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Newsletter - November 2006

Three Guideposts to Greater Ad Conversion

10 Misconceptions That Can Derail Your E-Commerce Business: Your Customers Will Assume You Are Trustworthy

Hiring a Professional to Manage Your PPC Ads

A Shopping Cart That Closes the Sale

If your website is your sales pitch, your shopping cart is your close. It's your last opportunity to finalise the sale – or drive your potential customers away.

How can you build a shopping cart that addresses your customers' needs thoroughly enough to close the sale? Here are five tips to help improve your shopping cart closes.

How to Avoid Shopping Cart Abandonment and Improve Sales

1. Accommodate Different Paths Through Your Online Store
Many companies think from only one perspective when they build their shopping carts – the customer who has found what he or she wants to buy and is ready to proceed to the sale.

However, many shoppers have not finished buying when they put an item in a shopping cart, or they are only checking shipping prices, or they change their mind and want to buy something else.

To accommodate your customers, make your shopping cart flexible. Ensure that changes and additions are easy, and help customers return to the pages they were viewing with a click.

2. Reassure Customers When They Waver
It's natural for questions and objections to spring up in the moments before completing a sale. For this reason, it's smart to address any potential objections during the check-out process.

Drive home your trustworthiness by including contact information such as your address and phone number right when customers could be having second thoughts. Include links to your privacy policy, and highlight how simple your returns policy is (if applicable).

3. Show Progress at Each Step
If possible, keep your checkout process short and sweet. If you need several pages to complete your checkout, keep your customers updated on where they currently are and how much longer the process will take. This reduces frustration and can prevent cart abandonment.

4. Add an Exit Survey
If you give your customers the chance to tell you why they abandoned their shopping carts, you will know what metrics you can improve to boost your conversion rate. You might be surprised at what you can learn about customer perceptions of your business with a simple survey!

5. Give Your Customers Options
Don't assume that all your customers want to buy through your shopping cart. Give customers the option of completing their order by telephone, fax, or postal mail. Not only can this improve your profits, but sometimes simply having those options available will be enough assurance to convince customers to complete the online checkout process.

Following these five simple guidelines can help you create a more pleasant shopping experience for your customers – and increase your chances of closing the sale.

To find out more, call 01242 570330 for a no-obligation consultation.

Three Guideposts to Greater Ad Conversion

Imagine yourself walking through a beautiful forest. You don't know the forest well, but your path is clearly marked, and you are certain you are going in the right direction. But without warning, the path ends, and there is nothing to indicate which way to go. Confused and frustrated, you turn around and go home.

Sound terrible? It is. And even worse, this is the experience of many Internet users who respond to online advertisements.

How to Increase Conversions in Online Advertising
All too often, companies create fun, informative, and appealing advertisements that have little to nothing in common with the website that visitors see when they click through. Suddenly, visitors find themselves in unfamiliar territory, with no sign of the offer that enticed them to visit the website in the first place.

The result? A high exit rate on the landing page.

If you want to increase the power of your advertisements to convert visitors into customers, you must define an easy-to-follow path from your ad straight through to the sale. How? Just follow these three simple steps:

1. Make sure your advertisement matches your landing page in colour scheme, tone, and/or theme. If your ads look unrelated to your website, visitors will wonder if they are in the right place.

2. Use images to mark the trail. Visual elements in advertisements stick with visitors longer than words. Therefore, make sure to mark your visitors' trail with well-placed images and logos to ensure that they can find their way. Creating special icons for sales and promotions makes it easy for your visitors to follow the path to conversion.

3. If you make an offer in an ad, put the offer on the landing page. It's amazing how frequently a company will lure visitors to its website with an attractive offer, and then leave them high and dry when they arrive. Don't make your visitors search your site! Make it easy to find the offer your ad promises.

Keep these three simple rules in mind when you design your next online ad campaign. To see your conversion rates soar, craft a specialised landing page to greet your visitors once they've clicked your ads. Make sure visitors know they are in the right place, and remind them of why they came. Escort them along the path to the offer that lured them to your website with clear navigation and obvious links to the information in your ads.

By following these guideposts, you will decrease your exit rate and establish a clear path for your website visitors to follow. This, in turn, will encourage many more visitors to become paying customers.

If you would like a no-obligation consultation, please call 01242 570330.

10 Misconceptions That Can Derail Your E-Commerce Business: Your Customers Will Assume You Are Trustworthy

Do you receive a steady flow of traffic to your website, but see only anaemic sales? Do you offer a fantastic product or service, but fail to gain a foothold in your chosen market? If so, you may have fallen prey to a common e-commerce misconception – the belief that your customers will automatically assume your company is trustworthy.

Eighth E-commerce Misconceptions: Your Customers Will Assume You Are Trustworthy
If you open a brick-and-mortar store, you have already made headway towards proving your trustworthiness. You have invested in renting a shop, stocking your shelves, and employing staff, which implies that your company will still be around next week if a customer has a problem.

You will also have taken additional steps to demonstrate your good intentions. For example, you will have ensured that your store is clean and well lit, you have a transparent returns policy, and you employ friendly and attentive staff. All these actions signal your customers that your business is reliable.

While these signals of trust come naturally to brick-and-mortar businesses, it's amazing how many online companies ignore them. E-commerce requires even more trust than offline shopping because customers do not talk to your business representatives face to face, and cannot even see the quality of the goods offered for themselves. In addition, you will frequently ask customers for private financial information, and customers must trust your website enough to supply it.

To help customers feel comfortable shopping with you, you must actively work to boost the trustworthiness of your website. For example:

Hire a professional to design your website. Sloppy graphics, grammatical mistakes and typos, and bad navigation are the online equivalent of a store with clutter blocking its aisles.
Make your contact information easy to find. Include a street address and telephone number as well as an email address or contact form to let customers know that yours is a legitimate business.
Provide a high level of customer service. Answer any questions promptly and politely so that customers know they are dealing with a company that is actively concerned about their shopping experience.
Have an ironclad privacy policy. Customers will be reluctant to share personal information if they don't know how the information will be used.
Use strong site security. If you ask a customer to transmit private information to your website, be sure you have the highest level of site security available. Make sure that customers know they and their information will be protected.
Display policies prominently. Don't leave your customers to wonder what will happen if they are dissatisfied. At the point of purchase, describe your customer satisfaction policy.
Use testimonials. Customers will have a higher level of trust if they see that others have been pleased with the service your company provides.
Use third-party verification. A number of companies exist to audit and evaluate online businesses. Employ them to prove your trustworthiness.

Assuming that potential customers will believe your site is trustworthy is a sure way to hamstring your e-business. But, if you pay close attention to the way your business presents itself, you can see your profits rise dramatically.

If you would like a review of your site's trustworthiness, call 01242 570330 for a no-obligation consultation.

Hiring a Professional to Manage Your PPC Ads

In our series of pay-per-click (PPC) articles, we've discussed how useful pay-per-click advertising can be. PPC maximizes your return on investment by narrowing your focus to target customers who are most likely to buy at the times when they are most likely to be shopping.

Furthermore, you can increase the overall success of your advertising both on and off site by using your PPC campaign as a test bed. But, do you know the least expensive and most effective way to accomplish these goals?

Many small to medium-sized enterprises dive into PPC advertising with little knowledge or experience, and end up getting burned. They either lose money hand over fist while gaining experience or, even worse, they get such a bad impression of PPC advertising that they walk away and lose all its potential benefits.

But, hiring a professional to manage your PPC campaign can help you achieve your company's goals in a fraction of the time that it would take you. Here are just a few reasons why hiring a pro can makes good sense.

Time is money
PPC advertising is a sophisticated and highly competitive advertising tool. You can't expect to throw a few ads up and start raking in the money. There is a lot to learn if you want to be successful, including marketing theory, the rules and regulations of each major PPC advertiser, and the tricks to writing PPC-specific advertisements. If you can bring significant money into your company through sales, networking, or managing the business, is studying PPC a valid use of your time?

Continuing education
You must stay current with continuous changes in the industry. PPC tactics can shift quickly as new techniques come to light, searchers become savvier, and search engines fine-tune their offerings. Even after you've learned the basics, you still have work to do to stay on top of your game.

Mistakes are expensive
Many large companies require PPC campaign employees to have years of experience – for a reason. Running a great PPC campaign takes knowledge, and you can lose money while you are learning the ropes.

Consider also how an advanced PPC strategy could attract qualified traffic to your site at a fraction of the click cost that the most obvious search terms exact.

Wasted time translates into lost market share
If you spend time studying information the pros already know, you lose the opportunity to spread the word about your products and gain market share from your competitors.

While it may seem more cost-effective to manage a PPC campaign in-house, the benefits are deceptive when you take the loss of time, manpower, and business focus into account. Hiring a professional PPC company to manage your campaign could be the best money your business ever spends.

If you would like a no-obligation consultation, please call 01242 570330.

Reaching Your Target Customers

New advertising opportunities arise every day in the online world. This presents a challenge to marketers who must allocate a limited advertising budget to achieve the highest return on investment.

Do banner ads deserve a larger portion of the advertising budget, or would a pass-along viral campaign have a better result? How can you determine the likelihood of success for your marketing campaigns?

How Age Affects Marketing Success
Recent studies show that age is an excellent predictor of which advertising methods have the best result. If your company has a solid picture of the age range of your target customer– and it should – then you can hone your advertising choices to best appeal to the people most likely to buy from you.

For example, if your target audience includes:

People between ages 18 and 26, your best marketing results are likely to come from general buzz, links from blogs, and banner advertisements. This audience segment responds well to viral campaigns and emails.
Generation Xers, between 27 and 40, you'll want to concentrate on viral marketing – email marketing that encourages forwarding mails to friends, comparison websites, and recommendations from other trusted users.
Baby Boomers between 41 and 50, you'll notice a high response to mentions in the news. Press releases and interviews are likely to appeal to this audience segment.
Silver surfers, between 51 and 60, you'll find that recommendations from family, links on product packaging and offline advertisements, and entering URLs directly into a browser are the primary methods used to find businesses. If your target audience falls into this age segment, you will want to emphasize trustworthiness, provide testimonials, and encourage word-of-mouth advertising.

What If Your Target Audience Crosses Generations?
While some businesses offer services or products that attract people of a specific age, others cut across age ranges.

If your business appeals to more than one age group, you can use these guidelines to create customised advertisements that appeal to the age group most likely to respond to them.

In addition, one powerful advertising method appeals to every generation – search engine marketing. More than 70 percent of website visits from online shoppers in every age category begin with a search engine. Therefore, no matter what your target audience's age group, search engine marketing should be part of your advertising mix.

If some of the methods covered in this article interest you, please call 01242 570330 for a no-obligation consultation.