3 Things You Thought Mattered - And What Really Matters

There’s no denying that the Internet, including Social Media, has significantly changed the way people do business.  The attitudes of customers as a whole have shifted, and the power is moving into the hands of those customers more and more every day.  While some of the changes brought about by the move to online communications are more obvious than others, what’s clear is that the companies that will thrive going forward are those that learn to adapt their thinking as the business world changes.  If you’re a student of old-school business and marketing, you might still be clinging to some outdated beliefs about what’s important in your business.  To help illustrate the shift we’re talking about and provide some pointers on how to deal with the changes, following are three things that just don’t matter as much as they used to, and what really matters today.

1. Quality - What? Quality doesn’t matter?  Of course it does.  Quality is more of an expectation now though.  What that means is that you can no longer tout your product or service’s quality as the primary reason for doing business with your company.  You need to go beyond quality.

2. Price - Like quality, price is certainly important to some extent, but competing on price alone just won’t cut it.  If you’re the low-price leader, and that’s all you’ve got going for you, you’re in trouble.  With advances in manufacturing processes and the continued move to inexpensive, overseas solutions, “cheap” is easier to come by than true differentiation.

3. Testimonials - Have some customers who love you?  Guess what - so does your competition.  While there’s nothing wrong with displaying testimonials on your site, don’t expect them to be the thing that swings customers your way.  First of all, we’ve all become a little distrusting of testimonials.  Secondly, customers know that testimonials from a company are like references on your resume: You’re only going to list those you know have something great to say, so how much do they really matter?

What matters today…

1. Simplicity - Customers want processes to be simple.  This goes for every step of the customer experience, from ordering to paying, from shipping to customer service issues.  Make things too complicated, whether it’s with your order process or how people use your product, and they’ll go elsewhere.

2. Innovation - More strides in innovation have taken place in the past 20 years than in the previous 100, and we’re all eating it up.  People love the latest and greatest, and if it makes them look cool, all the better.  If your products and processes offer a new or better way of doing things, you’ll attract customers and keep them coming back for more.

3. Honesty - One word that has become more than just another buzzword lately is “transparency.”  It’s no secret that our current economic condition is at least in part due to a lack of transparency, and people are fed up with it.  Even a hint of impropriety or dishonesty will have your potential customers running for the hills.  People have always wanted to be treated with honesty, but today more than ever, they’re demanding it, and looking out for any chinks in the integrity armor.

4. Straight Talk - This goes along with honesty, but it’s a little different.  Straight talk has to do with getting rid of all the games that companies often play.  For example, when a guarantee or discount is offered, but the little asterisk next to the headline refers to a litany of conditions, restrictions, and limitations, it quickly deflates any excitement the original offer created.  This also goes back to the simplicity point.  Straight, simple talk is what will win customers over now, not perceived tricks and scams.

The companies that survive and thrive in the economy of today and the years to come will be able to identify these and other changes in public wants and needs and adjust their game plans accordingly.  Those that can’t or aren’t willing to adapt on the fly will simply go away.  It’s survival of the fittest, and the fittest in business are those who evolve the most efficiently.  What are your thoughts?  We’d love to continue the conversation in the comments section!

4 Easy Steps to Automate Your Online Sales Process

So you’ve got your blog up and running, you’re starting to gain a following, and you want to capitalize on your growing popularity.  One of the best ways to do that is by creating products around whatever your expertise is.  Your followers obviously like what you have to offer, so whether it’s through e-books, audio programs, webinars, or video workshops, creating products to deliver what they want is a no-brainer.  Once you’ve created products to offer on your site, one of the greatest things about the Internet comes into play: you can automate the entire process.  Sure, you have to do the work upfront to create the products and the process, but once it’s in place, it takes very little attention beyond tracking your progress and making necessary adjustments.  This is a great thing, because it frees you up to create more quality content, and more products.  So, how do you automate your sales process?  Here are four easy steps to make it happen:

1. Get ‘em on the list. The first step to the automated online sales process is to get your site’s visitors on your email list.  Your list will become the biggest asset you have, so this step is critical to your success.  To entice people to sign up for your emails, there are two critical factors you must nail down.  First and foremost, your free content (your blog) must be high quality and compelling.  If you’re not delivering value to your visitors, there’s no way they’ll sign up to hear more of what you have to say via email.  Secondly, you’ll want to offer a valuable incentive for people who sign up for your emails.  Value is the key.  While you’re not going to give away the farm in a single swoop, the offer you create must have real, valuable content, or the subscribers you do get will promptly unsubscribe.  The point is, you shouldn’t be trying to trick anyone into signing up.  They’ll detect it immediately, and no one wins.

2. Send out the emails. The next step in the process is to decide what you’ll send out once a person subscribes to your list.  Obviously you’ll be sending a welcome email with a link to the free product you promised.  But then what?  One of the greatest tools in the email marketing toolbox is the sequential autoresponder.  Whatever email marketing provider you sign up with, they should have the ability to set up sequential autoresponders to each new subscriber.  These autoresponders might even serve as the free product offer the subscriber signed up for.  For example, you might offer a “Free 7 Day E-Course on How to Make Money with Affiliate Links.”  Then, each day for the next seven days, your subscriber will receive an email with another part of the course.  If you follow this path, it’s a good idea to just provide the content without selling anything in these emails.  Even if you’re giving value, that value is diminished when you turn it into a sales pitch.  This brings up another good point: When setting up your sequential autoresponders, make sure you’re not selling in every one.  People get a ton of email, and if they know they’re in for a sales pitch whenever they open one of your emails, they won’t be on your list for long.  You want people to look forward to your communications, and then when you do present an offer, it’s far more likely to be acted upon.

3. Accept online payments. So someone has signed up on your list, they’ve received some great value from your emails, and now they want to buy the video course you just offered.  This is the coolest part of selling on the Internet.  It used to be that you had to be present to sell something to someone.  Now, you can do it in your sleep!  Whether you use a service like PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, or your own merchant account, it will be easy for you to sell your products on your site.  The nice thing about the ready-made services (PayPal, Google, Amazon, etc.) is that you don’t have to purchase shopping cart software to use them.  You’ll be able to create “buy now” buttons and easily incorporate those into your page.  The down-side is that you pay a little more in fees, and you have less creative and functionality control.  In either case, you’ll have access to comprehensive sales reports, so you can…

4. Track and measure. As your online sales get underway, and for as long as you sell online, you’ll want to know how you’re doing - not just in terms of sales, but with marketing and conversion rates as well.  You want to know how many people are visiting your site, how many of those are signing up for your email list, and how many email subscribers are clicking back through to your site and/or ordering products.  Using your site analytics, coupled with the stats provided by your email marketing company and your e-commerce provider, you’ll have easy access to all this information.  These statistics are very important, because they will paint a picture of how your content and your marketing are working to convert browsers into customers.  Using this information, you’ll be able to make necessary changes to improve your click-through and conversion rates.  Of all the steps, this is probably the least “easy” but it’s really not hard once you get used to looking at the numbers.  Then just make small adjustments and see what changes.  There’s no fool-proof formula that works for everyone, so you get to build your own!

Bonus step! This isn’t as much a step as it is a suggestion.  Provide outstanding service at every turn, and whatever products you create from your expertise, always offer a money-back, “risk-free” guarantee.  Few people, if any, will take you up on it, and it just makes people feel better about spending money on your products.  For those who do ask for their money back, don’t hesitate to return it, no-questions-asked.  Then try to get some feedback, but don’t count on it.  Sometimes you just have to move forward and focus on those who love you and your stuff!

The Internet has given us the ability to make money using automated systems, and we’d be crazy not to take full advantage of that.  So follow the steps above and get your cash-flow on autopilot.

Don’t Give Up on Your Customer if Their Payment Card is Declined

Whether we like it or not, business these days revolves around the use of credit or debit accounts and if you’re involved in e-commerce you have to address this situation. It is fairly easy to establish payment procedures using these types of cards for your online business, whether you use PayPal or another authorized reseller such as 2checkout, or you may have your own merchant gateway established. The entire process between presentation of product or service and delivery to the customer requires considerable attention and your business success will depend on your ultimate ability to control the effectiveness of each step.

From time to time, a customer’s card will be declined, but this need not necessarily result in a failed sale. There can be any number of reasons for the decline, including what is known in the industry as a hard decline or a soft decline. In the case of the latter, it invariably means that a system timeout occurred or some other technical issue precluded the transaction from running its course. As a retailer you have to decide when you actually want to process the account, as if you are not physically shipping goods for a specified period, for example, you could just build in a resubmission process, hopefully overcoming the soft decline and not having to contact the customer with notification of failure.

Sometimes you will be notified that the customer needs to contact his or her bank, known as a “referral.” Make sure that the shopping cart contents are retained and that the client can return to consummate the transaction once the referral has been cleared up.

If you find that you are getting a notable number of hard declines, whether the card verification details are incorrect or whether there is a funding issue, consider whether you want to offer alternative methods of payment or not. Tracking sales and conversions through an analytics program will help you to determine the level of the problem as it pertains to your business and whether or not you should really consider alternative methods, if at all possible. Some e-commerce software products support procedures for handling these declines. Either way, you should consider a “so near and yet so far” sale to be very valuable. Just think about how much time, effort and money you have invested in getting the prospect to that point in your sales funnel. At the very least, a communication via e-mail or phone would be in order before you think of abandoning the prospect altogether.

How do you handle declines?

Matthew Toren

Use Affiliate Marketing To Attract Customers Who Would Not Otherwise Find You

Affiliate marketing has been one of the growth areas of the Web in recent years. Sellers of goods and services understand the power of third party endorsement and know that a concerted affiliate marketing campaign could reach many more potential clients than a simple in-house initiative ever could. Anyone involved in e-commerce should consider an affiliate program. If there’s a market for what you’re selling and you have a great USP then you simply need to switch on a family of clones, just like yourself, to help you out!

You can increase your sales potential exponentially by starting your own affiliate marketing program. Work out how much you’re willing to invest and understand that affiliate marketing compares very favorably to the costs of conventional advertising and marketing. Be prepared to “reward” your affiliates very well as they drive business to you.

Many promoters find it best to develop a multi-tiered approach. They will have a fundamental package or service at the front-end, which they are willing to use as something of a loss leader. This product or service will naturally lead to a more expensive product or service and on upward, in tiers. This will require a quite sophisticated sales content or pitch and there should be a natural progression to entice the purchaser of the leading product to buy the bigger package. Using this approach, you can offer a very significant commission to the affiliate to sell your lead-in product, maybe even 75% commission. This should definitely motivate the affiliate and if you have structured your sales funnel correctly you should be able to use the loss leader as an investment towards larger returns.

There are a number of affiliate marketing networks, some specialize in particular niches and others may specialize in upscale. A process of research will uncover the best according to your particular product or service. You will then have to register with the network and may likely have to lodge a certain amount of money representing a potential commission payment due from a sale. The advantage of these networks is that they have a whole host of affiliates lined up and ready to promote your service. Make your pitch enticing to the affiliates and use the power of their own networks to drive sales back through.

Remember that you will have to create sales copy, banner ads and e-mail content for your affiliates to use. The easier you make it for them to promote your site and services the more success you will attain. Remember also that you do not want your message to be doctored by affiliates who do not have the correct amount of information, so you should be sure that your collateral is on target before you sign up with the network.

Have you used Affiliate Marketing to attract customers?

Adam Toren

Use Your Website To Get Purchasers to Your Physical Store

As we transition more toward a virtual world, it is quite amazing to see that more than 50% of “bricks and mortar” businesses do not yet have a web presence. As potential consumers use Internet search engines to do their research before they go out into the real world, those companies without a website risk being left out. For the off-line retailer, however, it is not good enough to just throw up a portal and expect to earn riches, as the entrepreneur must pay attention to the site composition to ensure that visitors make the connection between the online site and the off-line location.

On-site optimization is often focused merely on helping the website achieve a great position in search engine rankings, so that the would be consumer can find the site in the first place. This is of course very important, but if you are mostly relying on actual visitors to your bricks and mortar store then you have to do a lot more.

One of the biggest mistakes that many retailers make when considering a website is to assume that the website should be divorced from the actual physical location for some reason. They assume that a website is only good for e-commerce and they may or may not be geared up, or wish, to sell any of their products online. They are missing the bigger point here – the website is primarily a source of information and they should do everything they can to ensure that the visitor is “converted” in one way or the other.

If the website is not to be used for e-commerce, then the page must be designed to lead visitors easily to information showing your physical location. This will require a clear link in a prominent position on every page, using appropriate texts such as “find our locations,” or “how to contact us.” Some webmasters make the mistake of including contact details within a vaguely termed “about us” section. Don’t make the visitor think twice about anything, make it obvious.

These days it is fairly easy to incorporate a Google maps widget showing in clear detail exactly where your location is and remember to include your opening hours and customer service phone lines in prominent positions. Additional phone lines are very cost effective and should be used to help you track your clients. For example, use a different customer service phone number on your “contact us” page and another phone number on each of your product pages. Remember to keep track of client paths by asking the appropriate questions at the point-of-sale.

Any marketing initiatives that you engage in should be tracked and tested. This may require a process of education amongst your staff. They should get into the habit of asking appropriate questions to determine whether visitors found your location through your website or not. Always try and get your visitors to give you their e-mail addresses, so that you can send questionnaires for more feedback.

Is your website connected to your physical store?

Adam Toren

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