Successful online retail sales revolve around making shopping easy and secure for customers. A competitor's site is only a click away, and anything that is frustrating, untrustworthy, or annoying is an invitation to make that click. Learn to recognise the five most common mistakes that drive customers away, so you don’t make them yourself.
1. Ineffective Search
When customers come to your website, they might be browsing, or they might be looking for a very specific item. Your online store should make it easy for visitors to do either by ensuring a logical structure and solid search functionality.
Make it easy for customers to zoom in on exactly what they want to buy. Perhaps they are looking for a black lady's dress shirt, a gift for a friend under £25, or everything available from a specific brand. Anticipate all your customers' needs and fulfil those searches in as few steps as possible.
2. Poor Access to Customer Service
Some companies try to save money by making their customers jump through hoops to contact actual employees. The last thing you want to do is frustrate potential customers by refusing to answer their questions. Answers to commonly asked questions should be readily accessible on your website. If your customers have additional questions, let them contact a real person by email, postal mail, and by telephone.
3. Hidden Policies
Two of the most common questions shoppers ask are, "What if I don't like it? Can I return it?" and "How much is it going to cost to deliver?"
Some retailers try to hide the answers to these questions until the last minute, hoping shoppers will be so committed to their purchases they won't balk at high delivery costs or other problems. The truth is, most shoppers will assume no news is bad news. If you don't make your policies easily accessible, your customers will assume there is a reason for hiding them.
4. Hard-to-Find Checkout
Finally a customer has found a product he or she wants to buy. The price is right, the credit card is in hand… but there's no sign of a checkout. The customer immediately decides you don't really want the sale, and leaves your site.
Don't make your customers search for a checkout, or use icons that are difficult to interpret. Use strong calls to action and clear directions to make the purchase as easy as possible.
5. Intrusive Information Gathering
Learning more about your customers is a great goal for marketing – but terrible for sales. If your checkout takes too long or asks for too much information, your customers will start feeling uncomfortable or impatient and walk away from the purchase. Require only the information necessary to get the product to the customer, and leave the task of information gathering to follow-up emails.
By eliminating these five common e-marketing mistakes, you will retain more customers on your site, increasing both customer loyalty and profits. If you would like to review the effectiveness of your e-commerce website, please call 01491 614121.
Is your website worth the time your business puts into it? Could it return even more profit for your investment of time and money? Find out how to determine the return on investment (ROI) of your website, and how to ensure it's working hard for you.
1. Define Your Goals and Their Values
Driving sales is a clear benefit of a website. But some websites might not be intended to sell products; others may have secondary goals that can also make money for your company. Some examples include:
- Encouraging visitors to sign up for your newsletters.
- Getting leads through contact forms and white papers.
- Signing up for conferences or web broadcasts.
When you know what you'd like your website to achieve, place a value on each of those goals. Sales are easy – your average sale is the value. However, you may need to dig a little deeper to determine how well your other goals pay off for you. How much does your average newsletter subscriber spend on your site? How likely it is that you will convert a lead to a paying customer, and how much will that customer spend? Answering these questions will help you determine the value of each of your website's goals.
2. Identify Your Traffic Sources and Their Costs
After you know how much your website goals will bring in, you need to determine how much you're spending to achieve those goals. Where are your customers coming from, and how much is it costing to bring them to your site? Some traffic sources include:
1 Paid advertising.
2 Search engines.
3 Word of mouth.
The next step is to then assess the website’s effectiveness in bringing traffic to your site.
3. Optimise Your Website Conversion Process
A vital part of achieving a good website return on investment is your site’s ability to convert visitors into customers. Here are some crucial attributes you should aim for when preparing your website:
- A seamless, user-friendly website architecture that will lead visitors to the sale.
- Effective website text that is persuasive and has striking headlines and calls to action.
- A streamlined process to actuate the intended conversion.
Once you have gone through these five steps and made improvements to your website, it’s time to measure the effect.
4. Track Your Conversions
To know how your marketing is performing, examine how the traffic from each source behaves on your site. The easiest way is to use an analytics program to track how traffic moves through your site. Analytics programs have many benefits, but the important one when calculating ROI is that you can find how many conversions you receive from each traffic source. From your resulting ROI calculations, you will find out which traffic sources have the highest return on investment, and consequently be able to concentrate your efforts (and your marketing budget) there.
5. Track, Improve, Track, Improve
Even if your website has an acceptable return on investment, you can always improve. Use your ROI calculations as a starting point and tweak your conversion rate to boost the effectiveness of your marketing. By carefully monitoring your ROI, you'll know whether your tweaks are working and where to concentrate your efforts.
Return on investment is one of the most important calculations to improve profitability. You can easily see which marketing tactics are the most successful, track the success of the changes you make, and determine where to focus your efforts. Call 01491 614121 if you would like to improve your website return on investment.
Have you ever found a site that looks interesting in a search, but which is unable to provide the information you're looking for? Google seems to think so, and to address the problem they offer a new search method – searching within a search, right on the results pages. What could this mean for your business?
What is Google's Search Within a Search?
The idea of Google's Search within a Search is to enable searchers to see more of the options available in their search results. For example, a large news site might display some of the more popular categories of their site, as well as the option to search right from the Google results page to find exactly what each searcher needs.
However, these new search methods have caused a lot of controversy with marketers. One reason is that not everyone gets this new search capability.
Which Sites Get Search Within a Search Features?
Search within a Search shows up in searches for big names with large websites. For example, searching for Snopes.com or Best Buy will show the Search within a Search option for the top results. However, the second-place competitors who are vying for those top spots don't get the same visibility.
What are the Advantages and Disadvantages to Your Business?
Google says the new search functionality will save searchers time and provide them with a better user experience. But many websites aren't so happy with the idea. For one thing, not every site receives the same search functionality. But even for those that do there is controversy over the decision.
When users search through Google's new feature, they are not brought to the company's website directly. Instead, they remain on the Google site until they complete their search. That is a major consideration for page view-driven websites.
The new search feature diverts traffic away from the websites' custom-designed navigation and keeps them on the Google site. That could frustrate sites that put a lot of effort into providing superior navigation.
Finally, as long as searchers remain on Google, they are exposed to Google's own AdWords ads, which could drive more potential customers to competing sites.
Is Search within a Search Here to Stay?
Google is constantly looking for new ways to improve the experience of their users, while also improving revenue. Whether the Search within a Search feature achieves either of these goals has yet to be seen, and could change at any time.
If you would like to review or consider deploying a Search Engine Marketing Plan for your website please call 01491 614121.
Are you looking for innovative ways to entice high-value websites to link to your company? Would you like to improve your search engine visibility easily and effectively? If so, online press releases could be the answer.
What is an Online Press Release?
Members of the media use press releases to inform the public about company news, and it’s a great way to promote your presence on the web. You write a short article highlighting something new and interesting, and send it to a targeted news source that might be interested in what you have to say. You can create a press release with information that would catch the interest of the general public and send it to one of the mainstream news sources, or you might focus on a technical, industry-specific subject and send it to journals and magazines that serve your niche.
How Can an Online Press Release Help Search Engine Visibility?
Links from news organisations are much sought after because search engines respect them. Their links carry more weight than those from smaller sites, and have more effect on your placement in search results. A few strong links from respected news organisations can have a huge impact on how many people find your website.
But you can't expect news organisations to come knocking at your door. If you want to get coverage, you need to make things easy for the journalists to know what's happening with your company, and to know at a glance why their audience would care.
What Makes an Effective Online Press Release?
A great press release grabs the reader's attention immediately, and then makes a concise and irresistible pitch. The idea is to ensure your press release is timely, highly compelling, and easy to grasp so that it will quickly capture the attention of someone who is scanning many similar press releases for a story idea. You want to get your point across as quickly as possible, and make it easy for interested journalists to contact you for more information.
To make your press releases even more effective, include a link to your media kit with them.
What is an Online Media Kit?
An online media kit gives the location of your website and includes information a journalist would need to create an article based on your press release. The media kit might include photographs to accompany the article, background information about your company, additional information about new products and services, contact names and phone numbers for interviews, etc. The link to the media kit would be included in your press releases, and linked from your website.
Creating Press Releases and Media Kits is a Powerful Way to Reach New Customers
An online media kit and press releases can be a great addition to your website. Making it easy and compelling to write about your company can have a huge effect on your company's ability to reach new audiences. Not only will you have the added respect of being the focus of news media, but the links you receive will make it far easier for customers to find your business in the search engines. This makes it well worth the time to spread the word about newsworthy events concerning your business.
If you would like an easy way to add new press releases to your website, please call 01491 614121.
If you are focusing on the core of your business, it might seem distracting to simultaneously work on a social marketing strategy. After all, aren't places like MySpace and Facebook only populated by kids? The answer is no – the average age of MySpace users is now in the mid-thirties, and more and more e-businesses are discovering that social marketing is not just effective but actually critical.
Here are four important reasons why your business needs a social marketing strategy:
To Improve Your Search Engine Placement
Search engine marketing is the cornerstone of many businesses. What other advertising method can provide such a steady stream of highly qualified potential customers for free? And the higher your company ranks in the search engine results, the more traffic will flow to your website.
One of the ways to be better placed in search engine results is to receive links from other websites in your field of interest – and social marketing is a great way to attract these links. When you get people talking about your website, they'll naturally want to tell their friends and readers to check out your information, and they'll do it by linking to your site. Those links can help make you more visible to people trying to find sites like yours in search engines.
Make Your Brand Memorable
People won't be able to buy your product if they can't remember who you are or what you do. Social marketing is a great way to emphasise your brand and help people remember what your company is all about – without annoying them with unwanted advertising. Social marketing can help you tell your company's story in a way that engages and interests your clients.
To Learn More about Your Customers
The more you know about your customers, the better you will be able to understand their problems and tailor your products to help them solve those issues. Social marketing is a great way to connect with your customers on a new level, and engage them in a conversation that will benefit you both. Best of all, you can discover this information from those most likely to use your products and services, without costly focus groups and surveys.
To Provide Information about Your Products and Services
Social media is a wonderful place to provide information about your company to people who are curious about what you do and how you do it. You can educate, inform, and tantalise potential customers, which is critical in helping your customers through the buying process. Social media is a means of promoting your business to a different audience in a way most people appreciate.
Social marketing is a low-cost marketing method that can be extremely effective in creating buzz and spreading the word about your business. If you would like to explore how it can help your business, please call 01491 614121.
