The Bucket (I just cut and pasted this from a tool kit that I sell to clients then added CF related commentary. I hope it makes sense.)

Whenever I consult with clients for the first time I always do a quick survey of things that are easy fixes, then we start working on our bucket. What is the bucket? Well, if you think about marketing as the process of turning on a faucet that flows with new customers, then the bucket is the mechanism that these customers will flow into. Some clients will have a very good bucket, and we’ll start with turning on the water right away. Others will have buckets with holes, and others will have no bucket at all.

Step 1: The Path

Every business should have a well defined path that takes a customer from mildly curious to making a buying decision. A very good path will take them past their first buying decision, and include ways to get them to continue to buy.

In my primary business, a martial arts school, the path looks like this.

Info call - the prospect calls in with a question about the school. Then,

Appointment - the prospect comes into the school for a sit down with me where we get to know each other and explain the benefits of the program. Then, they sign up for a free, two lesson introductory program. So next is,

Intro 1 - 15 minutes showing them some martial arts stuff, then discuss the cost and time commitments of membership.

Intro 2 - Another 15 minutes of martial arts, then a sit down where we ask them to join our one year program. Then, 90 days later

Yellow Belt Conference - just a follow up to see how things are going, and an opportunity to plant the seed of pursuing a black belt. Then 90 days later,

Black Belt Update - we introduce the Black Belt portion of our program, and they sign on for another 3 years after their original one year has expired.

You see, there is clearly defined path that takes a prospect through my school, for a four year period. Actually, there is another four year extension after the first four years, but that is not as well defined... yet.

See, when you go after a prospect, you have to know exactly what you want them to do. That's why one of the first things I'm suggesting we do, and Mr. Daevryn seems to be behind, is tweak around the page that people see for the first time. In my opinion that needs to be done ahead of anything that would steer people toward us. (The only exception to this would be creating and running ads that point a person not to the website, but directly to telnet.)

We need to define how we want a person with no prior MUD experience to approach CF for the first time. (This is a good topic for discussion on this forum.)

Step 2: Statistics

At any given time I can tell you the number and percentage of people who are going from one step in my path to the next. This is hugely important. Keeping good statistics is like flying a plane by the instruments. When it’s foggy out, or when flying above water your intuition about how well you’re flying is very likely to be wrong. The same is true in marketing - you have to fly by cold hard statistics, and not by the seat of your pants.

So for us this means figuring out where we need people to go, so we can figure out how many people go there from where. You need to be able to track every ad, so that you know what is being productive and what isn't. Then it's simple, just do more of the productive stuff and less of the unproductive stuff. Of course, you do have to watch that, because when your doing things right all your advertising has a synergy that's greater than the sum of it's parts. For example, I pulled Val Pak ads once, because they weren't performing, but it turned out they weren't generating calls, they were sending people to my website. When I dropped the Val Pak ads, the number of calls from my website went down - because I keep good statistics I could identify what the fall in info call was from, and fix it.

Also, it doesn't do us much good to attract players to start playing if they don't continue to play. So we need, in my opinion, an in game mechanism that is telling us how many of our newbies are making it to level 10,20,30,40,50 and so on. It's not a bad idea to praise them on the forums, like maybe with an automated system. So you could have it do like a thing that says, "Congratulations Druktard on bringing your first character to 30!" And then the same thing at 51, and we give them their first PBF for free. Something like that would probably be cool... but at the least we need to be able to track how new players are progressing.

This also lets us track things like which ads aimed at which type of people (D&D players, Magic players, WoW players, hotdog vendors) are producing not only interested people, but also people who are climbing the ranks. Maybe when we advertise to WoW people we get 50 people who come to the website and click play now, and 5 when we advertise to Magic players - but then when we analyze statistics we see that of the 50 people who came from WoW, only 3 of them ever made it to level 10. Whereas all 5 of the Magic people made it to level 10, and two to 51. Now who is it better to advertise to? At first glance it looks like WoW people... after all, 50 responded. But closer analyzation reveals that we're better off advertising to Magic players.

Step 3: Followup

You also have to have a good system in place for followup. For us, we capture phone number, address and email at the first step in the path, the info call. That means that if the person falls off of my path for any reason, I can continue to contact them to try to get them back on my path.

I would strongly suggest that we capture email from people when they role their first character. We email them their character name and password, and a welcome letter with some tips to help ease the learning curve. Point them to the newbie channel and newbie QandA forum. Then a few days later they get an automated email that asks them how it's going, and if there is anything we can do to help. If they aren't playing we at least have an opportunity to find out what went wrong and fix it for the next guy.

Step 4: Adequate Customer Service

Finally, we want to make sure that we don’t overload our path so that people don’t get the attention that they need to make a buying decision. For us in the martial arts school, we know we can only process about 20 new members a month without bogging down our system. We aim at 20, and no more. How many people can you handle on your path at one time, logistically?

From here we move on to defining our target market. Basically what I'm hearing is that we have some vague ideas, but that someone (probably me) is going to have to do the leg work on that. I'll let this kick around on the forums for a few days, then we'll do some online focus groups.

First things first.