Essential ingredients for Internet success
Looks great – works great – but first you have to find some customers!
In online selling, credibility is everything. Your site must look great – to engage, inform and excite your customers – and must also ‘work great' – to provide buyers with an enjoyable ‘stress-free' experience while purchasing your products and services online. However, the story begins before customers reach your site - this article discusses the basic ingredients of successful internet marketing – how to get them there and keep them coming back.
Get your own domain name
If your domain looks something like http://members.tripod.com/~billgates/ then you need to think seriously about getting your own domain name.
- Businesses hosted on a free domains are not taken seriously, and are considered unprofessional
- Lengthy domain names unrelated to you or your services are difficult for your customers to remember
- A company with its own domain name and a professional looking website will have a far higher rate of success than a site hosted on ‘free' webspace
A domain name and professional hosting package is a necessity if you are serious about creating a solid impression. The good news is that hosting and domain name packages no longer cost the earth, and ‘all in one' packages take a lot of pain out of registering, setting up and configuring your hosting.
Build a professional website
Your website is a direct reflection of you and your business. Good design is a decisive factor in creating credibility – gaining and maintaining customer trust is the holy grail of e-commerce site design. However building a professional site is much more than great design, you must specifically design your website to sell.
Present customers with high quality content
In order to create and then maintain a steady stream of traffic to your website, you must give your visitors a reason to visit and continue to visit in the future. You must provide your visitors with fresh content on a continual basis.
Instant product delivery (downloadable, instant access, etc.)
Internet users are starving for information, as that is what the Internet is all about. They have a sincere desire to learn and want the information they desire right now.
The best products to sell on the Internet are those that can be delivered instantly, like software, e-books, mp3's and video.
Accept credit cards
Instant product delivery requires instant payment, so accepting credit cards is an absolute necessity. Once you have generated a ‘call to action', your customer is ready to purchase; the lack of ability for them to ‘buy on impulse' means they will go elsewhere.
You must provide your visitors with an easy online ordering process and the ability to pay for their order right online.
Give clear privacy statements and guarantees
Online customers are becoming increasingly protective of their online privacy, and so it is vital to give clear indications of whether personal details will be used for marketing purposes or (more importantly) transferred to third party companies.
In most countries it is now illegal to collect and share personal information without consensual notice contained in a privacy statement.
Targeted traffic and Internet marketing strategies
Developing a successful marketing strategy is the key to your success. It is essential to develop both short-term and long-term marketing strategies, to bring a continuous stream of targeted traffic to your web site.
By receiving ‘targeted traffic', we mean customers who are specifically looking to buy the type of product or service you provide. For example, if your company sells used and reconditioned computer parts, placing an Google ad linked to the search phrase ‘Hewlett Packard' will be likely to bring you thousands of referrals - but very few sales. However, placing an ad for ‘Hewlett Packard spare parts' would bring a fraction of the traffic but a far higher conversion rate.
So, no matter how busy your website becomes, unless you're receiving high quality, targeted traffic, you will make very few sales.
Its also important to choose the form of promotion that is right for your product - newspaper ads, paid internet advertising, affiliate networks and free search engine traffic are all complementary forms of promotion.
Short term strategies
‘pay per click' and paid advertising
The advantage of paid referral campaigns (including banner advertising and classified ads) is that they generate instant results, and can be an excellent way of achieving a visible presence for specific products and services or widening your customer base.
However, short-term gains also mean short-term results - once you stop paying, this traffic dries up!
- It is vital to monitor the conversion rates of paid advertising, ensuring you generate a return on investment for paid referral campaigns
Search engine traffic
Search engines can be an excellent source of free traffic, and, if your site content is well chosen to ‘optimise' for popular search phrases, obtaining a good ranking for well targeted search phrases is an achievable goal. However, basing your marketing strategy on search engine traffic alone is risky in the long term: because search engines regularly modify the way they rank pages, there is no guarantee that good rankings can be maintained indefinitely; you may have a top ten ranking one day and the next day your site may disappear!
- Register and ensure your site is well optimised for search engines – 25% of all e-commerce sale result from free search engine leads
- Research and build your site content around carefully chosen search keywords, to maximize targeting free referrals
In order to create a steady stream of targeted traffic in to the future, longer term marketing techniques must be utilised in addition to short term goals
Long term strategies
Your long-term marketing strategies will drive a steady stream of traffic to your site. By managing this vital asset intelligently is is possible to ensure your traffic will continue to increase over time.
Build a customer database via opt-in mailing lists
By constantly working to build your opt-in lists, you are creating a long-term database of potential customers.
E-zines and informative newsletters are able to:
- Maintain the interest of potential customers, resulting in higher conversion rates
- keep existing customers coming back by sending personalised follow-up messages, both to introduce new products and provide excellent after sales service and support
- Maintain a consistent, informative presence which builds credibility and brand awareness
E-commerce news: Visa Australia reports online purchases up by 60%
