In direct response radio we have One Minute to open the sale.  You have Three Minutes or less to close it.  Or Lose it.

My :60 commercials will drive Today's Prospects to your 1-800 number or URL.  Your own TMs and landing pages have three minutes or less to get that credit card out of the wallet.
Radio-driven Impulse Shoppers are curious and somewhat more open-minded than KeyWord Searchers.  They are no less impatient, though. Few have the time find their way from a cluttered corporate home page through elegantly labyrinthine navigation protocols to a 1,200-word sell page to a shopping cart.

Every required action - a scroll-down, a button click, even an eyeball movement - loses prospects forever and wastes money.

This article discusses a few things you should do to avoid the collision of Hope with Reality, slickify your website, and maximize sales from media-driven, pay-per-click or SEOPs shoppers.  This is a fairly long article derived from one simple truth known to all Direct Response gurus:

The longer the time lapse between Inquiry and Sale
the less likely the latter will ever occur.

Searchers v Impulse Buyers.

Everything you're about to read flies in the face of everything you know about Google, Yahoo, Bing, Pay Per Click, and Search Engine Optimization.

The reason is that the dynamics of PPC and SEOPS are markedly different from those of media-driven direct response advertising.

KeyWord Searchers often have a specific product or problem in mind.  They're looking for the best price, or for text content that's the same as whatever they type into their Google Bar.  KW Searchers exemplify the Reflection Principle perfectly.

Radio Respondents may be at or near Steam Heat with regard to some persistent problem, but they haven't necessarily begun a frantic search for a known solution.  They haven't settled on one set of words that must be delivered by a prospective suitor's copywriter.

KW Searchers are shopping NOW.  Radio Responders might become KW Searchers in a week or two.  Your commercials should tempt them to come see your thing early - before they start to GooHoo!  Your website and in-bound telemarketers must quickly convert transient curiosity & sudden interest into firm resolve.

Your web site is your ad, your store, your warehouse manager, even Your Thing Itself.  Most Impulse Shoppers want to get in and out fast.

Think ! Not !

Most web developers build vast corporate sites on design & code templates.  Most pages sandwich a little text content into complex layouts loaded with drop-down menus, flash, buttons, banners, and links to elsewhere in the corporate empire. 

But most first-time visitors size up a site in eight seconds or less. Half or more bail out in less than a minute.  A few, with time on their hands, may well visit several pages, read up on your corporate history, even bookmark the site, then move on.

The vast majority of sales come from people who hit your home page, see what they're looking for, check the specs, buy it, and go back to what they were doing. 

In D. R. Radio Conversion is King...

Dot-Com advertisers pay attention to PPC costs and SEOPs fees, but they routinely settle for an abysmally low conversion of visitors to customers.

A Google KW click may cost $.11. A radio click may cost $1.67.  Your media cost per sale is always Cost per Inquiry divided by conversion rate.  If your on-line C is 1.4%:

$  .11 / 1.4% =  $    7.86
$1.67 / 1.4% =  $119.29

Conversion (C) is the most powerful number in the GM/C=X formula.

Here's what might happen during a typical one-week satellite radio Click-to buy against Females 25+.  G is a solid 1.535 (i.e. 1,535 Target Audience Gross Impressions per Unique Visitor), M (Target Audience cost per thousand) is only $2.89.

Look how Media Cost Per Sale drops with each 1% increase in Conversion:

With which Reality would you like to collide? $443.62 or $36.97?

It pays to Slickify!

There's an old adage in Direct Response:

The longer the time lapse between initial inquiry
and final sale, the less likely the latter is to occur.

In most Direct Response Radio tests, early responders are Drivers & Expressives.  They are in moderate Steam Heat, are quick to act on impulse and have almost zero patience.  The more time they have to spend hunting for your Thing, negotiating your navigation, or reading lots of corporatese, the less likely they are to Buy.  They have to see something, of course!  But what?

Slickifying is part science, part art & design. You first peg the Optimum Time Spent on Line among current customers.  Next you identify what they read or saw.  Last you repackage that Direct Optimum Content in one or two internal landing pages, or on a separate URL.

I have people who can do this for you, or you and your webmaster can DIY. Here's the routine:

1. Optimum TSOL.

Here's a simple exercise you or your Webmaster can run this week, even today.  Open Google Analytics or this week's FTP Logs.  Select all the Unique Visitors that visited your site from Sale #1 to Sale # 100. Sort the path records by Time Spent on Line.  You should get an Excel summary that looks like this:

In this case 2900 Unique Visitors generated 100 sales, for an overall Conversion rate of 3.45%.  That's not too bad.  However a third of UVs bailed out in under 01:30, and 700 leisurely browsers finally found something they didn't like or simply lost interest.  All that extra TSOL produced only 16 sales.

Seventy five percent of sales came from the 1300 UVs who spent two to four minutes getting to your shopping cart.  (Check out time is extra.)  They converted at a rate of 5.77%.  Your peak Conversion rate was 6.36% at 3:30 TSOL.

Here are the same numbers in a simple chart:

If you have time, sort the same UVs by day of the week.  You may learn that mid-week shoppers spend far less time on your site than weekend browsers. You'll also identify the best days of the week to run your radio.

2.  Direct Optimum Content

Next, note all the discrete pages on your site visited by those 1300 Hi-Conversion buyers and all the pages visited by the 700 leisurely browsers.

The first set of pages contains all the content you need to convert Impulse Shoppers to buyers.  The second set is extraneous content you could easily lose.

You're probably loath to excise any of your KeyWord content, though.  And you'll surely want to track radio response separately from GooHoo! and SEOPs traffic.  There are two ways to do so.

The easy way is to register a simple, easy to spell URL that auto-refreshes directly to your current home page.  Example.  Hope collides with Reality when you learn that early radio respondents may have no more attention span, even less, than your PPC/SEOPs shoppers.

The harder, but more profitable way, is to create a separate website with that easy to spell URL that contains only the Direct Optimum Content.

If you want to sell shoes, build a page that sells shoes, not snow shovels, your corporate management team, or your most recent annual report.  (If you deliver a complex service on-line, build a separate marketing site.  Put the meat & potatoes content on an https:// site that can only be reached by Registered Customers.)

3. www.TheThing.com

Thumb through any national magazine and you'll see dozens of direct response ads: headline, picture, 150 to 250 words of copy, call to action. The good ads are simple and focused. They take about a minute to read.

So, build a Radio URL Home Page with similar features.  This page has one mission: establish perceived value for The Thing before the visitor encounters the price.  Perceived Value must be greater than price or there's no sale.  If your DOC page reveals the price, that's what people will look for and see first (Reflection Principle).  If the price is higher than they expected, many won't read anything else. 

TheThing.com can include Flash demos, audio testimonials (from the radio, of course), FAQ, etc. But there should be only two places to go from The Thing page: Out or to The Price page.  If you establish high value for the thing, most people will be at leas curious to find out how much it costs.  Other than fly-out html pages that amplify the main sell, the only link on this page is to ThePrice.com.

Here's where you sell the price and the deal.  Offer several ways to purchase: BOGO; Buy Two Month's Supply Get One Free; Order Now and Get a Special Gift; Four Easy Payments... etc.  Ask people to select the option they'd prefer, then send that selection on ahead.

If you have recorded or written testimonials that address the Value and price-worthiness of The Thing, package them in a fly-out page.

If you want to promote similar items to the same visitor you might fly-out an OtherThings.com page that looks like the Radio URL page.  (Be careful, though.  Don't try to overwhelm an impulse shopper with too much information.)

Once again, the only places to go from ThePrice.com are out, back to TheThing.com, or on to CheckOut.com.  Recap the purchase selections and deals from ThePrice.com. Capture CC#, contact info, ask "Where did you hear about us?" Thank people for ordering.  Offer a coupon code good for future purchases (not this one, though). Start building your Back End here.

Check Out might involve more than one actual page.  When the order is confirmed (or the CC# validated) you can then, and only then, offer a link to the snow shovels, management bios, investor information, and other stuff housed on your elegantly labyrinthine 600-page corporate website.

The Time Spent On-line from TheThing.com to CheckOut.com should be be, according to your homework, about 3:30.  Get some objective guinea pigs to read both pages.  Time them.  When your Slickified path greases out in the allotted time, you're ready to go on the air.

D.R. Radio URL - Streaming Test.

You can test your Radio URL on satellite, network, or in spot-market terrestrial radio.   Your budget should be sufficient to buy one to three stations or programs for at least a week.

If you'd like to track response from several formats simultaneously, consider a Streaming Radio Test.

After a week or two, you get a census count of how many people heard your spot on each station, how many clicked to your DOC page, and how many actually bought something.  You can track TSOL and, of course, the effects of different pricing and "deal" strategies on sales.

3:59 to Check Out!

My :60 radio sets up the look-see click.  Your DOC page has another 1:20 or so to continue the dialog and deliver rational facts.  Your Shopping Cart gets another :59 to state Price & Deal.  In all, three minutes and fifty nine seconds from on-air to BUY NOW.

When you slickify the path and remove all extraneous content, your Radio URL conversion could easily soar!

In the graphic below, I show how your Web Master will track the DOC-CART-CHECKOUT paths from five (out of maybe 20) stations in a single market.

In this test, the Streaming Cume is about 22% of terrestrial cume, and we've bought a bundle of gimps (at a flat $3.00 cpm) equal to about three times the streaming cumes.  Note that tracked banner-clicks from different formats will likely indicate different response rates (G), different conversion rates (C), and hence different Media Costs Per Sale.  We can use those values to set Target CPM, G & C for future rollouts.

Slickify Your Telemarketers, Too!

Your website is your store.  Your TMs are your front-line sales force. Make sure they hear your spots and understand all claims and offers your make.  Make sure they know their way around your site.  Some prospects, especially disabled persons, may need help finding what they want.

If your IVR system permits, answer each in-bound phone call with a :60 Loop Tape.  Replay the last snippet of copy from your radio commercial.  Add some pre-sell copy.  Invite callers to "Press 1 to speak to a human." A human should answer every phone call after about 40 seconds.

The idea is to weed out DOAs (kids, cranks, confused, no credit card, etc) so your TM's can concentrate on bona fide prospects.

TMs can help you improve your radio and web copy, too.  Ask them to run a Brand Resistance Survey among the next 500 to 1,000 callers.

Good salespersons work on commission.  Do yours?  A 5% bounty on each unit sale adds a little to the selling price but may increase your conversion rates greatly.  When the phone aren't ringing, your in-house TMs should call recent on-line customers.  Thank them for buying.  Make friends.  Get an email address...

...and The Back End is Queen.

Your commercials, telemarketers, and web site must establish a Perceived Value for your Thing that is greater than the asking price, or there is NO SALE. If you look cheap, you can't price dear.  Indeed, it's usually smart to look more expensive than you really are. (Why do you suppose corporate TV advertisers spend so much on Production Value?)

First time shoppers arrive at your website or phone-bank with a high degree of skepticism and all sorts of Wallet Protection Excuses in mind.  Once they try your Thing, why of course they'll instantly become long-term repeat customers.

So don't rush them.

Offer newbies a deal, a price, a freebie, some sort of incentive to try you out at price that's easy to swallow.  You can ask them to register their email addresses to get the deal, then send them newsletters, reminder emails, special offers on new products...

The rate at which you Convert first timers to loyal customers exerts tremendous leverage on long-term revenue & profits.  If you build a robust back end, you'll eventually set Target Media Cost Per Sale at an acceptable percentage of the Expected Downstream Revenue of a first-time customer.  If you already have one, you can use that Expected Revenue to set your Radio test & rollout budgets in your Free Strategy & Planning for ROI.xls workbook.

Radio is not   Conversion is King.  The Back End is Queen. It's better to accept those Realities today than to collide with them later on.

I'm pretty sure that this page costs me a fair number of Impulse Customers who want to "Try Radio - see if it works!"  But when it all comes true, many of them come back.