Ecommerce

80% Conversion Rate!! I'd Like To See That

Seth Berman over at Post Click Marketing recently posted on how some large companies such as Mattel are getting an 80% conversion rate for some of their website properties.

Unfortunately he didn't say too much more, so I immediately chastised him for being such a tease and begged him to do an interview, share some slides or whitepaper with the companies in question.

He promised to do that, so stay tuned.

What Seth did add was that Mattel wasn't the only one getting such high conversion rates. He cited Mozilla and this page as another example.

This is the Firefox 4 download page See pics below.

My first reaction was: “Well, yeh, of course, that's what you'd expect from such a page.”

But after engaging my marketing and optimisation brain, I realised there was plenty we could all learn from Mozilla's page.

So here are my seven top tips of what you can learn from the Mozilla Firefox page:

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Always Call When The Customer is Hot

How to Remarket for Maximum Results

If you have any sort of online shopping cart, registration, sign-up or customer enquiry process you must complete that interaction within a few minutes.

This is especially so if they abandon the process.

Whether it's responding to a customer enquiry for more information or re-marketing to customers after they have failed to complete the shopping process, all benefit from rapid response.

The research continues to show that the quicker you respond the higher the likelihood of closing the deal.

And that makes sense.

If the customer has just been on your website, tried to register or buy something, or filled in a contact form, then that is when their interest is at its highest.

That's when you should call them. That's when you should remarket to them.

Call Me Now or Lose Me

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Online Marketing Success in One Easy Step

Online Marketers Still Clueless

The Insanity Continues

Most online marketers are still clueless as to where to spend their money, or your money more to the point.

For every $80 spent online to get a prospect to just come to your website, only $1 is spent on actually turning them into a customer once they get there, according to Omniture.

This is madness, and unfortunately it's been going on for over a decade.

According to Omniture in 2008

•  $23 billion was spent on online search and display ads

•  But only $250 million was spent on site optimization

I'm sorry, let's read that again, that's billions vs millions.

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What Sexy Food Can Teach You About Website Navigation

Sex and food are the two greatest motivators for most people, so any website that combines the two has a good chance of getting high conversion rates and good online business.

The other day i took a shot at Yogurberry for having a great landing page but with no call to action.

That being said it's still a great looking site, and the way it uses it's images on the rest of the site perfectly highlights how captivating the right images can be.

It looks like the designers had a lot of fun when doing this site.

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What Australian Business Must Learn From the Gerry Harvey Fiasco

We should all thank Gerry Harvey for giving us one of the best case studies on online shopping and social media for a long time.

His New Year attack on online shopping was over almost as soon as it began. While there has been a mountain of criticism over Harvey's ill advised campaign, there are lessons from this one act tragedy all Australian businesses to heed.

1: Respect the Customer

Harvey's first mistake was to treat shoppers and the wider public as fools. Telling people to buy goods from his stores where they are 30-40% dearer, rather than buying them online was never going to wash. Even mainstream media could see this was nonsense, and he was deservedly castigated for this.

If shoppers want to save money don't attack them for it, it won't win you any friends or new customers.

If shoppers want to shop online, then make sure you're online store is the one they go to.

Respecting the customer is one of the golden rules of business and marketing. It shouldn't be necessary to restate this rule, but obviously it is as Gerry Harvey was merely the public face of a campaign supported by other Australian retailers.

Kiss and Sell - Conversion Rate Optimization - Tip # 4

The simpler you can make your online processes the better.

The easier it is for your customers to interact with your site

the more money you’ll make,
the more leads you’ll get,
the more conversions you’ll get etc.

Just think of Google.

Late to the search engine game, it made searching so simple it eventually trumped all the long established players. (Some of you don’t even know who the players were before Google.)

Not only did Google become the premier search engine, it went on to become one of the dominant technology companies, even putting the wind up Microsoft.google

Simplicity is a very powerful marketing tool. Don’t under estimate it.

Remember the KISS principle – Keep it Simple Stupid.

Conversion Rates - The Missing Improvement Secrets

Conversion rates can be 400% higher or more when running a marketing campaign. This means there is more to website conversion rate improvement than conventional conversion rate practices such as landing page optimisation, and tweaking website design factors.

Offline and offsite marketing factors such as better advertising, better offers, better products etc are equally as effective.

The fact that marketing/ advertising campaigns can increase conversion rates by four or even eight fold seems obvious in hindsight. It’s really just marketing 101: If you’re marketing is any good it should be driving more highly qualified customers to your website who are more likely to convert at a higher rate. (If that isn’t happening then review your marketing and your landing pages.)

But the effect of good marketing brings up a number of key points that aren’t usually part of the current conversion rate improvement conversation.

Is Your Customer Data Secure? - Very Unlikely

Most businesses are making it incredibly easy for organised criminals to steal critical data, according a new report from Verizon Business.

While organised crime is getting more and more innovative about online crime, many businesses seem to be going backwards and failing to comply with even the basic security standards.

The reasons seem to be a combination of ignorance, laziness and a surprising reluctance to invest in securing customer and company data.

Organised Crime is Coming to Get You

The Verizon report found that 285 million records were compromised last year (2008), and that 91% of the attacks were by organized criminals.

That is, security breaches are no longer the domain of teenage hackers just looking to make a name for themselves. Your data is now a major target of organised crime, which is investing considerable time, money and resources to get at your sensitive information.

Ten Free Online Marketing Tools

A while back, I put together a list of 10 free tools to enable you to build an online business for free. (Actually, it ended up being 21, but who’s counting.)

Anyway, I already have another 10 that I just have to tell you about, that are not only free but actually really very useful.

Online Advertising - the Last Thing You Should Do

And the Top Five Things To Do First

Ninety nine percent of online advertising doesn’t work. Two more reports highlight the appalling click thru rates generated by online ads. One from Adtech and another from ABI.

photo credit: Pascale PirateChickan

After a study of more than 10 billion banner inquiries across Europe, Adtech found the average click-through rate fluctuates between 0.11% and 0.19%.

That’s a 99% failure rate for attracting visitors to your site. Any sporting coach with a 99% failure rate would quickly find themselves looking for a different line of work.

So why do so many people keep wasting huge amounts of money on something that is a total failure: In a word: HOPE.

But as a good friend of mine always used to say, “Hope is a t*#d with a cherry on top.”

For those of you who are ready to abandon hope and try the world of effective marketing then enter here.

How Validation Will Increase Your Conversions and Profits

To put it simply - validating your site (making it standards compliant) will increase your conversions, sales and profits.

It will also prevent you from getting sued.

If ever anyone ever tells you that your site's validation and compliance doesn't matter be afraid, very afraid. This is a warning bell that says they don't understand the requirements and responsibilities of business.

Content is Not King - it is Supreme

How Web 3.0, the Semantic Web Will Affect Everything

The web of the future is going to make content supreme. What’s more, it’s going to make it incredibly valuable in ways that may finally see content creators get real reward and value for their efforts.

Almost since the start of the modern web, industry experts have been continually saying that Content is King: And they’ve been right, but now they’re right in ways that they couldn’t have possibly imagined.

The coming semantic web, known variously as the data web, microformats, FOAF, RDF, Linked Data, Web 3.0 and a whole host of new acronyms is pointing to big changes in cybersphere.

Yahoo recently announced it was embracing semantic web standards , and has already released some interesting tools that point to the future. Many are seeing this as a good thing and direct challenge to Google.

The End of Google?

Never Pay For Web Development Again

10 Free Solutions To Give You a Complete Website

When I first began working in e-commerce I was regularly "quoted" seriously high six figure amounts just to build a website, with another similar amount required for implementation.(It wasn't that long ago.)

Mercifully, things are so much better now. Today there are so many free solutions and services that it is possible for anyone to build a fully featured website for nothing. And in almost no time.

Obviously there will still be design and set up costs involved, but for the most part the change has been radical.

Here then is my list of 10 free services and applications to get you on your way. They are not in any order, so you can choose at random.

How To Get More Customers Online

Some interesting reports have recently been released detailing what techniques and strategies many direct marketers are using to acquire and keep customers.

Direct marketers are usually the sharpest cookies in the marketing arena because they are obsessed with producing financial results, and will usually do whatever it takes to turn a dollar. (No bad taste jokes please.)

Therefore, they are usually worth listening to as they can always back up their marketing strategies with hard results.

The Number One Tactic

According to Target Marketing’s Media Usage Report, the number one tactic for getting more customers and giving the strongest return on investment (ROI) was direct mail.

That’s the printed, personal letter in an envelope with stamp kind of mail.

To Market Online You Must Market Offline

Traditional offline marketing is one of the most effective ways of driving qualified customers to your online business.

However, it is often totally overlooked by many in the ecommece and online marketing arena. Scratch any online marketer and you'll find an almost obsessive focus on search engine optimization, search engine marketing and online advertising.

There will probably be some talk about email marketing, and, if they are really on the ball, a discussion about conversion rate improvement, but traditional offline marketing methods will probably barely rate a mention.

As a business owner, this means you're missing out on a huge opportunity to drive customers to your site and generate revenue.

Traditional marketing's effectiveness at generating online customers was recently highlighted in research by The e-Tailing Group.

It found that consumers are most motivated to go online after:

Confessions of Conversion Rate Commando

There’s more to it than just conversion rate.

For the past 12 years I have been a conversion rate fanatic, evangelist and downright pain to some people over conversion rates.

While my obsession has not been without good reason, for a while now I’ve been thinking that conversion rate is perhaps not the ultimate measure of a site’s performance that I thought it was.

The Problem With Averages

The first problem with comparing yourself to global average conversion rates is that they are averages.

Without seeing the bell curve it’s hard to gain any context of where the low or high performers are.