Ecommerce Experiment » ecommerce marketing

Staying Social and keeping interest

Justin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:56:23 +0000

Scenario: Walking down a high street window shopping, something catches your eye and you enter the store. The next thing you’re doing is walking out of the store with a purchase.

The above scenario shows that without realising, you can actually become one part of a sales tunnel very quickly. Online things are different, granted people window shop but only seasoned buyers will go to the same online shop time and time again. This would usually happen if they’ve had a really good buying process, excellent customer service and event better delivery times.

For the general Joe/Jane Blogs who might only buy twice online in a month, buying online is generally different. They’re more likely to hear about a product socially.

Word of Mouth has changed dramatically in the last year or so, you’re more likely to find a group of people talking about a product online than you would physically. It takes one conversation with one link added for someone to become a buyer.

The question is, once you have a buyer how do you keep them interested in you and your company to come back and be return buyers?

The answer, you stay social.

Companies large and small really need to hook up to the fact that people are people, just like themselves they also need to understand their customers. Customers LOVE interaction. They LOVE feeling a part of something bigger. Get to know your customers socially, make a friend and you’ll gain a loyal follower. Remember however that it is not good of you to force yourself on people, present what you have in the right way to the right people and you are half way there.

eCommerce Usability and Localisation

Alex — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:29:33 +0000

Following usability guidelines for your eCommerce site are obviously important. Design aspects of your website such as quick downloading, easy navigation and interaction with no ambiguity trigger sales, however selling to foreign markets requires extra consideration. An eCommerce site that only focuses on their target audience in one country cannot exploit the internet’s global reach and many eCommerce sites are losing much overseas business due to the usability of their site to international customers. Foreign consumers may have heard about your site and are able to find it easily but any marketing employed by your business will be wasted if they cannot connect with the content on your site, preferring instead to use a local site. Research has suggested that internet users are four times more likely to purchase from a website that communicates in their own language and over 50% of web users speak a native language other than English so connecting to these non English speaking countries will potentially double your audience and hopefully double your sales!

Localisation refers to designing your website in a way that can be adapted for and is appropriate to international customers. Taking into account language and cultural differences will allow you to communicate with more customers worldwide and increase sales. Applications can be localised to different levels depending on the user group or culture you expect to use your site. You may wish to keep the content of your site the same but translate local measures such as currency or time or you may decide to translate the product text and terminology to suit the appropriate country. Some eCommerce sites even go as far to change colours, images and symbols to suit the target culture as customers perceptions of service quality differ from country to country. For example, The colour red means error, stop or warning in western culture however this isn’t the case for Asian countries. In pursuing a global market, businesses should be sensitive to elements such as this. If you understand their local cultures, how they use technology and their expectations you will most likely be successful in selling to them.

Even simple differences between variants of English can make or break a sale. For example, British English and American English obviously differ with British using shopping basket and Americans preferring shopping cart and spelling variations such as colour and color. Customers who recognize that the site is based abroad will become less trusting of it, hence less likely to purchase from it. This isn’t a case of automatic translation but researching your target markets expectations and customs.

When did you last check your eCommerce site for these issues? Can you get more sales from applying simple changes?

Top 10 Voucher Code Websites

Alex — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:54:09 +0000

There has been a huge increase in companies opting to use voucher codes on affiliate’s websites in the hope that these will be turned into sales. Consumers are always looking for savings on the internet and so offering voucher codes has become an effective marketing strategy for merchants. A voucher can often turn a consumer from window shopper to an actual customer. In return, the affiliate receives some sort of commission, usually in the form of a percentage of the total product sale amount or a fixed amount per product sold. We plan to use voucher code websites as part of our marketing plan for Eliot Turner.

I have identified the top 10 UK voucher websites:

And a few international sites:

All sites are essentially the same, offering similar discounts. www.myvouchercodes.co.uk claim to be the UK’s No.1 discount code website offering deals from 1000’s of stores, hence likely to have the most hits and obviously the international sites are seen by a wider audience. We will take this into consideration when choosing which voucher code sites to use as affiliates.

Viral marketing at its best

Justin — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:11:14 +0000

If you look at the most successful online shops in the market place you will see they rely heavily on email marketing. Therefore it’s really important that we build an opt-in email database rapidly. We are going to use quick and simple viral marketing techniques to build the database. Spam is an increasing problem for everyone using email, so it’s incredibly important that the data is gathered in a sensible and ethical way.

We are going to use an online prize draw competition to build interest in the site before launch. We will be giving away a few products and asking people to enter through an online form. The form will have an option to opt into the email distribution list to ensure only the people interest in our products receive the email.

Although we are running a pre-launch competition this is a long term market strategy and we will be running regular giveaways over the next 6 months. We are aiming to build an email marketing database of 10,000 active subscribers over this time frame.

We use what we feel is one of the best distribution systems in the market place which allows us to manage the mailing list to follow anti spam legislation. It will track sales, open rates, clickthroughs, demographics and much more. Most importantly the system will automatically allow people to unsubscribe and cleanse the data when hard bounces occur.

So the million dollar question is, “how do we get people to enter the competition en-mass?”

There are sites on the Internet that spread the word of online competitions. There are professionals who do nothing but enter online competitions and make money from doing so. For us this is very much a safety in numbers exercise of getting a huge number of people to sign up with only a certain percentage actually interested in our shop. Don’t forget that a further percentage of people will not want to be contacted by email and choose to opt out when entering the competition. Once we start sending marketing emails, we will lose further emails from hard bounces and people un-subscribing. Therefore to get 1000 active subscribers after the first email sent we need about 3500 entries per competition.

After 6 months of running the competitions we hope to have built the level of interest significantly to generate constant email sign ups. Our experience at carrotmedia has taught us this is a tried and tested technique which works fantastically for our clients.

Apparently (http://www.asos.com) holds an email list of over 2 1/2 million subscribers and costs per email address as £60. £60 being an average basket size. If you work out the numbers its quite astronomical. I’ll talk more on this in the near future.