Joe’s First Blog: Review of Rob Walling – ‘The Number one goal of your website’

Hello dear reader. I’m Joe, I’m a 23 year old former SAP consultant and present day marketing nerd who has recently had the pleasure of joining The BLN. I’ve already had the pleasure of meeting some of the BLN community, and I’m very much looking forward to meeting more in the future. If we haven’t met, please say hi!

As part of my assimilation into the BLN, one of my first tasks was to explore some of the content produced over the years by The BLN and BoS. I started with ‘The Number One Goal of Your Website’, delivered by a croaky one man analytical mastermind – Rob Walling.

Rob’s opinion is the number one goal of your website should be to build your mailing list. The grounding of this argument is a disproportionately high level conversion of returning visitors vs. new ones, and how email is the best method to coax individuals to returning.

His views were surprising for someone new to marketing such as myself. Nurtured by Twitter and LinkedIn posts, I have been conditioned to think of email as a lumbering dinosaur vs. new(er) and shiny(er) methods such as social media. I would have thought methods such as social media would have been more effective in eventually gaining sales, because I subscribe to a school of thought that ‘love’ is what compels people to buy, and this is more effectively gained through social media where a brand can convey their personality better.

Rob however talks about a different story, grounding his arguments in facts and figures. Rob talks about having a key goal in mind for your website, a raison d’etre if you will. I surprisingly found myself convinced by his arguments, with email now resembling a ‘Superman’ like image in my mind: strong and proud.

Rob’s assertions, backed up by figures such as a 7000% difference between purchases from new vs returning customers showed me how in terms of a solid marketing tool, emails can be really very useful as they are designed to push people back to the website by their nature.

As a marketer (albeit a very new one), this is a useful lesson to have in mind. I imagine even for the most experienced of individual caught up in the day to day running of operations, then the idea of refocusing operations on one goal would be particularly refreshing and useful.

I encourage you to watch the video, seen below, and form your own opinion. Would you agree that email still is king, or have other methods overtaken or become as important since?

Help!

Like Rob, I believe in having a number one goal. Beginning my career at the BLN, mine is to grow to be the best marketer I can be. To achieve my goal I would like to reach out to the lively and helpful community which The BLN have managed to bring together over a number of years. If you feel there is anything/anyone you feel I could benefit knowing/meeting, or would be able to kindly be able donate some of your time to help me be the best I can be, then I’d be forever appreciative and excited to hear more. I will also be blogging about my experiences going forward, so it could also be a good bit of exposure for anyone willing to help. I’m available via email at joe@businessofsoftware.org, or twitter at @josepheglover.