions of small businesses. Fear not, loyal reader, as guest author Erin Costello has got your back. In our third most-popular post of April, Erin explains how to wring every last drop of value from your limited marketing budget, including data and real-life examples of how to make your budget go farther. Essential reading for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

4. Google Changes Impact of Ad Formats in Ad Rank

For years, advertisers have speculated precisely how Google calculates the impact of ad formats in its Ad Rank formula (as well as just about everything else that Google does). Recently, however, Google changed the Ad Rank formula to focus on the concept of “ad prominence.” What does this mean? Well, the new calculation formula will no longer allow ads in position 2 to display more ad formats than those in position 1. Erin breaks down the new formula and how it will affect advertisers in this post, including a before/after comparison of how ads will be displayed in the SERPs based on this new calculation.

5. 5 Awesome AdWords Scripts for Beginners

Scripts are among the most powerful tools at advertisers’ disposal, but they can also be very intimidating to beginners. However, you don’t need to have a computer science background to make the most of these amazingly powerful scripts, and in our fifth most-popular post from April, Maddie Cary of Point It Digital Marketing shows you how to create your first AdWords scripts in a visual, step-by-step way – perfect for those new to scripting in AdWords.

6. 16 Ways to Optimize Your Product Landing Pages

We talk a great deal about landing page optimization here at WordStream, but some types of landing pages – such as product landing pages – face unique challenges and obstacles that might not necessarily apply to other pages. In this post, guest author Giles Thomas of Whole Design Studios and AcquireConvert offers 16 ways you can optimize your product landing pages, each of which is backed by a lot of data and real-world examples.

7. 5 Deadly Landing Page Mistakes Sabotaging Your Results

No sooner did I mention the fact that we really like content about landing pages does a prime example of this find its way into this month’s round-up. In this post, Brad Smith outlines five all-too-common landing page mistakes that could be killing your conversion rates. By the time you reach the end of this post, you’ll either breathe a sigh of relief (because you’re not making any of these mistakes) or be scrambling to fix these problems.

8. 7 Super-Creative, Crazy-Effective Retargeting Ad Ideas

If you’re a regular WordStream reader, you’ll know how often we evangelize about the power of remarketing. However, even if you’ve been using retargeting techniques for some time, that doesn’t mean you should be serving the same old boring ads to potential customers. In fact, remarketing ads offer a wealth of opportunities to really get creative with your ads, and in this post, Erin outlines seven awesome ways to make your remarketing ads more memorable – and more effective.

9. 11 Easy Ways to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Bounce rate can be a mysterious thing. First, there’s the (understandable) confusion about precisely how bounce rate is actually calculated. Then you’ve got many marketers’ bewildering preoccupation with bounce rate as a performance metric, a near-obsession that can be just as confusing as the metric itself. Of course, that’s not to say you shouldn’t pay any attention to your bounce rate, and in our penultimate post of this month’s round-up, yours truly will show you 11 easy ways you can reduce yours.

10. Facebook Unveils Miss Takes, The Digital Assistant for Drunks

April Fool’s Day is awesome. Not only because some articles and news stories might catch you out if you happen to forget what day it is, but also because it’s an excellent opportunity to remind ourselves that there are actual people behind the brands we follow and the companies we interact with – people who like a good laugh just as much as we do. In our final post of this month’s compilation, Larry attempted – with moderate success – to fool you into believing Facebook’s latest “news” story about a digital assistant to help you handle those… slightly more embarrassing, ill-advised status updates you may or may not make after a few too many.

Find out how you're REALLY doing in AdWords!

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How To Stop Worrying & Love Your Blog

OK, so you have been told that you must write a blog for your company website, but you have the constant nagging questions at the back of your mind - is it worth it, do I have time? Well, the […]

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

How To Stop Worrying & Love Your Blog

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Written by Danny Hall, FSE Online

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Why Your Sales and Marketing Stack Needs a Solid Foundation

Imagine the best pancakes you’ve ever had. What made them work? They likely started with a solid recipe of core ingredients, then added just the right blend of proprietary variations to make an unforgettable short stack. But it all started from a solid foundation – flour, eggs, whole milk, baking powder, salt, cooking fat, and sugar.

Your marketing and sales stack is no different. The foundation will make it or break it. Luckily, the ingredient list isn’t nearly as long as the pancake mix.

What are the core ingredients that make up a solid sales and marketing foundation? It starts with a strategy focused on the customer and your content, and the right tool to whip it all together.

Constructing the Stack

The right recipe will help ensure you deliver the right message to the right person at the right point. An effective sales and marketing strategy starts with the customer and content at its core, and is further refined by understanding the journey that customer makes. Glossing over this part often results in half-baked strategies that fall flat.

It’s critical to understand what the buyer’s journey looks like – the stages of awareness, consideration and decision, and the transitions in between. Each phase or stage will be specific to your buyer, which means getting to know your buyer is imperative.

Enter: The buyer persona. These are detailed accounts of your target customer. They go well beyond basic demographics like age, gender, and occupation. A good buyer persona will detail what their motives and priorities are, how they determine success, what their perceived or actual barriers are, where they search for solutions, and who impacts their decisions.

While surveys and reviewing analytics from online behaviors can provide some level of insights, one-to-one interviews are the best way to gather in depth details. You can conduct phone interviews or in-person visits with existing customers, or use industry events and trade shows as opportunities to talk to prospects, current customers and even the customers of your competitors. You’re looking for answers to questions such as:

• What priorities/problems prompted them to search for a solution?
• Why did they choose your brand over another? Or why didn’t they?
• How do they determine success and what are their goals?
• What barriers (perceived or actual) might stand in the way of their decision?
• Where do they look for solutions?
• Who influences their decisions?

In depth buyer insights are the bedrock of customer success-focused content.

With this level of detail, you are better equipped to understand and interpret their actions, and the questions they might ask within each stage on their path to purchase. At this point, the recipe will start to come together as you determine how to align your sales and marketing strategies to harmonize with the buyer’s journey and be there with the relevant content they need to answer their questions or solve their problems.

Understanding the framework – the customer, their journey and the desired outcome of the content you produce – you will be able to identify what parts of the recipe can be changed as goals change or you learn more about buyer preferences. These three ingredients – the customer, their journey, and the content – will be staples, but how that content is delivered or the type being created can be substituted.

In-depth buyer personas and a map of the customer journey is almost like cheating the system. Marketing and sales teams armed with these are better equipped to make a calculated, winning recipe – serving up the right stack (authentic content), at just the right time and in the right place.

Serving Up the Stack

Now that you’ve got a solid foundational recipe in place, there’s one final element – a solid platform to serve it from. Today, there’s a near endless supply of sales and marketing tools to support with everything from automation to customer relationship management and sales enablement, but even the best stack of tools can become unstable without the right foundational platform.

Just some of the tools that can be added to the marketing and sales tech stack. Without the right foundation, this stack can quickly become unstable.

How do you identify the right platform from which to build the recipe? First and foremost, it should support you in building a solid foundation. In other words, it should enable visibility into your customers, the purchase journey they go through, and the delivery of your content at the right place and time. Internal portals, analytics and collaboration amongst the various players on your team is also essential.

(Image Source) How much do you know about your customer? What they’re reading, where they’re reading it, what social channels they use, and what they do?

Try to avoid a cobbled together “Frankenstack” of sales and marketing tools. This creates silos within your team and makes for an unstable strategy that lacks cohesion. Instead look for a primary platform to serve as the hub. It should play nice with a variety of tools – everything should work in concert. Before you commit to a platform, consider the following:

• What is our desired outcome?
• Will this platform support our goals?
• Does this platform integrate with the apps we need for our team to work seamlessly?
• Does this platform help us fulfill the goals of our customer, and ultimately ensure they continue to move through the funnel?

If you are working with an indirect sales channel, that platform should also support them with the training, marketing and sales tools they need to do their job and nurture their customers.

Conclusion

Before you start throwing together sales and marketing recipes, be sure to understand the role of each of those core ingredients and how they can be used to direct all recipes that follow. This will enable you to create far more effective strategies rather than hoping something will work.

The customer and customer journey, and content that originates from those two ingredients, produces a winning recipe and helps ensure your efforts won’t be lost in a sea of marketing messages.

About the Author: Jen Spencer is the Director of Sales and Marketing for Allbound, an innovative SaaS platform that helps companies empower their resellers and distributors to be more customer-focused through content and collaboration. Jen loves animals, technology, the arts, and really good Scotch. You can follow her on Twitter @jenspencer.

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You & Your Customers Can Win An Amazon Gift Card This Mother’s Day

Happy (almost) Mother’s Day! To celebrate, we’ll be honoring some of our customers that send the best Mother’s Day email marketing campaigns.Related Articles

1. Mother's Day Email Templates for Sunday May 8th!
2. 40:1 Live Google Hangout & iPad Giveaway
3. April Fool's Day Pranks & Templates

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5 Ways to Get Tons of Low-Cost Conversions on Facebook

Lots of advertisers wonder if Facebook advertising really works. Take a look at these numbers: 85% of new WordStream users are already advertising on Facebook; Facebook ads get 22 billion clicks a year, and those ads reach a total of 1.6 billion active monthly users. It’s clear Facebook is an attractive channel for advertisers—that many users can’t be wrong.

In 2016 it’s a must-have channel for any serious online marketer. I mean, just look at all the data on user growth and revenue at Facebook.

 

Wow, though: Have you looked at all the crazy stuff Facebook offers? It’s information overload and can cause paralysis.

On the plus side, it’s quite simple to boil Facebook ads down to some basics that will help drive great results when implemented properly. Let’s not overcomplicate this one.

So what are some tactics advertisers can focus on to harness the power of Facebook? Let’s take a look at five key things Fashletics, an athletic jewelry company in Miami, Florida, did to drive quality traffic at a low cost per conversion during a six-week holiday campaign.

1: Have Rock-Solid Ad Targeting

Facebook’s targeting capabilities offer a scary amount of information – which is great for advertisers. You can make the case that you can get too granular on any platform, but when you want solid conversion rates at a great cost per conversion, go deep, especially when you’re budget is limited.

Fortunately for Fashletics, Facebook offers a perfect fit for the primary audience: females who are into fitness, primarily CrossFit.

In this instance, Fashletics set targeting as follows:

With these targeting capabilities, Fashletics hit the sweet spot of its market: Women who are into a variety of fitness activities in the U.S. and who, most importantly, would likely be interested in the Fashletics product line.

2: Make Sure Your Visuals Stand Out

This should come as no surprise, but Facebook – like most other contemporary advertising channels – is visually driven. Clean, crisp, eye-catching images stand out and help your brand image. Don’t skimp on this. Invest in professional images that showcase your product(s).

 

3. Use Copy That Speaks to Your Target Audience Specifically

In the above example, the ad copy speaks the customer’s language. It’s the type of copy (using words like “tough,” “authentic,” and “breaking point”)  that gets the target market nodding and saying “yes, that’s me, this is exactly who I am.”

What makes it go even further is that it excludes people by saying it’s not for everyone – it’s for an elite target market that doesn’t want to wear something that could be bought anywhere. Exclusivity sells.

4. Test Your Ads (Seriously, Test Your Ads)

This is no surprise to anyone reading this. We have to test our ads all the time. Yes, it’s kind of a pain, but it reveals so much about your customer. And those “learning moments” carry forward to the rest of your advertising channels.

In Fashletics’ case, two scenarios were created in which the choice was either free shipping or a percentage discount. Without reading ahead, I bet you can guess which one most consumers chose.

 

Not all that surprisingly, free shipping won by a more than two-to-one ratio. We can infer from this data that people hate doing math, because a 30% off offer would have actually been cheaper than free shipping, but the bottom line is this: people love their free shipping!

5. Use Facebook Remarketing

Without a doubt, if you don’t know how to remarket, figure it out. With Facebook’s remarketing features, you can reach people who visit your website and then go to Facebook. Since these are people who have already shown an interest in your offerings, they’re much more likely than strangers to convert.

In Fashletics’ case, two ad sets ran: one to target people who visited the site in general, and another set to target people who abandoned their shopping cart. This is a very basic approach, for sure, but you can get super-specific with Facebook’s pixel.

 

As the data below indicates, Fashletics got 141 sales at an astonishing CPC of $0.44, not to mention an additional 137 page Likes, in six weeks.

What really stands out is the success rate with cart abandoners – hey, come back and finish that order you started!

Results of Facebook remarketing campaign

 

Final Results

Often people ask how much Facebook advertising costs. Given industry averages, Fashletics experienced tremendous success with a fairly modest budget and was able to beat the averages:

Overall Facebook Averages for 2015:

• Average Facebook Ad cost per click: $0.27
• Average click-through rate: 1.5%
• Average Facebook Ad cost per click: $0.21
• Average click-through rate: 1.8%

Fashletics Averages for Holiday Campaign:

Results of regular campaign

 

Overall Totals: Regular + Remarketing

 

In addition to the final data, we were able to identify some other KPIs (key performance indicators) that helped Fashletics determine the efficacy of Facebook advertising.

Key Performance Indicators:

• Cost per conversion: $5.79 – meaning Fashletics paid that amount for each conversion. This is one of the most meaningful metrics because it allows Fashletics to know how much each new customer cost.
• Conversion rate: 3.6% – meaning 3.6% of Fashletics’ clicks convert.

Bonus Benefits of a Facebook Ad Campaign

In addition to conversions and additional Likes, during the course of the campaign, Fashletics saw email subscribers increase by approximately 1,000 people. There’s gold in an email list, so in addition to sales and Likes, Fashletics can continue to market directly to its subscribers on a regular basis.

Of course, not every company can emulate these types of results (it’s marketing, folks – nothing is guaranteed!), but the Fashletics story is enough to make any advertiser who’s on the fence about Facebook marketing take notice and give it a shot. 

Brad McMillen is an internet marketing consultant and freelance copywriter at Mac Strat in Redondo Beach, California. He manages pay-per-click campaigns, performs SEO audits, and writes web copy. He rarely has a case of the Mondays, and he enjoys watching people surf while he works. Connect with Brad on Google+, follow Brad on Twitter, or connect with Brad on LinkedIn.

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Search Marketing Solutions For Firms With Franchises

Maintaining a local web presence for a franchise business is a challenge. Each franchise site (or microsite) has to be treated as a separate case and optimized for local search individually. Businesses can ensure its franchise websites show up in […]

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

Search Marketing Solutions For Firms With Franchises

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Written by Michael Georgiou, Imaginovation

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The Local SEO Agency’s Complete Guide to Client Discovery and Onboarding

Posted by MiriamEllis

Why proper onboarding matters

Imagine getting three months in on a Local SEO contract before realizing that your client’s storefront is really his cousin’s garage. From which he runs two other “legit” businesses he never mentioned. Or that he neglected to mention the reviews he bought last year. Worse yet, he doesn’t even know that buying reviews is a bad thing.

The story is equally bad if you’re diligently working to build quality unique content around a Chicago client’s business in Wicker Park but then realize their address (and customer base) is actually in neighboring Avondale.

What you don’t know will hurt you. And your clients.

A hallmark of the professional Local SEO department or agency is its dedication to getting off on the right foot with a new client by getting their data beautifully documented for the whole team from the start. At various times throughout the life of the contract, your teammates and staff from complementary departments will be needing to access different aspects of a client’s core NAP, known challenges, company history, and goals.

Having this information clearly recorded in shareable media is the key to both organization and collaboration, as well as being the best preventative measure against costly data-oriented mistakes. Clear and consistent data play vital roles in Local SEO. Information must not only be gathered, but carefully verified with the client.

This article will offer you a working Client Discovery Questionnaire, an Initial Discovery Phone Call Script, and a useful Location Data Spreadsheet that will be easy for any customer to fill out and for you to then use to get those listings up to date. You’re about to take your client discovery process to awesome new heights!

Why agencies don’t always get onboarding right

Lack of a clearly delineated, step-by-step onboarding process increases the potential for human error. Your agency’s Local SEO manager may be having allergies on Monday and simply forget to ask your new client if they have more than one website, if they’ve ever purchased reviews, or if they have direct access to their Google My Business listings. Or they could have that information and forget to share it when they jump to a new agency.

The outcomes of disorganized onboarding can range from minor hassles to disastrous mistakes.

Minor hassles would include having to make a number of follow-up phone calls to fill in holes in a spreadsheet that could have been taken care of in a single outreach. It’s inconvenient for all teammates when they have to scramble for missing data that should have been available at the outset of the project.

Disastrous mistakes can stem from a failure to fully gauge the details and scope of a client’s holdings. Suddenly, a medium-sized project can take on gigantic proportions when the agency learns that the client actually has 10 mini-sites with duplicate content on them, or 10 duplicate GMB listings, or a series of call tracking numbers around the web.

It’s extremely disheartening to discover a mountain of work you didn’t realize would need to be undertaken, and the agency can end up having to put in extra uncompensated time or return to the client to renegotiate the contract. It also leads to client dissatisfaction.

Setting correct client expectations is completely dependent on being able to properly gauge the scope of a project, so that you can provide an appropriate timeline, quote, and projected benchmarks. In Local, that comes down to documenting core business information, identifying past and present problems, and understanding which client goals are achievable. With the right tools and effective communication, your agency will be making a very successful start to what you want to be a very successful project.

Professional client discovery made simple

There’s a lot you want to learn about a new client up front, but asking (and answering) all those questions right away can be grueling. Not to mention information fatigue, which can make your client give shorter and shorter answers when they feel like they’ve spent enough time already. Meanwhile your brain reaches max capacity and you can’t use all that valuable information because you can’t remember it.

To prevent such a disaster, we recommend dividing your Local SEO discovery process into a questionnaire to nail down the basics, a follow-up phone call to help you feel out some trickier issues, and a CSV to gather the location data. And we’ve created templates to get you started...

Client Discovery Questionnaire

Use our Local SEO Client Discovery Questionnaire to understand your client’s history, current organization, and what other consultants they might also be working with. We’ve annotated each question in the Google Doc template to help you understand what you can learn and potential pitfalls to look out for.

If you want to make collecting and preserving your clients’ answers extra easy, use Google Forms to turn that questionnaire into a form like this:

You can even personalize the graphic, questions, and workflow to suit your brand.

Client Discovery Phone Script

Once you’ve received your client’s completed questionnaire and have had time to process the responses and do any necessary due diligence (like using our Check Listings tool to check how aggregators currently display their information), it’s time to follow up on the phone. Use our annotated Local SEO Client Discovery Phone Script to get you started.

No form necessary this time, because you’ll be asking the client verbally. Be sure to pay attention to the client’s tone of voice as they answer and refer to the notes under each question to see what you might be in for.

Location Data CSV

Sometimes the hardest part of Local SEO is getting all the location info letter-perfect. Make that easier by having the client input all those details into your copy of the Location Data Spreadsheet.

Then use the File menu to download that document as a CSV.

You’ll want to proof this before uploading it to any data aggregators. If you’re working with Moz Local, the next step is an easy upload of your CSV. If you’re working with other services, you can always customize your data collection spreadsheet to meet their standards.

Keep up to date on any business moves or changes in hours by designing a data update form like this one from SEER and periodically reminding your client contact to use it.

Why mutual signals of commitment really matter

There are two sides to every successful client project: one half belongs to the agency and the other to the company it serves. The attention to detail your agency displays via clean, user-friendly forms and good phone sessions will signal your professionalism and commitment to doing quality work. At the same time, the willingness of the client to take the necessary time to fill out these documents and have these conversations signals their commitment to receiving value from their investment.

It’s not unusual for a new client to express some initial surprise when they realize how many questions you're asking them to answer. Past experience may even have led them to expect half-hearted, sloppy work from other SEO agencies. But, what you want to see is a willingness on their part to share everything they can about their company with you so that you can do your best work.

Anecdotally, I’ve fully refunded the down payments of a few incoming clients who claimed they couldn’t take the time to fill out my forms, because I detected in their unwillingness a lack of genuine commitment to success. These companies have, fortunately, been the exception rather than the rule for me, and likely will be for your agency, too.

It’s my hope that, with the right forms and a commitment to having important conversations with incoming clients at the outset, the work you undertake will make your Local team top agency and client heroes!

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