__
My friends at Forrester Research invited me to a dinner last Tuesday night featuring James McQuivey, Ph.D., the author of the book Digital Disruption.
The event was held at Southern Art restaurant in Buckhead. Since I work at the Terminus building right down the street, this was super convenient for me. Plus, I’ve been wanting to try Southern Art since it opened. I’ve heard great things about their buttermilk fried chicken. I do consider myself a bit of a fried chicken afficianado but I do recognize that it’s not the healthiest food you can eat. I made sure to work extra hard in my Flywheel class eariler that morning so I could indulge without guilt.
The attendees at the event were mostly senior level execs who work in the digital space from many of the large companies around Atlanta – Cox, IHG, Delta, Coke, Home Depot, Georgia Pacific, AutoTrader. There were some good discussions over dinner about which company had the worse CMS platform. It’s encouraging to see that we’re not the only ones struggling with our online presence. Read More
iMeet Therefore I Am
My company PGi, sells a product called iMeet. It’s a very cool tool for online meetings and conference calls. Since I’ve joined PGi, I’ve become a religious user. I hardly even pick up my landline phone anymore I just do all my calls through iMeet whether I’m on my computer, iPad or smartphone.
In the past, we’ve had an online sign-up process where people interested in iMeet can get a free 30-day trial. The only catch, they had to put a credit card down. We did some analysis and found that about 60% of people who started the sign-up process would drop out when they got to the credit card page. That’s a lot of online prospects to lose.
Fortunately, we were able capture information about those customers before they get to the credit card form, so our sales reps could follow-up. But, we still lose a considerable amount of prospects in the process.
So, we just took off the credit card requirement. Now you can do a trial of iMeet with no credit card. After 30 days, you’ll have to sign up for a plan and give your credit card at that time.
Click here to see the “no credit card” sign-up page. And feel free to do a free trial while you’re at it.
We’re going to closely monitor the results. Having the credit card requirement could be an effective way to screen out the lower quality prospects who only want to use iMeet free for one meeting and they’ll never use it again. Or, it could really limit our ability to get more people to use our product. My hypothesis is that we’ll get a lot more sign ups but a lower rate of conversion from trial to paying customer. In the end, I think we’ll get more paying customers. It will be interesting to see what happens.
If you sell a product with a free trial, do you require a credit card? Do you think the credit card requirement helps or hurts? Post your comments below.
Sharing insights and killing trees.
I was asked to write a an aritlce for the 2013 Lead Generation issue of BtoB Magazine. I submitted the article about a month ago and the printed issue just came out. In this digital age, the idea of a paper magazine seems a bit old school. But, I have to say that it’s kind of nice seeing yourself in a print publication. It just feels more important than being featured on a website.
Click here to read the article.
But, magazine circulation has been on a steady decline for years. The chart below shows the year over year loses. Fewer reads means fewers advertisers. Fewer advertisers means that magazines are going out-of-business or have to merge to stay alive. It’s amazing to think that a print magazine like Newsweek is no longer around. All the content was absorbed into The Daily Beast.
Magazines on the decline.
I don’t know what the future holds for magazines. But, I hope they stay around. There’s something nice about reading a magazine with the glossy paper and beautiful photos. I’m a subscriber of Outside Magazine and Runner’s World. I have to admit that when they come in the mail every month, I get very excited to see them. It’s like a nice gift where you get to open it and you’re surprised by what’s inside.
Plus, if magazines go away, what else will I do with 15 minutes on an airplane during take-off and landing when you can’t use your electronic devices?
__
I graduated from college in the mid-90s. When I started my first job at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, everything was about the TV ad. Sure, we did newspaper, magazines, outdoor and direct mail. But those weren’t as sexy. And the Internet was hardly a blip on the radar.
So it really was all about the TV ad. The agency old joke was, “A prospective client walks into the room. The agency guy says, ‘The answer is a 30-second TV spot. Now, tell me what the problem is.”
But TV spots were very expensive to produce. They took a long time to develop. And when you were only producing two or three spots a year, the stakes were very high. You couldn’t afford to get it wrong. And if you did get it wrong, there was a good chance your client would be looking for another ad agency.
So agencies would spend months crafting the perfect strategy. Validating that strategy through exhaustive research. Developing the creative concepts based on that strategy. Continually researching and testing throughout the process. So, by the time you finally produced the ad and started running it in-market, you knew that it had a pretty good chance of working.
Today things have totally shifted.
You can literally change your advertising message on the fly. You can have multiple messages in-market that target different audiences. You can test and learn in real time.
Geeking Out in South Beach
I spent a few days this week attending the Interactivity Digital Conference in South Beach. It was an interesting conference focused on a range of digital issues including SEO, content, social, analytics and more.
The conference was held at The James Hotel which is right on the beach. A very nice venue for a conference. It was great to wakeup each morning and go for a run along the beach at sunrise. It sure beats running through my neighborhood in Atlanta.
The conference kicked off with Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz. Rand is an engaging speaker and always interesting to listen to. It was a good way to start the conference. You can view his presentation here. Here are some of the points I found most interesting:
single-minded proposition 
You must be logged in to post a comment.