Five Easy Ways to Improve Any Website

- Get the basics right and make the sale.

1. Your Website is a Salesperson not a Billboard
Many companies use their homepage as a huge billboard with flash animation and many more believe that the home page should tell the visitor who they are and why the company is so great. In reality, customers are visiting your website because they’re trying to find something. You need to help them find it.

The most important thing you can do to improve your website is use your home page to sell. You need to view your website as your virtual sales person working 24 x 7 x 365 and equip it with the same tools that you would provide the sales team. Save all the bragging about yourself the about us or company info pages.

2. Make it easy to buy, sign up, get information and navigate
When customers arrive at your website they need to easily understand where to find what they’re looking for.

• The best way for you to do this is to make your navigation intuitive and easy. People have been trained to look to either the top or on the left side for the main navigation. There’s no reason to stray from this format.
• Featuring products and allowing people purchase directly from the home page will increase your sales.
• The ability to sign up for special offers or newsletters and to share your site with friends is also a key element and both should actually be featured on every page.

3. Engage customers with content
Content is not just important in search engine optimization, it’s the key to keeping customers engaged with your website. The more engaging your content is the longer people will stay. And the longer they stay, then the greater your chance of moving a widget (generating a sale, sign-up or download).

4. Integrate rich media: video and podcasts
Adding rich media elements like videos and podcasts will offer your visitors another reason to stay on your site. You should also create individual pages and with transcripts of each podcast because that generates the type of keyword rich content that the search engines love to see.

5. Drive traffic with online and traditional media
Put your URL on everything. While natural search results will generate much of your traffic, online and traditional media should both be used to drive traffic incremental traffic. And generally, more relevant traffic means more sales, sign-ups, whatever.

As we’ve explained in other articles, ideally you would want to use landing pages that highlight the specific offer that your featuring in your online and tradition media.

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Understand your Customers through Research

Don’t worry research is not as hard as it sounds and it’s not something exclusively for huge conglomerates or companies with massive marketing budgets. Every company can do it and more importantly, every company can benefit.

Everything you need to know about customer research you learned in 5th grade science class:

• What is the question you want answered (hypothesis)?
• How will you test it (experiment)?
• What do you results say (evaluate)?

Do those three things and you’ll be able to make better decisions that will lead to better results.

Here are five keys to customer research:

1. The Research Plan.
Begin by figuring out what you know, what you don’t know and what you’d like to know. (what’s the question?) Then figure out how to gather the data (how will you test it?). Will you send out a survey, test offer response, conduct a field study, etc?

Say for example you want to figure out if it makes more sense to offer 20% off or buy two get one free: A simple way to test would be to put together two offer emails, that are exactly the same except for the offer copy and send them to two groups of customers that are roughly the same size.

When the customers respond, track the results. Did more customers respond to 20% off or buy two? You should also consider which one generated more revenue – more customers may have responded to the % off, but the fewer customers responding to the buy two offer might have generated more total revenue.

Evaluate your results. If 20% offer was better, what if you’d offered buy one get one, did you have to offer 20% or could you have offered 15% and gotten similar results, what if you’d offered 25% off?

Results often lead to more questions and as you can see, research isn’t something you do once. The best results come from continuously testing, measuring and evaluating.

2. Current Customers.
Find out what’s working by asking your current customers. You already have an existing relationship with them, and you can find out you what they liked, why they bought and what sets you apart from your completion. Their feedback will give you your competitive differentiators and should be the key sales points.

3. Potential customers (and your competition).
Learn how to improve by asking your competition’s customers or reviewing your competitors websites, sales materials, etc.. What is your competition’s value proposition? How are they positioning themselves? Ask their customers why they chose them over you.

The honest feedback may not be what you want to hear but it’s the key to uncovering your faults and finding out how you need to improve. If you can’t improve, then at least you’ll be able to address the issues pre-sale rather than post-lost sale.

4. Non-Customers (and other industries).
Explore untapped markets by evaluating other industries and talking to non-customers – people who aren’t in the market for your products. Why don’t they want what your selling? What are they looking for? Is there an untapped market in another industry that you or your competitors are missing or could easily exploit? If so, you can gain market share by getting their first.

5. What’s it all mean?
While research can be complicated and technical, it’s also something that can be done relatively easily. Every company already has or can easily start to gather a wealth of information -- from customers, competitors, industry and trade sources. By planning appropriately, then compiling and evaluating this data we can make better decisions, increase sales and improve revenue.

You should also recognize that it’s a continuous process, because the answers to the first question should lead to additional questions, answers and more questions….

Basic Structure for E-mail Marketing

– Essential elements for creating a successful email marketing campaign:

1. Make it clear.

• Be clear about who the e-mail is from. Ask yourself, would you be more likely to open something from offers@yourcompany.com or from offers@secreturl/or/somecompanythativeneverheardof.com? If you’re like most, then you’re more likely to open the e-mail from the company your heard of and done business with. If your customers have opted in then they’ll expect to hear from you, getting them to open the e-mail is the subject of another article.
• The subject should match the content of the message. Tell your customers the benefit of opening the message in the subject line. Use the subject line to pique their interest and tease the offer: One Week Only - 20% Off Orders of $25 or more or A Special Offer for Your Friends and Family. Make sure you pay it off quickly and clearly in the body copy. Then use the rest of the space tell them about your latest product, discovery of however else you like.

2. Ask for the sale.
You’re not going to sell anything if you don’t ask for the sale. A good rule of thumb is to make the ask at least twice. Once above the fold, and again later or in closing. If you’re talking about a specific product or offer, then you should link directly to the product page not just to the home page.

3. Make it easy to subscribe and unsubscribe
Making it easy to subscribe and unsubscribe will benefit you more in the long run than it will hinder you. Firstly, it reduces the likelihood that you’ll upset a customer (and risk losing for life) who can’t easily opt-out. And you’ll benefit from additional subscriptions gathered when your message is forwarded.

4. Provide choices.
Let your customer decide how often and what type of information to receive. If you only send offer a periodic e-mail consider, repurposing the content on your website to create a newsletter. Then allow your customer to select whether they want offers, the newsletter or both.

5. Test various formats and offers.
Not everyone you send communicate with will react to the same message in the same way. A percentage of your customers will react to Free offers another percentage will respond better to 2 for 1 or 20% off. Which one works best? Testing various messages allows you to specifically tailor your message to your audience or find the single message that resonates best.

Essential Elements of E-Mail Content

- Improve your content and improve your email campaign results:

1. Tease the offer in the Subject Line.
Let your customers know what value they’re going to for reading your e-mail in the subject line. As your customers scan their e-mail, have yours stand out with a creative and compelling offer. It’s important to remember to make sure that your subject is relevant to the body copy.

2. Pay it off early.
Get to the point. Don’t wait to the end of your note to explain the offer. If you wait too long and put the offer too far down in the copy, then you risk losing the customer beforethey’ve even read what you want them to see.

3. Ask for the Sale.
You’re not going to sell anything if you don’t ask for the sale. A good rule of thumb is to make the ask at least twice. Once above the fold, and again later or in closing. If you’re talking about a specific product or offer, then you should link directly to the product page not just to the home page.

4. Keep it short.
You should use paragraphs to break your e-mail into digestible pieces but try to limit it to three or four paragraphs.

5. Encourage forwarding.
People like to share great offers with their friends, ask and encourage them to forward your message. But make sure you make it easy to opt-in and out out in the event that the person receiving your e-mail.

Build a brand, not a slogan.

– Establish your brand and set yourself apart from the competition.

Why is building a brand important? When all other things are equal (or viewed as equal), your brand is the differentiator. Building a distinct brand that resonates in the consumer’s mind should be one of your company’s main objectives.

Here are five basic ways you can begin to build a brand that makes a difference:

1. Think long-term
Building a brand begins with a consistent approach to communicating who your company is and what you stand for. The words that you select to use to describe your company will be used by the consumer to form your brand image, so they should be selected carefully. Your companies brand or slogan of the moment will not become recognizable overnight, over several months or even over several years. You need to expect and commit to use them over a long period of time. Once you’ve committed to brand building.

2. Use Research
The best way to find how your company is perceived is to conduct research. Start your research with your customers. Find out why they selected your company over your competitors. What are the attributes you possess that elevate your company in the mind of the consumer? You need to also talk to potential customers to find out what are they looking from companies in your space. You’ll garner just as much if not more insight from the people who aren’t doing business with you and you do from those who are. Use this research to help you identify your companies, strengths and weaknesses.

3. Recognize your Faults
Now that you’ve used research to find out what your strengths and weaknesses are, take a hard look in the mirror and see your company through the eyes of your customer. Are you really delivering on your promise of outstanding service or huge selection or whatever? If you are great, but chances are your customers will tell you that your not as cool as you thought you were. That’s a good thing. One of the best ways to overcome objections is to know what the issues are. Once you know where the issues are, you can be prepared to overcome them and you’ll also know what things your company is really good at.

4. Play Up your Strengths
Hopefully, the research and review have shown you that your customers view you differently, than you view yourself. The next step in build a brand is to take the things you do well -- customer service, high quality materials, low price, whatever -- and

5. Don’t over-promise and under-deliver.
This one’s pretty simple: Your brand and brand promise will be built on your companies ability to give the customer exactly what you say your going to give them. If you don’t, then customers will discount your brand to the benefit of your competitors who are or are perceived to be delivering on their promises.

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