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New Prices And Reviews Pages

On August 12, 2010, in Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech, by Philip Boyle

WhatClinic.com navigation tabs

We’ve just added a new set of navigation tabs to our search results pages after A/B testing them for a week. They didn’t improve conversion by any significant amount but by adding them we give ourselves the flexibility to add new ways of slicing our data, and hopefully capturing more traffic.

First of all, we’ve moved the map link which was on the top right hand side of the page into one of the tabs. This has already increased usage of the maps pages on the site. Secondly, we added two new types of pages, one which pulls together all the reviews for the clinics in the search results, the other all the prices.

These two tabs are brand new pages with their own URLs and are SEO’d to capture traffic relating to reviews and ratings of clinics and treatment prices. This is an SEO experiment in itself. All of the data on these pages exists on other pages. For instance, all the reviews of each clinic exist in their own profile, but these new pages pull together what we think are a useful set of reviews so they can be compared in one place. The same goes for the prices.

Here’s what a normal search results page looks like: Dentists in Dublin

Here’s the reviews page: Reviews of Dentists in Dublin

And here’s the prices page: Prices of Dentists in Dublin

Time will tell whether or not the search engines think these pages are useful, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on how their traffic and usage grows in the coming months.

Have you any experience with re-slicing your own data? How did it work out for you? Leave us a comment below.

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Philip Boyle

Philip is the marketing manager at WhatClinic.com.

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Worst. Feature. Ever.

On August 9, 2010, in Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech, by Caelen King

Worst. Feature. Ever.

Sometimes you just get it wrong, and in this instance by God were we wrong.

Letting visitors create a shortlist of clinics they were interested in comparing and contacting was a feature we’d been discussing almost since the beginning of the company. It would come up for discussion every couple of months and eventually we got so fed up talking about it we decided to just try it out.

As features go it was pretty simple. All we needed was a link added to each clinic’s search result, one in their profile, and a page to display the visitor’s chosen shortlist. We thought it was a good idea that would be useful to our visitors.

This obviously wasn’t an original idea, and there were plenty of sites that had implemented similar features we could look to for some inspiration. Kayak.com and HostelWorld.com both had directly comparable features, and we also looked at shopping carts on ecommerce sites as well as light boxes on photograph websites.

We planned and rolled out the feature within a week and sat back waiting to see a truckload of visitors happily creating shortlists and coming back to them to compare their options.

That wasn’t exactly what happened.

The Result

We were able to get a pretty good picture in a very short space of time as we have a lot of traffic coming to site. Things weren’t looking good after an hour, and after a full day it became clear that close to no one was using the feature.

We’d had 22,000 visitors over the course of that 24 hour period and only 80 people (0.3%) had added any clinics to their short list. To make matters worse only 17 of those people (0.08%) had subsequently gone back and viewed their short list.

We decided to enter EMERGENCY FEATURE RESCUE MODE. Everyone in the office had their own opinion as to why it wasn’t working. These included:

  • The call to action – ‘Add to Shortlist’ wasn’t immediately understandable
  • People could not see the call to action link
  • It was a crap feature

We changed the call to action text to “Save this Clinic”, pushed it out and waited…

101 people added a clinic to their shortlist on day two. Now normally an uplift of 25% in usage is a cause for celebration. However, when only 0.4% of your visitors want to use a feature it can only mean one thing: turn it off.

So that’s what we did. Two days after launching a feature that we had great hopes for it ended up in the trash can.

Sometimes you just have to work harder on a feature, refining it over time to increase its usage, and other times you just have to accept that you were wrong in the first place and bin the idea. In this instance we figured that no end of finessing was going to create a feature that resonated with our visitors.

Not All In Vain

Over the last three years we’ve gotten pretty used to the idea of launching features that don’t get adopted. A lot of people would look at the effort that we put into these feature as a waste of time but that is not the way we think about it.

Every feature that we decide to develop we regard as a learning exercise. The purpose isn’t to create a fantastic feature; the purpose is to learn something new about our visitors. If you build something and it doesn’t add to the overall knowledge of the company then you’ve missed the lion’s share of the value.

To make this possible we have learned code as lightweight as possible and our processes are now fairly efficient. When we roll out a new feature now we try to expend as little effort as possible getting it to the stage that we can test whether the basic premise is viable or not. Once we decide it is viable we go ahead and refine and improve it.

What was the worst feature you ever rolled out, and how long did you leave it run for? Share your experiences in the comments below.

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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The Secret To Increasing Your Clinic’s Revenue By 500%

On June 16, 2010, in Health 2.0, Stuff we've learned, by Caelen King

Every day in RevaHealth.com we talk to clinics that seem to be determined to destroy their own business. They do it the same way that thousands of businesses all over the world do it every year: by not selling to new customers.

When these clinics are contacted by a potential new patient they take the easy way out and send an automatic email reply. Some of them even go as far as sending a personalised follow up email, but neither of these actions is sufficient. To sell to these new customers you have to pick up the phone and call them.

Recently we looked at data from literally hundreds of thousands of email enquiries that have come in through RevaHealth.com and we can say definitively that if your clinic relies on email alone to convert your patient enquiries into paying customers you are cutting your new business by 80%.

Take for example one particular clinic that received over 400 enquiries over the course of a year, and never called any of the patients. Not surprisingly they had a very low conversion rate and weren’t particularly happy with us. Unfortunately they didn’t heed our advice to call the patents and relied on email alone, and in the process they left hundreds of thousands of Euro on the table.

Failing to call your new customers will damn your business and wastes the customer’s time.

Now imagine what your business would look like if you could increase the amount of new business that you get by 500%.

It’s easy to understand why some clinics don’t like to call potential patients. It can be difficult to get your staff to do it promptly, and it is time consuming, but when you realise how much value it can unlock, there is no question but that it has to be done.

When you get an online enquiry into your inbox the natural inclination is the reply to it immediately. Don’t. Take your time read the customers requirement and research the information that you need and CALL them. That’s right don’t email them back, call them.

The process should be:

  1. Send an automated response acknowledging receipt of the enquiry and letting the patient know when to expect a call from your clinic.
  2. Research their enquiry – potential treatment options, prices, length of treatment etc.
  3. Call Them. If you don’t get through leave a message and call them back. Never rely on email alone unless the customer has specifically asked not to be called.

Pick Up The Phone!

Now for the even more surprising finding: nothing else matter as much to the patient as calling them. Not your prices, not your location, not your facilities, not even your qualification has as much of an influence on your ability to convert an enquiry into a customer. They all help, but if you don’t do the customer the simple courtesy of calling them they will not consider going to your clinic.

Happy Customers

Happy Customers

This is not something that is still up for discussion. IT IS A FACT. If you want to convert enquiry to customers you must call them. Otherwise you are wasting everyone’s time. A patient will never come to your clinic without you calling them. They will go to the clinic that calls them back.


About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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The Speed Of Irish Websites

On May 13, 2010, in Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech, by Caelen King

We spend a lot of time optimising our page load times because we have found a direct correlation between how fast a page displays in a browser and its bounce rate. There are still plenty of improvements left to roll out here, but I was interested in seeing how other Irish websites are faring at optimising their page load times.

I took the companies on the ISEQ 20 Index and added the top 5 indigenous Irish websites based on their traffic from Ireland according to Alexa and tested them for speed.  All tests were run using webpagetest.org and were run from Gloucester in the UK 5 times consecutively. The test emulated IE7 running over a 1.5 Mb/sec DSL connection.  For interest’s sake we also ran it on our own site and saw that we had several areas where we could improve.

A quick caveat: these results were run during just one period of one day and it could easily have been during a bad/busy period for one or more of the sites in question. If you’re interested in making a definitive list of the fastest and slowest Irish sites you should run the test again at various times of the day and on different days of the week.

The Fastest
Unsurprisingly the fastest sites are dominated by relatively simple sites that have largely static content. The page size is relatively low in all cases, maxing out at 250 KB with C&C Group.

  1. Greencore 2.0s
  2. Grafton PLC 2.1s
  3. Kerry Group 2.2s
  4. BOI 2.6s
  5. C&C Group 2.8s

The Slowest

  1. The Independent 15.9s, requiring 165 files and 1,500 KB
  2. RTE 9.8s, requiring 100 files and 478 KB
  3. Irish Times 8.7s, requiring 127 files and 866 KB
  4. Kingspan 9.3s, requiring 91 files and 1,316 KB
  5. FDB 9.1s, requiring 72 files and 613 KB

Full Results

In general the results were pretty disappointing with an average full page load time of over six seconds. Some very obvious improvements can be made. Text compression was not enabled on 18 of the 25 sites. There really is no excuse for a website not to have compression enabled these days as it is simple, well understood and implemented on every web server. This can reduce  bandwidth requirements by up to 70%.

The second major area for improvement is the sheer number of files that many of these sites require users to download. Each file has it own overhead and browsers can only download a certain number of files in parallel. On average each of the sites required 57 separate files to be downloaded, with The Independent requiring a truly massive 165 different files. This could largely be resolved by using CSS sprites and combining javascript & CSS files.

Start Rendering Sooner

Of course total download time doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes a good user experience can be achieved even if your page takes a long time to finish loading. The way to do this is to get the page to start rendering before the final files are down. The average start to render time for our sample list was 2.7 seconds and this is where some of the Irish web companies shine. For example, Paddy Power and boards.ie, despite being complex sites, start to render after just 1.5 seconds each giving their users a very acceptable experience.

So how does RevaHealth.com compare? Pretty well actually, but with  some obvious room for improvement. We had the fastest overall load time at 1.4 seconds, however our start to render time of 1.1 seconds was 300ms off of the mark. This comparison of home pages may be slightly unfair as RevaHealth.com’s home page is relatively simple compared to one of our typical landing pages. I reran the tests on Dentists in Manchester and we had a full loading time of 5 seconds which isn’t great and needs to be improved. Happily our start to render time was 1.5 seconds which I am pretty pleased with.

Let me know if I’ve made any mistakes in my analysis here. How does your site compare? Post your results in the comments

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Some Shocking Phone Call Statistics

On April 29, 2010, in Stuff we've learned, by Caelen King

Over the last month we have been providing local phone numbers for some of our overseas clinics. Essentially we provide them with a UK or Irish number (€240 PA) and proxy the phone calls through to their regular clinic number.  In doing this we have discovered some shocking statistics.

If a clinic’s phone number is looked up by 100 unique individuals it results in 25 unique people trying to call the clinic. You would think that this means the clinic gets to talk to 25 people, but we were shocked to find out that only 45% of the phone calls made result in a conversation with the clinic.

Patient To Clinic Phone Call Statistics

  • 30% of all calls are made outside of office hours or during lunch hour
  • 10% of calls result in a busy signal
  • 15% of calls are not answered
  • If there is a voice messaging service available only 30% of people will leave a message
  • The average length of a call that is answered is 2 minutes and 20 seconds

Typically a caller who gets a busy signal or no answer will try again immediately and if they don’t get through the second time they give up.  All of this suggests that there must be serious frustration amongst consumer trying to call clinics. We plan on monitoring this area closely over the coming months and will keep you updated on our findings.

Have you had problems getting through to companies by phone? Share your experiences of calling businesses in the comments below.

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Figuring Out What Your Visitors Want

On April 19, 2010, in Stuff we've learned, by Philip Boyle

We recently ran a test that improved our email enquiry conversion rate by 25%, but we decided not to make the change. Picture this. You spend months or years even building a website, and it works like a charm. You’re getting plenty of visitors and they are taking the actions you designed for them to take. Everything is great, right? Well, probably, but are you sure?

One thing we’ve discovered again and again here in RevaHealth.com is that it’s never worth assuming that you understand what your website’s visitors want when they arrive. In the past when we added new features we looked at a couple of headline metrics to make sure we hadn’t broken everything, and hopefully improved a key metric like conversion rate or reduced another like bounce rate.

Google Analytics & Website Optimiser

Nowadays we try and go into a bit more depth about things, making more subtle improvements to parts of the site that some visitors see and others don’t, and this requires more fine grain measurement than before. A key tool that we’ve been using for years now is Google Analytics. If you’ve not been using it (or something similar) on your site up to now, I can recommend it wholeheartedly. Right now we’re using it primarily for page tracking, but we’re hoping to use it for goal tracking and even event tracking in the near future.

Google Website Optimer

Google Website Optimer

Another free tool from Google we’ve just started using is their Website Optimiser. On a site like ours where we get enough traffic and enough conversions in a day or two to our key pages to give meaningful results it’s a boon. We don’t have to do any of the maths or work out confidence levels or margins or error. It does it all for us. Best of all, we can test multiple changes to a page all at once, and see which combination our visitors use the most.

Testing Two Types Of Conversion

Recently we were discussing the two main actions that people take on our site: contacting a clinic by email and looking up a clinic’s phone number. The former is far more valuable to us a company. Our customers, the clinics, can see the end result of a visitor using the site to email them. When a visitor looks up a phone number it is very unlikely that the clinic will ever know that the visitor found it on our site. The clinics can see the value of one action, and not the other. Even though we tell them how many people find their phone number on our site, it doesn’t really resonate with them.

Knowing how much more valuable an email enquiry was, we decided to test whether taking away the ability to look up a phone number would cause a significant increase in the numbers who contacted a clinic by email. The results were pretty extreme.

25% Up, 100% Down

We tested a over a two day period with only half of our traffic having the ability to find a phone number. The half who didn’t have the ability to find a phone number converted to email enquiries 25% better than before, which would seem like a good result, until you look at the numbers involved.

Over the course of the two days the 50% who couldn’t see phone numbers created an extra 109 email enquiries. In the same period the people who could look up phone numbers did so 1,418 times. To put it another way, only one in thirteen of our visitors who wanted to look up a phone number created an email enquiry instead when that option wasn’t available to them.

In the end we decided that the cost of frustrating so many of our visitors far outweighed the gains we could make from having 25% more email enquiries. Phone number look ups are here to stay because they are what a large portion of our visitors want.

We already knew that a lot of people were looking up clinics’ phone numbers on our site, but testing it in this way gave us a very clear picture that those visitors are very different to the visitors who create an email enquiry, and they need to be treated differently.

Have you discovered unusual or unexpected behaviour from your site’s visitors? Are you giving them all the actions they are looking for? Are you tracking and testing them? Let us know your experiences in the comments below.

About the author

Philip Boyle

Philip is the marketing manager at WhatClinic.com.

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Why We Built Our Own Internal CRM System Instead Of Buying One

On April 7, 2010, in Start ups, Stuff we've learned, by Caelen King

We provide the health clinics who are our customers with an enquiry management system in order to help them get the best from their patient enquiries, i.e. their customers. We are no different in that we also need a system to manage our customers.

Like a lot of new small companies we were familiar with different CRM solutions, but not enough to know which one would suit us best. We tried an expensive one, a cheap one, and in the end we built our own. Here’s our story.

What Did We Need From A CRM System?

The core functionality that we required included:

  • Keeping track of tasks
  • Keeping track of leads
  • Making notes
  • Managing a pipeline

Salesforce

We decided to implement Salesforce pretty early in the company’s life. Of all of the mainstream CRM systems out at the time it was the obvious, albeit expensive choice.

One of the common aspects of a traditional CRM system is that it attempts to model a typical sales process, i.e. Contacts, Leads & Opportunities. From a young company’s perspective this can seem very attractive as it gives your sales process some shape where perhaps there was none before, as was the case with our own. This idea of structuring your sales process is seductive and it gives the illusion of control.

The problem is that the structure acts as a natural restraint to change. As you move your company forward, you often need to make rapid fire decisions and changes to your initial assumptions. However the structured sales process resists these changes. This is not a good thing. In my opinion traditional CRM systems are best suited to mature companies that have very specific requirements which are very unlikely to change.

The downsides of Salesforce in our experience were:

  • It is very expensive
  • Its feature set is strongly geared towards licensing
  • It can be very slow
  • It is extremely complex. It can take days to become competent with certain aspects of the software.

Integration Issues

For us one of the major problems we had with Salesforce was the nature of our own business. RevaHealth.com is a directory of health clinics and our live database contains all of the relevant information about each of our customers. Salesforce became a new database that had to replicate a lot of the same information.

We worked very hard to push all the changes made in the Revahealth.com database out to Salesforce as they happened in an attempt to keep the two synchronised. Needless to say this resulted in numerous problems including:

  • Changes made to Salesforce were not pushed to Revahealth.com. This was not an immediate problem but over time the problem grew.
  • Salesforce couldn’t hope to deal with the scope and flux of the specific information that Revahealth.com handled and this lead to account managers being forced to work with two systems – Salesforce & RevaHealth.com.
  • As with all interconnected systems, service failures happen and the effort required to monitor and to fix these failures was greater than expected.
  • Once every couple of months we would decide to push the entire RevaHealth.com database into Salesforce to refresh it and every time we ran into licensing issues.

Eventually the SalesForce database and the RevaHealth.com database diverged to such an extent that the sales team no longer trusted it. And that was the end of it. After a year of effort and about 6 man months of integration, maintenance and support we reverted to pens, notepads and Excel.

This wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Even though we had tens of thousands of free accounts to work with we only had around 200 paying customers. In retrospect it is easy for us to say that there is no way we should have even been looking at a full scale CRM system with that number of paying customers.

Highrise

Towards the middle of 2009 one of our sales staff, Owen Cooney, started looking at other systems and experimented with Highrise from 37 Signals. This made a lot of sense to us as we were already using their Basecamp product for our project management. After a month of evaluation we officially adopted it and were very happy that it answered a lot of the shortcomings of SalesForce:

  • It was quick.
  • It was simple, although excessively so.
  • It did not have the licensing issues of Salesforce.

Having learnt from our previous mistakes about database synchronisation we decided that the Highrise system would only be used for new customers and not for account management. This meant that we avoided any integration issues. It worked for a while and was especially effective at task management. However its inability to deal with existing customers and any form of pipeline management meant that our sales team consistently had to use three different web applications:

  • Highrise for new customers
  • The RevaHealth.com account administration tool for existing customers
  • A home-grown pipeline management tool

Of these the single biggest issue for us was pipeline management. As the number of deals that we were creating increased we found that an inordinate amount of management time had to be spent at the end of every month reconciling the sales recorded in Highrise, those in the pipeline tool and the actual invoices generated by the RevaHealth.com administration tool. Invariably there would be substantial discrepancies. This meant that we couldn’t trust either Highrise or the pipeline tool for management purposes.

So What Did We Do?

In the end there was only one answer that made any sense. We built our own CRM system. From the mistakes of the past we now had a very clear set of requirements, and we avoided any sort of replication, duplication, integration and reconciliation issues by building it on top of our existing database.

It took us about 3 man weeks using one of our developers to get it up and running. We’re not the best designers (graphically speaking) in the world but it didn’t need to be pretty as it was only going to be used by our own sales staff. Much more important was that it had to be fast, which thankfully it is.

Seeing as it looks directly at the source data the pipeline report looks at actual invoices not at our sales team’s interpretation of the invoices. It also has a nice and simple task management tool built in to it, and there is no need for two systems for new customers and existing customers.

Building Your Own CRM System Might Not Be Right For You

It’s now more than two years since we first started down the road of using CRM systems. If we had tried to build one ourselves at the very beginning we’d probably just have another horror story to add to our experiences with Salesforce and Highrise, but now was the right time for us to build our own. We had a clear set of requirements and had all the information we needed in one source, our own database.

For you things might be different. Hopefully by reading about some of the mistakes we made you might identify some issues you could run into. Feel free to ask us about our experiences in the comments below, and share your own CRM success or horror stories too.

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Increase Your Sales By 400% With The Same Leads

On March 25, 2010, in Start ups, Stuff we've learned, by Caelen King

Leads are the lifeblood of sales. Nothing arouses quite as much passion amongst sales staff as the quality of their leads. The following Al Pacino clip gives a good, if slightly dramatized version of this passion.

Warning: Lots of Swearing!

How Good Are Your Sales Leads?

Sales leads are a strange beast, and the value that is placed on them depends  both on the company and the sales person in question. Give a sales person that normally generates their own leads a list of purchased leads and somehow they’ll manage to call the guy on the list that died last week. All of a sudden the list of leads is worthless in the sales person’s head.

What Determines The Value Of A Sales Lead?

  1. Age. In general the younger the lead the better. Older leads might have already decided against the purchase, or even purchased from your competitor.
  2. Rarity. The more people who have the lead the less chance that you are going to sell to them. After all, the customer is probably only going to buy from one source.
  3. Relevance. How relevant is the lead to the product or service that you sell? The more relevant the better! In other words if you are selling compact cars you are better off with a lead for small cars than with a general enquiry for cars.
  4. Stage in the Buying Cycle. Depending on what you are selling it can be better to be at the beginning or the end of the buying cycle. For example, if you are selling TVs then its probably best to be at the end of the buying cycle. The customer has probably made up their mind to purchase and is shopping around for the best price. In the case of an enterprise class software solution though it is best to be around at the beginning of the cycle when you can still shape the requirements.
  5. Effort. The sales person’s effort is by far and away the most important factor when determining the value of a lead. If they don’t value a lead (and therefore don’t put the required effort into closing it) then it becomes a self-fulling prophecy.

Obviously the quality of sales leads vary and there are good sales leads and bad sales lead but the quality of the lead is not the only factor in driving sales. You can give top quality leads to an organization and if they don’t value them then they are going to be worthless. Give the same leads to a company that works them tirelessly and they are gold dust.

The effective value of a sales lead is a combination of the original quality of the lead and the value that is placed on it.

Your sales staff will always value the leads they generate themselves the most, because they cost them they most, i.e. their own time. Next will be the leads that cost the organization the most. Right at the bottom of the pile will be the so called ‘free’ leads, i.e. the leads they never asked for but landed on  their desk from some over eager youngster in marketing.

How Do We Know This?

Not only do we depend on sales leads to drive our own business but we also generate large number of leads for health clinics around the world. What we have found in RevaHealth.com is that the clinics that pay for their online enquiries tend to value them the most too. When we survey potential patients two days after they contact a clinic the higher paying clinics routinely get higher levels of consumer satisfaction.  Unsurprisingly they also get a higher conversion rate.

Customer Satisfaction with Conversion Rate

Satisfaction With Initial Communication & Resulting Conversion Rate

* Note conversion rates are extrapolated from the number of reviews generated as result of patient enquiries through RevaHealth.com

It is interesting to note that there is a 50% increase in the number of potential patients who are happy with the customer service they receive from our free clinics compared to our paying clinics. However, there is a 400% difference in their respective conversion rates.

The implication here is that even though 50% of people who contact a free clinic say they are happy with the communications they receive, ultimately only a small proportion go on to convert because their expectations are just about being met. On the other hand, the paying clinics value their leads far more and put in more effort meeting or exceeding the patients’ expectations leading to a far higher conversion rate.

How Do The Top Clinics Convert More Patients?

The top clinics on RevaHealth.com pay the most per patient enquiry and therefore they value them the most.

  • They contact every patient  regardless of the perceived quality of the original enquiry.
  • They make a phone call as well as emailing the customer.
  • They are prompt.
  • They are well prepared for each communication.
  • They are consistently ranked by the consumer as having above average customer service.

Conclusion
Unsurprisingly spending time taking care of your potential customers through professional and personal communications results in higher sales. Our statistics shows that there is a potential 400% improvement in conversion rate that can be achieved by improving the level of attention that a company pays to its potential customers. There is also a clear link between how much effort a company puts into its communications and how much they spend to create the sales opportunities in the first place.

Do you prioritise leads from different sources? How do you make sure your sales team put enough effort into all the opportunities they receive? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

About the author

Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Free Trials. What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

On March 23, 2010, in Start ups, Stuff we've learned, by Caelen King

Trials are a very useful way of demonstrating to reluctant customers that you have something that they will value. A trial allows them to see for themselves what your product or service can deliver without committing to the full purchase price. Used correctly trials can be a tremendously effective way of boosting sales, particularly of products or services that do not yet have a reputation.

For a lot of companies, consumer software companies for example, running a trial is effectively without cost. You simply put your trial software up on a website for download and let whoever wants to trial it do so. However, for other companies, including us in RevaHealth.com, trials have a tremendous cost.

Running a trial here with a potential customer means we have to spend time setting them up and teaching them how to use the system. It also means that the trialling company may receive value that would otherwise flow to one of our existing paying customers. The trialling company is also monitored by an account executive on an ongoing basis. All of this means that running a trial from our perspective is an expensive proposition.

The whole purpose of a trial is for the potential customer to determine if the product or service can deliver value. This means the trial isn’t without cost to them either. They have to devote time and effort to evaluating the offering. If they take the trial and don’t spend any time working with it then the trial was obviously pointless in the first place.

So how can you ensure that the customer is going to give the trial the attention it deserves? You can’t really, but a good starting point is to charge for the trial, and here’s why.

What’s The Worst That Could Happen?

A decade ago I was working for Baltimore Technologies selling Public Key Infrastructure into tier-one banks all over the world. Our software was expensive and complex, costing millions of dollars. In the beginning we thought that simply trialling our software for free with one of the world’s leading financial institutions represented a great success. Later on we found that all our product was doing was sitting gathering dust without anyone actively evaluating it. Obviously the entire trial was pointless.

So we started to charge for trials, and as a result we did much fewer, but the trials that we did were always a success. (A successful trial doesn’t necessarily mean that you make the sale – a successful trial simply uncovers and clearly demonstrates the value your product offers to the customer.) Not only did this mean more sales in the long run but it also resulted in significantly reduced costs.

How Did Paid Trials Reduce Our Costs?

Charging for a trial is a nearly foolproof method of evaluating a customer. It tests their interest in the product, their ability to purchase at all, and demonstrates a commitment in a way that is close to impossible through any other means.

  1. It forces your own sales staff to correctly evaluate the customer.
  2. Even if a customer isn’t interested, sometimes the path of least resistance is to agree to a free trial. After all, it doesn’t cost them anything. Charging for the trial uncovers this.
  3. Charging for the trial uncovers if the customer has any money to spend.
  4. It also reveals whether or not the person you are talking to has the authority to sign off on a deal, and so helps to identify the key decision maker.
  5. Finally, it helps to ensure that the customer will spend some time and effort making sure that the trial gets the attention it needs. After all, they probably have to justify paying for it in the first place.

At RevaHealth.com we never give free trials of our paid accounts. If someone wants to trial a particular account we will normally accommodate them, but they will always pay, normally for a quarter of a year at a pro rata cost. Ultimately, charging for trials reduces the amount of time we need to spend on customers who would never buy in the end.

Charging for trials isn’t going to work for everyone in every sector, but it does work for us. What are your experiences of offering your products or services on a trial basis?

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Caelen King

Caelen King is CEO and founder of WhatClinic.com, the medical search engine that helps people find clinics anywhere.

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Generic Keywords And Locations

On March 22, 2010, in Stuff we've learned, by Philip Boyle

Following on from our posts about geo-targeting for SEO and keyword length I was doing a little more research into our keywords. I noticed for the first time that some of our top 50 keywords were single words like “dentist” or “braces”, so I took a look at where the users were who did these searches and where they landed on the site.

Searches for "Dentist" landing on RevaHealth.com

Searches for "Dentist" landing on RevaHealth.com

Looking at the numbers the traffic really isn’t that significant by itself. What is interesting though is what Google is doing. When a user searches for a generic keyword, i.e. one that doesn’t include any qualifier – location in our case, Google is determining where the user is and trying to serve relevant results based on this. Best of all for us, they seem to be doing quite a good job of it too!

We have spent a lot of time over the years making sure all our SEO elements (URL, page title, etc) include location information on the basis that it reflects the content of the page and that users include it in their searches. Now it seems that Google are using this information to determine the location relevancy of the content of our pages.

While the location specificity is quite coarse in the example above, only going down to a country level, it will be interesting to see if over the coming months the landing URLs change to counties or cities, i.e. a user in Dublin lands on our page about dentists in Dublin rather than dentists in Ireland.

Keyword Analysis Tools?

During the last month 87% the quarter of a million keywords used to find RevaHealth.com were unique. The good thing about this is that it means our long tail SEO is working well. The bad news is that it makes it harder to get an overall picture of which keyword phrases or broad match pairs and triplets are doing particularly well.

If you have any recommendations for good tools to analyse the keyword data we have I’d love to hear about them. Just leave a comment below.

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Philip Boyle

Philip is the marketing manager at WhatClinic.com.

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