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If you are looking for ways to convert more site visitors into paying customers – and who isn’t! – you should consider the information you are providing to visitors in the shopping cart.
According to Harris Interactive's Online Retail Report, nearly half of the polled internet users have abandoned a shopping cart because they had questions that weren’t answered before they were asked to commit to the purchase.
Shoppers Abandon Shopping Carts When They Have Questions
That response represents a huge opportunity for e-commerce businesses. Can you imagine the impact of nearly doubling your site revenues simply by providing your visitors with the information they need when they need it?
Here are 4 top tips for improving the conversion rate of your shopping cart:
Anticipate Your Shoppers’ Questions. Think about your service from a customer perspective. What questions are likely to come up when they are making a purchase? Some common ideas include shipping prices, the refund policy, and what recourse the customers have if they are not satisfied with the product. Try going through a competitor’s shopping cart and seeing if you come up with any questions.
Provide Answers on the Shopping Cart. It’s not enough to have answers hidden somewhere on the site. You really don’t want visitors to leave the cart and start poking around for answers; even if you did, it’s more likely that your visitors would leave in frustration and use another site to make their purchases. Answer the most common questions prominently, and provide links to more information where needed.
Provide Additional Support. If possible, put your telephone number or a link to live tech-support chat directly on the shopping cart. This will encourage shoppers to ask for additional help instead of simply giving up if their questions haven’t been answered.
Get Feedback. Ask friends, family members, and employees to test the shopping cart and write down any questions that they had during the process. Ask them to rate how easy it was to find the answers, or whether the answers were there at all. You might also consider usability testing, to ensure that your shopping cart is as easy to use as possible.
Answering your customers’ questions at the point of sale costs you little to nothing and will vastly increase your chances of making a sale. Remember, a Website is never finished; constant tweaks and improvements keep your profits rising and your customers satisfied. If you wish to improve your conversion rate, call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation.
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Last month, we spoke about magnifying your success with cross-media marketing, by adopting a joined-up offline and online marketing strategy to help reinforce your brand, amplify your messages and help spread the word about your products and services.
In this article, we provide some ideas for successfully integrating offline advertisements into your e-business’s marketing campaigns.
Integrate Online and Offline Marketing Methods to Boost Your Ad Power
Advertise Where Your Customers Live
Offline advertising doesn’t do you a lot of good if it never reaches your target audience. Before launching an offline campaign, take the time to research the habits of your current customers. Determine what newspapers they read, which radio stations they listen to and where they spend their leisure time. Concentrate your advertising budget where your potential customers are most likely to be.
Give Your Potential Customers a Compelling Reason to Go Online
Don’t use advertisements to drive customers to the home page of your website – that’s far too generic. Instead, send them to specific pages that contain the information that they need immediately. By satisfying your customers’ goals quickly, you are more likely to convince them to spend more time on your website and to learn more about your products or services.
Reinforce Your Message
The more often people hear a message repeated, the more likely they are to believe it. Take advantage of this by repeating your company’s most important message online and off. This will make your message resonate more strongly while establishing your company name as a known brand in your listeners’ minds.
Use Specialized URLs to Track Effectiveness
It’s very important to track the success of your offline ad campaigns at driving traffic to your website. However, it is not nearly as easy to track where people heard about your ad offline as it is to simply track online referrals to your website. To help you overcome this problem, set up a dedicated web page for each ad; so you can tell where people heard about the site. To encourage people to use that specific URL, you can add a discount offer that is only available from that page. Make these URLs work harder for you by making them specifically relevant to the information contained in the advertisement.
By following these tips, you can create an effective cross-channel marketing strategy that will help establish your company as a trustworthy partner in your potential visitors’ minds. If you would like a no-obligation consultation to explore how a cross media marketing campaign could improve your marketing message, please call 01491 614121.
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Search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms to try to make their results as relevant and useful as possible. However, Google’s most recent changes are some of the largest and most revolutionary in their history. If your company relies on search-engine traffic to drive visitors to your website, you’ll want to prepare yourself for the potentially rough waters ahead. Learn why the search engines are making changes and what those changes can mean for you.
Is Your Website Ready for More Relevant Searches?
Why Users need Google’s Universal Search
Google spearheaded the revolution when they introduced their new Universal Search in mid-May. Although most users don’t realize it, Google offers a number of different, specialized searches that target specific categories of information. For example, users can choose to search blogs, news, books, images, videos, and much more, aside from the regular web site results. This can help users drill down to find the exact information they want.
In the old Google results, users could choose the type of search they wanted – but most didn’t. Only a very small percentage of Google users had any idea of the breadth of search options available. Google attempted to integrate other search types by displaying more options at the top of regular search results, but most people ignored them, either because they looked strange or because they didn’t understand them.
With Google’s new Universal Search, additional results from the other specialized search areas are mixed into the regular web page returns. This means that a user who searches for “New York Hotels” might receive local search and image returns mixed in with websites centred around the topic. Similarly, searches for current events could include news topics and books on the subject.
This is great news for searchers, since they have the chance to view a wider swath of relevant results with every search.
What Does Google’s Universal Search Mean for Search Marketing?
The decision to include specialized results in the search engine results pages means that there may be fewer slots available for websites. Depending on the search term, three or more websites could be bumped out of the first-page results.
That makes this an important time to focus on your search-engine optimization. Making your site relevant to popular search terms is more important now than ever before, since your competition has effectively increased.
Google is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
Google is not the only company making drastic changes. Ask.com has already added a wider range of topical results to their search, and other engines are sure to follow. This is an excellent time to review your site content, to see whether you can rank in additional specialized searches. Listing your company in local search, adding unique photographs for image search, and providing a company web log for the blog search could pay off now more than ever.
If you would like a no-obligation consultation regarding improving your Search Engine Marketing activities, please call 01491 614121.
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Are your customers finding what they need on your website? Are you sure? Many companies believe that their layout and navigation is perfectly simple to use, and that all of the information that customers need is at their fingertips.
However, their site visitors tell a different story. Frustrated at not being able to find the information they need, they leave and spend their money on a competitor’s site – all of which could have been avoided if you had a search function on your website.
The Benefits of Integrating Search Into Your Site
Search fields on your website yield two major benefits. The first is obvious – they help site visitors who are having trouble with your navigation to locate the information they need quickly and easily.
Website visitors will only spare a few seconds to look for the data that they’ve come to your site to find. A good search function lets them focus in on their needs, without requiring them to take the time to get to know your site navigation. Once they realize that they are in the right place, they are much more likely to look around and learn more about what you have to offer.
The second major benefit of a search function is a bit more subtle, but equally as valuable. By tracking what site visitors enter into your search field, you can see what interests them and what they are having trouble finding. If you have this information on your site already but are seeing a lot of visitors search for it anyway, this may be a sign that you need to spotlight that information a bit more, to make it easier to find.
You can do this by:
Rethinking the positioning of your navigation. Perhaps site visitors are overlooking your categories or confusing site directions with advertising.
Considering the wording used in your navigation. You might think that “Illumination Stations” sounds better and is more accurate than “Lamps and Outdoor Lighting,” but your visitors might not understand what it means.
Repackaging your information. Use FAQs and Top Ten lists to help direct users quickly to the information they need.
Helping visitors to scan. Even if the information is right in front of them on a page, visitors might overlook it if it is buried in other text or images. Organize your pages so that relevant information pops out. Lists, headers, and sleek text that avoids being overly wordy all help with this.
Of course, the information your visitor is searching for may not be on your site at all. If that’s the case, your search field is an excellent source of inspiration for new sections for your website.
There are few things that can provide so much information about your visitors’ needs at so little cost. If your site lacks search functionality, you are missing out on the chance to convert more sales more easily. If some of the methods covered in this article interest you, please call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation.
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Verdict Research, a UK retail analytics firm, has predicted a huge swell in online retail sales over the next five years. Counting only retail products, not services or other forms of e-commerce, sales in the United Kingdom alone should reach 28.1 billion pounds by 2011.
Meanwhile, Leadpile.com has predicted that US online sales will reach a trillion dollars by 2012. That number would make e-commerce responsible for a full quarter of all American sales, although some analysts say that this projection is a little too rosy. Even the more cautious predictions expect a steady growth in the already booming e-tail segment, estimating that e-commerce will account for at least 10 – 15% of U.S. spending.
Analysts Predict Massive Growth in the Next Five Years
These predictions only cover direct online purchases. An even larger portion of spending is influenced by e-commerce. As much as 85% of all purchases are preceded by such online research as reading reviews, comparing prices, and listening to other customers’ experiences.
This enormous growth is attributed to the increasing speed and decreasing costs of internet use. With faster connections becoming the norm, online shoppers can compare more sites and receive the information they need to make a sales decision in a shorter time than ever before. This decreases the frustration of e-commerce and makes online shopping an even more attractive alternative to dealing with brick-and-mortar stores.
Interestingly enough, however, the bulk of the e-commerce growth will be due to current shoppers spending more money online, rather than new people being converted to the convenience of e-commerce. By 2011, e-commerce shoppers will be spending an average of 1,056 pounds per year on their internet purchases.
This finding underscores the importance of customer retention and making an excellent first impression on your site visitors. The people who are buying from you today will be spending even more money, down the road. If your site visitors get a bad impression of your company or your website, you can’t simply rely on attracting new customers in the future to make up for their loss.
Investing the time and effort to build brand loyalty, to discover what your customers want, and to hone your company’s ability to fulfil those needs efficiently will yield a large pay-off over the next five years. As more and more of today’s online shoppers turn to the internet as their primary method of shopping, businesses that position themselves well today will be booming tomorrow.
If you would like a review of your site's first impression and your customer retention strategy, call 01491 614121 for a no-obligation consultation.
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