Increase Your Website conversion rates
Posted on March 14, 2008
Category: website marketing | Leave a Comment
Dramatically Increase Your Website Conversion Rate or Your Money Back! 100% Guaranteed
You are about to gain the knowledge that will take your online business to the next level! Did you know that every little change you make on your website from the colour themes to the sales copy can have a dramatic effect on how well you convert a sale?
This book will expose you to literally thousands of dollars worth of knowledge on key fundamentals, ideas, tips and tricks that will drive more sales than you could ever imagine! You could easily increase sales by an amazing 30% with just a few changes specified in this book……Read more - Website Conversions E-book
Leave a CommentMeasuring Marketing Success
Posted on February 3, 2008
Category: Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
Most businesses that come across this page are most likely small internet based companies that don’t have that much marketing budget to spend. Unlike the big corporate businesses that utilise billboards, TV, Radio to advertise their websites, you have to look for the best bang for buck marketing investment every time you have a bit of money.
So how should you approach it? In the early stages of a business there is less emphasis on branding and much more on the return on investment. After all the promotion HAS to pay for itself before you can make enough money to move on to another promotion. One of the ways that I measure how well a promotion went is with
Cost of Sales (Percentage) - The amount of marketing dollars (cost) that has generated a certain amount of gross sales.
Eg: I spent $100 in Adwords and it returned back $1000 in gross profit. So the cost of sales is 10%. After a while you will have a good idea of which promotion creates the best Cost of Sales value and more money would be moved from the ones that aren’t doing well to the ones that are.
Leave a CommentThe importance of reinforcing Checkout Security
Posted on February 3, 2008
Category: website marketing | Leave a Comment
One of the major reasons of high check out abandonment is the lack of the trust and safety factor when shopping online. Many consumers are afraid of hackers stealing credit card and personal details, so to reassure them, you have to show signs that you are a safe merchant. A couple of things you can do are
- At the login page - underneath the password, have in small writing that the above details will never be disclosed to others
- Reassure the buyer that any details collected from them will never be disclosed to any other party
- Have Any verisign or Thawte security badges clearly stamped on checkout pages
- Run the checkout through a SSL page with HTTPS
- Ensure the padlock is at the base of the Browser window.
- Ensure no pop ups of leaving or coming into a security page.
- Ensure no error screens come up.
- Have sections of “did you know we shop out XXXX amounts of products each week?”
- Have return policy easily accessible and visible in check out
- Reduce the number of pages in check out but maintain useability.
- If you have Hacker Safe and or COMODO - show it in check out
- Have a checkout confirmation page and also an email to be sent to the customer after the sales has been transactioned.
All these points give the trust factor a boost and will drop your cart abandonment rates. The checkout is one of the most important areas where some small change in either colour, font or features that could drastically increase or decrease sales. It is a good idea to do A/B testing and variant testing on it to ensure that your checkout is getting the most sales possible.
Leave a CommentAIDA - Getting the Best Action
Posted on February 3, 2008
Category: website marketing | Leave a Comment
The action is the most important part of getting a sale. After all, if they don’t act on the desire, then you have basically lost the sale. Everyone has different thresholds before they cross the line to say “I’m going to get that item” It’s your job to make the offers irresistible enough to make them feel compelled enough to do something about it. Here are a couple of pointers in what you can write to create better action
- Create a sense of urgency - This can be through making it a limited time offer for 2 days or so, once that time has passed the product will return to its original price
- Create a sense of urgency 2 - Limited supply. There is a very limited amount of quantity of this item so you’d better hurry up before it’s sold out - there wont be any restocks!
- Sell the item with bonus upgrades that are free if you order now - This method builds up the desire high enough to bring them to the point where they just simply cant resist.
- Simply say Buy now” - instead of ending your sales copy with a feature. End it with a powerful “Click here to purchase this item today and start changing your life!”
- Incorporate the risk reversal concept - throw in lines of guarantees and satisfaction guaranteed at the end with your action content to drive it home
- Bundle it up with extra after sales services to make them feel secure and comfortable to click the buy button
- Ensure that the page design is optimised for customers to want to click the buy button.
How much should I pay CPA in banner advertising?
Posted on January 30, 2008
Category: Email Marketing, Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
So I came across this topic when someone searched for it on google and found my site. That’s an interesting question and really there is no direct answer. It varies from business to business. Some people might value a customer on their database at $10, some might value it at $1.
There are really 2 ways to look at it:-
1) You pay for the acquisition based on the sale of the product - So if you paid $1 for the CPA, you sold the product at the landing page for $10. That $1 should be considered as part of the cost of sale.
2) You pay for the acquisition based on gathering email addresses - If you paid $1 for the email address, you have to determine how much an email address to send direct marketing offers to is worth, you’d have to look at variables such as.
- What you are selling to your customer base?
- How much does your product you are selling cost?
- What are the sell through rate of emailing to your customer base?
- Are these customers buying your products?
Using an example - I personally would pay $1 per email address depending on how good that email address is. If I think it is a very active email address, I might consider moving up to $2
So if I am selling a few different products and I wanted to market to this list regularly, I’d pay
- $1 to get the customer,
- Sell a product at $100
- I’d expect 2% conversion rate - meaning every 100 people that I email to, I expect 2 people to buy my product.
So I’d be paying $100 per 100 people and I’d sell 2 products to a total of $200. Therefore it has made me $100 to get that CPA back.
Now if I had sold products at $50, then if you make the calculations, I’d break even on my sales. But one thing to seriously consider is that that email address is an investment. You could continually market to that email address (provided they agreed to it) and continue selling products even without paying for the acquisition.
So overall, you really have to look into how much does it cost to sell your product, then work backwards and find out how much you can afford to gain a new customer PLUS continually try to sell to them.
Jay
Leave a CommentSelling the Benefits
Posted on January 28, 2008
Category: website marketing | Leave a Comment
When writing your sales pitch you should take note of your tone and language. You might decide to write your sales pitch in a casual note with stories and references to how it has effected your life and why you endorse it yourself. Or you could write it in a more professional way to give the product more class and flair. Either way, you should always write to sell the benefits.
Instead of saying - “This MP3 player has 2GB of storage to store 400 songs”
You should be saying - “This MP3 player has 2GB of storage so you can now upload 400 of your favourite songs to take on your morning run or on that train ride to work”
People love context. They want to hear references and applications of the product you are selling in their lifestyle. Another example is
“This cutlery set is 18/10 Stainless Steel” - Some people understand that 18/10 stainless steel is good quality, but what about the people that don’t know what it means? The way that you should word it is
“This cutlery set is high quality 18/10 stainless steel so it will never rust and will stay shiny as the day you purchased it” - See how I am wording it so that its not the features that sell, but the benefits to the customers that I am selling. In today’s world, everybody things about me, me, me! To cater for that you must write in a way to allow the reader to picture how the product you are selling will fit perfectly into their lives. If you can pull this concept off well, you can basically sell ice to Eskimos.
Jay
Leave a CommentFinding your Niche
Posted on January 28, 2008
Category: Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
Targeting the general public is a difficult way to gain customers. You don’t know who you want, you just want everybody. That’s why finding a niche is a great way to direct your marketing efforts at a smaller demographic and focus on the wants of those people. Besides, the competition for niches would be less and more spread out, making it easier for you to gain customer loyalty.
The first step to having a direct marketing approach is to find out who your ideal customer is. Write down on a piece of paper what are the features, the personality types, the goals of your ideal customer. Then find out what are the best locations or the best ways to get in front of these types of people.
The main aim of targeting a niche is to know what the customer WANTS, not what they need. Most people don’t act on needs, they act on “wants”. Once you know what they want, you can direct your approach and your sales pitch towards that emotion or desire. Some ways to find out what people want are performing surveys, going out on the street and asking people, sending people emails (politely), asking your email database if you already have one.
Now that you know what the customer wants, its your job to convince them that your product is the solution to their problems. To do that, you utilise the wants that you learnt from the customers and you direct your sales approach to that direction. This way you get the ideal customers that you want and at the same time keep the customers happy. Some methods of direct marketing are:- email marketing, targeting a niche magazine print, finding a complimenting website that isn’t a direct competitor or even finding a database that is related to your market.
Jay
Leave a CommentClickbank and the various other payment systems
Posted on January 27, 2008
Category: website marketing | Leave a Comment
For anybody who hasn’t heard of Clickbank, it is a website that offers a 3rd party payment system (very similar to PayPal) for digital products to be sold online. I say only digital products because the payment integrates with your download page where the customer can receive their product instantly.
The main differences between Clickbank and PayPal is that Clickbank accepts payments from major credit cards such as VISA, MasterCard without the purchaser signing up to an account. While PayPal is a different payment system where you can provide both offline and online services but purchasers must have a PayPal account. The Clickbank system is perfect if you want to set up a website to sell E-books or online services to the public.
Registering for Clickbank is free but if you want to start selling a product, it will cost you just under $50 to become a seller. What you can do is set up your website with your sales copy and then have a “buy now” button to link to the Clickbank checkout. This link to the checkout is provided by Clickbank itself and is simple to implement so that shouldn’t be a worry.
The first thing you need to do is set up an account and submit your sales copy link to Clickbank for their team to check over the conditions of your service to make sure you are in line with their conditions, this processes usually takes only 1 to 2 days. Once it has been approved, you can pay your $50 and start your marketing campaign to sell your digital product.
If you intend to grow your business as a full fledged website, I recommend you purchase an out of the box checkout system such as x-cart.com or digishop.suneffect.com and purchase an SSL key (approx $300 from dreamhost) then implement this into your system itself. That way you have a seamless payment system that accepts all forms of payment with options for modifications and adjustments to suit your needs.
An out of the box system is great but you should definitely be clear as to know what you are purchasing, these shopping cart systems usually need to be integrated into your content management system, so you would need to know some PHP programming knowledge or have a programmer ready to implement the system for you.
Jay
Leave a CommentThe Good and Bad of Banner Advertising
Posted on January 27, 2008
Category: Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
You must have seen many different banner advertisements out there such as “beat this guy in a drinking contest” or “spank the fat kid” and have wondered, do they really work? Obviously they have to for someone to actually keep putting them up although most of the spammy banners usually lead to competition type websites that seem too good to be true and have a bunch of conditions at the bottom to suck your wallet dry. So the real question is - Will banner advertisements work for you!
Banner advertisement were the craze during the dot com boom and was one of the reasons why the dot com boom actually burst. Back then, it was all about impressions - how many times your banner was displayed. Companies started pouring in vast amounts of money to see their advertisements plastered on websites as banners to only see their money go down the drain. This measurement was called CPM (cost per Mpressions) and is usually calculated on a per thousand basis eg ” $1 per 1000 impressions”
Today, we have other measurements such as CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition). These allow for better value because now you can base the rates on the amount of traffic it draws to your website - very similar to how Google work on their Adwords.
These methods usually incur higher rates but if you strike a good enough deal and you are sure your product can convert well - then this might be a good solution. Saying so, why should you pay more than you would on your Adwords account if you can get the same traffic from Google itself? Some companies claim that you get branding aswell as click through rates and in a way that’s true, but you have to weigh up the price differences just to get some brand awareness out in the market.
Personally I don’t recommend CPM deals and offers - to me, they never work unless you have something exceptional to sell. If you have a chance you should work out a CPA deal to acquire email addresses of some sort - but always have a price per email address in mind before striking up a deal as the rate you pay per email address might be too expensive. It really depends on how much you value your email address and what you will be able to get out of the email address investment.
Most companies now offer CPC deals. If you want to succeed in this kind of marketing, you will have to have a targeted campaign rather than a broad one. This way, the online customer that is clicking in will only click on it if the advert applies to them. Hence saving money on unnecessary click throughs.
Another major point in CPC and CPA banners is that you should always implement proper landing pages to introduce your website to the customer and have powerful messages that will get them to take action and make a purchase. This could be in the ways of addressing a need / want. Making a special offer that will get them to make a purchase or offering a limited time discount of some sort, there are hundreds of possibilities.
So to end the thought - Banners are definitely still a powerful medium of online marketing, but you have to strike up the right deals to suit your budget and to take full advantage by working on CPA and CPM deals with direct marketing campaigns and special promotional offers.
Jay
Leave a CommentDirectories - The first step to Link building
Posted on January 27, 2008
Category: SEO marketing | Leave a Comment
Submitting your website to directories has more value in SEO than it does to direct traffic to your site. Although the value of the link from directories are rather weak, some might even say that it is a waste of time but for most web marketers, it is usually the first thing they would do to get your website out there. Plus it only takes a few minutes to achieve, so why not?
There are a few online directories that you should submit to as soon as you start your website. The 2 main ones are DMOZ and Yahoo Directory.
Each directory has certain guidelines to follow so follow them exactly and get your site listed. You must select your category in which your website falls under - avoid listing it in an incorrect category. DMOZ editors work free of charge and have no obligation to put your site on the network.
Yahoo! directory offers free submissions for non business websites but charges $299 for businesses. The free service is easy but if you are a business I believe that this $299 fee is well worth the money to get your site listed on the directory.
For websites that aren’t businesses, the service is free but if you are a business, the submission costs $299. This is well worth the money spent as Yahoo would put extra weighting on searching if your site is on their directory list.
Other smaller directories such as JoeAnt, Skaffe, RubberStamped, GoGuide, Gimpsy are great to submit your site to and they all cost less that $50 each for submission. These smaller directories are fantastic as you are able to get your site closer to the top of the page as there aren’t as many submissions as the big ones.
Don’t just submit to random directories as there are many spammy directories that just receive spam sites and give out no value at all. There are definitely more worthwhile SEO tasks that could be better time spent on such as website optimising, contacting webmasters and article building campaigns.
Jay
Leave a Comment keep looking »