Good Processes Rock, Broken Processes Leak. Two Examples Given. You Might Learn, or You Might Help.

This post is about processes and how they can help (or harm) your business. I'm guessing this will be most useful to those just starting to realize some success, but it may also give newbies a different way to look at things that could help them. You veteran marketers probably won't learn anything, but you may be able to help me with a problem and do your good deed for the day.

What are processes?

There are many kinds of processes, but for the purpose of this discussion we're going to look at the process a customer goes through when they buy a product. A very basic process goes like this:

* customer arrives on your sales page
* customer reads sales letter and decides to buy your product
* customer pays and is redirected to the download page
* customer downloads the product and lives happily ever after

Of course, there are many variations on this basic process: upsells, downsells, one-time offers, free bonuses with built-in profit centers, etc.

I received two emails regarding the sales process for one of my products that gave me the idea to write this post. I won't post the entire content of the emails, just the parts relevant to the points I want to make. Both emails refer to the same product. Here's how this particular process is supposed to work:

* Customer buys the product
* Customer is redirected to the download page automatically by Paypal
* Customer downloads product and reads my one-time offer and decide whether or not to buy

Now, one email I received included this comment:

Dennis, you're too good at one-time offers. I couldn't resist buying [the OTO product].

I edited out the name of the product so no one would think I'm trying to promote it with this post.

Obviously that process worked as intended. The customer bought, was redirected to the download page, and then bought the one-time offer product. About 40% of my customers who are redirected to the download page for this product buy the one-time offer. I'm happy with that. That's how a good process can help your business. It means extra sales immediately, and happy customers who will often buy from you again and again as long as the products deliver on the promise.

Sometimes processes break down though. This can be bad for your business because the customer is upset. If they're upset they may not buy from you again. They may tell others. They may request a refund before you get a chance to make things right. The other email I received had this comment in it:

Dennis, I bought [product] from you and didn't get the download. This is the second time that's happened.

My process is broken for this customer. It happens about 4-5 percent of the time with Paypal transactions. I think it happens because a customer's browser security settings prevent the redirect to the download page from occurring. When that happens, Paypal has a link on their page that reads "Return to merchant," and clicking that link will take the customer to the download page (if you set it up when you generated the Paypal code). Customers often click away without finding that link though.

When this happens the customer usually emails me about not gettting the download. Most are nice, a few are not. Either way, I send them an email with a link to the download page. The conversion rate for the OTO drops significantly with these customers. It's around 20 percent, so basically I lose half of my OTO sales for those who experience a broken process. Plus, if you provide customer service and support personally, customer service for a broken process takes time away from other things you could be doing.

A broken process also reduces the chance for future sales with that customer. Fortunately with this customer, he liked my first product enough to buy from me again. That will not happen with everyone, and there's no way of knowing how many sales a broken process will cost you.

Since this only happens about 4-5 percent of the time (in my experience) many marketers would look at the 95-96 percent of customers who experience the process as the marketer intended and feel good about it. They may blame the customer when the process doesn't work, or just consider it part of doing business.

Blaming the customer isn't a useful way to look at it, IMO. You set up the process. If it doesn't work for some of your customers, that's on you. You can call it an acceptable negative if you like, and ignore the problem, but it's still a leak in your process that will cost you time and money, and perhaps reputation.

It can be useful to think of marketing in terms of processes rather than in individual chunks. Of course, any amount of complexity can be added to a process, but at it's core marketing is really very simple:

- Find what people want or need
- Create a product that fulfills that want or need
- Put your offer in front of those who want or need it.

Do that and you'll make sales. Do it well and you'll make lots of sales consistently.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of leaky processes out there. I have one I want to fix, and that leads me to the last part of this post...

Have you solved this particular leak?

I tried the easy fix, by adding a note to my Add to Cart sales box instructing people to click the Return to merchant link if they aren't redirected to the download page. That helped, but didn't completely solve the problem. I should have known it wouldn't, but I was hoping for an easy and fast solution.

I've bought products through Paypal where an email gets sent to the customer with download instructions. I can do that with the sales that go through my DLGuard installation, but I don't want to set up DLGuard on every site (expensive) and I don't want to run all my sales through a central site (if that site goes down, all my sales processes would be broken).

If you sell through Paypal and have an email automatically sent with the download link, how do you do it? Is 3rd party software required, or is there a way to set up an automated email within Paypal for each individual product? How have you solved this problem?

Until recently I've always sold through my own merchant account so I'm not that familiar with all the options Paypal offers. I'm switching to Paypal because so many customers expect it, and I'll use my merchant account as a backup.

Any questions, or advice?