Create a Buyer’s Guide

Knowing what product to buy (which model, what features, what accessories, etc.) can get very confusing and overwhelming for consumers. If I want to buy a new TV (it’s time to get rid of my rear-projection set), I have a lot of research to do! Plasma vs. LCD, new features (they can stream Netflix to TVs now!), sizes, manufacturers, contrast ratio – everything that factors into buying a new TV can be quite intimidating.

Use Landing Pages

There’s always more than one transaction happening on your website. Visitors converting to sales are your eventual goal, but there is also the transaction of information. Once you’ve created your awesome and valuable buyer’s guide that will make your potential customers’ buying process easier and more painless, park it behind a landing page. The concept of a landing page is that it asks for something valuable to you — the seller — (e.g. their contact information and answers to some qualifying questions) in exchange for something valuable to them — the consumer (e.g. information about how to make their buying process simpler).

Use Lead Nurturing

Once you’ve identified list segments that correlate to different products or categories, create custom email campaigns to follow up with consumers using information and special offers. Most eCommerce sites have some type of email marketing campaign in place (many of which are very expensive, involving hundreds of thousands or millions of email lists), but the conversion rate is usually very low. The reason is that generic email campaigns fail to capture the interest of readers in the precious few seconds that customers glance at your email while clearing out their inbox.

When was the last time you had an expert review your meta tags for relevancy and how competitive they are?

Have your key search phrases changes recently with new search behavior and/or changes in your industry? If you have not checked in the past 90 days, you are overdue.

Are you getting plenty of quality content added to your site on a regular basis?

How about internal and external links? Internal links help the search engines index your site, identify primary keywords and can increase the page rank of linked pages. External links or links leading to pages outside your website do a couple of things. Like internal links, external links help the search engines identify important keywords.  Let me know if you need help establishing more internal and external links.

A 10 percent increase in the usability of enterprise data could translate to $2 billion (BILLION!) in additional revenue every year. So says a recent study by Sybase, Inc. and the University of Texas. The study details how improvements in data efficiency can lead to measurable financial gain.

“Measuring the Business Impacts of Effective Data,” illustrates the direct correlation between an organization’s IT investments and overall business performance.

The Financial Impacts of Effective DataT

he study looks at how even the most incremental investments put into improving the versatility of data delivers impacts on the following key business performance metrics.

• Employee productivity is influenced by the usability of data. According to the study, a 10 percent jump in data usability increases sales per employee by 14.4 percent. Here’s the kicker – if applied to the median sales per employee ($388,000), the median organization could increase this financial measure by $55,900 per employee annually.
• Return on equity (ROE) is affected by data quality and sales mobility. When both of these data attributes are improved by 10 percent, ROE increases by 16 percent. When applied to the organization with the median net income in the study ($410.47 million), a 16 percent increase in ROE would deliver an annual increase of $65.67 million in net income.

Small businesses don’t need 5,000 Facebook fans, Diggs, or blogs that are updated daily. They need business: clients, customers, shoppers, etc.

It’s much easier than you think.

Use Videos on Your Website

When you’re a small, local business, your main strength is your personality. To highlight that, you should create videos so that your local customers can “meet” you before they hire or buy something from you.

What kind of videos can you create? An Orlando plumbing company created instructional videos like “How to Fix Your Sink.” This was great because if people in the area used his video to fix their sink, they wouldn’t hesitate to call for a more complicated job.

If you don’t want to create instructional videos, create testimonial videos. If you made one of your customers extremely happy, encourage them to film a quick testimonial video that you can show other potential customers.

Also, you don’t need a high-tech, expensive video camera. A Flip Cam or equivalent do the job done just fine.

The more videos the better.

Promote Your Phone number and Email Everywhere

When you work with a local business, you want a person with a soul who has your back. And how do you show people you have a soul? Make it extremely easy to contact you by placing your phone number and email address in your header, footer, and sidebar.

A international Tax Attorney puts their cellphone number at the end of almost everything written online.

Static Page for the Home Page

When someone visits your website from search, they often visit your home page. Additionally, your loyal customers will often visit your home page, too.

The question is, how should you design your homepage? Small businesses that did best used a home page that sells.

Publish High Quality Content

Small businesses aren’t media companies. You don’t have to use Twitter or blog several times per day to build the right kind of audience.

Publish less often and keep the content high quality, but at least publish!

Create Effortless, Predictable Navigation

When you create your website’s navigation, you should make it predictable and easy-to-use because people want to browse your website effortlessly.

How can you keep your navigation predictable? Place it where people expect to find it, which is at the top of the page or in the left sidebar.

Also, when you create the navigation, use the words people are accustomed to seeing. For example, if people want to reach you, they’ll look for “Contact” or “Contact Us.”

Publicize Other Small Businesses

Have you ever walked into a local business and noticed a table with business cards from other local businesses? Of course. It happens everywhere. Local shoppers want to know about other local businesses.

Online it’s no different. People who shop local want to discover other local businesses, so help them do that by sharing links to other local businesses.

Linking to pillars of the community make people think you’re a pillar.

Include Several Calls-to-Action On Your Website

If you’re creating a website to gather leads or interact with potential customers, make sure you’re clear on what you want your prospects to do.

Want your customers to buy your product? Ask them. Want them to contact you? Show them where they can do it.

Overall, inviting people to call or buy your products is important. Some people may not even realize it’s an option unless you specifically tell them that it is an option.

Establish Credibility

The consensus online is that you must give away something, like a white-paper, to get leads. However, when you’re a local business, that simply isn’t true. Being local and credible is enough.

For example, if you’re a plumber, it doesn’t matter if you wrote an ebook on how to be a plumber. Instead, you’re going to want a conversation with your customer—that’s why you use video.

All you have to do is look credible and show your customers that you are looking out for the best interest.

… even though it can lead to additional sales, writes Investopedia.

Of the top 100 internet retailers of 2009, only 44 of them had a blog and just 36 posted on a frequent basis, it said. “Investors rightly should expect retailers to do everything in their power to drive traffic to their online stores including the use of blogging. It’s a critical piece of the e-commerce puzzle and many companies still are dropping the ball.”

Amazon, for example, writes 13 blogs include Zappos, it said. “If Jeff Bezos and company see the benefits, everyone should. Ignoring his lead is like a musician not listening to the musical advice of Sir Paul McCartney. It’s just plain dumb.”

Customers are willing to pay a 10.7% premium for ‘excellent’ online customer service – an amount that was sized in the aggregate to be $17.3 billion a year. That is a surprisingly large number, says StellaService CEO Jordy Leiser (via E-Commerce Times).

“It was quite a shock for us, actually, especially considering that so few companies meet the criteria for offering this level of service.” According to the survey, ‘excellent’ online customer support includes online tools, interfaces and content, easy to use return policies and a human operator if needed. StellaService found that Zappos.com, Diapers.com, BlueNile.com, Amazon.com, Staples.com, Crutchfield.com, LLBean.com, BestBuy.com, Apple.com, Sears.com, REI.com, Ebags.com, Onlineshoes.com, Orvis.com and Netflix.com were the top 15 retailers that offered the best online customer support.

Top online retailers sent each of their subscribers 2.7 promotional emails on average during the week ending March 26, 2010. This represents a 9% increase in average promotional email volume from 2.5 emails the week ending February 26, 2010, according to Chad White, research director at Responsys and author of the Retail Email Blog.

Compared to March 2009, year-over-year promotional email volume increased at an even higher rate. Retailers increased their promotional email volume 13%, from an average of 2.4 emails in March 2009. (via MarketingCharts).

During the week ending March 26, 2010, the highest percentage of retailers (50%) sent a promotional email on Friday, March 26. The lowest percentage of retailers (19%) sent a promotional email on Saturday, March 20.

Despite the growing popularity of internet shopping, most online shoppers still want to reach a living and breathing person when they have a question, problem or issue. A recent study found that a live voice is still the most preferred form of customer service among online Americans, writes MarketingCharts.

At the same time, the move to online also means that consumers are warming to the idea of other live customer service options. Two-thirds (67%) of US consumers say they would value the option of having both a live text chat and a live voice conversation to get the help they need when making online purchases, according to a survey by ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc).

Additional study findings:

• Nearly 85% of consumers who browse, research, and buy products and services online want the choice of click to call or click to chat to get live sales or service assistance.
• 70% of consumers rated click to call – defined as a direct connection with a live voice agent without having to go through an Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) – as “extremely useful” or “very useful.”
• 68%of respondents reported that a reasonable price of a product or service is the main factor that drives them to visit one site over another.

A study by security firm McAfee has found that 65% of online shoppers wait a day or more to fully convert on a purchase.

The study, Digital Window Shopping: The Long Journey to Buy, reviewed 163 million online transactions. Released September 17, it observed that this behavior — generally characterized as shopping cart abandonment — may simply be characteristic of a cautious shopper.

“The good news is that those shoppers who you thought were disappearing may not be gone, they may just be delaying,” said Research Analyst Shane Keats of McAfee.

In April, a PayPal/comScore study found that 21% of buyers said they decided not to shop at a given site because of security concerns.

A majority of US consumers are likely to maintain or increase current spending levels – especially on basics – in the next 30 days, while young professionals and the affluent will up their spending in a broader number of discretionary categories, according to results from the newly introduced American Express Spending and Saving Tracker (pdf) study.

The survey, which asked consumers to compare spending priorities now vs. a year ago, revealed that 60% of overall respondents are willing to spend the same or more in the next 30 days (compared with the past 30 days), while 40% plan to spend less. However, the general population is increasingly willing to spend more on essentials such as groceries and car maintenance, while young professionals and the affluent also put a high priority on non-essentials such as travel and dining out.