Questions to ask before you rebuild your website
Seth Godin, guru of permission marketing and leading edge thinking on new media, and new marketing has posted this list of questions to ask before you redo your website on his blog.
My additions/comments are shown in bold italics.
- What is the goal of the site?
- In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur? How do we measure these outcomes?
- Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
- How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level? Who is ultimately responsible for the project?
- Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
- What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
- Are we trying to close sales? Have we thought of the back office logistics to process these sales?
- Are we telling a story?
- Are we earning permission to follow up?
- Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?
- Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
- Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
- Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
- Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
- Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
- Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?
- Do we want people to call us?
- How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?
- Who needs to update this site? How often? What skills/tools do we need to make the updates?
- How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
- Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?
- Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?
- How much money do we have to spend? How much time? Can we stage the roll out of the project?
- Does the organization understand that ‘everything’ is not an option?
Do you have any questions to add to this list?
Be Responsive
From Cow Command Blog http://blog.cowcommand.com/2009/08/be-responsive.html. Also have a look at the new Cow Command eCommerce Site – http://www.healthandwellbeing.com.au
The key to E-commerce happiness is responsiveness. Full stop.
It’s what gets you talked about positively by your colleagues, and recommended to others by your clients. It’s what gets talked about on forums and twitter, if you do everything right. Read more
What is the best thing you can do for your website
So you've got a website, what next. What can you do now to get it working for you and working for your business?
- Email Marketing – a simple, regular, valuable email message to your database can have incredible increase on your enquiries and sales.
- Google Adwords / Facebook Advertising – Target Google or Facebook ads can get in front of new prospects immediately and provide instant traffic and enquiries. It's under your control, scalable and measurable.
- SEO – Survey your best clients and find out what words they would use if they were looking for your products & services. Optimise your website in search engines for these words.
- Social Networking – Interact with communities such as Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook, and LinkedIn to form relationships with your target market and drive them to your site.
- Design – what is the perception that your website is creating. Does it match the brand that you have or that you are trying to convey? How people perceive your business is their reality.
- Outsource – if you don't have the skills or the time to do it yourself, let a professional help you. It will be well worth the investment and you can spend your time doing what you do best.
- People – brand individuals by using blogs, twitter and articles. People like to do business with people more than companies.
- Quality – people seek consistency and quality. Make sure your website is error free, easy to navigate around, generally helpful and everything the user expects. Test, Test then Test again.
Tool for eBay Sellers and Buyers
Ebay, the well known online auction and shopping site is often the preferred destination for people looking to buy and sell almost anything. Below are just some tools that might make your life a little easier when using eBay.
- Firefox toolbar for eBay
- eBay default toolbar
- Stuff Alert
- Wipbox
- Auction Sniper
- AuctionBloopers
- PicClick
- FatFingers
- Auctiva
Conversion Rates for Online Business
Most online businesses have several conversion rates. On most occasions there are several steps from getting a visitor to click from a email, search engine result, PPC ad, Banner Ad or link to ultimately making the decision to buy your products or services, subscribe to your site, or whatever your end goal is.
In fact every step that brings a prospect one step closer to being a customer is a micro-conversion and looking at each of these micro-conversions is more important than your overall conversion rate. The reason for this is it gives insight into what part of your process is working and where the process stalls.
So what are some of these micro-conversions?
If you look at using an eDM (email campaign) you have the following conversion rates
Opens
The percentage of emails that were open as a percentage of the emails sent.
This is typically 25% – 40% for most campaigns and is effected by the frequency at which your emails are sent, the quality of your database and the subject of the email.
If you send emails at to high a frequency people won’t keep opening them, if you send them at to low a frequency people will forget you are.
If you have a large but poor quality database, many of the people won’t be in your target market and won’t be interested in your message.
If you don’t have a captivating subject relevant to your market, people won’t be interested in what you have to say.
% Action
The percentage of emails where the call to action was clicked on as a percentage of the emails opened.
This can be any percentage and is affected by the message in the email. The more target, captivating and benefits driven this content is, the more people will follow your call to action.
Landing Page Conversion
Once someone clicks through on your call to action they will arrive at a page on your website. More often than not this should be a landing page with specific content following on from the email, not the home page of your website. From this landing page people should have only a couple of options.
Option 1 – take the desired step, be that adding a product to a shopping cart, subscribing to a service, making an enquiry to a sales person, making a phone call.
Option 2 – opting in for further information. If we can’t get them to buy we don’t want to loose them altogether. This could be a newsletter signup, free e-book, obligation free quote or anything that engages the prospect.
Checkout Conversion
In the case of product based eCommerce websites, it’s also important to monitor the how many of the people who have added a product to a shopping cart, actually make it through to checkout. This can give valuable insight into possible problems in the check-out process, that the freight was a lot more than people were expecting or that there was not enough information on delivery times or stock on hand.
Conclusion
Try to identify all of the different micro-conversion in your online sales process, work out how to measure them and then work out what insight the give you.
Does your website have a call to action?
Are you scratching your head because your website just isn't providing the enquiries or sales that you expected?
If you are driving significant traffic to your website and it's not turning into business then first you need to look at the basics.
If you can tick the following boxes
* professionally designed
* fast loading
* clearly structured
* professional can carefully placed images
* logical, common sense structure and navigation
* good font size
and you are still not getting good conversion rates, then I can almost bet that there is no ”Compelling Call To Action!
Are your visitors clear about what action to take? Or do they look around your website, absorb your information, think “That's Nice” and then continue on to someone else's (maybe your competitions) website.
When confronted with a choice, most of people will take the easiest course of action. If that choice is “no choice,” that's exactly what they will do.
So how do you fix this problem?
Well, that's the easy part. You decide what action you'd like your web visitor to take, and tell them in no uncertain terms. But don't give them too many choices. Have one or at the most two choices for them to make. People get confused when you give them too many options. Keep it simple, and point your prospects to the best option and you'll get a lot more enquiries and sales.
In Summary, have a call to action on every page
Every page on your website should have a call to action. This action may be to get them to contact you, or it may just take them to the next page in the website that you want them to read.
Examples are
* Click here to contact one our qualified consultants
* Call now on xxxx xxxx to get started
* For more information click here
* Leave your email address and we'll send you a weekly marketing tip
Nice article on Sticky Tickets at "the marketer"
You always get a sense of pride when somebody writes something flattering about something you've done or something you've built.
It was a great surprise to find this article on Sticky Tickets from another interent marketing guru while reading through some blogs today.
http://themarketer.typepad.com/exporting/2007/08/a-sticky-vision.html
He came across Sticky Tickets when he bought tickets to an organisations awards night, that we being sold through Sticky Tickets.
How to get started in your online business
If you want to create an online business then you are going to need help building it in the first place. Then you will need ongoing help in supporting and continuing to evolve it. This is why it’s important to find a company that you can build a long-term relationship with.
When looking for a company:
- Use a company that is passionate, but constructively critical, about your idea. If they don’t believe in your idea then they are not going to do a great job. But be careful if they blindly love your idea, because they may be faking enthusiasm to win the work.
- Use someone you feel comfortable with because you will want to build a long-term relationship with them. If you don’t feel at ease with them now, you won’t in the future.
- Ask to see examples of their work in similar fields and for projects of similar size and complexity.
- Speak to their clients and ask questions about how the initial project went. Was it on time and on budget? How was the project managed? What was the quality of the end product like? How was the support and follow up after the site was launched?
- Don’t choose the cheapest solution. We are talking about your online business here. You are better off delaying your plans and raising the extra funds than sacrificing quality and the success of your idea.
- Look for companies that have strong technical and marketing skills.
- Avoid sole traders and micro-businesses. Sole traders tend to be ‘flat out’ working on someone else’s project when you need them.
Your website is your business and you need your development resources to be available when you need them. Over the years we have taken over many websites that were started by a one-man-band but never finished.
Would you walk 100km for your dream?
In many ways getting an online business off the ground and to the point where it is creating a significant sustainable income is like doing a 100km walk. I came to this conclusion when competing in the Oxfam Trailwalker in Sydney last week. You have a lot of time to think when you walk 100km.
The Oxfam Trailwalker is an event where a team of four walks together to complete 100km over a 48 hour period. There are 8 checkpoints along the way and each team must enter and leave the checkpoint as a team of 4. At each checkpoint you are met by a support crew who can give you food, refill camel packs, change clothes and attend to injuries.
I was invited to join with a team of 3 other friends and colleagues and thought it sounded like a good challenge at the time. The reality of continuously walking 100km is quite different!
In the lead up to the event we met every couple of weeks to plan the event, what we would need to bring, who we would need to support us, what training we needed to do and how long we thought it would take us.
Three weeks before the event, we walked the second half of the course, and I'm glad we did. There was 2100m of incline and 2300m of decline, and it was a real wake up call to what we were going to be up for on the day.
Our team left Middle Head in Sydney at 7am on Friday 25th August and start walking towards the first of 9 checkpoints with a goal of 27 hours. It had been raining consistently for the last week in Sydney so the tracks were pretty muddy and at times required us to take off shoes to cross creeks. You couldn't get from one checkpoint to the next without getting your shoes wet, so we had to change socks at every checkpoint.
The toughest part of the course was coming into check point 7 (72km down, 28km to go) at 3.30am. We had walked 4 hours for the 13.5kms from checkpoint 6 in the dark with headlights on. There was a lot of mist, which made visibility very poor and the track was very rough. We had been walking for over 20 hours and fatigue was setting is, so there was a lot of slipping and tripping and we knew the hardest parts of the course were still to come. It was a mind game at this stage to keep going. Almost 600 of the 2000 competitors pulled out of trailwalker throughout the event and over 200 pulled out at checkpoint 7.
After an extended stop at checkpoint 7 of eating drinking and getting physio, our spirits were strong again as it started to get light and we set off to finish the 100kms.
We came into the finish line at 2.10pm on Saturday, 31 hours after we had started. We were tired, sore and had blistered feet, but were filled with an immense sense of accomplishment and success as we crossed the finish line at Brooklyn on the Hawkesbury.
So how is it like succeeding in an online business?
- The concept of it sounds really good, but the reality of doing it much harder than you could ever imagine.
- You have to do a lot of planning, training and preparation before you even start.
- Whilst you know the general path you are going to take, there are external conditions that you can't control that can make your journey a lot harder.
- It's much easier to do it as a team than go it alone.
- There are lots of ups and downs.
- You need a support crew to help you along the path that can raise your spirits, revitalise you and keep you on track.
- There are some very dark times on the path when you wonder why you got into it in the first place and you don't know how you are going to keep going.
- People are always dropping out. The majority of the people drop out when they have done all the hard work and they are only a short way from the finish line. If they had just have persisted that little bit longer, they would have gotten all the rewards.
- It almost always takes you longer than you thought it would.
- When you make it to the finish line there is an immense sense of accomplishment, gratitude and celebration
- If you get to the start line you are in a minority of the population, if you get to the finish line, you are in an elite group of people.
