You've built your website, you've done great search engine optimisation, great offline marketing, your products are ready, you're ready, bring em on. You look at your web statistics and they are way better than you thought they would be. You are getting thousands of hits (hits by the way really aren't what you should be looking at, they really are not much use to you except when bragging to people who don't understand what you are talking about) and visitors every day. That's fantastic right? Well maybe not. When it comes to internet marketing that age old adage applies just as much if not more. "Quality not Quantity ". Look a little deeper at your stats. If 90% of your visitors are arriving and leaving within 30 seconds or even 1 minute, well then that's not much use to you is it? They aren't going to buy anything. "But it said that 60% of them bookmarked my site, so they'll be back." Great ! have you looked at your favourites lately, I don't know about you but I can't even find my real favourites among them, in fact I'm even afraid to look at my favourites folder. "But I've got a really catchy/short/easy to remember domain name they'll remember that won't they?." Look over there, Isn't that your competitor with their really catchy/short/easy to remember domain name. So what do you do? It's actually quite simple. You Add Value to their visit. Yes you make your site a Value Added Website. In other words you GIVE them something, something that will bring them back to you, that will help them remember you as being a useful site, an interesting site. It doesn't have to be something you physically give them. Information is one of the most valuable commodities and if you can find the information that your customers want then give it to them ! I'm not going to tell you what that information is, you know who your customer is right? (you should and if you don't you better find out). So it shouldn't take you too long to work out what they might be interested in. If your website is competing heavily with offline marketers which in particular a lot of online clothing and gift retailers are, then this is even more important. Don't compete on price alone. Statistics have shown that a customer must have contact with you on average 7 times before they buy. You need to get those other 6 connections in. Do a little bit of research on areas related to your products. Top 5/10's are great. Find the top 10 .whatever ! something that will be relevant to YOUR customer. There is plenty of FREE information on the internet that you can use, loads of articles that as long as you keep the authors link in you can generally use. If possible you should capture your visitors. When you do capture them, look after them, nurture them, communicate with them and send them information via email. You can set this up very easily by using an autoresponder. But don't bombard them with useless information, with 10 emails a day, do you think that is going to endear them to you? But DO communicate and give them the option each time of stopping the communication if they want to. Always have an unsubscribe button at the end of your emails and make sure your emails are always double opt-in. (In otherwords they have to confirm their subscription somebody else can't just sign them up.) So how do you capture them? Well that could be a whole new article and it probably will be. Unfortunately nowadays you can't just put something like "sign up here for our free newsletter ? it doesn't work anymore, there are just too many of them. It comes back to adding value, what I have just been talking about, giving them something useful. Turn your website into a Value Added Website and watch your business grow. |
