| Visit your local shopping mall or shopping centre in recent times and you canโt help but notice the increased number of empty shops. It would be easy to totally put this down to the recession, but I canโt help wonder if itโs also a symptom of the slow but steady shift of trade from offline to online. More and more of us are switching to online shopping carts to purchase all sorts of goods and the number of substantial web-based businesses is slowly climbing. The fundamental drivers behind online shopping, says Andreas Stjernstrรถm, Australian and New Zealand country manager for content management systems provider EPiServer, โis that it is convenient and users can find new products, conduct research around the clock and feel like they have made a great purchase โ thereby verifying their spending. Which is classic consumer behaviourโ. But how do you approach the whole issue of e-commerce marketing? How can you attract the right people to your website and convert them into paying customers โ and bring them back time and time again to buy more? Amongst the gazillions of sites out there โ how can you make yours profitable? Lee Williams seemed like the ideal person to ask. An online marketing veteran and driving force behind Europeโs most successful motoring website (autotrader.co.uk), heโs now โleading the next wave of online revolutionโ with online video marketing (silverlinemedia.tv) and online advertising solutions for small business (eboost). To bring in the customers, first ensure your website is visible to Google and other key search engines such as Microsoftโs Bing and Yahoo, he says. โGoogle is where most of your customers will start their online journey. Ensuring your website ranks well for your products and/or services is critical. Your first priority is therefore to ensure your site is search engine optimised (SEO).โ No surprises so far you might think โ most of us know about SEO. But as Maria Wasing points out on the EPiServer blog-site, your SEO is influenced by many factors. โThe quality of the content, how it is created, technology (the quality of the code) and site design, how many other websites compete with you as well as their ranking, links to your site, the technology and how the website is coded. You need to look at all of these to ensure that your ranking is good,โ she says. Google is constantly looking at your siteโs content and looking at whatโs happening off your site, says Netinsitesโ Alex Garden. โSo consider how many people link to your site. Do they use the right keywords in the link text? If you have other high-ranking sites linking to your site then Google will think youโre important โ and up the rankings youโll go.โ So SEO is the first thing to tick on your list โ and itโs worth remembering that 50 percent of all online purchases start with a search. But to do search marketing correctly, itโs best to seek help from an expert. Another means of attracting potential customers is via online directories, says Williams. โNew Zealand businesses have a plethora of choices online with attractive audiences in terms of both volume and targeting.โ He cites NZS.com, Finda.co.nz and Hotfrog.co.nz as good examples โ as well as vertical directories such as nocowboys.co.nz (trades and services), menumania.co.nz (restaurants) and equinetrader.co.nz (horses). Online advertising or โbanner-adsโ is also an option, says Williams โThese options are expanding fast as international websites start to offer the targeting of advertisers to โKiwi eyeballsโ.โ In New Zealand, he says, the IAB PWC Online Advertising Report indicates online advertising will reach $200 million this year, probably overtaking magazine advertising spend, to add to the scalps of outdoor and cinema. In the UK the IAB PWC survey has shown online is now ahead of the historical giant of TV. Fourth on the list for generating traffic to your site is social media. โThe big online development over the past couple of years has been the dramatic rise of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and โ for business specifically, LinkedIn. Social media can deliver new customers, but primarily is a terrific tool to communicate and engage current customers.โ But wait, thereโs more. Alex Garden says Google AdWords can still be effective if youโre looking to drive the numbers up just a few percentage points. โAlthough thereโre more up-front costs because youโre paying per click, AdWords are particularly good for real-time promotions. You can have a campaign up and people clicking through within an hour of posting,โ he says. โI know of one client who managed to completely regenerate his business through AdWords.โ And Garden says donโt discount traditional forms of advertising to attract people to your site. Channels such as email marketing and e-newsletters still have an important role to play too. Conversion and engagement Once youโve brought those prospects to your website, the trick is to turn them into paying customers. The first question, says Garden, is to ask whether your website looks the part. โIs it professional looking? When was it last refreshed? Howโs its usability โ is it well-structured so users can easily find and buy things? What would happen if you threw someone whoโs not all that web-literate on your site โ would they have difficulty making a purchase?โ Donโt hide things away โ and keep everything simple, adds Garden โ no use having a cool looking site, when people have to go hunting for things. Build interaction on every page, he says. โYouโve got to get them to sign up for your newsletter and keep them engaged โ you could perhaps do this by hosting a prize draw or a competition. On the subject of competitions, Garden says in the US particularly there are many tricks and technologies employed to engage customers โ user-generated content (UGC) being one of them. โThe 3M Post-It Note campaign in the US, entitled โYou Stuck it Where?โ is an example of UGC โ the competition encourages consumers to submit videos of themselves using the brandโs Super Sticky product line in an innovative way. The winner, as voted by the public, received $10,000.โ Converting visitors to your site into paying customers is a bit of an art, according to Michael Walmsley, GM of Experian Hitwise, the online intelligence service and search marketing agency that delivers traffic and reveals the demographics, attitudes and behavioural characteristics of visitors to thousands of websites. |
โOnce youโve attracted the right people to your site, itโs all about โconversion optimisationโ. Look at the path to conversion. It must be as short as possible. Look at the balance between providing too much or not enough information. Make sure itโs a simple process, and that itโs measurable.โ ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย |
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