A New Generation Marketer

Did you know that every day, 98% of the people who visit your website make a near-instantaneous decision NOT to do business with you? If you’re experiencing high website bounce rates, low conversion rates, and raised eyebrows about your business idea, you may be a part of this statistic.

Performable, based in Amesbury, Mass has found a platform to help companies discover and overcome this barrier. Performable is a do-it-yourself tool to help any company improve their website and convert online visitors into customers easily. With Performable, you can test your message, improve website design, optimize landing pages, conduct A/B testing and more.

We had the chance to chat with Justin Rachwalski, the director of Performable’s marketing, to find out how users are interacting with their tools and how they are reaching prospective customers themselves.

If you are on the marketing team at your company, you are probably faced with the task of finding new sales opportunities, connecting and engaging with new customers and developing ways to streamline marketing activities. With Performable’s integrated tool, you can find this all out in one spot.

The tool allows you to dig deeper into each channel where customer interactions are occurring. For example, if you are using Twitter as a marketing channel, you can now discover customers who are connected with you on Twitter and start a conversation with them.

With Performable, marketers are also discovering ways to find out how customers are using their site. You can delve into each user’s activity, including pages visited, time of website visit, where they are located, and how many times they have been to your site. As a marketing professional myself, this is crucial information to know since I am involved with inbound marketing at my own job.

If you have been on Twitter for any amount of time and are into marketing and entrepreneurship, you have probably heard

of David Cancel. Cancel is the CEO and founder of Performable. He is also a serial entrepreneur with a twelve-year record of building successful companies. One thing Cancel believes in is customer relations and feedback. This is emulated in Performable’s every day activities that allows them to improve their service.

Rachwalski told us, “We provide exceptional customer support in which we gather customer feedback on the problems they face. In addition we love to meet face to face with our customers as well as survey them.” Recently, they have worked with some of the best online marketers to learn what problems they face today and work with them to find solutions to those problems. “All of that has gone into the new Performable 2.0 which is launching soon.” Rachwalski explained.

Performable 2.0 is the brainchild of all the research and development the team has done with top marketers. This enhanced platform will help you understand more about your best customers and ways to acquire more customers like them.

Performable 2.0 will allow marketers to find new sales opportunities, contact points, interactions across social channels, reviews of marketing plans every day (aka milestones), view how people are engaging with your marketing campaigns, and find which ads are working for which pages and market segments. Essentially, Performable 2.0 makes it easy to discover, engage and optimize; this is a marketer’s dream!

While Performable helps other companies succeed in their marketing efforts, we wanted to dig deeper into how Performable itself is marketing to customers and engaging with them.

Rachwalski told us, “Our top priority is providing an amazing user experience with unrivaled customer service. This naturally results in a large amount of word-of-mouth organic marketing. This has been our most successful channel by far.” You will find that many companies today with new and brilliant products are relying almost 100% on word-of-mouth since it is so powerful on the social web.

“We supplement that with a wide range of marketing including PPC, SEO, Display, affiliate/partner programs, social media (Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), and community building. Finally our CEO is very active in the startup space.” Rachawalski found that each concurrent marketing channel helped tie the loop back to their word-of-mouth marketing quite well.

If you are following David Cancel on Twitter, you are probably familiar with his immense knowledge base and influence. If you are not following him, do so and you will see why he is such a successful entrepreneur, especially with this particular venture. Personally, I first found out about Performable by stumbling upon Cancel’s Twitter page and following him. I started to read a few blogs that discussed their work and became very interested in what they had coming next.

The main marketing take away I received from my chat with Rachwalski was to “never underestimate the power of word of mouth marketing.” Then, when it comes down to adding other paid forms of marketing, “it is important to focus on all stages of the customer life-cycle.” In other words you want to look at the “first click”, supporting clicks, as well as the “last click” when it comes to your funnel.”

Performable is definitely a company to keep your eye on and try out for your own company if you can. Performable 2.0 is not currently available yet but will be in a few weeks! Stay tuned for more details.

To keep up to date with their new developments, make sure to check out their site, read their blog, become a fan onFacebook and follow them on Twitter.

I originally wrote this post for BostInnovation as my weekly new marketing article.