This is a classic sales process for many organisations, often referred to as the sales funnel, yet this methodology on the web is not widely available. Below I will provide a brief overview of a client that uses this technology to stunning effect.

Laser eye surgery company

Founded over 10 years ago on a traditional clinical sales model (information -> consultation -> sale -> treatment) the emergence of the Internet offered this client a unique opportunity to map their current sales process onto an online model. At the start of this project in 2002 less than 20% of treated individuals ever touched their web presence. In 2009, nearly 90% of treated patients went through some element of the various web assets – they have, in effect, transformed into a dot com business in just a few years with spectacular results.

The challenges

Mapping a sales transition curve onto an online system is relatively simple to do with the right platform and this was achieved quite quickly and easily. Using the VITES™ platform a number of sales steps were created; first-timers, information gatherers, thinkers, consultation bookers, consultation attenders and treated patients. At all stages in the journey help and assistance is made available. Testimonials re-enforcing and evangelising the positives in the process are posted.

To grow the business and generate sustainable sales, every person in the process has to go through (almost) every stage and this process is not always linear, some steps are missed out and some are clumped together depending on the needs, fears, issues and financial standing of the customer.

At each stage there are various challenges faced by the company and the customer. Here is a summary of the stages and the challenges:

First timers – Stage A

Customer : Who is this company? Are they right for me? What’s involved in surgery? How much? Will it hurt?

Company : Quick engagement, make sure they stay or leave a method for re-engaging (email, address)

Information gatherers – Stage B

Customer : Where is the information I need? How much will it hurt? How can I afford it?

Company : Getting the “this is simple & painless” message across. We can make this affordable. We are the best.

Thinking about it – Stage C

Customer : Really not sure about surgery? Will I go blind if it goes wrong? It’s expensive.

Company : Gotta keep ‘em warm, if they disengage we stand a good chance of losing them. It really *is* safe.

Consultation bookers – Stage D

Customer : Can I see someone near me? Does it cost? Will it hurt? Credit or cash purchase?

Company : Consultations are free, no obligation, no sales pressure. We are the best!

Consultation attenders – Stage E

Customer : Hmm, I’m suitable now – should I go ahead? What happens if I go blind? What about post-op complications?

Company : Gotta get them to buy, this is the most expensive stage to lose ‘em, momentum is the game

Treated patients – Stage F

Customer : Wow, it’s fab – who else can I tell this about, can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner, it didn’t hurt

Company : Lets get these guys talking to the wide world and also to the people in the early stages

There are clear themes that run throughout most of the process, fear and cost for example, but at each stage there are subtly different issues, challenges and therefore different messages, different calls to action and different ways of dealing with the visitor.

The solution

Using the VITES™ Journey Platform, rules define that each visitor is tagged at each stage and “dropped” into a profile that fits the stage that they are at. In each profile there are different ways of dealing with the various challenges and these are served up as custom content based on what is known about the visitor. Additionally, there is external learning that can be transferred into the system; for example an incoming first-time visitor who has typed “laser eye treatment” into Google has a higher preponderance to move faster through the sales cycle than, say, an individual who has responded to a “win FREE laser eye surgery” banner on Hotmail.

A bespoke forum comprising FAQ’s and posts is available to the visitor. It is important that platform technology and the quick and easy availability of “help” work together to enable the journey to continue.

Below are some rule examples:

• If you are a stage A and have typed “laser eye treatment” into Google then show a “Consultation request” form
• If you are a stage A from a (filler) banner campaign based around “Win FREE” then show a “Win FREE form”
• If you are a stage A person and leave the site then flood the visitors banner network with “Win FREE” banners to get you back.
• If you have been on stage B for more than 30 days show an “Interest Free Offer”
• If you have just become a stage B then show a “Consult Booking” option
• If you are at stage C then show testimonials from people like you, treated near you and show forum posts from stage F people (how wonderful it is)
• If you are stage D then show special offers during week 6 to 9

The rules are not complex but there are a great deal of them and with around 3,500 entrance points to the site used by approximately 1,000,000 visitors per month the automated system simply chugs away delivering the right content at the right time. To further expand the model, to say “show a consult booking” option is wider than just online; it includes the use of personalised email and also communicates this information to (and from) the call-centre to ensure that the sales message is consistent across all communication platforms.

See it working?

The average time from first-arrival to sale is around 90 days and with the VITES™ platform being self learning and with many of the rules making quite subtle changes it’s actually very difficult to see the process in action – which is good. You don’t want the visitor to have a “jolting” experience every time he or she returns to the site. The very nature of VITES™ is that it is subtle.

Trial and error economics

The very nature of the platform encourages testing, seeking improvements in all the stages. A few percentage point improvements in the stages generates huge compounded gains. For example, the overall conversion rate from visitor to client has doubled over the last 3 years and the cost per sale has dropped 80% over that time period whilst the time-to-close has fallen by over a third. These are all substantial gains and one of the reasons that the work done on this client is often quoted as real “best practice” across the world and used by some of the top Internet gurus as the basis for workshops, seminars and events.

With different visitors having wildly differing needs online the provision of a platform that a) identifies the visitor’s needs and b) serves up the most appropriate content is the new nirvana for both commercial and service-orientated site providers. Amazon, Ebay and Google have been doing this for years using in-house technology to great effect. The time is now right for the provision of an off-the-shelf visitor personalisation and journey management tool.

Journey management

It’s a simple enough concept but here is the crux of the new thinking: Recognise and understand the needs of the visitor and where they sit in their journey and then deliver appropriate content to enable or enhance their journey. All the technology tools to do this are already available and it’s only a matter of gluing them together into a manageable process:

• A visitor cookie can index or passport the visitor to a permanent record of journey progress held on a central server
• The visitor’s aims and predicted journey should be calculated via learning, testing and good practice thinking
• Every-time the visitor interacts with the site the journey is re-plotted and the visitor’s “passport” is updated with this new learning
• The site then delivers content based on the probable journey of the visitor. This content could be something as simple as a call-to-action or journey-specific content but should also include other journey variables into the mix.

The approach is not new, it’s how “sales” have been carried out for thousands of years but the application of this methodology on the web is really rather cutting edge, despite being available from developers and off-the-shelf applications such as VITES™.

Re-thinking marketing

One of the great challenges facing marketing departments is this shift away from “one size fits all” mass marketing to personal messaging and journey marketing. This might go a long way to explain why such an obvious approach has been largely ignored in the last 5 years, it’s too different a mindset and too different an approach for a traditional marketing department to embrace. There are new skills to learn and one of the most important ones is to spend more time listening. Listening to:

• passengers that get off before they complete your journey, having completed theirs
• your successful passengers and learning about their journey and it’s key points
• the identification of key “stops” along the way and establishing good strategies for managing these stops
• how people get onto the journey in the first place
• what motivates some passengers to travel faster or further on their journey
• recognise the white noise of tyre-kickers
• the time it takes people to start, travel and end their journey
• the semantic and personal trust networks that exist in and around the journeys

The internet has frequently hailed the death of mass marketing but to the surprise of many the old mass-marketing world is not going slowly into the night – too much experience and knowledge is invested (tied up?) in the old world and too little motivation, skill or bravery exists to drive commercial organisations into this new space.

The next few years will see the explosion of personalisation tools, born from all walks of technology (analytics, testing tools, CMS, behavioural targeting etc) and with no standards in place I expect a wild-west, free-for-all race to develop new tools. Sadly, it probably signals the end of the line for the smaller companies as they simply won’t be able to compete with the muscle of the larger corporations and their software house-sized development budgets.