So what are the dimensions of trust for a prepaid card prospect?

• Company: We’re talking about handling people’s money and moving it internationally (in some cases).  The strength of your company and its affiliations to known banking players is a key dimension

• Support: Most people have some experience with banking and card products and they have experienced challenges at some time or another.  The critical factor for them has been the level of support they have gotten from the company when the problem did arise.
• Fees: Hidden or surprise fees are an accepted fact of financial services products and the assumption among buyers is that the “price is not the price”.  The question is: how bad will the hidden fees be?
• Ease of Use: An often used benefit of prepaid cards is the significant convenience gain as compared to conventional money transfer products.   The buying public is justifiably skeptical of such claims having fallen prey to other services which promise a better experience but instead replace one weak spot with another.

Building Confidence in Context

The trust question which arises in a potential customer’s mind is not all encompassing.  Usually, the focus on trust lies in several critical subareas of the overall buying criteria for the customer.  A couple of examples will convey the idea more quickly:

Example 1: International Money Transfer

A resident of the U.S. sends money regularly to his brother in Europe to help in the early stages of setting up a new business.  Until now, he has been sending the money via a bank and has been frustrated with several aspects of the service.  The issue which is foremost on his mind is the unreliable delivery times of international money transfers.  He wants to get the money to his brother on a regular schedule.  Everytime he gets paid on the 31st of the month, he wants to send his brother the money for the office rent by the 2nd of the month.

A prepaid card company promises faster delivery (within 24 hrs via direct credit to a prepaid card account).   He’s interested in this benefit but has heard similar claims from his current bank provider also.   The trust challenge in this case is to create confidence in the fulfillment of promised benefits.

Example 2: Parents Funding College Student

When parents send their kids off to college, the challenge of providing support while maintaining spending control is  always a big one.   The promised benefit of prepaid cards is the ability to rapidly and regularly provide money to your child at college.    This confidence is required to displace less convenient but know systems like regular bank account deposits.

In this context, the key factor is rapid availability of funds.  A potential customer (parent) will look for reasons to have confidence in your claims of instant or rapid availability of funds.

Understanding and Adapting to Buyer Context in Building Trust

Total trust and confidence is a loftygoal which is neither possible or required to achieve for most companies.  Experience has show that buyer confidence in prepaid card companies is based upon each individuals hierarchy of needs from the prepaid card product.   Context is created by the unique combination of needs / pains of a specific subset of customers.   Before seeking to address the trust issue, it is important to understand the context and where to focus your trust building efforts.

AftertheNet pushes clients to treat their website the same way as their “real world” sales pitch.  While everyone recognizes that a website is not the exact same as a personal call or meeting, a lot of the same rules apply.   If  you expect your website to provide you strong leads, it needs to create trust among potential buyers that you can deliver whats important to them.

Your most precious resource in any marketing situation is customer attention.  With the goal of saving time, a prospect will only give you a limited amount of time to deliver enough information to convince them your prepaid card is valuable to them and that they can trust you to deliver as promised.   If your website doesn’t pass the early relevancy test, you won’t get the chance to deliver your whole sales pitch.

Focus your efforts in trust building on the context and segment that each part of your website is focused on.  Too wide an effort will dilute your message and cost you the prospect.    Any new purchase from a company has a certain amount of risk and buyers recognize that.   Companies need to meet a minimum standard of relevant confidence and trust with a new buyer to get them to absorb the risk of dealing with a company which is unknown to them.

The Web Strategy Company will continue to publish this ongoing series of articles about how Prepaid Card companies can achieve a higher level of sales results.   Stay tuned for more articles in the series.

You’ve had an SEO expert optimize your site and you’re getting traffic but the conversions on your site are way below your targets. Congratulations – you’ve impressed the search engines — now its time to impress your prospects

Getting traffic to your website is a fairly mechanical exercise in optimization (meta tags on your web pages and keyword rich content are two big factors).  But getting that traffic from landing to conversion (contacting you or purchasing online) is a completely different challenge.

The same rules apply online as offline:

• a visitor needs to see content which connects to them directly — either via needs, pains, features or product needs or their demographic / industry.
• Most importantly, the perception of value must be built and the obstacles to conversion must be removed

Creating the value perception among website visitors is an exercise in targeting each segment’s unique needs, perspectives and doubts with precise and time efficient content.  If you look at your website visitors, one way to divide them up is by their relative knowledge of your product category, company and products.  Depending on their level of awareness and connection to your products, visitors will need varied treatment and content.

On the surface the most knowledgeable visitors would appear to be the most promising prospects.  But they come with a price — a competitive sales cycle.  Prospects who already know what product type they want will typically already be talking to competing companies when the reach you.

To avoid the pressures of competitive sales, reaching prospects when they are searching for a solution rather than a specific product can represent a less competitive scenario.  Converting that traffic can take more time and a more targeted and optimized online experience.

Using an approach which we call targeted value selling, our company creates separate envrionments on clients’s websites for each key customer group. Taking advantage of more specific buying criteria for a specific segment, we create a deeper understandng of the value proposition, brand strength and compelling reasons to convert for each customer group.

At that point, our clients are putting as much effort into impressing their prospects as they’ve put into impressing the search engines

What does this decision depend on?

The nature of your product, the visibility of your competitors and their ability to retaliate and do material damage to your current business.

What are we talking about here?

If your company is in a highly competitive industry, there will be clear entrenched players and a large number of newer entrants seeking to take share away from the leaders.   Often newer players benefit from a better and more flexible business or technology platforms and boast superior features and higher value for clients.

The question becomes: do you attack your competitors head to head on your website?

The answer is the case of competitive industries is yes.    The easiest pickings for you to grow your customer base is to take them from your bigger competitors.   You’ll save huge amounts of sales cost because you don’t have to educate them on the benefits of your product category.   Your only hurdle is to demonstrate that your product has superior ability to address their core pain / need areas.

There are critical tactics that you have to incorporate into that competitive displacement strategy.   These include:

1) a clear head-to-head comparison from the perspective of the client’s need areas

2) an easy way for them to test (prove) that your product is superior (ie. easy transition and a well setup free trial).

When you have big competitors, every sale is a competitive one — so you have to meet the challenge head on with a precise, well executed competitive displacent strategy.

In a tight economy, companies and individuals tend to be even more defensive when it comes to being sold new things.

They have two key things in mind:

1) They have less time as they are working longer and harder to ensure they keep their income at its current levels

2) They are vigilant about resisting all new spending and become much harder to sell to.

Combined these two factors can lead to a wrong perception – that the need for your products or services is far lower than it was earlier.    Taking an optimistic view, recessions usually only represent a small fraction of economic contraction with a few percentage points more of unemployment etc.

So the correct conclusion may be that your reduced sales success is the product of busier prospects and a higher standard of value demonstration having to be met to close a sale.  All this needs to be done in a lower pressure sales pitch.

So what does this have to do with your website?

There are several key benefits that your website has over your “human” salespeople:

1) It doesn’t only work during business hours — its available 24/7

2) It can spend an almost infinite amount of time with the prospect — allowing a much deeper education about the core value of your products.

Consider your website as a more available, more patient and lower pressure sales rep.  All the right things in these economically challenging times, especially if you sense the core demand for your products is still intact.

We’re confident that if you treat your website as the powerful salesrep it can be, your company can start 2010 more prepared for success than the 2009.

So why not make every key page on your website a landing page?
The tendency on many web sites is to treat web pages like the pages of a brochure — only one first page and one last page — the rest are part of the sequence.  Not only is this an incorrect approach, it reduces the potential of each page to add value to your traffic generation strategy.

A highly focused website page has:

1. specific audiences in mind (not necessarily just one but some finite defined audiences) at which it is aimed
2. specifically chosen content to satisfy the different entry points from which a person will land on the page
3. clear exit points to the logical next step in the website flow

Now doesn’t that sound exactly like a landing page?

We know how companies work

Everyone is too busy and things that require extraordinary attention fall by the wayside most of the time.  This can have a huge impact on your online marketing efforts — if you have to design and build content for a new landing page everytime you want to run a new AdWords campaign, most of the time the new campaign won’t happen.
That’s a huge price to pay in your business simply because of a lack of preplanning.

We’ve built websites for clients in many industries that have targeted and focused pages that are also effective landing pages for AdWord/SEO/email campaigns.  One recent client had 14 pages related to individual pain areas and 6 pages related to specific product features.  Add to that 7 industry focused pages and they already had more than 25 landing pages ready for focused marketing campaigns.  These were all part of the normal website flow (not specialized) landing pages.

Consider this strategy as a way to create efficiency in your online marketing operations and giving visitors a more focused experience on your website.

1. Where they’ve been
2. Where they want to be

The power of this approach is that it connects your with your prospects at their most important level — pain.

Where They’ve Been:
There are several dimensions that describe where a prospect has been.  In the context of looking at a product or service, it usually implies a negative “place”:

1. difficult situations
2. negative emotions
3. pain or need areas unmet
4. business or personal challenges
5. unmet goals

If you study a good sales call or great marketing materials, they inevitably include the effort to connect with the “place” that a prospect has been.   Why? Because to build a product which solves a problem, a company needs to understand to a good extent the nature of that problem.

Where they want to be:
Along the same dimensions, there is “place” where prospects are want to be in the context of looking at a product or service.  As expected, this a positive “place” which reflects an ideal of some sort with respect to key dimensions like:

1. good situations
2. positive emotions
3. benefit received
4. challenges overcome
5. goals met

In the effort to convey the “value” of your product, your success will substantially be determined by the prospect connecting your product or service to reaching their desired “place”.  Describing credibly how your offering will take them from where they “are” to where they want to be, will create the perception of value which allows for sales to be completed.

This represents a key part of the fundamental perception shift of what your website about.   In another article, we’ve discussed the new paradigm that successful online marketing efforts are built on: your website is not about your company or your products, its about your prospects and their needs.

How is trust built?
Along with the standard perspective of proof of success with other customers, a company’s history with respect to a product area or segment can serve as a powerful trust builder.  We’ve seen many examples of companies using their history as  tactical tool to position against both competitors and buyer skepticism.

Its useful to ask the question: what is the underlying aspect of buying behaviour which can be helped by presenting company history? Often buyers are unable to fully assess the features of a product against their needs.  It might be the result of inexperience, lack of knowledge of the area or simply a lack of willpower.   As a result they look for shortcuts in the buying process: one of which is trusting a company to provide the right solution for their situation.

Part way through a successful sales cycle, the mentality of a buyer can switch from resisting to being positive to the product.  They will look for reasons to trust your ability to deliver value to them.  This is the opportunity to utilize key elements of your history to demonstrate credibility:

1. do you have a long history with particular industries?
2. has your management team spent decades in the industry and bring a wide expertise in the product area?
3. does your history stand out from the competition in some areas (even compared to larger competitors)?

Trust: From Enemy To Friend
Where trust initially can be an enemy in your effort to secure new customers, when trust is built, it will lead some prospects to trust your ability as a company to deliver.   That can often shorten the sales cycle as less emphasis placed on line by line assessment of your products.

So what’s the difference between talking to prospects versus talking at prospects ?

We’re not talking about being polite in your prepaid card sales pitch (even though being arrogant or rude isn’t a great idea).  In any communication situation, the “listener” can quickly tell if the “speaker” is interested or even cares who they’re talking to.  It’s the same thing when you’re selling your prepaid card products.  It needs to be obvious that you have thought about and care which potential customers you’re addressing.  This is important for both creating an understanding the value of a prepaid card for their situation and creating buyer trust in your company (they’re asking you to handle their money).

Here are a couple of examples:

Example 1: A parent of a teenager heading off the college is concerned about managing the spending money of their child.   It’s a strong situation for prepaid card products to create value but the features and benefits that apply are very specific and different for some families than others.  The trust in your prepaid card product is partially built through a feeling that they are a customer category that you focus on.  What’s the trick in making them feel they are a key segment for you?

Example 2: People with challenging financial histories are also a critical segment for prepaid cards.   While they share a common challenge (getting a bank account or credit card), they’re pain areas can be quite different.  For some it’s about the loss of convenience while for others itss about fundamental dignity and participation in the mainstream economy.  Again — how to you make them feel that you are talking directly to them as a key customer segment?

A key to more prepaid card sales: Make prospects feel that you’re talking to them, not at everyone.

It sounds fluffy, but it works.  The best prepaid card websites deliver a targeted experience for different customer groups.  The result is a higher relevance of content, more value perception and a higher degree of trust that your company should be trusted with their money.

The same rules apply online as in the real world:

• Your website is delivering a sales conversation for individual prospects
• The best sales conversations are reactive, specific (to the prospect) and interactive
• Does your website deliver this experience to hot prepaid card prospects?

How to talk to specific groups:

• Ask first — then talk: early in your website, you should ask visitors to self select their core category
• Identify your key prospect groups and their key financial and payment pains and preferred card feature areas
• Define their real reasons for needing a prepaid card
• Create different sections of your website for different type of cardholders
• Defining the problems that they are focused on right now that you can solve

The impression you don’t want to create with potential cardholders:

• You don’t want them to think that your product is generic and is a “one-size-fits-all” product
• Don’t let them get the sense that you say the same thing to every prospect
• It shouldn’t appear that you really don’t focus on any customer groups
• Your prepaid card product shouldn’t appear to have been designed and priced without them in mind

AftertheNet pushes clients to treat their website the same way as their “real world” sales pitch.  While everyone recognizes that awebsite is not the exact same as a personal call or meeting, a lot of the same rules apply.   If  you expect your website to provide you strong leads, it needs to create a strong first impression and clearly establish the potential for value in the minds of visitors.

Your most precious resource in any marketing situation is customer attention.  With the goal of saving time, a prospect will only give you a limited amount of time to deliver enough information to convince them your prepaid card is valuable to them and that they can trust you to deliver as promised.   If your website doesn’t pass the early relevancy test, you won’t get the chance to deliver your whole sales pitch.

The Web Strategy Company will continue to publish this ongoing series of articles about how Prepaid Card companies can achieve a higher level of sales results.   Stay tuned for more articles in the series.

So how does a prepaid card company undersell its products?

It’s not about whether you’re selling hard enough.  Pounding them over the head with strong promotional language isn’t a great trust builder and shows a lack of confidence in your products.  Underselling takes place when prospects don’t get the most valuable information for their decision about your products. Different segments have different needs for your card products and lot of it is based upon their past experiences with the products that yours replaces.

Here are a couple of examples:

If a potential cardholder is a frequent international traveler, then the focus of their value from your products is around exchange rates, security and sending money abroad.    Whats the value of telling them about how you help people with poor credit get back on their feet?  They want to know how you’ll improve their exchange rates and allow them to get cash or shop more easily.

Similarly, a struggling unemployed worker isn’t going to be connected to your products by a pitch about cheaper exchange rates and instant money transfer.   They want to know about how its easy to get the card and how you can help them get back on their feet.

So what is the right approach to avoid this form of underselling?

Our experience has shown that for most companies, there are two fundamental hurdles to selling more product:

• Making sure you know enough about your customers
• Making your customers know enough about your products and company

Knowing enough about your (prospective) cardholders:

• segmenting your prospects
• identifying their real reasons for needing a prepaid card
• Defining the problems that they are focused on right now that you can solve
• Understanding their way of looking at value in your prepaid card range
• Knowing what can you tell them to make them understand the solutions your cards bring to their problems

Your (prospective) card holders knowing enough about your company:

• make sure each customer segment gets specifically what they need to know about your products
• its not about a longer or more detailed sales pitch about the benefits of your cards
• its about connecting your sales pitch to what you learned / concluded in step 1 above
• talk to your different customer segments differently
• give them a higher level of content relevancy (which aspects of your card products are most important to them

We push our clients to focus on a focused sales experience for key customer groups.  That means analyzing your customer segments and delivering different content to them on your website — based upon their key pain areas or what their demographic situation is.

Extensive experience has shown that customers perceive the highest value in a product when they receive information which is highly relevant to their current needs.     Figuring out and targeting the specific areas that they need help in a sure way to achieve higher sales.

So how should your Prepaid Card website be setup to deliver achieve a full powered sales pitch?

First, do the analysis of your top customer segments?  Do they have particular area of their lives in which they use your cards?  Do they fall into a particular income bracket or lifestyle bracket (such as heavy travellers)?

Second, create an interactive website experience in which the first step is to allow visitors to self select their primary areas of focus or their demographic group.   Based on that, you can take them to dedicated sections of your website which focus on specific applications, user groups or pain areas that may apply more closely to them.

Your most precious resource in any marketing situation is customer attention.   A prospect will only give you a limited amount of time to deliver enough information to convince them your offering is valuable to them and that they can trust you to deliver as promised.   Don’t undersell by giving a generic sales pitch on prepaid card products to every website visitor.

The Web Strategy Company will continue to publish this ongoing series of articles about how Prepaid Card companies can achieve a higher level of sales results.   Stay tuned for more articles in the series.

It seems like every day that we’re in a discussion with customers who want to start using discounts or special offers to get people to buy their premium services. We don’t stop customers from using whatever means they think is right. But we do suggest taking a look another a possible cause for atleast a significant portion of sales of higher priced items.

We’re not saying its not logical to take another look at your prices or product line. But there a big chunk of the population that’s still working and/or has plenty spending power. But they’re not just looking for potential value. They’re looking for a higher probabilty of value — meaning they’re more risk averse.  If they have doubts about your ability to deliver, the likelihood of purchase drops even faster with price.  It’s not that people aren’t willing to spend on higher ticket items, its just they want higher certainty of value.

Your challenge in this economy is not just to prove the value of your products or services. You also have to give prospects a stronger sense that you can deliver that value. Our approach with our clients, is to break down the resistence points by all dimensions: product lines and user segments.  This allows a more tactical use of discounting or offers versus using credibility and branding techniques to address doubts among those who can still afford your regular prices.