As I mentioned on my personal blog yesterday, my book Online Marketing Inside Out, co-authored with Shayne Tilley, is now available on SitePoint.com. As an added bonus, they’re bundling the book with ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s new eBook 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Order now and you can get Darren’s book for FREE (a $20 value).
There is a lot of debate about the issue of offering phone sales and service. Many of the large retailers such as eBay and Amazon have all but hidden from customers, by only posting email contact forms. Does that mean smaller e-commerce retailers can get away with not listing contact information?
The large retailers such as Amazon have so much brand equity, and have so many processes in place to automate customer service issues, that they can often get the same conversion rates without a phone number prominent on their site. Unfortunately, most retailers (99% of them) don’t have the brand equity to do that.
There are several reasons why people will actually call you:
At first, you might try to simply address these issues with a more robust website. List frequently asked questions, maybe even interactive forms. Take your product information to the next level with detailed photos, description, etc. But it’s a simple fact that providing contact phone numbers increases conversions.
According to an Elastic path report, 60% of e-commerce retailers provide a contact phone number during checkout. Many online retailers report 10-20% of their business comes from phoned-in orders. In addition, simply having a phone number displayed on your website can increase conversions by simply making your website look more legitimate, increasing trust.
If you have a phone number listed on your website, make sure it is prominently displayed, especially on key pages such as the shopping cart or product detail pages where people will be more likely to have questions. If you don’t currently display a phone number on your website, I’d suggest adding a phone number prominently. Run an A/B split test to see if the conversion rate increases due to the number being displayed, and track how many phone calls you get and how many you are able to convert into customers. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
Say you have a great idea and want to sell a product online, but don’t have a big enough garage (or permission from the spouse) to stock inventory, and leasing warehouse space is just a little too risky when just starting out. You need the help of a fulfillment service! Order fulfillment services stock your products, charging you monthly warehousing fees, and then pack and ship orders to your customers as needed.
ShipWire - Their simplified pricing structure makes outsourcing fulfillment easy, but means that they aren’t a good fit for all products.
Fulfillment by Amazon - Warehousing with Amazon has its benefits, like being able to sell on Amazon.com and offer “Prime” shipping to customers.
eFulfillmentService - A fairly small company, they’re more flexible and more likely to work with you if you have odd requests such as large or specialty products.
That’s right! The reason this blog hasn’t been updated recently is because I’ve been slaving away co-authoring The Art & Science of Online Marketing with Shayne Tilley.
The book is a complete overview of the entire landscape of online marketing and covers a wide range of topics including:
The book is aimed at business owners, entrepreneurs and traditional marketing managers who want a practical introduction to online marketing. The Art & Science of Online Marketing is scheduled to be released in May, 2009.
The newly released Canonical URL Tags, supported by all three major search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, were created to help webmasters specify which piece of content is unique, and ignore the rest.
Duplicate content is bad. When a search engine finds multiple pages with the same exact content, it has to choose which to show. It will only show one piece of content in it’s index, and that used to mean your print-friendly page or affiliate pages. Multiple links to the same content also dillute pagerank.
Until now, the only way to control pagerank and duplicate content were to use the rel=”nofollow” tag in your links that you didn’t want to be indexed. The major search engines recognize nofollow, but you can only do this on links on your website, not affiliate links or links from third party sites.
The canonical URL tag allows you to specifcy which link and page should be indexed. It’s more of a suggestion, but Google, Yahoo!, and MSN are all paying attention. As long as you only specify one canonical URL tag per unique piece of content, the search engines will most likely follow your recommendation. Google said on their blog: “It’s a hint that we honor strongly.”
Canonical URL tags can give you an edge over the competition. Very few (less than 1%) of e-commerce websites sculpt pagerank by speficying which pages pass pagerank (through nofollow or canonical links).
Last week we sent an email newsletter with a coupon code to about 6,000 recipients. The coupon wasn’t fully tested, and was not configured to work with the appropriate products. It was several hours until the mistake was found, and naturally most of the traffic from the email had already visited the site.
The site received several orders, some noting the coupon code didn’t work, which is how we realized there was a problem. We had a choice to make… what do we do now? We could simply fix the coupon code and be done with it. We could fix the coupon code and resend the original email. We could fix it and send an apology.
We decided to write an apology and resend to all 6,000 recipients, effectively doubling our newsletter costs. Our response to the problem is below:
I want to apologize. Yesterday, we sent out an email newsletter that had a coupon for 15% off all Propet and Columbia items on our website.
Unfortunately, when the email went out the coupon did not work. In our haste to get the newsletter out in time, I didn’t test the coupon code. Oops!
I’m sorry if you tried to place an order using the coupon code yesterday morning.
We have fixed the coupon code and it now works properly.
We’re extending the sale through Sunday night. All Columbia and Propet shoes and boots are eligible for 15% off:
Propet
http://www.2bigfeet.com/propet.phpColumbia Sportswear
http://www.2bigfeet.com/columbia_sportswear.phpTo redeem, just enter “SELECT15″ in your shopping cart and click the “Recalculate” button.
Again, I’m sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your business.
All the best,
Brandon Eley
Owner, 2Bigfeet.com
brandon@2bigfeet.com
What’s the lesson here? First, test, test, and test again. If you’re sending out a coupon code, test it with the actual products it should work with. All of them.
Second, man up when you make a mistake. Apologize, make it right. We extended the time frame people could redeem the coupon code and sent another email letting them know we had issues. The coupon code had already been fixed, and many people had already ordered successfully (never knowing we had a problem). Apologizing lets them know you’re human… and it lets them know you care about your customers.
There is a lot of speculation about whether this online shopping season was a bust or boom. Some reports just before Christmas shows online shopping down 1% over that same time last year, and other reports I’ve seen show slowed overall growth, but numbers still above 2008.
In this slowing economy, many online retailers (myself included) were worried about this holiday season. We ramped up for our holiday season in early November with specials and regular email promotions, and it paid off. We’re predicting a 178% increase in online sales over last holiday season and a 220% increase in online sales in December alone.
There are likely several reasons for the increases… extended customer service hours, increased Pay Per Click budgets, long-tail search rankings that set us up as industry leaders inside our “niche of a niche.” We anticipated a strong holiday season and prepared by hiring additional staff early, beefing up on inventory, and adding features to our website such as date-specific messages about shipping times which decrease customer service inquiries.
In the midst of a rocky economy, my e-commerce sites and several of our clients’ websites continue to grow. How did you do this holiday season? To what do you attribute any increase or decrease in sales?
The average conversion rate for e-commerce websites is 2%, which means that the vast majority of customers don’t make a purchase.As many as 10-20% of your unique visitors will place an item in their shopping cart, but leave before closing the deal.
Below are the main reasons people abandon shopping carts:
You can take steps to improve your checkout process and convert many more of these visitors. By simplifying checkout and shipping options, you could see your conversion rate increase by 50% or more.
Below are a few quick tips to reduce your shopping cart abandonment rates:
It’s also a good idea to do usability testing on your website. There are a lot of inexpensive tools available that will record users’ responses and even where they looked on your pages. They can provide a lot of insight into why visitors are leaving.
Today is Election Day in the United States. This is probably the biggest election of all time, and voter turnout is amazing. With all the people at the polls, who has time to shop online? A lot of people, apparently.
By 8 o’clock this morning I had already received 3 emails from online merchants. I don’t just subscribe for research, we buy almost everything online so I love a sale like anybody else.
I never would have thought an “Election Day Sale” would be a great idea, but after receiving several newsletters this morning, we hussled together one of our own and got it out the door around 8:30 AM.
The response has been amazing. Sales have skyrocketed and all from a simple text-only email newsletter. The email we sent is below:
It may just be the most important election in our country’s
history. If you haven’t already voted early, please find your
polling place and go vote today.To say thanks for voting, TAKE 15% OFF ANY ONE PRODUCT
Use coupon code ELECTION2008 at checkout.
If you’re not up to speed on the issues, checkout Glass Booth:
http://www.glassbooth.orgIt’s a very good tool to determine where you truly stand on the
issues. You don’t have to vote like us, but be an informed
citizen and vote based on what you believe not what you see in
the media.Also, please encourage your family and friends to do the same.
Sincerely,
Your friends at 2BigFeet.com
It’s probably too late to get an email out for Election Day, but take a look at the calendar and see how many holidays and national events occur throughout the year. These events are excellent chances to connect with your customers. Even if they don’t buy anything, it shows you’re human and care about what’s happening in the world.
StoneEdge, makers of the popular Order Manager software, have their own bailout plan. For a limited time, get 20% off StoneEdge Order Manager when you use the coupon code “BAILOUT.”
Order Manager is a backend order and customer management software that integrates with dozens of popular shopping cart and e-commerce systems. It features inventory management, customer management, order management, pick/pack/shipping and reporting functionality.
We have been using Order Manager for years to manage our e-commerce businesses. It streamlines the order processing and customer service and lets you focus on more important issues with running your business.
I own several e-commerce websites and am the Interactive Director for Kelsey Advertising & Design, an agency with a strong focus on interactive and e-commerce.