12 Tried and Tested Golden Rules for Converting Your Internet Traffic into Customers

Preaching To the Converted

Peter Van Zelst

What Barriers Do You Put Before Your Potential Customers?

Imagine that thing you've most wanted to buy.

You've seen the adverts, read the reviews and write ups, talked to all your friends about it and heard loads of stuff that's got you so excited.

You've seen it in the window and now you're there, seeing, feeling, touching and trying it. You're all ready to part with your money and it's yours. But then….. the Sales Person scare you off, or you can't find any sales people to take your order, or they close the checkout, or the queue is around half an hour, or they make you complete a three page form before you're even considered worthy of becoming a customer, or ..... Well I'm sure you've got your own examples.

We've all been there – we're sold, we want to buy, all we need is….. And the stupid retailer puts a barrier before us.

How frustrated do we feel? How annoyed do we get? Will we ever go back there again? And what about the retailer? What a chump? To get that close? And to have wasted all that effort and expense on a customer who will NEVER come back?

This happens every day in shops throughout the world but it also happens all the time online and, in my opinion, is the cardinal sin of online marketing.

Companies make great efforts to get people to their website and lose them before they even get past the landing page, because they don't properly engage them and convert them from browsers to visitors?

Website owners set an objective like getting people to sign up for something or request an appointment and then don't properly consider how it works and what they are actually asking people to do.

So here are our 12, tried and tested, golden rules for converting internet traffic into customers:-

1. Set Clear Objectives, i.e. Conversion Targets.

Sounds simple but you'd be surprised how many site owners just want to get people to visit their website and think everything else will follow. What do you want people to do:-

2. Design Your Site/Page Around Those Objectives

If you want people to book a follow up call or visit, make sure your visitors understand that and are clearly requested to do that. My old uncle (who was professional salesman) used to tell me that the biggest mistake most salespeople made was not to ask for the order. And this is the same with a lot of websites. You've got a visitor who has found the site, wants what you've got, has read all about your company and wants to do business but they don't know what to do next because it hasn't been spelled out.

3. Make It As Easy As Possible For Your Visitors To Complete Your Objective

If you want someone to sign up to a newsletter all you need is their name and email address, you don't need them to complete a 10 item form. If you want someone to buy something don't put obstacles in the way. Ask for the minimum amount of information you need to complete their request and make it as simple and easy to complete as possible.

4. Keep It Short, Sweet And Simple

Minimise the content on each and every conversion page. Do not fill your page with words and complications; just keep it very simple with straightforward bullet points telling them what they need to know and what they need to do next.

5. Finish Every Page With A Strong Call To Action

Whether you want them to submit a form, send a payment, give you their email address or just view another page, issue a strong, compelling call to action, telling them what you want them to do and how it will benefit them when they do it.

6. Make Everything As Simple, Straightforward And Obvious As Possible

Look at your website with your customers eyes. Understand how they think and try to imagine every conceivable scenario that may make them confused or unsure. Don't use jargon, acronyms or long words where simple English is possible. Try to keep everything to a minimum of clicks, think of Amazon and Apple's 1-click shopping.

7. Test Everything… Repeatedly

Think of every possible scenario and test it. Get your friends and staff to test it in every conceivable way. Once your site or pages are live, monitor it! If you can see issues which you think may be hindering conversions, test out different alternatives and monitor them closely.

8. Know Your Site and Conversion Process Inside Out

I'm often staggered when I find companies that don't regularly test their check out process, sign up form, or other conversion processes. When we take on a client we get to know the conversion processes backwards and test them out from all different scenarios;- using different types of internet user, different browsers, different operating systems and computers, different internet connections, different network locations, different times of day and so on. Then we monitor the process closely using analytics to see if there are common drop out points that we haven't spotted. Then we try to replicate and get the site developer to fix the issues.

9. Build Trust And Establish Empathy

You want your visitors/customers to empathise and bond with you, you also need them to trust you. If you want them to give you their email address - tell them all about how you protect their data and privacy, how you will not sell their information and how much you hate spam. If you want their credit card details, make sure you have top notch security procedures and SSLs in place and you back it up with security and privacy policies. Lack of trust is one of the biggest causes of conversion failure and customers bailing out of a transaction.

10. Don't Sting Them With Extras

A Great Headline Price, a Free Offer or Subscription can often bring people in and get them so far, but if you then sting them with extra charges or additional requirements expect your conversion rates to plummet. Extra charges, conditions and the like have traditionally been the number 1 obstacle to converting a transaction.

11. Make Sure Your Site And Pages Are Quick To Load

Your pages need to load quickly, if not instantly. People are impatient and will not hang around for your tardy site when there are plenty of others who do what you do. Research shows that anything up to 60% of your visitors will exit your page if it takes more than 6 to 8 seconds to load (and you can bet your bottom dollar they will NEVER return).

12. Did I Mention Testing?

Yes I know it's boring but you need to test everything. Retail is detail as the saying goes and online it's just as, if not more important. If you website crashes, page fails to load, if your SSL is out of date, if there's a spelling mistake, or a broken link, your visitors will find it and they'll leave, never to return! Make sure everything works and then test it again.

And the bonus rule, Don't spend time and money marketing your website until you have fully understood and implemented the above. If you do, not only will you be wasting your time and money but you'll be alienating your potential new customers in the process!

To find our if and how we can help convert your vistors into customers Contact Us Now!


Online Marketing - Focus on the Business First Not the Tricks

Search Engine Marketing with Go Faster Stripes

Peter Van Zelst

Turbo Charge Your Search Marketing but get the Fundamentals Right First

Focus on the Business First, Not the Tricks

Being involved in online marketing I read, hear and see a lot about the various tricks and tools people recommend you use to get you to the top of the search engines, bring you untold riches and lead you to eternal happiness.

The truth is that, like a lot of quick fixes, get rich quick schemes and teach yourself/how to guides, the basic principles will mostly work, however unless the foundations are there, the value of such schemes is largely futile.

Put it like this, if I could show you a quick way to run faster wouldn't that be great? Well, it would be if you knew you were running in the right direction, but what if you didn't know where you were going or worse still were heading in completely the wrong direction? It would just mean that you got to the wrong place quicker or further away from where you should be.

If I could show you a way to tune up your engine to get an extra 10% performance, that would be fantastic, provided the wheels hadn't come off your 15 year old Ford Escort.

Fancy tricks, tweaks and tunes are great provided you know where you're going and it's the place where you want to go, you've got all your wheels on and your bodywork's sound! But if they're not, at the very least, you could be wasting your time.

Unfortunately, focusing on the fundamentals is the difficult bit, one that not everyone can do and something that a lot look to avoid, hoping fancy tricks will overcome. If you want genuine, lasting and sustainable success, however, focus on the business first, not the tricks.

To find our if and how we can help you with your online marketing Contact Us Now!


How PPC Can Help You And Your Business

Why Paid Search Advertising is the Most Cost Effective form of Advertising

Joe Wanamaker Would Have Loved It

An Introduction to Pay Per Click (PPC) Paid Search Marketing

John Wanamaker, a Philadelphia department store retailer and US Postmaster General, is famously quoted as saying "I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half." If you've been in business for any length of time you'll know the feeling. Advertising is about committing money, an often considerable amount of money, to one or a series of advertisements, doing your best to ensure they hit the mark and then sitting nervously and hoping.

The trouble is that a lot of the time that's all you've got to show for your money, hope. Hope that it did some good, hope it built your brand, hope it spread awareness and hope, one day, that it may bear fruit. How many times can you say, well I know when I spend £1000, I'm going to get x sales and when I spend £2,000 I'm going to get 2 times x sales? Well, that's what PPC is all about. If you want to know how you can get advertising that delivers results that you can measure and takes the guesswork/gambling out of advertising spending then read on....

My background is in business. For many years in my career, I avoided Newspaper, Television, Magazine and Radio advertising because it just didn't deliver results. When I set up an online business, however, I realised pretty quickly that you have to advertise because, sure as eggs is eggs, no-one will find you by accident. I spent large amounts of money on Newspaper, Magazine and Radio advertising and guess what? It still didn't deliver results.

So, I learnt about online marketing:- natural search, developing links with other websites, directories, online banner advertising, affiliate marketing, email marketing and a number of other things. All great ways of developing business and all measurable.

And then I discovered Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Marketing. PPC was a way of taking the gamble out of getting to the top of the search engines. You could guarantee to come at the top of the page if you paid a few pennies for each click that you got. Suddenly, rather than the famine or flood type of traffic surges that many of the other activities produced, you could regulate the amount of traffic and business to your website. Absolutely amazing! PPC has moved on somewhat from those early days but, in essence, its benefits remain the same. It is:-

So if your firm needs a regular flow of business, or you have people and facilities to keep busy, or you have overheads to cover and don't want to rely on pot luck, then PPC provides it.

The Search Engines

Advertise Only to Your Customers

Search Engines are an online resource that gather, sort and report information from the Internet, based on your topic of interest. There are hundreds of different search engines, but, according to who you believe, Google, the largest, now accounts for between 43% and 90% of the world's searches.

Most of the larger search engines finance their activities through offering advertising. The largest element of this advertising is the sponsored links or search results that appear at the top of the page, which are traditionally, sold on a Pay Per Click (PPC) Basis, i.e. the advertiser only pays when someone clicks through to their website. Because of its dominance, particularly in the UK, I mainly talk about Google's PPC offer, called AdWords, and this is what I tend to initially recommend to clients. Yahoo, Windows Live Search, Ask, Miva and a number of others all offer PPC services which can and should be used as a business's PPC advertising model is developed.

What Is Google?

For the benefit of anyone that has been buried under a large object for the past 10 years Google is a search engine that gathers, sorts and reports information from the Internet, based on your topic of interest.

Advertise to Your Target Customers

What is Google Advertising?
Next to the search results, adverts can appear both on the right hand side of the page and occasionally above the search results. These are put there by Google's online advertising product, called Google AdWords. These Adverts are triggered by the user query - this is called keyword advertising.
Google adverts are also displayed on partner network sites like the Times, Telegraph, Conde Naste websites next to content on related topics, e.g. an advert for Designer Menswear may appear on the GQ magazine site on a page that is talking about designer menswear.
The Google Network reaches over 85% of Internet Users worldwide, so one way or another you can reach most of your potential customers.

Keyword Advertising

Because keyword advertising is highly targeted, you only ever advertise to people who are looking for what you have. And because you only pay per click, you only ever pay for people who are actually interested enough in your offer to visit your website. How many other advertising mediums do that?

If you get your profiling and targeting right then you are advertising directly to people who are using search engines to look for specific items. They are in the market for what you have and are indicating that they are close to the buying decision. And what's even better you can see exactly what those people do and how they react to your advertising and offer. So if your advertising works you can do more of it and if it doesn't you can change it or stop it.

Benefits of Paid Search Marketing

I think you can summarise the main benefits of PPC as that:-

Targeted

The Targeting in the above is crucial and you can target:-

So how do you prepare a campaign?

Well, there are two ways. You can either throw a lot of money and PPC advertising in hope and then moan that it doesn't work (which a lot of people do at first) or you can employ professionals like ourselves who do the boring preparation work…....

How do we prepare a campaign?

Basically, we prepare a Strategic Marketing Analysis which focuses on a company's:

From this we then develop

We then actively manage the campaign

Sounds complicated? Well, yes it is a little but to get the most out of your PPC campaign you need to do this and because of the huge volume of searches there are, if you don't get it right you can end up with an awful lot of poorly targeted traffic and wasted spending.

Benefits of AdWords

With AdWords there is absolutely no minimum spend. You can spend as little or as much as you want. The only maximums are the amount of people searching for the keywords you choose and deciding to click through to your adverts. You choose your own maximum daily spending limit (daily budget). You choose how much you want to spend per click for every keyword and then pay Google for users who click on to your ad. Minimum ‘bid' or click prices for a lot of terms start from as little as 1p, and many clicks can be bought for pennies.

Because it is so targeted, it is significantly more cost-effective than Yellow Pages, Banner Ads & Direct Mail and when you get leads, they are warm leads because they have already demonstrated they are in the market for your products or services.

By using Conversion tracking you can see your real-time return-on-investment data and adjust your advertising accordingly. If your order book's full you can stop advertising, if you need more business you can up your campaign.

In a nutshell, PPC Search Advertising is cheap and effective versus any other advertising method, which is why it is so fast growing. It can be used in most business sectors and contexts, to achieve a variety of objectives, from generating sales, leads or enquiries, to making people aware of a key message. Search is now, by far, the Largest Share of Online Ads and Google will soon overtake ITV as the biggest UK advertising medium.

Are you exploiting this fast growing media and using PPC for precise, targeted, low cost and highly cost effective marketing?

If you want to know more about PPC advertising and how it could help your business, Contact Us Now or download this FREE PowerPoint Presentation.


February 2007: Selling Touchy Feely Stuff Online

Two interesting things happened coincidentally yesterday afternoon! A new client, Lovingthatgift.com, was telling me that she'd taken along some of her site's products to a presentation at a local women's group meeting. She said that once people could see, touch and feel the stuff they commented how lovely and different they were. She realised that not being able to do this on the internet is what she needed to overcome to make her site a success. Shortly afterwards I read a news story about online fashion sales last year exceeding £1 billion. It reminded me of the early days of e-commerce when it was widely believed that clothes sales online would never catch on, because people had to feel, touch and try them on. So what happened? In short things and people have moved on, consumers and retailers have both become more sophisticated. So what do you need to do to successfully sell Touchy Feely Stuff Online? Here are a few pointers.

Products

Choose your products carefully. If you're selling clothes, a very fitted garment will look completely different on people of different sizes and shapes and is probably going to be a hard thing to sell over the internet. A baggy jumper, on the other hand, will fit a wider variety of people and won't be so difficult. Boden is one of the most successful and best online fashion sites

Pictures.

Good images help sell products. Poor images will stop sales. And no images are an absolute turn-off. I was shopping online yesterday with my 9 year old daughter for a new webcam and was amazed by the number of items we saw that either had no image or were ‘awaiting images'. My daughter wouldn't even consider those products. If the image was poor or product badly displayed there was a similar reaction.
Make sure the image is representative and realistic. If a product (like a person) has a good side and a bad side show both. If you just show the bad side you won't sell anything. If you just show the good side you'll have disappointed customers.
Where possible, show as many pictures as possible, from different angles and distances, so that the customer can really see what they are buying.
Scale. Size is important - try to emphasise it in the product image. People tend to see what they want to see. You don't want people discovering its much bigger or smaller than they imagined once they've bought it.
Colours. Be wary that everyone's monitor is different and represents colours differently. Style. Try to follow a consistent theme with your product photography. A mish-mash of different image sizes, layouts, backgrounds, etc., will confuse people and will detract from the shopping experience.

Words or ‘Content'

If you're familiar with the concept of NLP you'll recognise that people place different emphasis on images, words and feelings. If your site is to be successful it needs to have a good balance of images and words. Some people will focus more on the images, whilst others will concentrate on the words and some will study both. The words need to describe, in as much detail as possible, the product and its benefits to your customers. You need to write these words in the language of your target customers. If your target ‘demographic' is teenage girls you need to use a completely different language to that if your target market is 50-60 year old men.
Focus on the benefits of your products not the features. Simple but you'd be amazed how few people do!
Don't over promise – Do over deliver. You want delighted customers whose expectations you've exceeded, not disappointed ex-customers who will tell all and sundry how you let them down.
Add as much background and stories behind your brand as possible. You want to establish credibility and trust with your customers and potential customers, so that they believe what you're telling them and want to do business with you.

Guarantees and Returns.

A Guarantee and a straightforward, no-nonsense returns policy are vital. People don't want to be conned and they don't want to be stuck with something they're not happy with. Few people do return items or enforce guarantees but they don't want to risk trying new things or suppliers if they haven't got the option, so you'll tend to gain more than you lose. If you're selling clothes returns are a given and you need to build that into your pricing.

In short, you have to make your online shopping experience as comparably enjoyable to visiting a shop as possible, with all the added benefits of e-commerce. You must look to give your potential customer as interactive experience as you can and look to engage them wherever possible in the benefits of your brand. And you need to give your customers as much information as they need to allow them to buy your products.

To find our if and how we can help you with your online sales Contact Us Now!



December 2006:Online Spending Surges

Amazon were one of the chief recipients of the Online Christmas Spending Surge

Britons will spend 55 per cent of their Christmas present budget online, or an average of £237 each, with around 70 per cent of the population buying gifts on the internet.

And this means that, if you're a retailer who isn't currently selling online successfully, you should be seriously considering your plans for 2007.

So if you're retailer who isn't currently selling online successfully, I'd like to talk to you about how to exploit your business online and how to market your products and services profitably over the web.



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