Tag Archives: Online Marketing

Marketing On Your Receipts

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Whether you’re talking about online or offline purchases, receipts are a great way to continue the conversation with your customers, and encourage repeat orders and up-sales. If you’re anything like me, you’ll casually look at a receipt several times after a purchase, and even keep them for years. Unfortunately, they are one of the most under utilized forms of marketing.

Supermarkets have been using receipts to market complimentary products for years.  They use complicated software to deliver targeted ads based upon current and previous purchases.  Fortunately, you do not need this software to effectively market using receipts.

Here is a great list of ways that you can improve your marketing on receipts.

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Alternative Payment Engines

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Over the past year several new companies have emerged offering Alternative Payment Engines.  Alternative Payment Engines offer a creative way to increase sales, recapture lost sales, and in the case of subscription products increase customer retention.  Based on a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) model, Alternative Payment Engines act as a broker between you and other merchants willing to pay a commission on sales.

Here’s how it works:

Instead of paying for your product or service directly, Alternative Payment Engines provide your customers with a series of offers from recognized brands.  If the customer takes one of these offers, you receive a commission from the recognized brand (typically more than the actual cost of the product they were purchasing), and the customer receives your product or service free.

Here’s an example:

  1. A customer is shopping, and chooses a $10 product from your online store.  At checkout, instead of paying with their credit card, they choose the “Get It Free” option provided by the Alternative Payment Engine.
  2. The Alternative Payment Engine gives the customer a list of offers from trusted brands.  You have previously pre-approved all of these offers, and established a minimum amount that you are willing to accept for the product.  For this example, let’s say that the customer chooses is for a VOIP phone service, and you have said that the minimum you will accept is $10.
  3. When the customer completes the offer provided by the Alternative Payment Engine, they are emailed a coupon code good for the product they wanted to purchase.  This gives the customer the product for FREE.Quick note: most Alternative Payment Engines offer an even tighter integration with your online store, allowing you to streamline this process.
  4. You receive a check from the trusted brand for $12.50, more than the minimum amount you previous established that you will accept.

Alternative Payment Engines can be used in any number of places within the sales process.  You can use them when a customer exits the cart without purchasing, when a customer cancels their subscription, as a post-sale upsale offer, or as a special offer to past customers who haven’t purchased in some time.

The offers provided by the Alternative Payment Engine are intelligent, meaning that previous customer activity as well as the customer’s profile (including location, machine type, time, previous purchases through the Alternative Payment Engine, etc.) are used to deliver the most relevant and effective offers to the customer.

There are several companies which provide Alternative Payment Engines, including:

You can also participate as an advertiser with these networks, offering your products or services to customers, and “sponsoring” their purchase of goods and services from other online stores.

There are a few downsides to Alternative Payment Engines.  First, you are sharing your customer data with other companies.  When the customer accepts the offer from the trusted brand, they are sharing their contact information (including email address).

Also, some Alternative Payment Engines don’t offer follow up tracking.  So if a customer cancels out of the offer process, you cannot follow up with an email.

Your First Online Store

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Lately, quite a few friends have approached me asking for advice on how to launch their first online store. This isn’t unusual, every now and then I’m brought in to lend my thoughts. And being someone who happens to know a little something about online marketing, and more importantly has a passion for marketing, I’m always happy to exchange ideas. But lately, I seem to be talking to more people that usual.

So, I thought that it might helpful to outline some simple steps to starting your first online store. But before I get into what you should do, let me talk about what you don’t have to do:

ONLINE MARKETING MYTHS

  1. I need an online store
  2. In that online store, I need a lot of products
  3. And I need a lot of money to advertise my products
  4. I’m more successful if I sell more products per transaction
  5. If my store is set up correctly, I’ll start making sales right away

HOW TO START YOUR FIRST ONLINE STORE – PHASE 1

The fact of the matter is that you really don’t need an online store to sell your products online. In fact, if you are just starting out, I recommend that you don’t have an online store.

Right now you may be asking yourself, “well, how do customers buy my products?”.

Let me answer that question by discussing focus.

STAYING FOCUSED

The biggest problem of any new online store is focus. More specifically, lack of focus. Too often, we try to be everything to everyone. We think that they more products we offer, the more attractive our online store will be and the more sales we will make. And alas, we are wrong. Why? Because consumers are easily confused, and more easily distracted. If you have 100 items in your store, you have just given each customer 100 opportunities not to click the Buy Now button.

Your first online store shouldn’t be an online store. It should be a single webpage, selling a single product. Why? Because you don’t need anything more than that. Your only goal is to get the customer to make a purchase. Every additional product you offer in your online store is another distraction to your customers. Considering the cost (monetary and otherwise) of acquiring a customer, you cannot afford to lose any sales. Remember, once you have their contact information, you can always go back and remarket other products to your customers. So don’t offer the customer 30 different products, or 20 different options, or 100 different upsell offers. JUST MAKE THE SALE.

Focusing on a single product also allows you to more easily fine tune your marketing, and sales conversion. You’ll be surprise at the time and energy it takes to market a single product, and be grateful that you don’t have to do this an additional 99 times.

SELECTING A PRODUCT TO SELL ONLINE

Assuming that you’ve drank the koolaid, how do you select that one product that you want to sell? Here are some guidelines and criteria that you’ll want to consider when selecting your first product to sell online.

  • Your product should have at least a 300% gross profit margin. If you buy or make the product for $1, you should sell it for $3. You need this buffer to accommodate online marketing costs, transaction fees, affiliate commissions, fraud, etc.
  • Your product should retail for somewhere between $25 and $150. If you price your product for less thatn $25, you’ll lose the attention of affiliate marketers. Price your product more than $150 and you’ll lose a majority of online shoppers in your target market.
  • Your product should be somewhat unique. The Internet has made it VERY easy for customers to comparison shop for price. Competition kills. Unique products are easier to market and sell.
  • Your product should speak to a target market that buys other similar products. Remember, you’re not going to sell a single product forever. Just in the beginning. So pick a product that appeals to an audience who will buy other products.
  • There should be a demand for your product – somewhere. You don’t need a huge demand for your product – that will come in time. But you do need some demand. As a rule, smaller target markets are easier to penetrate. You don’t have to select a product that appeals to all pet owners. Dog owners represents a large enough market for your first online venture.
  • Some of the easiest and best products to sell online are digital products (software, music, online instruction, etc.). I like digital products because they are cheap to replicate, and easy to distribute. If someone “steals” your digital product through a charge back, you really haven’t lost much.
  • Whenever possible, choose a product that requires updating (and sell it as a monthly or annual subscription). What would you rather do – sell a single product to a single customer, or sell that same product to the same consumer every year. The latter sounds a lot better to me – and is possible when you sell subscription products.

RECAP

The formula for your first online store is simple: Choose one product, build a simple webpage for that product with a straight forward online checkout process, market the heck out of it, and only after you’ve perfected that process go back and upsell other products to your customers.


 

How To Increase Your Website Traffic

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How To Increase Your Website Traffic

If your primary focus isn’t towards getting more traffic to your website – it should be.  Traffic (aka website visitors) is one of the most important factors of any successful online marketing campaign.  More important than traffic is targeted traffic.  Targeted traffic are users who can reasonably be customers.  Without targeted traffic, your online marketing efforts will fail.  Remember, there is no such thing as too much traffic.

There are simple things that you can do to increase your website traffic.

1.      Forum Marketing
Whether you are selling a product or a service, you are providing a solution to a problem.  And where there is a problem, there are people who are looking for a resolution to that problem – online.  They do this by posting their question in online forums.  Forum marketing is a great way to find potential customers, and drive traffic to your site.  By simply answering questions related to the solution you are providing, you can expose your product or service, and your website, to a targeted set of customers.

2.      Email Marketing
Email marketing, through newsletters , etc. , is a great way to drive traffic to your website.

3.      Search Engine Optimized Press Releases
Writing search engine optimized press releases about the various things going on in your company is a great way to increase online awareness of what you have to offer.

4.      Online Articles
Similar to search engine optimized press releases, online articles can serve to drive substantial traffic to your website.  Writing “how to’s” and “top ten” lists are great ways to communicate a lot of information effectively.

5.      Corporate Blogs
More and more, corporate blogs are being utilized to gain positive online exposure, and established company figure heads as thought leaders.

6.      SEO
None of these techniques work if you don’t optimize your content for search engines first.  EVERYTHING you post, publish, and distribute should be optimized for search engines.

7.      Partners
Partnerships  – whether they be traditional corporate partnerships or commission-only affiliates – are a great way to increase traffic to your website.

8.      Online Advertising
Managed properly, online advertising is a good way to drive consistent traffic to your website.  The trick is to properly manage and measure every campaign, ensuring that effective campaigns are ramped up, and failing campaigns are shut down.

9.      Syndication
Syndicating your content is an effective way to exponentially increase your online exposure.  You should syndicate everything that you post, publish, and distribute – so that it is put in front of the largest possible audience.

As with most anything, there is a right and a wrong way to do each of these traffic driving activities.  In future weeks, we’ll review some of the major pitfalls to avoid.