Transcript

Even a business that is averaged with its digital marketing can convert those people that come to it, either by visiting its website, signing up for its mailing list or whatever, who are red hot, they’re ready to buy. They know what they want and they know that they need to buy from that company. The real skill and the real leverage in digital marketing is by getting what I’m gonna call the fence sitters.

These are the people who are on the edge of purchasing and they just need a bit of a nudge over the fence. To get them into your customer list. Well, the good news is that there’s plenty of ways you can do this. The bad news is that very few businesses do a good job with fence sitters. Most of the time, these people stay on the fence or they drift off down the lazy river off to your competitors.

Today we’re gonna get this sorted. We’re gonna run you through a brand new framework that we are sharing for the very first time, which is gonna help you convert these fence sitters. We’re gonna have loads of examples, b2b, b2c, all types of different businesses. I’m gonna be running you through, I’m gonna be explaining them.

If you wanna see these, and you can go to our YouTube channel, just search Thinkplus on YouTube and you’ll find it. But I’m gonna be running through them so you can listen to them while you’re in the gym or in the car or whatever. Okay, let’s go. Welcome to the Thinkplus Digital Marketing Podcast.

Welcome to the. Thinkplus Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Tim Cameron Kitchen. I’m Head Ninja at Thinkplus. We are a digital marketing agency that helps our clients get more leads and sales through their websites. And one of the ways that we do this is by helping them to convert these fence sitters.

The people who aren’t red hot, they’re towards the bottom of the marketing or sales funnel, but they’re just not ready to purchase yet. What we want to do is we want to nudge them over the line and get them to make a purchase or. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna be doing today. Now I’m very pleased to announce a brand new acronym for you, E C P C .

So clever Jess. Our video producer was freaking out when she discovered this incredible new acronym, which is gonna take the world by storm. Most marketing frameworks have some lame shoehorned acronym, which is designed to be catchy. This one is exactly the same. Anyway, the first step upon our E C P C journey.

E for educate. Lots of fence sitters need a little bit more education about your product or service before they’re ready to purchase. So let’s talk about how exactly we can do this. Let me give an example. Let’s say that someone has come onto your website, they’ve downloaded something at some point of time, and they are now sitting in your email list.

They’re not massively engaged, but at least you have their contact details. This is a prime situation where the average digital marketed business will lose that customer. That customer will drift off into the ether and never be seen. But the ninja business is gonna do a good job of turning this fence sitter into a customer.

How? Let me give you a B2B example. So let’s say that you’ve been on a website, um, and let’s say that you’re a software company and you’re selling cybersecurity software. So let’s say a customer has come to your website, they’ve downloaded a cybersecurity checklist. They haven’t purchased, they haven’t become a customer.

Well, one thing that you could do is you could hit them with some content, which is high in emotion, high in fear. There’s a great example we look at in the video from LogMeIn, which is. Cybersecurity software, and they have this incredible email that they send out to their list, which is to get these fence sitters over the line.

The headline is it apocalypse don’t just Survive it. Prevent it. There’s a picture of someone sitting on their laptop surrounded by technology, which is in flames. Right, and the copy underneath is brilliant. It says, have you ever wondered what it would cost your company if a data breach hit with 61% of small businesses reporting cyber attacks in the past 12 months?

It might seem like the end of the world. Then there’s a video, which is a bit sort of cinematic. It says underneath, hopefully not coming soon, to an office near you. Okay, so it’s light-hearted. It’s obviously a little bit exaggerated, but the goal of this is to motivate these people who might not be, you know, in the market for cybersecurity software, or they might have sort of scratched their itch by downloading this checklist, but actually we wanna encourage them to purchase.

We want to dial up the emotion. So basically the principle here is to remind them of why they got this thing in the first place and just add a little bit of emotion, add a little bit of leverage. You can do this in all sorts of ways, obviously is gonna depend on your business. Another way that you can use education to nudge the fence sitters is to create how-to content in both written and video format.

Prospects might wanna see your products or services in action without making the commitment to talk to your sales team or putting the time in to get the most from a free trial or buying your products just to give it a go. So you’ll see some companies use things like webinars as a great way of educating customers about why they should purchase from them.

Gonna give you a B2B example and a b2c. The B2B example is frame.io. Now, this is a, a company that sells sort of video feedback software. So we use it when we’re editing our videos. You upload your video to it and it allows people to give you feedback on it. And when you’re editing you can say, oh yeah, you know, we need to make, make this piece faster, or We need to make Tim 20% funnier in this bit.

And, and it’s really easy to use that sort of thing. So their target customer, It’s basically, um, video producing people and camera teams and that type of stuff. So they have a fantastic webinar on, does camera to cloud work with my camera, which is basically all about can I upload, uh, to the cloud from my camera.

This is a great question that people who are potential customers of this. Are gonna have, it’s about a feature of their software. Okay? So what they’re doing is they’re answering that objection. So someone doesn’t have to sign up to frame.io find out, actually this doesn’t work. Or more likely they wouldn’t sign up in the first place because they have that question.

They haven’t had that education piece. Now give you a couple of B2C examples. The first one is Dyson, the vacuum cleaner. I nearly said Hoover Company, the vacuum cleaner company. Um, so Dyson has some amazing content on their site in the community section. Uh, in particular, they’ve got some guides that help you understand the different tools and accessories.

Cause when you’re buying a Dyson, there’s loads of different types, right? And they come with different accessories. So you get like the pet one or the one for people who, uh, need filtered air. Or the one for people who have wooden floors, or the one for people who have composite floors, which have bits of wood on them, but also plastic, and there’s some grouting and there’s a bit of carpet, and each of them come with all these different accessories.

So it can be wildly confusing. And the risk is that someone doesn’t make a purchase at all. So Dyson has this guide on how to understand all the different tools and accessories, and there’s videos and there’s text and all this type of stuff. Brilliant. So think about for your business, what are the potential points of confusion?

What. The questions that people need asking. Another example is on AO, the Appliance services company. So the appliance, uh, you know, direct consumer, so you buy washing machines from them and they’ve got a great, um, washing machine and washer dryer measurement guide because again, if someone’s scared about getting the measurement for their new washing machine, right?

They’re just not gonna purchase, right? They’re not gonna buy one only to find, ah, it doesn’t fit. Like how am I gonna send a washing machine back? That is a total washout. So what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna make sure they’ve got that objection handled first. And AO has the buying guides to do that.

And they, of course, it links through to all their products. They’ve got products featured, um, in the buying guides as well. Now I want to give a special mention. There’s a another strategy of education. Which I think is worth considering. It’s a bit of a higher investment time, but it can work fantastically well.

And this is platforms offering free training and certification. We see this a lot in software and there’s a lot of it in marketing software. For example, Google has, um, certifications for their Google ads and their Google Analytics, um, Hubspot has certifications, uh, Semrush has certifications. Now these certifications are, you know, they’re really transparent.

This is basically education about that company’s product so that you feel like you know everything about it. They give you a sort of, Hey, you’ve got a certificate in Google Ads. What’s the purpose of that? Well, the real purpose of that is so you stick that on your linked. And then you try and sell everyone that you meet, Google Ads.

That’s the point of it, is to be a sales tool for them to give you this little badge. Cuz we all need badges , we’re simple creatures, that you can be really proud of and go and show off to all your friends whilst selling their product. But this makes. Loads of sense for the companies because not only are they giving the audience loads of education about their product, but they’re also enabling that audience to then go and educate their prospects.

So think about this for your business, it’s not gonna be relevant for everyone, but how could you use this concept of certification to educate your audience and give them a level of education that they feel proud of and want to share with the next person? Right, that’s the E, the C compare comparison. A lot of fence sitters need to compare and they will compare your products against other people’s products or your products against your products.

They want to know which one they should buy, and if they don’t get the right answer or they don’t feel confident in the answer, they just won’t purchase. So often the way to convert these comparers is to get them comparing, and you can do this on your website in a few key ways. Blog posts are the simplest ways to do this.

This is gonna be content targeting, words and phrases that people are searching for when they’re comparing products. Let me give you a B2B example. We see this really often with software and SaaS companies. So let’s say that you’re in the market for email marketing software. You might do a search for something like MailChimp versus Klaviyo.

Both of these brands have blog posts that are ranking in the top 10 comparing their service versus their competitor. So on the MailChimp website, there’s a blog post that says Klaviyo versus MailChimp. On the Klaviyo website, there is a blog post called MailChimp versus Klaviyo, and what are they doing? They’re sort of semi honestly comparing them versus their competitors.

Low and behold, each of them recommends their own product, which you would expect. Now, there’s a few ways to do this. I mean, I think Klaviyo does an excellent job. Klaviyo wins this shootout, not because of the comparison itself, because you know, there’s times when either one of these is a good option, but because they do it in a slightly tongue in cheek way.

So clavio, they, um, they didn’t even make their own comparisons. They actually referenced. The comparison made or MailChimp’s website where MailChimp sort says honestly, Hey, do you know what? Some circumstances Klaviyo is better. Well, Klaviyo just makes the most of that and actually uses that comparison in their own blog.

So I love it. It is got a bit of personality, it’s a bit sassy and it’s the sort of thing that really stands out. A B2C example, uh, the, um, you know, the bamboo, um, toilet paper called Who Gives a Crap. They have a, what’s called a bamboo versus recycled toilet paper SmackDown, where they compare bamboo toilet paper versus recycled toilet paper to show that actually their product is better.

And that’s for people who are searching, you know, bamboo versus recycled toilet paper to try and work out which one they should buy. If you sell a product or service at different levels, you also might want to help, uh, customers choose between those different levels. So for example, um, B2B Xero. Xero has a bunch of pricing plans, the accounting software, and

pretty typical for a lot of SaaS companies, their pricing plans come with detailed comparisons between them because they want to help customers to find the right plan for them. And if they don’t, they know that that person is gonna be a fence sitter. They’re not gonna convert. So they break down exactly who it’s for.

They also tell you it’s good for. So this plan of the smallest one is good for sole traders, new businesses, and the self-employed. The middle plan is good for growing small business. And the premium plan is good for established businesses of all sizes. So you wanna make your customers feel like one of your options is, ah, this is for me.

Another example that we’ll all be familiar with is Apple. So when Apple brings out a new iPhone, they realize that their product range is pretty confusing. You’ve got the iPhone normal, you’ve got the iPhone s. You’ve got the iPhone Pro, you’ve got the Plus, you’ve got the Pro Max. How do you compare each of these?

Well, obviously iPhone or Apple has these, uh, they, they have like a default table, which shows you all the different options. But they also allow you to run comparisons between your phone, your old version of your phone, and the new one, so you can see exactly how they differ. So they’re really, I mean, I was gonna say Apple are really open about it.

The way that they label their features is really misleading and designed to make you really want the new one. That’s a topic for another day though. But what they’re trying to do is help you feel like you’ve made a really good comparison so you can feel confident in your choice to get off that fence. Another way of semi sort of comparing is running ads against your competitors’ brand names.

So if your competitors are, you know, very prominent and they’ve done a lot of brand advertising. They’re gonna have customers who are searching for their brand or their product names. Think about it. That competitor has invested the time and energy to build the brand. They’ve invested the time in persuading that potential customer that they are the solution.

They’ve invested the time and energy. To get that person over the line so they’re actually searching. What you can do is run ads against their brand name or their product name if you have a comparable product to try and steal the ball on the goal line. So you’re working with this customer who is maybe a fencer for your brand, for the competitor, and you’re getting them onto your site.

That’s the C for compare. Let’s talk about the P in our E C P C, and this is about proving. Proving that you are the best. And that the time is absolutely now. Now, case studies are a fantastic tool for B2B s, but also b2c, but mainly B2B s, they’re a real no-brainer. Every B2B company needs to have some form of case studies on their website now because they are a must have,

often the case studies that get published on B2B websites are really lifeless, bore fests no good for anyone. But you know, the business says that we need case studies, so they produce some rubbish case studies. Well, there is good ways to do case studies and there is definitely not good ways to do case studies.

One of the companies that does a really good job of case studies is notion the productivity app. So if you go to Notion So slash customers, um, you’ll see this incredible customer stories section they call it. So they don’t call it case studies, they call it customer stories. Now there’s loads of these different case studies,

they look really appealling and you can filter them by company size. This is really important because it allows you to see how companies that are a similar size to you are using Notion and the benefits that they’re getting. If you are a, a consumer rather than a company, then you can choose the company size, just me, where you see personal stories of people that use notion.

These case studies also amazing. You hover over them, you get a little quote about how great notion is. Um, if you click on them, they’re really rich. There’s images, there’s gifs, there’s videos. They’re a really, really excellent tool. So go and check it out at Notion Dot. So slash customers, um, a B2C example.

Wild and Wood Skincare have some great examples, uh, where they show people, um, before and after who’ve used their products. Absolutely fantastic. Cuz the before and after is one of the most powerful sales tools in the world, particularly if it’s visual. Now, the goal of case studies or customer stories, whatever you want to call them, is always that you have a range of different ones so that your potential customers can see themselves and at least some of them, what we really want

feeling of resonance. Ah, this is for me. They recognize themselves in the, before they recognize their goal outcome in the after. That’s a fantastic way to get fence sitters off the damn fence. Alright, let’s talk about testimonials. Now, testimonials often used in a b2c, um, example, one of the greatest companies for testimonials.

Um, not so much if you’re into like, uh, IP respect or, uh, you know, uh, prevention of the destruction of the planet. Uh, but if you’re into effective customer review implementation, then SHEIN, fast fashion, eco tyrants and IP stealing behemoth SHEIN, um, do a fantastic job of their reviews. They, um, incentivize their customers to add more details, so things like, uh, sizing or custom images by giving loyalty points, which means money off future purchases, if customers leave better reviews, fantastic

strategy. So I get thinking about what can you do to incentivize your customers to leave reviews, and how can you incentivize them to not just leave more reviews, but actually more detailed reviews. The final aspect in prove is objection handling. We should be handling objections everywhere. In our site and in our email marketing and in through everything that we’re doing now, we should be handling objections in our benefits bar.

We should be handling objections in popups, next to downloadables, next to CTAs in our checkout on our product page and service pages everywhere. A great example of a B2C company who does a good job of objection handling is Rave coffee @ravecoffee.co uk. If you go to any of their product pages, you see a few really key elements of objection handling.

Now think about it, they’re selling coffee to people who are, they know their coffee, um, but obviously you can’t taste it if you’re buying it through eCom. So what do they do to handle the objections that I might not like this coffee? Well, they do a couple of things firstly, on their product pages. Have really quick, a little key that says taste like, and then it gives you a few words to describe what this one tastes like.

So this is, uh, signature blend number one, and it tastes like caramel, almond, and chocolate. Now I don’t drink coffee, but I do like chocolate, so I’ll be well into this. Um, I once bought a, uh, a fancy cocktail because the, I said to the, the, the bar guy, I was like, I really don’t like cocktails, but you know, what have you got?

And he is like, this one tastes like chocolate. So I said, great, I’ll get that one. And got it. And it just tasted disgusting. It just tastes like a cocktail, not like chocolate. Anyway. That’s another story. Um, so we’ve got this little key that says, tastes like, and then it gives you a few words to describe what it tastes like.

So you know, if you know your coffee, you’re gonna be thinking, yep. All right. Caramel, almond chocolate. That sounds pretty good to me. Let’s get that one. And then if you don’t know, um, the roast level, you know, you might wanna. Apparently people, they want to know the roast level. They’ve got this little bean key that shows you how much, you know, four out of five beans for the roast.

I don’t know what that means, but apparently my video producer Jess, informs me that this helps you to handle the objection that you’re not gonna like this coffee. There you go. Um, so fantastic way handling objections, um, other ways to handle objections. We’re actually gonna come back to later on the, um, the next thing that we’re gonna look at in this prove aspect.

If you’re B2B or B2C and you sell something thatis a little bit. Um, you gotta suck it and see, right? You can have a free trial, but good free trial. There’s bad free trials and there’s good free trials. One of the worst free trials I’ve ever had was with, um, the, uh, the, the software sort of group, Zoho, right?

So when you sign up for Zoho and you get a free trial, you’re basically dumped into this complex world where you’re left to figure out your own way around. The wiring is horrendous. It’s really difficult to understand the product, and there’s very poor onboarding. And it’s a horrific experience. While there’s some good free trial experiences, and the key to making a good free trial experience is to make sure that you are educating the customers as they’re going through the free trial.

So for example, if you’re, if you’ve got a software free trial, having an email automation sequence that runs alongside the free trial, answering common questions, inviting the customers to ask any questions if they have. You know, specific to your team, offering them a free one-to-one call or that type of thing can work really well.

Now you obviously want to give customers educational information to explore it themselves. If they’d rather explore your product or service or software that it themselves, and that’s totally cool as well. Um, but B2C companies can also do this with free samples, app free trials, money back guarantees and stuff like.

Let’s look at a B2B example, Semrush, everyone’s favorite digital marketing tool, which by the way, you can get an extended free trial of at thankyouninjas.com. It’s the tool that I personally use. Absolutely love it. It’s the main digital marketing tool I use. I probably use it for 95% of the analysis I’m doing at different companies.

Uh, so if you go to thank you ninjas.com, you can get that. But they do a great job of their free trial, um, and it’s really easy to use. It sort of guides you through the process. B2C example is something called Gruum. Now Gruum is a cosmetics product and they have a great product on their site called the Free Luxury Hair, face and Body Trio.

This says was 20 pounds, now zero pounds. And what you get is you get samples of their three top selling products. It’s not totally free cause you’ve gotta pay for shipping, which is sensible. Firstly, because if the shipping cost is high enough, this can be a self-liquidating free offer. Um, but secondly, also, it is a bit of a trip wire.

So people have to commit to at least putting their payment details in, which means that they’re semi-serious. And of course, because you’ve got their payment details and they’ve set up an account. You can now incentivize them to purchase much more easily because they don’t have that block or that barrier that they’ve get over, which is putting their payment details in.

And you can see this if you want, at G R U U m.com Gruum and then free luxury hair face body trio test they call it. So I guess they’re testing it out. Now we know that this test works because our very own, Jess converted on this and then she’s stuck it in as an example in this podcast. Alright, so that’s ECP C is for convey.

You’ve put the hard work of getting these fence sitters educated. You’ve proven that you’re the best option for them. Uh, you’ve invited them to compare. So now it’s time to actually get the conversion to make the sale. But what happens if they don’t make that purchase the first time they land on your site?

Well, of course you’re gonna be running remarketing ads to them. You’re gonna be chasing them up when someone’s nearly converted, you’re gonna get ’em back to your checkout page or back to your CTA by following them around the internet. A great B2C example is Secret Labs chairs. Um, so what they do is very common with e-commerce stores.

If you visit a product page or a product category page, they’ll run dynamic, uh, retargeting ads, which show the particular products or products in the particular category that you’ve looked at, because they know that that’s gonna resonate more for you than if they show you some product that you’ve never seen before.

This is a great example. I remember the first time I saw dynamic product retargeting or remarketing ads, I was watching my sister, uh, browsing around the internet, which must have been, I don’t know, early 2010s, and she’s been just hounded by Nike product ads showing her she’s into black. Absolutely loves black.

All these black shoes. And I’m just watching my sister navigate through all these websites and surrounding every website. There’s all these pictures of these Black Nike shoes. And I’m thinking, when’s she gonna snap? When’s she gonna snap? Eventually, boom. She’s on those ads. She’s in the checkout. Off she goes.

Go for it, Steph, you got this. Um, uh, the right, the next thing that we’re gonna look at in conversion is cart abandonment email sequences. If someone’s come onto your site, they’ve filled in the form to get whatever offer you’re asking. And they’ve, they’ve been through the process, they’ve put the product in the cart, but then they’ve com uh, they’ve disappeared.

Well, you are gonna go back to them. You’re gonna remind them about the thing that they were about to purchase. A B2B example, GoDaddy does a good job of this. They’ve got a cart abandonment sequence, uh, which says you’re about an hour away from publishing your free website. Wow. What a great way to get back into that cart to convert on their new domain name. A b2b, a B2C example, sorry, is l n e r. They’re a train company. Um, and if you go on their website to browse particular destinations, if you’re thinking about buying a ticket, they will then retarget you with an ad, like, oh, sorry. They’ll then send you, a cart abandonment email, something like, uh, still thinking about London.

They’ll remind you that they’ve got your ticket on the website in their saved search. Um, they’ll tell you about, you know, here’s some great things that you can do while you’re in London. And they’ll also nudge you a little bit by saying, these prices aren’t gonna last forever. So they’re adding a bit of scarcity, which is really important with cart abandonment.

So if you’ve got some sort of discount that is gonna run out at, you know, X days after the, uh, after the first email, then that’s a great way to nudge people through. You often get a spike in conversions just before that discount ends because we all need a little bit of scarcity. We all need that deadline on our homework, uh, so that we can be doing it on the bus, on the way to school, on deadline day.

All right. Um, discounts and promo codes can also work well nudging people over the line into conversion. If you’ve been through all the other steps, you don’t necessarily need to do what you’d expect here. You can be running ads for competitor discount code phrases because someone who’s searching for a competitor plus discount code is definitely about to buy.

You can also be, uh, getting your own if someone is searching for your company plus discount code, let’s say your SHEIN – SHEIN discount code or SHEIN deals, you can have a page on your site dedicated to deals, which you can optimize to get ranking for that organically. But if you are like sneak energy drink, They actually run ads driving people to their deals page when they search for sneak energy discount code.

Why does this work for them? Why would they want to pay to get people on their site if they were just looking for a discount code ready to convert anyway? Well, remember when somebody is using an affiliate discount code, you are gonna have to pay an affiliate commission. So rather than having to pay that money out to the affiliate Sneak can spend a little bit less money by getting people onto the deals page and of course then they get all of the purchases. They don’t need to, uh, pay any money back to the affiliates. If you’re getting people to convert based on, uh, you know, an offer, then of course you’re gonna want to increase their average order value by running an upsells and cross sales. You can do this on product pages, checkout pages.

You can offer a discount on a service if you have it with another service. So for example, on the Halford’s website, uh, if you want to buy an MOT, uh, they will offer your MOT and your full service together. And they’ll say, they’ll say, you know, you save 35 pounds. Right? So they’re doing that to increase the average order value to get you in, then of course they’re gonna find a whole bunch of stuff wrong and then off you go. But the goal is you wanna make that MOT purchase more attractive by bundling in the, the, the service as well, combining it and offering a discount on the combination.

Okay, so that’s Ecpc. There is a bonus step for you though, of course, once you’ve implemented this stuff, you wanna make sure you’re measuring, you need to be measuring in order to actually work out how much of this stuff is beneficial for you. So when you’re testing these things, of course you’re looking for an increase in total purchases, whether that’s.

E-commerce purchases, or whether that’s purchases through a, a, a lead capture, a cta on your website, you’re looking for a, an increase in earnings per lead or earnings per visitor if you’re an e-commerce site, you’re looking for an increase in trial signups or demo request, and in particular, the conversion rate on those from cold traffic to see that you’re nudging more of these people over the fence. And all of this is obviously gonna lead to an overall return on investment in your digital marketing. You are looking for a decrease, on the other hand in cart abandonment, you’re looking for a decrease in cost per lead, and of course, you’re looking for a decrease in your overall personal stress levels.

So I hope you found this guide on how to nudge these annoying fence sitters over the line. Of course, if you want some personalized help from the team here at Thinkplus, we can give you some advice on how to nudge fence sitters over your websites, uh, fence, um, specific to your website, we have the free website and marketing review where we’ll take a look at your site, we’ll have a look at your competitors, and we’ll give you some suggested priority actions that you can I implement over the next six to 12 months, to increase the volume of leads and sales that you’re generating. All you need to do to request this service is go to Thinkplus.com/review. And if you qualify, we’ll send you your free review, usually within two to three working days. It’s a 15 minute video recorded by one of our team , it is stunning.

So go to exposureninja.com/review to request your free website a marketing review, and I’ll see you next week.

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