I’m a big fan of Gazelles.com as well as Verne Harnish’s thinking tools and blog.
So today I thought I’d do a Website Conversion Review of the Gazelles.com website and walk through a couple of frameworks for improving their website ROI.
In this review I analyse the site and provide specific recommendations for achieving:
MUCH faster email list growth
MUCH faster customer growth
MUCH faster “ramp up” of Lifetime Value
Every concept I cover is broadly applicable so it can be plugged into your situation too.
And below the video you’ll also find a slide deck and transcript to aid scanning.
Download the slides here
Download the transcript here
“How To Craft A Killer Unique Value Proposition That Attracts More Ideal Clients” FREE UVP GUIDE
If you’d prefer to read, here is a full transcript of the “Video Conversion Review of Gazelles.com”
Hi, it’s Will Swayne from Marketing Results.
In this video, I’m going to conduct a conversion review of Gazelles.com.
I’ll be focusing on the question of:
“How could Gazelles.com significantly grow their list, drive more leads, and increase revenue without significantly redeveloping their entire website?”
To do this I’ll be using a reputable framework for improving the results of any website, yours included.
So let’s take a look at the Gazelles.com homepage.
Just for a bit of background to explain why I’m looking at this website, it is that I think this website is relevant to most of our audience which are business owners or entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their businesses. Gazelles provides profit boosting tools, strategies, and coaching to growth companies. So this is relevant to most businesses who have growth aspirations, particularly, if you’re reasonably established in the 5 to 10 mil revenue range, but you want to get to a significantly higher level of growth.
The other reason why I’m doing a conversion review on this website is because I think this website makes many of the same mistakes that most websites make. And by fixing these, I believe Gazelles could get some good upside, and by extension, if you apply the same principles to your website, you can do the same.
Please bear in mind that this is a bit of a fan review. I don’t have inside information into the current metrics of the Gazelles business or what numbers they’re currently doing, but I can provide insights into what I believe would boost results based on my 15-plus years of experience doing this.
So let’s get underway.
When we come to Gazelles.com, we actually see this screen which is a kind of a progress wheel spinning away whilst the first piece of content loads.
I noticed that this progress wheel pops up a number of times on the website. It must be a function of the content management system or something like that. But there’s a heap of research out there that says that slow loading websites are bad for both conversion and SEO. So that’s something that I think I would try to optimize on a website like this.
But that’s a bit by the by. Normally, we have a framework that we go through to apply to our client’s websites dealing with firstly the unique value proposition and marketing funnel.
So this is the homepage of the website.
And in the first splash, which is that first screen of information at the top there, we see that it’s basically exclusively promoting the Scaling Up book which is Verne Harnish’s book. It’s an awesome book; I recommend you read it. But the book itself is taking pride of place on the website, and perhaps this splash area is not doing the job of positioning the entire Gazelles’s business. So it’s a slightly unusual piece of real estate despite some positive aspects, such as the proof elements on the right hand side.
So what would we expect to see here?
Well, let’s just quickly go through a unique value proposition framework. A unique value proposition is really an articulation of how a business is uniquely desirable to their target market. Here we see a bit of a diagram.
Everyone is sort of everyone in this business improvement niche or category. Twenty percent of customers are A grade customers, and 20% of 20%, or 4% are AA grade customers, which is perhaps the ideal target market for a company like Gazelles.com.
So they’re a relatively a small part of the overall business improvement market that Gazelles could be focusing on here. And the interesting thing is that these AA grade customers are likely to spend 80% of all the money in the market. So there’s a great advantage to focusing really closely on those people whom you can help very directly.
Here you can see this dramatically portrayed, where the 4% really drive most of the spin, and at the moment, there’s no real target to the whole website, at least obviously on the first screen of information, and that’s an area that we recommend should feature this information. If you want to read more about this framework, you can do so here, which will take you to our long article around this.
Digging deeper into the website, we actually find a bit of a statement of what Gazelles does and why it’s good.
“Gazelles provides executive education, coaching, and technology services to help mid-market companies around the world build and execute a strategic plan. Best known for our One-Page Strategic Plan and other One-Page tools, Gazelles focuses on helping executive teams make the right decisions when it comes to four key areas: people, strategy, execution, and cash.”
It’s a pretty common scenario where some of the best and most compelling information on the website is actually buried on the About Us page or buried deep into a Services page somewhere. So I think this is a reasonably compelling explanation of what Gazelles does, who it does it for, and why it’s good. So I’ve kind of fashioned this into a very rough splash area that a company like Gazelles might use. Now, this is something I’ve knocked up in 10 minutes. So I fully accept the copywriting could be tweaked and refined to some degree. But let’s have a look at the key components.
You have a major headline, “We help mid-market companies reach the big time.” And then a statement of how they uniquely benefit the target market, “Gazelles provides executive education, coaching, and technology services to help mid-market companies build and execute their strategic plan by making the right decisions around people, strategy, execution, and cash.” It’s a bit of a condensed version of what they’ve already got on their About Us page. The image over there in the corner on the right hand side could be an image of the One-Page Strategic Plan or something like that.
Then we have a call-to-action button below that saying, “Download my One-Page Strategic Plan.” So immediately asking the prospect to grab onto some information. And below that, we have a bit of a Proof bar with some of the successful clients. Another approach there might be to include some of the publications where the head person Verne Harnish’s articles have been published or some similar proof element.
Above the fold, I think it’s always a good strategy to try and answer three questions that any user is going to ask when they come to your website. And those three questions are: Where am I? What can I do here? Why should I do it?
So this splash here, I think, answers those questions reasonably in the time and space available. Obviously, the intention is that once the user looks at this sort of material, they will then be prompted to search further and delve deeper into this site. So that’s a unique value proposition, and we really believe that should be front and center on the homepage of your website.
The second thing we’ll look at now is about the marketing funnel. A funnel is a sequence of marketing activities that’s designed to convert a shy first time visitor into a lifelong client. And I’m going to assume that there are three major funnel goals here….
Build the email list.
Make more direct sales or direct sales revenue for low to mid ticket items. By that, I mean e-commerce transactions.
Create more sales opportunities, so mid to high ticket sales for, say, coaching or other high-value services.
So with those goals in mind, let’s look at the Gazelles.com website and see how it’s performing.
Before we do that, we’ll just get a couple of frameworks and definitions in place.
There’s a lot of information in this funnel-style diagram, but I will look at some high level concepts first. So at the top of the funnel, when the prospect is in the awareness stage, we want to answer questions through trust and thought leadership, i.e., through blogging. Then we want to generate opt-ins onto the email list through the use of premium content and gradually offer education-based marketing before introducing products, and services, and various offers in order to generate sales or any leads down the track. So let’s have a quick look at how the website is performing and come up with some 80/20 conversion tweaks.
The first thing I notice is that Verne Harnish has a very, very good blog called The Growth Guy, and it’s actually housed at VerneHarnish.Typepad.com. So it’s housed on the Typepad domain. We would recommend that this top of funnel content and blog articles is housed on the Gazelles.com domain or at least a domain that Verne himself controls. This is really potentially delivering a lot of value to Typepad.com, but not as much asset value, if you like, to Verne himself. So that would be a nice way to optimize the top of funnel blogging content.
Now, we’ll just cut over to the homepage and look at another couple of things before looking deeper into some funnel concepts.
Here we are at the live homepage.
A few things here. I’ve talked about the splash in some detail. Below the splash, we have a bit of a montage of different calls to action. You’ve got your One-Page Strategic Plan and a One-Page Growth Tools, which actually leads to just some free download links to the PDF Growth Tools; which are absolutely brilliant by the way. I highly recommend them.
Then you’ve got some sort of product and service call-outs like, “Give Me a Killer Strategy and Improve My Cash Flow,” which is a little bit disconnected in time and space. Then you can come to Our Workshop, and then you can have online courses, and then you can go to live events, and then you can enable your team to run efficiently using something called Align, which I’m not sure what that is. Now, when you click on that, it turns out it’s a software product, but there’s just a bit of a montage of different calls to action, which I don’t think are very well organised. They look nice, but there’s a few different categories of information all in the same place, so that could be somewhat optimised, I believe.
In the next stack of information, we have some instructions. We can read Verne Harnish’s books. We can attend workshops. We can hire coaches, or use coaching software. That in a way is clearer, because at least I know there’s four ways to engage, and here’s what they are. Then we go down to “What’s New” on Gazelles. We have a bunch of videos here and a bunch of articles, and many of those go off to the Fortune domain, Fortune.com. If I click over here, then I in fact see that this is an article that requires subscription or sign-in to access, which isn’t ideal.
So this whole stack of free content, it acts as a proof element, because Fortune’s a well known magazine, and a wealth of things have been submitted to Fortune, and there’s obviously some credibility there. But the downside, I think, is that there’s a lot of external links leading off the site, and also that the content is subscription only content at the other end which adds a bit of a barrier. There’s more we could say about the videos here, specifically, those that are currently using YouTube, which is an okay platform for this, playing the videos. Potentially, another system like Wistia could be better from a conversion point of view.
Below that, we have the “Upcoming Summit” section, which is, I think, okay, directing people to where they can sign up to a specific event. That’s okay. Then we’ve got “Broad Growth” Workshops. It’s not clear, I suppose, what the difference is between a growth workshop and a summit, unless you’re well and truly in the Gazelles’ funnel already. And then we have “Online Executive Education”, so a few different choices here. One thing I noticed is that if you click on, say, Jack Stack to read about The Principles and Practices of The Great Game of Business, we in fact just go to a top level homepage for this sub-website around the growth institute. Obviously, it would make more sense to lead the user directly from this title here directly into the Great Game of Business product.
Then we go down to Testimonials, and there’s this usual carousel feature of testimonials. There’s quite a bit of research that says carousels are not good, and that static testimonials are often more effective, because I might be halfway through reading one of these before it slides to the next one. Equally, there’s about 20 testimonials here, and then 4 or 6 of them might be from people I’ve really, really heard about; they might say some really on-point stuff. Others might be people I’ve never heard of or they might be people that don’t have the same issue that I have. So we would recommend making those static, and putting four or six in line, and giving the user the opportunity to read more if they want to on another page.
Then we have our opt-in here at the bottom to build the list, and I really believe that’s far too under the radar. Then we go down to the footer. The footer is somewhat large, almost taking the place or duplicating the menu. And that can often introduce, I guess, conversion leaks on other types of pages where you’re trying to drive a conversion goal. So we would suggest really truncating a big footer like that.
So all in all, there’s a few areas that could be quite quickly optimised; testimonials, click-throughs, and I think this top area just needs to be looked at again to make sure that it provides a logical experience for the client or the website visitor.
Let’s go back to the presentation. We’ll cover off the rest of this session.
Here we are back in PowerPoint land, and I’ll just run through a couple of conversion optimisation ideas for the website itself. So there are certain times on the Gazelles.com website where a pop-up comes up and invites you to subscribe for weekly insights, and this is the thing that you see.
The call to action is to sharpen your competitive edge, subscribe to Verne’s insights, our popular free weekly e-newsletter. So it’s got a bit of a hero shot of Verne, which is fine, but he’s actually looking at the Scaling Up book. And then I’m invited to subscribe to Verne’s insights to get a free weekly e-newsletter. So some mixed messages there, and there’s no big hitting carrot for me to sign up, but nevertheless I can put up my name and an email and click Continue to sign up.
What happens when I do that, unexpectedly, is I get sent to this Thank You page, and it’s not really indicated that I have indeed signed up for anything. But if I scroll down I find that my information’s been pre-filled here.
The implication, I suppose, is that, “Oh, I’ve got to fill out all these extra bits of information to receive the weekly insights.” I haven’t put in all the information here on this screen, but it looks like you have to put in your title, and your company name, your employees, your URL, your address, and all these other fields just to get an email newsletter.
Now, that’s probably really, really dramatically reducing list size and something that I think is a bit harsh at this point in the funnel. There are other ways to get their information, specifically by selling them something. That’s a pretty good way, selling them a low ticket item. So I think there are a whole host of optimisations around this list-building strategy, and I’ve highlighted a few of them.
What could you do? Again, please don’t criticise me for my graphic design skills too much, but this is another way you could do this. The free newsletter sign-up could trigger like a pop-up box, something like this.
In it, there’s a stronger value proposition to get the One-Page Strategic Plan worksheet and 12 business growth templates when you subscribe to Verne’s weekly insights. So it’s like an additional carrot over and above the weekly emails. And again, you could have a thumbnail or an image of what you get on the right there.
Then you’ve got a few bullets just to intensify the value of the offer. Get the instantly downloadable PDF templates including step-by-step instructions on how to fill them in. Get Verne’s Insights delivered to your inbox weekly. No fluff or filler; unsubscribe at any time. So there’s supporting bullet points, and the strategic plan worksheets are used as a carrot to get the visitor to sign up. At the moment, all those wonderful worksheets are just given away free with no email address. But then to sign up to the email list, you have to sign away your life to get on the list. So we would suggest some rationalisation of that proposition there to build the email list faster, because that’s really where most of the value is. That’s where the kernel of value is for a list or a funnel.
The user pops in their email address, and we could perhaps ask for one field to start with, your role at the company; so head of company, management, etc., and downstream the messages could be customised for that role. And downstream we could ask for more information on the prospect as well and then customise the market you want to mention around that as well. So something like this, a pop-up designed well with this type of approach could probably get double or triple the email signups that are currently being generated via the existing approach; so worth trying.
Now, let’s just look at what the downstream funnel might look like.
Using a pop-up, like we just looked at, you could generate people under the free email list. And rather than on the Thank You page, making them fill in lots of extra fields, why don’t we offer them the Scaling Up book on the Thank You page on some preferential basis. One possible offer would be a free plus shipping offer. So the book itself is free. The prospect just pays the shipping, let’s say it’s $9.95 or something like that. And that’s a really, really low list generation strategy or buyer generation strategy for Gazelles. It gives you their address, their phone number, their email address, their name, their position, and lots of other information quite readily, because people are purchasing something.
Then when they go to order, you can have an order form with a bump. So, yes, the core offer is to get the free plus shipping offer for $9.95, but there could be another idea button which says for $99, you can grab a Keynote webinar or some other broad spectrum offering to bump the initial transaction value and perhaps monetise some of the inbound traffic.
If they purchase that, then on the Thank You page again, you could have a bonus Keynote training, perhaps where Verne Hernish goes through the four decisions and presents some of that high-level content, which is very valuable. But at the same time, it actually mentions we do coaching with certain companies, and here are some of the criteria. If you’d like to have a discussion with someone who can customise all these strategies for you, then head over to this offer here, where it’s a high ticket coaching and consultation offer. For this type of offer, you often want the person to commit some money like $100 just to book the consultation. It’s perhaps refundable when they attend, but you just want a little bit of a barrier, so that you don’t get too many low-end consultations taking up the pipeline.
When they buy that, then they’ll go into an inside sales process where presumably a trained coach will walk them through a process and assess their eligibility for the high ticket sales. Whether or not they sign up for that offering or not, when you ship the book, there should be smart offers downstream for higher ticket programs and more offerings.
But let’s assume they do none of that. Let’s just assume that they sign up from the free email list. Then the first thing you do would be to deliver those templates that you promised and offer some great value. And then every week you would deliver the weekly insights as promised. But you usually have some sort of onboarding or indoctrination series that would follow the sign-up. And that would feature, of course, some paid offerings or some added value offerings to that list as well, because the quicker you can monetise that list, the quicker you can pay for traffic, for marketing, for business development, and other great things. So that’s kind of a high level funnel concept that I think can work very, very well here.
Let’s just look at one more thing before we sign off, and that’s really explaining how you would build up multi-step funnels. Because if you look at the Gazelles.com website, you’ll see that they offer a huge amount of material and resources in many, many aspects of business. So I guess I’m answering the question of: What do you put in these dotted boxes here? What sorts of sequences and series could you have there? And we’ll run through one example.
So let’s say you had some materials for that pricing strategy that you want to sell to a list. You can use this four-step funnel, and these type of funnels have been spoken about a lot by Digital Marketer, and there’s variations of these going around in many sources as well. But let’s look at this approach.
First of all, you could go to your email list, and you could offer them a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a report, something they need to sign up for, maybe give their email address again or indicate interest. So they’ve got to put up their hand and say, “Yep, I know I’m getting the weekly insights, but I’m actually specifically interested in pricing strategy.” And an example of a lead magnet around pricing strategy is The Top Seven Pricing Mistakes That Cause Mid-Market Companies Billions in Lost Margins, something like that. Interesting enough to certainly give your email address and have a read.
Once they sign up for that, then you would typically offer a tripwire product. That’s what we call a fire-starter product. But the goal of the tripwire is a really, really low resistance offer to get the prospect to get out their credit card. And it’ll typically offer something that’s of really good value but very, very focused. So here my example is How To Use Price Anchoring to Immediately Increase Your Average Sale. It could be a report, an eBook, a video, but it’s going to cover often one specific pricing strategy which is called anchoring
Then when they sign up for that, then the next offer that you present to them is the core offer, that $99 webinar called The Executive’s Guide to Pricing Improvement. That’s actually the name of the webinar that is offered on the Gazelles website at the moment. So instead of just offering that out of the box, you offer these two offers in front of it in order to get people directed toward the core offer.
Finally, for people to buy that or not, you have the profit maximiser, which is perhaps the Price Optimization Masterclass. It’s a $1000 price point, obviously more expensive. That’s where you earn a bigger dollar per customer.
So we’ve covered one funnel here for pricing strategy. There could be other funnels about social media, website traffic generation, hiring, motivation, and all sorts of different topics. And that’s how a complex business like Gazelles can manage many, many products by just organising them into these many multi-step funnels.
If Gazelles.com were to execute these strategies, we would expect them to see…
MUCH faster list growth
MUCH faster customer growth. A customer has just been defined as the number of people who’ve paid you $1 or more.
And a much more integrated pathway to ramping up customer value. So instead of people sort of hanging around on the list and eventually going, “I should probably go to a workshop or a conference some point.” And rock on to that, you give them opportunities to buy within 10 minutes of signing up on the website. And you give them opportunities to spend more with you, so that by the time they get to the conference, they’re extremely well rounded, good, loyal customers.
Of course, everything I’ve covered in this video is probably relevant to your business as well, whatever type of business you have. The same strategies can be used pretty broadly to improve results.
If you’re interested in finding out a bit more about our methodologies and these particular strategies, then you can go here. There’s a contact form there where you can inquire, and we can also be reached at +61 1300 RESULTS (1300 737 858).
If this has been useful, I really hope that you will try to employ some of these strategies and let us know how you get on, and I look forward to hearing some success stories.
Thanks a lot.
“How To Craft A Killer Unique Value Proposition That Attracts More Ideal Clients” FREE UVP GUIDE
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