As the saying goes:
Every happy customer will tell 3 people, every unhappy customer will tell 15 people.
It pays to ensure you have a happy customer because a happy customer be your most lucrative salesperson! Keep your customers happy by providing a fast, easy to use website, providing responsive and helpful customer service, and dealing with any issues in a prompt and positive manner.
Bad news travels fast. Don’t let the bad news be about your company or product.
Who typically buys your product online? Do you know your demographics? Older? Younger? Affluent? Middle-class? Active? Sedentary?
These are all questions you should know in order to properly target products and services to new prospective customers. The challenge is, you cannot ask your customers these questions in order to find out the answers. To get a better understanding of which demographic your products appeal to, you need to pay attention. You could run a focus group. You could have a booth at a town fair and keep track of the interest level for people who come to your booth.
Try to think out to the box for how you can get closer to your customers and start to know them better. Once you know them better, you can target products and offerings toward the demographic you most commonly serve.
Rat tat tat on the drum… yeah… turn the beat around….well, that’s not really where I was going with this post 
Test, analyze and tweak (TAT) are the 3 words to keep in mind for constant improvement to your online marketing. Online, whether on your website, blog, or email, is such a wonderful place to test new ideas because it’s relatively easy and cheap. Web analytics tools (our free favorite is Google Analytics) give you immediate feedback on how your marketing test is performing and if you are meeting key conversion goals. Lastly, if your great ideas didn’t work so well the first time, give them a little tweak and test them again!
Lee
How do you get the point across on your website without overwhelming your visitors? Consider the old adage that “less is more” when it comes to website design.
When developing your website design, first determine what are the top 5 goals of your website. Sell your product? Educate the visitor on your service offerings? Provide directions? If these are your goals, then focus on delivering ONLY to these top goals within your primary design.
Imagine the last time you went into a brick and mortar business. Visitors are used to this experience so how can you replicate it online?
- Flash has it’s purpose, but not for blocking entry to your website. Video and animation should be used only when necessary.
- Provide ONLY the text necessary to achieve the primary goals. Your corporate history is better left for your About or Company page.
- Provide quality pictures of products, clear short descriptions, accurate pricing, and product details (especially nutritional content for food products).
- Group products into departments so that users can easily search for them
Just like your favorite store that provides nice ambiance, clear signage and well-organized products, make sure you’re providing this same visual merchandising experience for your online customers as well.
How do you know if visitors are coming to your website or not? Are they finding the information that they need when they get to your website?
One of the most important features you can add to your website is visitor tracking analytics. This usually requires that you put a simple piece of code into every page of your site. If you have designed your website well, then you just need to add the code to a shared component that is included into all your pages.
This code will be triggered each time your site is visited. The code will track the visitor along with lots of great information about the visitor like:
- What website referred them to your site (e.g., a search engine)?
- How long did they stay on your site?
- Did they go to more than one page on your site?
- What browser were they using?
If you have an online product catalog and a shopping cart on your website, you can use this visitor tracking data to see everywhere the user went within your site before they purchased. This is called conversion tracking.
Most of the visitor tracking tools give you pretty graphs to show you all sorts of great information. I’ve shown you an example of a graph to the right that shows the percentage of traffic from each source.
Our favorite traffic analytics tool is Google Analytics because the tool has comprehensive reporting (and it’s free).
Take the time to track your visitors. Once you have this in place come back and visit us to figure out what to do with the tracking information now that you have it!
What is an e-commerce cross-sell you ask? Well, have you ever placed a book into your shopping cart on Amazon and been given a message that says “people who bought Book X also bought Book Y”? What these shopping sites are doing is trying to sell you another book in addition to the one you’ve already shown the intent to buy.
The revenue for an online shopping cart goes up the more they get to you purchase. As the shipping box gets bigger, the cost to mail it stays almost constant. If they shopping cart provider can fill up the box to it’s maximum, they make more profit overall.
If you can cross-sell an item that the user finds interesting, they are much more likely to purchase it as well. Select items that go together (if an electronic toy is in the cart, then offer them batteries to go with it).
As an online shopping cart owner, please don’t automatically put the cross-sell into the cart and make the user remove it! Just give them to the option to add it if they want to.
Getting online with a new website is not as hard as it once was. Many online services exist to let you create your website fast and easy without having to know any html. While most people think that blogs are reserved only for people who want to make an online journal, today many of the blogging services provide enough features to get your corporate site online! Website designers create new and interesting templates all the time and and you’re sure to find one that matches your style.
Most website hosting services have a point-and-click tool, but here is a list of some of the most common website design and blog creation services that we have tried and liked.
Are you partial to another one? Let us know which one!
Everyone wants to come up first in the “organic” search engine rankings. Here’s our list of Top 10 SEO tips:
1. Relevant inbound links from popular sites
2. Make your page titles count, use keywords and benefits you provide
3. Use the <h1> & <h2> tags with your keywords in them
4. Use a domain name with your keywords in it
5. Make your keywords dense within the text copy
6. Use keywords in links, at the top of your page and bold in a few places
7. Have great outbound links to other relevant websites
8. Include keywords in the ALT attribute of your <IMG> tag
9. Include keywords int he TITLE attribute of your <A> tag
10. Have great and unique content to make your site a popular destination
We believe in giving you straightforward, no-nonsense advice on how to manage your online business so that you increase sales and attract new customers. We hope you will bookmark our site and come back often while we share information on search engine optimization, pay per click campaigns, e-commerce design, company reporting and other juicy topics.
We believe that to increase online sales you have to look at your business from all perspectives. Through this blog we will share experiences from our own success stories and help you create some of your own!
Kathy