Over the past few years my team has provided a guarantee to our new clients that we would double their contacts in the first 90 days or refund your website costs and put your site back to the way it was.
Unfortunately, guarantees in the world of marketing usually are met with skepticism–and for good reason.
No one wants to believe that their current marketing is THAT bad. And if we claim that we can double their contacts in just 90 days, then we’re essentially saying that they are only performing half as well as they should be.
Ouch.
Who wants to hear that?
So we’re scrapping our “Double Your Contacts Guarantee” and instead we’ll be focusing on promising to do everything it requires to make such a guarantee possible.
Granted, we’ve been promising to do these things since 2012 so our services aren’t changing. Just how we communicate them to you.
Here’s the highlight:
Through scientific testing, we promise to learn what marketing works in your local area and apply what we learn to every step in your online sales funnel.
And along the way, we’ll keep you informed of everything in a clear and transparent way that allows you to hold us 100% accountable for your results.
With that in mind, here are the elements involved in keeping this promise:
Clear, Transparent Metrics
You will know your Total Contacts, Investment/Contact and Conversion Rate every month or you won’t receive an invoice from us. This enables you to hold us accountable and forces us to figure out exactly why a metric is getting better or worse.
Scheduled, Committed Time to Work for You
This is huge. Each month we believe we have to earn our fees. No breaks. No time off. The web is constantly changing so you can rest assured that one of our Internet Market Scientists is working each month to make sure your web presence is changing with it.
Using a Standardized Process
The only way to ensure consistent quality is with structured systems and processes. These include our proprietary tools for evaluating your Adwords account, assigning value to the top pages on your website, checking your search engine rankings each month and even monitoring your online reviews.
Holding Ourselves to Scientific Standards
The scientific process can be applied to marketing and, regardless of whether or not an experiment improves your online contacts, we still gain keen insights to refine our hypotheses for your local market.
Giving Low Up-Front Costs
If the best way to improve your marketing is through scientific testing, then it’s hard to fathom spending $10k, $20k or more on an untested website that’s just guess at what will convert your visitors. So we don’t do that. Our sites range from $1500-$3500 up-front and that usually doesn’t even cover our costs. If we don’t deliver results we lose money so you can be assured we’re in this together.
Quickly Implementing New Tools
Online marketing is a rapidly evolving industry. Every other week it seems like someone is developing a new tool, strategy, or innovation that has the potential to revolutionize the way you find new customers online. At Optimized Marketing, we make a point to stay on the cutting edge of all this new stuff. We’re almost always one of the first companies to adopt new tools; and if they appear promising, we’ll implement them on your site.
Offering Continual Optimization
As far as we’re concerned, nobody’s website is “good enough.” Even if we are able to improve your website’s conversion rate from 8% to 20% (which we’ve done), we still aren’t satisfied. We promise to continue testing your website to improve it, month after month, forever.
Listening to Your Ideas & Feedback
Have an idea or suggestion for your website? We promise to listen to all your ideas and test them, using A/B split-testing, to find out if your idea improves your site’s performance. Even though we’re the “web experts,” we realize that you’re the expert on your local customers, market, and business. So if you think your site can be improved, by all means–let us know!
Learning about Your Local Market
When you become one of our clients, we learn a lot about your local market. Through split-tests on your website, measuring the impact of your search & display marketing, and collecting survey & poll information from the visitors to your website, we learn a great deal about who your visitors are, how much they know about your company, and what they’re ultimately looking for.
Applying What We Learn
And the more we learn, the better we can optimize your online marketing. We promise to take everything we learn about your local market and leverage it in every other aspect of your marketing. It’s not uncommon that a winning Adwords text ad can give us an insight that helps us to improve the performance of the landing page, leading to a synergistic increase in your website’s performance.
We Won’t Work with Your Competitors
With our optimization and testing obsession, we’ll know more about your market, your prospects, and your competitors than any internet marketing company out there. That’s not information you want in the hands of your competition so we promise not to work with more than 5% of your direct competitors within 10-25 miles from your office for as long as we’re on your team.
The Truth Is…
We can’t promise that we will always be able to double everyone’s online contacts. Depending on how well optimized your site already is, there might only be room for a 30%-50% improvement.
But let me make one thing clear:
Just because we’re no longer guaranteeing to double your contacts, our goal is still to double your contacts.
For the new clients we accept, we almost always achieve that goal–and we usually exceed it.
Now, what about those clients whose new contacts haven’t doubled in the first 90 days? This is rare, but it has happened a handful of times in the past few years.
Every time this has happened, we’ve always reached out to the client and offered to honor our guarantee: refunding their money and putting the website back the way it was.
And you want to know something funny? They have never accepted our offer.
Never.
And why not?
Because in each case, while we didn’t double their contacts, we still increased them significantly–improving each client’s marketing ROI by 30%, 50%, or more.
Even though they didn’t improve 100%, they were still more than happy with their results–and with our personal level of service and the transparent way we communicate your results.
What we’ve learned over time is that our clients are happy with our performance–not just because we were able to double their contacts, but because of how we did it: using a standardized scientific process, reporting your results in a transparent manner, and working to continually improve your results over time.
So that’s our promise to you:
Through scientific testing, we promise to learn what marketing works in your local area and apply what we learn to every step in your online sales funnel.
And along the way, we’ll keep you informed of everything in a clear and transparent way that allows you to hold us 100% accountable for your results.
To your marketing success,
Bryan Trilli
