By Allan Maurer
RALEIGH, NC—Most interactive marketing firms tout their ability to drive traffic to a site. Brooks Bell Interactive’s goal is to increase the number of visitors who convert into buyers or otherwise interact with a brand in a way the marketer wants.
Bell says the goal of Brooks Bell Interactive is to “make Raleigh the epicenter for direct response marketing.”
The company Bell founded with her husband in 2004 started off with a marquee client, AOL and soon attracted equally impressive clients such as The Wall Street Journal online, Chase Banks, NASCAR, and AARP. It now employs 13 people.
The secret sauce behind the company’s success, says Bell is “A creative approach based on psychology and direct response principles. It’s done through scientific testing.”
Instead of making one landing page, for instance, a company such as AOL would create two different ones and send 50 percent of its traffic to each. “You run them at the same time until one clearly beats the other on click-through rates and conversions,” Bell explains.
Then, the winning page becomes the “control,” and another challenger page is posted until an even better click-through and conversion rate is established.
The approach only works for larger companies with large volumes of Web site traffic. It costs from $5,000 to $30,000 a month with an average of about $15,000, Bell says. “It takes time and effort,” she notes.
Companies usually have to commit to at least six months of testing.
What drives conversion rates?
“Five big factors,” says Bell. She notes they were pointed out by www.marketingexperiments.com “They are motivation, the clarity of your value proposition, an incentive to move forward minus the friction of difficulties or complexity, and reducing anxiety. You really want to reduce that.”
Reducing anxiety can be as simple as putting up a link and phone number for cancelling service with no questions asked. It means addressing things a potential buyer might be worried about.
On a larger scale, says Bell, “You want to look at what someone is thinking when buying something or making a decision to interact with your company.” That means answering four big questions:
What is it you are selling or asking me to do? What’s in it for me? What’s the price? And why should I trust you. “Answer those four things and there is much higher probability people will follow through,” says Bell.
“It’s common sense, but too few marketers think about their consumer on that level. Instead, they think in terms of demographics—a 45-year-old male and so on. We build a hypothesis of what the visitor is thinking and wait for the data to tell us which strategy is most relevant. A lot of time, we build two strategies and we don’t know which will win. We try to make them equally good, but different. Sometimes we think one will win, but you can always be surprised.
“You put it in the market and wait for the consumer to tell you. We’re very results focused. You establish the key thing the customer is interested in and it takes a while to fatigue if it’s a good message.”
Bell says that in this economy, where people are trying to do more with less, the importance of data is becoming apparent to a lot of agencies and companies. “The light has gone on. Data is the new black,” she adds, referring to the color’s role in fashion, but it could just as easily refer to the bottom line.
Online: www.brooks-bell.com
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