Internet Marketing Commerce

The relationship you build with your customers and how you do it is one thing that will send you on your way to being the leader in your niche. How do they contact you? How do you contact them? Are you always ready to answer their questions right away? These are all very important questions and you need to make sure you have a good grasp on them.

The first thing you can do to improve your website is examine your sales letter or sales letters. What questions are you being asked and which ones are the most consistent? This is something you need to look over and then adds those questions and responses to your website. Even with a near perfect sales letter you will receive emails from customers asking questions.

If you do not respond to emails in a timely manner you may lose that customer. They are ready to buy they just need you to guide them in the right direction. The faster you answer your emails the better. Chances are they asked a few of your competitors a similar or the same question and whoever gets back to them the quickest with the best answer will be the one they buy from.

Live chat is also a good feature to have this allows your customers to get an answer right away and allows you to talk to multiple customers at once. This will make your customer service much more efficient without sacrificing quality and efficiency.

Depending on the type of e-commerce website have an 800-Number, but make sure it’s displayed in an eye-catching spot on every page of your site. Every e-commerce website should at least have an email for customer service contact. Making either one of these very visible makes a big difference. That way your customer does not have to go on a hunt for your number or email address. It’s also a good idea to show it throughout your checkout process in case there’s an error with your customers order. Also make sure you have an FAQ page to help eliminate the amount of customer service inquiries. This is also a good page to deliver a live chat option. If your checkout has multiple steps make sure it shows the customer how far along they are in the checkout process. The most effective way is to make your checkout process only two steps, your shopping cart page and one page to enter all of their other information. This will improve your conversion rate and eliminate the chances of more errors occurring during the checkout process.

Many people will sign up for your newsletter simply for whatever it is that you’re offering as an incentive. However, many of them will still remain subscribed but not actually read the newsletter. There is only one way to change the view of these subscribers and that’s by writing a subject that captures their interest. You will need a subject that is well thought out and well written. Without a subject that captures their interest instantly what is the incentive to open the email? Well, there isn’t one and your readers are going to move on to their other emails.

Your subject should be short and concise. It should provide a summary of the emails content to give your subscribers an idea of what to expect. A good subject will trigger a certain emotion of your subscribers and get them to open your email. You have to remember your subject needs to grab their attention right away since you only have a few seconds. Two of the best types of subjects are ones that ask a question and that command your reader. You need to make sure that your subject pertains to your niche as much as possible. The only way to really know which type of subject works for your niche is to test. Divide your list and send out the different subjects you’ve come up with and see which one converts better.

1. Trying to target multiple niches

The larger the market that you target the harder is becomes to be the best and satisfy every customer. While it can definitely be done it’s much more difficult to do than targeting towards a specific niche and your marketing becomes much more complicated. With all kinds of different products and services it’s no small undertaking. This is something that will cost a lot of money to startup and creates a much bigger risk.

2. Venture capital with a return that takes too long

While there are many business plans that can become successful with the right amount of venture capital investment, there are some that will take longer than others to become profitable. If you are relying on venture capitalists for an initial investment you need to make sure you have ones that are truly sold on your plan. There are times where a business will take longer to be profitable than predicted but will in fact become profitable if you give it time. You need to make sure that you they truly believe otherwise they may pull out before they even give the business a chance to succeed.

3. Continuing investment in unprofitable advertising

There are several forms of advertising that do in fact take a good initial investment to start seeing a return. However, you need to be careful with this and take your advertising slow in the beginning to truly see what is working and whether or not you should continue to advertise there. The mistake that most businesses make is trying to grow to fast and advertise everywhere. This is setting up your marketing campaign for failure. How will you know which advertising campaigns work and which do not work? You could be spending thousands of dollars on advertising that doesn’t work when you could have invested it all in the advertising that works.

Whenever you are doing tests on your website to increase your conversion rate always make sure you change one thing at a time. You could also do split testing but that is a little more complicated and it’s suggested that you start out with standard conversion rate testing. There are several things you need to look at before coming to the conclusion that a change worked or didn’t work to improve your conversion rate.

One of the most important things anyone should remember when testing their conversion rate is to look at the amount of traffic converting based on unique visitors. It’s not a good idea to do this over a day but rather a week or multiple weeks. This can make all the difference for one main reason; typically a lot of visitors require multiple visits to convert. The reason for this is because a lot of visitors want to compare, price shop, get budget approval etc. So, if you record your conversion rate based on a day or a few days it may not be accurate due to these kinds of customers.

You will also want to be careful and make sure that you aren’t running your change too long if it’s consistently posting a negative conversion rate. If you don’t watch your changes carefully it could end up costing your business thousands of dollars in just a week. So as I said before stick to single changes and test. If you make more than one change you won’t know exactly which one worked and you could end up loosing thousands of dollars. Test! Test! Test!

No matter which niche you’re in there is most likely a forum that is in your niche or closely related to your niche. When you find a forum you want to market in you must establish yourself as a user before trying to market. Respond to some others posts and start some new threads that aren’t marketing your website. This is crucial, to establishing yourself as a knowledgeable person and not a spammer. Once you have established yourself continue to provide benefit and answers to others but add in your website as a signature link to your posts. This will show up after every post you make and will bring you traffic from the forum and help build your search engine links. A forum can generate some of your best traffic besides search engines because it’s extremely targeted traffic.

The shopping cart is one of the most important parts to a customer checkout process. In order to receive the best possible conversion rate you need to be sure that you make your customers checkout process as smooth as possible. Besides price, your customers want to make sure that they are purchasing the products with the attributes they wanted. Attributes like size, color, shape, voltage and many others. The reason these are so important to display in the shopping cart is because a customer may need to add or delete and you want to make sure they are adding and deleting the correct products. One of the best things you can do to help eliminate this confusion is to make sure there is an image next to each product in the shopping cart. An excellent shopping cart will display the sku color, a thumbnail image, quantity and a shipping calculator.

There are a number of things that create customer hesitation to purchase a product or products. For instance, is it the best price, is the site secure, quality of the product, is your customer service quality, when will the item arrive, is the product as described and can I return the product? The e-tailing group conducted a consumer survey and found that product descriptions were the most important to help make a purchase decision, followed by the merchant’s guarantee, stock availability and quality of images.

A good way to create great product descriptions is to see what your competitors have and write a better description. For example you may be selling the same t-shirt as a competitor and they only have the color and different sizes. Your description could have that plus the brand of the t-shirt if there is one, the type like 100% cotton and where it’s made. The more information you can give your visitors the better. They are more likely to buy and less likely to contact customer service before purchasing.

Customer reviews can also be very important to a product description. Even if they are bad customer reviews, they are proven to help improve your conversion rate. One of the best ways to get customers to review products is to offer them a discount or something free if they write a review. As long as you give them some type of incentive you will see reviews start to appear or increase.