Today I found an ad in my Facebook feed for a band I had never heard of before. They were advertising their upcoming concert….in Anaheim.
If you don’t know, I live outside Chicago.
The ad said, “We still get your ticket for Anaheim show. You can buy them at eventbrite.com. Search for BandName Anaheim.”
Okay, a couple of things here…
One – grammar. I don’t mean to sound like the grammar police, but people will judge your brand by what you write. There are hundreds of tools available to help you with spelling and grammar. I personally use Grammarly. It finds hundreds of mistakes for me every week. Most of them caused by my fingers moving faster than my brain.
Two – segmenting. I don’t live in Anaheim. How much money are they wasting by advertising to people all over the US? Facebook makes it so easy to target by location. Their marketing dollars would go so much further by focusing only on people within an hours drive of the venue.
Now that may sound like it doesn’t apply to email, but how many times have you received a message that has nothing to do with you? If someone had segmented their list you may have received a message specific to your interests/location.
Three (and this is the one that really irked me) – Why would you send someone to Eventbrite’s home page and make them search for your event? I tried three times and never did find the show on Eventbrite.
Your marketing needs to break down barriers for your prospect. Don’t make them work for it. It’s not a scavenger hunt.
Every obstacle you put in their way lowers your response/conversion rates.
Another example….
Last week I pre-ordered the new Sturgill Simpson album (look him up, you’ll thank me). But DAMN! Evidently, Sturgill has enough album sales and his label thought it would be fun to test fan commitment by making me jump through thirty hoops to buy it – literally took me about 20 minutes to successfully order the album.
If I wasn’t a true fan, I would have bailed on that process. How many sales have they lost because they added mountains of friction to their shopping cart?
One of the first questions I have when I’m hired to audit someone’s Ontraport setup is “where do all these emails take the buyers?” I walk through the process as a brand new visitor. You’d be surprised some of the obvious issues I find that are killing conversions.
Please, make it easy as pie for your prospects. If you haven’t been through your own order process lately, try it out today.
