I’m back from Pubcon where I spoke on phone call lead generation and my wife reminded me to not forget to give right now ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. It goes without saying this is an incredibly tough time for many families and this is especially true for rust-belt households who have taken more than their fair share of hard knocks the past few years in the manufacturing, machine trades and construction sectors. Our local Cleveland charity of choice is The City Mission found at TheCityMission.org.
Lead generation for charities isn’t much different from other forms of online lead generation. Namely, you have a site visitor and your job is to figure out who they are, what they want to do and then take this information and channel the visitor into a conversion goal while reporting back these metrics into future campaigns. Based upon my experience today giving to The City Mission (which is just one experience I know) I’m willing to speculate that traditional charities lag behind in skill-sets as compared with professional full-time lead generation professionals who operate in the online marketing space. Common tools and techniques such as landing page optimization, organic and PPC driven traffic, advanced web analytics, social campaigns, and A/B split testing should be used more by charities conducting online lead generation.
This review is not meant to bang on the City Mission at all. It’s my favorite local Cleveland Charity so my hope here is by giving my time on this review I can share with Charities my thoughts and ideas on lead generation in a beneficial way.
Need For Campaign Tracking For Attribution
So we get a very well prepared mailing with a simple and clear set of instructions for giving. Being an Internet Marketer, I of course choose the online giving method. I enter in the City Mission’s website address and on the homepage I see a very clear button that takes me to the online payment form – good!
Now my lead is being generated from a postal mailing campaign where the instructions are to go to simply, TheCityMission.org. Improvements to this mailing campaign could be made by both instructing on the mailer a simply custom URL to enter such as perhaps, TheCityMission.org/givethanks or whatever sounds meaningful and is short. Next, on the homepage, for anyone that doesn’t enter the custom URL it would help to see reinforcement of the offline mailing campaign. This could be as simple as a thumbnail image of the mailing piece artwork I received. Perhaps a header nav bar at the top of the site would work with a ‘Why are you here?” question and drop-down responses. Experimentation is required, but my point is that there are ways to better track the arrival of traffic from offline mailing campaigns.
With campaign tracking through custom landing pages you can make a direct path for the recipient to follow the same message and experience and track this across channels. I received a postal mailing and my experience is about giving for this Thanksgiving. A well prepared landing page to reinforce this campaign could have both enabled better campaign tracking for The City Mission and given a better user experience for site visitors.
The above screenshot shows City Mission's current button that leads to their online contribution page. The button was in a good place and easy to find but a custom landing page combined with an additional campaign specific conversion button would have enabled better campaign tracking.
Lost Metrics – External Domain For Online Payment
Clicking on the above button takes me to the online payment page. I quickly notice that the page is on a different domain name and there’s additional branding. Since I deal with internet marketing all day, I’m probably hyper-sensitive to changes in domain names and site templates. It’s probably only a slight negative for more average visitors who spend less time online. However, as a general rule, changes in site experiences such as templates and branding can hurt conversions because it’s creates a point of consideration in the mind of the visitors, ‘what is this page?’, ‘am I on the right site?’, ‘is this fraud or spam?’ And while this is only a small negative, what if it causes a 1 percent loss in conversions from visitors who think, “I don’t know what this is, I’ll give later” and then never do. Is 1 percent important? Probably.
The City Mission’s logo at the top of the page helped to continue the brand experience and I wasn’t bothered by it too much. However, the lost metrics is I think a more serious problem. What I mean by lost metrics is that when the City Mission’s visitor goes over to the payment site, the City Mission’s web analytics package (Google Analytics I looked) loses the chance to further track and measure the campaign because there is no analytics tracking on the external payment form domain.
Losing the opportunity to track on the payment form creates black holes in the conversion funnel and things such as campaign conversion tracking, A/B split testing on payment forms, ROI tracking (value of donations), are not possible.
Confusion In Donation Payment Forms
Confusion = lost conversion. Without web analytics installed on the payment donation form it’s much harder to conduct experiments and spot problems. From my experience, I nearly left the check-out process on step 2 because of a simple form default setting I didn’t understand. After completing my contact information and donation level on step 2, I saw this:
This form asked for my bank account information. I did not want to give my bank account info. I was looking for the credit card payment form and I nearly abandoned the process entirely.
So with the above payment form, I nearly left the process entirely because I did not wish to pay via bank account transfer.
What I didn’t realize is that back at the top of the step 1 form, the payment option was set by default to bank payment instead of credit card. Simple confusions like this can hurt a campaign’s performance. Without analytics tracking experiments in payment form optimization cannot be made. Forunately for The City Mission, I decided to take extra time and go back the the first page and see where the credit card option might be – a close one. Site visitors are not always as patient and something as simple as an interrupting phone call can be all takes to derail the conversion completely. Keep forms easy and confusion free and always test and measure.
Paid Search Lead Generation
Just a quick note to say that charities should consider paid search to generate local leads. A quick search for ‘Cleveland Ohio food charities” didn’t come up with either strong paid search results or organic results with the exception for the Cleveland Food Bank – another great charity. With analytics, campaigns can be tracked to determine ROI.
Leveraging The Close With Social Media
It is HARD to get someone to give you money online. Even in the best of situations. When it does happen, I think it helps to use social media in creative ways to further brand the charity and to extend the message across the donator’s network. It feels good to give and while some prefer to give totally anonymously, others like me, don’t mind saying that we did in order to drum up further support for the charity among friends and colleagues. A simple Twitter or facebook app or reminder on the thank you page is all it takes. This is what I did on my own, charities should remind others to do this as a way to further market for donations:
So with the above example, it’s possible to take the donation viral and again cross channel. The campaign began as a postal mailing to my home, it converted online to a credit card donation, and now with viral marketing there’s the potential to share the event with others in my network who perhaps need a simple reminder to do the right thing.
Summary
I wrote this review quite fast. If you have comments or suggestions, please feel free to participate in the thread discussion below. I’ll be curious to see if anyone from the City Mission is doing social reputation management – another lead generation tool – and will see this post. If so, I hope you appreciate the comments and suggestions.
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