Getting Customers

In my last post I talked about auction sites, today let’s assume you have a ecoomerce site but no one is visiting.

While it is certainly possible to sell your merchandise exclusively through auction sites you should still have a website. A presence on the web beyond eBay will help you promote your business and develop a more enduring relationship with your customers. If you don’t already have one and are daunted by the technical aspect of making your own site there are software templates that be purchased at any office supply store or online for around $20. You might consider hiring someone to design a site for you. Web designers can make your site attractive and highly personalized. Professionally made sites look more professional as a rule but the cost will be much higher than doing it your self.

Having a website does not guarantee traffic. There are millions of websites out there and you will need to find ways to maximize the chance of a customer finding yours. Once they’ve found your site much of that traffic will be unproductive. There are many ways to help generate traffic and make sure that that traffic generates sales, some are free and some are not.
A few free things you can try are contributing to discussion groups, trading links with similar businesses, and collecting testimonials. There are discussion groups out there for nearly every topic under the sun. Contributing to these groups will help establish you as an expert in your field and simply get your link out there. Trading links with websites similar to yours increases the chance of your site turning up on search engines and provides a valuable service to your customers.

Testimonials from previous customers may not improve your chance of being found on the web but it does help drive sales.
Never underestimate the power of a well-written press release. The press release will generate links to your site and inform your customer base. Spend some time researching the sites to submit your press release to and write a few informative paragraphs about new products or trends.

One method to improve traffic that you will have to pay for is hiring a search engine optimizer who can vastly improve the chance that the major search engines will rank your site higher. If you have the time and inclination you can learn to do this yourself by purchasing instruction books and PDFs.

Another way to improve traffic is to enroll in a pay-per-click search engine. The engines will charge you a fee per click they generate for you. Usually you will bid against other customers for position on the site. The higher your bid the better position you will get. You should expect to pay fees ranging from a few cents to around a dollar per click.

Direct mail campaigns can be a powerful tool but unless you’re willing to send what amounts to spam be prepared to pay serious money for permission only email lists. Beyond avoiding annoying people permission based lists will help you be sure to reach actual prospective customers. Permission based lists are available from reputable list dealers online.

Useful Link:
online businessbasics

It’s All About Conversion!
Steve Gibson
Gigi Fotou

How many phone calls do you receive from excited marketers trying to sell you traffic to your site? Probably quite a few. Now, how many phone calls do you receive from someone wanting to show you how to convert the traffic you are already getting? Our guess is very little or none.
Unfortunately, someone selling you traffic could typically care less about your conversion rate: They delivered the traffic they sold you – and in their eyes, their job is done. If it fails to convert, it must be your site’s fault.
The truth is, over a period of time, traffic to your site will always fluctuate, but with a little work, your conversion rate can steadily increase. Sadly, most internet business owners are satisfied with a one percent conversion ratio when, in fact, one percent is already the general conversion ratio for online sales. Can you imagine any bricks and mortar business content with this rate of conversion? Certainly no car dealership, department store or Mom & Pop. They simply could not survive with anything less than 10%.
Bottom line: Instead of spending money on traffic, focus on conversion and in particular, on the following points to make it happen:
Create Trust – Creating trust means much more than just offering your customers a secure checkout. A professional site with no dead links and no missing products is the biggest credibility builder you can have. A well-designed site utilizes good use of color, space, and navigation techniques to communicate experience, commitment and customer service. In addition, think of including testimonials, client lists and independent reviews to educate your visitors. Yes, prospective customers really do read those things!
Pay Attention to Presentation – You have one chance to present your product: Make it outstanding. Professionally photograph items, optimize your pictures for quick download and show multiple angle and zoom shots of important details. Make it easier for visitors to read about you and your company by keeping your web site content in short width lengths. One of the fastest ways to lose visitors is forcing them to read a wall of text that goes across the full width of your pages.
Write Killer Copy – Write descriptive and detailed copy with an emphasis on benefit and remember to remain user friendly. Don’t bog your readers down with unnecessary words, such as ecommerce when Selling Online can get the message across faster and more simply. Utilize clear, bold headlines on each of your pages to draw in your readers and encourage them to read on. Remember the two-second rule: you really only have two to three seconds to grab the average users’ attention.
Disturb the Buyer – You want the buyer to take action immediately and the easiest way to accomplish this is to associate a negative consequence with not buying now. Low inventory, limited price availability, competitors buying remaining stock and missing the peak trend, are all effective ways of conveying this message.

Entice the Buyer – Clearly define your products’ most positive attributes and communicate the benefits of owning your products. In most cases, people are looking to buy the feeling your product creates. SELL THE FEELING. Speak directly to your visitors and ask them questions that make them think about what benefits you are offering. For example, do you want to improve the conversion rate of your web site? What will happen when you succeed in improving it – More sales? Pride of ownership? A trip to Hawaii?
Ask for the Sale — Most important is your call to action, and remember, your site’s most desired actions could be any number of things, including a quote request, free gift or brochure download. A buyer should never need to look for an “action” button. Name your buttons with assertive buying terms such as, Buy it Now, Add to Cart, Make it Mine, etc. Be sure to place these buttons liberally throughout your pages.
Make it Easy – How many of your prospective customers are computer whizzes? Your buyers need to be able to view their carts easily and check out quickly. Attempt using a one-page checkout to streamline the process. Allow customers to see the contents in their carts and the purchase amount. Clearly define your shipping policy and offer a variety of shipping methods and times.
If you’re serious about your online business, receiving quality, targeted traffic to your site will always be a necessary marketing expense. Optimizing your conversion allows you to wring the most from your marketing dollar and will outlast your advertising campaigns. It is also what your customers will remember best.

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Steve Gibson and Gigi Fotou are partners in Skyabove® Ironically, Skyabove® is a full-service internet marketing agency specializing in both Search Engine Optimization and Conversion. They’re also pretty darn good at web design. Call them today for a free detailed consultation at 714-553-4894 or contact them on-line at www.skyabove.com. They currently have two national locations to serve you better.

How to Double your Conversion Rate
Without Increasing Search Engine Marketing
Steve Gibson
Gigi Fotou

How many repeat customers do you have? For most wholesalers, repeat customers are the backbone of their enterprise. But unfortunately, statistics show us that many wholesalers have less than a 50 percent return customer rate. Why is that? While attracting new business is essential for growth, isn’t it much easier to sell products to those who have already bought from you?
Bear in mind that once a customer places his first order, he has overcome the three challenges to any online sale: Perceived value, trust and safety, and competitive view. This means you have far less work to do to complete another sale by working on tactics specifically designed to encourage many repeat buys.
If you are not successful in turning customers into your clientele, you are not working your back-end marketing strategies. And if you are not working your back-end, you are simply not taking advantage of your full conversion capabilities.
Consider the following strategies you can begin implementing immediately:
Create an Affiliate Program – The selling point of affiliate marketing is that it benefits everyone involved: Merchants love it because they only pay when a certain action is made on behalf of their ads; affiliates earn livings simply by having visitors to their site click on the ads – either in a pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, or pay-per-sale basis.
Coupons on their next order — Include a coupon in every order shipped for a percentage or dollar amount off their next order. Make certain the coupon is time sensitive with a specific expiration date to encourage quick action. If your current shopping cart does not provide for an easy coupon system, it may be time to start looking for another cart. Yes, coupons are that important.
Include a bonus or unexpected gift with order — This could be a sample or promotional item with your name or logo on it. For example, one of the most effective gifts is an eBook because it is inexpensive to produce and easy to distribute. Attach an ad for your backend product to the gift. Your return customer will likely be in a favorable state of mind to read your ad.
Follow up phone call — Call your buyers one to two days after they have received their products. Ask them about their purchase process, shipping time and arrival condition. Are they happy with the products, do they have any questions, and most importantly, would they like to place another order? Asking for another order may seem presumptive but it is the perfect time to push a larger buy on one or many of the current items they have purchased. Although courteous calls like this can take some time, they can result in a 25 percent increase in sales without an increase in your marketing budget.

Publish a Company Newsletter — Newsletters can come in many forms, cover a variety of subjects and are much more potent than generic e-mail campaigns. The key to an outstanding newsletter is to make it worth reading and that means making it valuable to your reader. Make this more than a marketing message; give information that will help increase your retailers’ sales, such as industry news and statistics, success stories, positioning and promotional ideas. Of course, always include a link to your main page and mention any of your top promotions. In most cases, the frequency of a newsletter should me no more than once a week.
Branding — You would be surprised how many times someone in a warehouse ran out of an item and did not know where to reorder it. Print your name, logo, web address EVERYWHERE…on your packaging, packing slips, invoices, wrappers, shipping labels, and anywhere there is some remaining blank space.
“Customers Only” – Creating a “customers only” area on your site conveys the message that they are VIPs and part of an elite group. Fill this area with helpful content, interesting articles, invitations to an event and even some free downloads to really boost this area’s traffic. Subtly promote your product ads without being too evident.
In today’s competitive online business environment, success is sometimes measured not just by great leaps and bounds but by measured tactical increments. It is true that serious online businesses have great looking websites and targeted traffic. But not all of them have the patience, motivation or knowledge to go the extra mile and attract that one segment of their buyer base that will most likely double their sales for next to nothing: The returning customer. If you’re not putting effort into your back-end campaign, you can be sure your competition already is.

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Steve Gibson and Gigi Fotou are partners in Skyabove® Skyabove® is a full-service internet marketing agency specializing in both Front-End and Back-End promotion. Call them today for a free detailed consultation at 714-553-4894 or contact them on-line at www.skyabove.com. They currently have two national locations to serve you better.

Over the next several weeks I will be posting information intended to help the begginer in getting started in ecommerce. Todays post is an introduction to online auctions, a gateway that many fledgling online business peole use to get started.

An auction site such as eBay or Yahoo Auctions is probably the easiest way to get started selling things on the web. Start up cost are minimal and your business can get rolling right away. The first thing you should do if you are not familiar with auction sites is to take a look at them. Some time spent browsing eBay will give you a good idea about how things work there, how much people are getting for the type of items you are thinking of offering and the demand for them.

While eBay is by far the most popular auction site it is advisable to get some familiarity with others if for no other reason than to avoid having all your eggs in one basket. Yahoo Auctions does a good deal of business and your business could benefit from Yahoo’s powerful web presence.

Setting up an account with most auction sites is quite simple. You will have to provide all the standard personal information and even though registration is free you will have to provide a credit or debit card number. When choosing your user name and password think about security. Make your password as complicated and unobvious as you can without making so you can’t remember it yourself.

Art Micklewraith

Useful Links:
Yahoo! Auctions

Ebay New Users

Trade shows and holidays are right around the corner. Wholesalers should be concerned about how you’re going to increase the traffic to your booth so you can increase sales. Buyers will be in full power getting ready for the holiday seasons and stocking up on inventory. One known way of increasing sales and traffic to your booth is by advertising your booth space on your website. The same wholesale buyers that attend the trade shows are the same buyers on http://www.toptenwholesale.com every day.
Someone once said to me that they do not encourage buyers to go to the trade shows. I asked why and was told because then the buyers have an opportunity to see the other products and meet the competition. I was shocked. I am under the impression that wholesalers should welcome the buyers to meet their competitors. This gives you the opportunity to show the buyers the benefits and features of doing business with you. And once you gain their trust, they’ll be more then likely to keep doing business with you.
With that said, those of you wholesalers that believe in your product, and believe that your customer service and expertise truly are superior, advertise your booth space. Encourage the buyers to not meet your competition, but give yourself the opportunity to show them why doing business with you is going to help their business.
- Best Wishes

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Brad and I have just been brought on as the new Web Media Director for JP Communications. As Web Media Director I will be taking control of our network of wholesale web sites (TopTenWholesale.com, WholesaleU.com, OffPriceNetwork.com, and Wholezilla.com).

Today marks the end of my second week here at Top Ten Wholesale. My first ten days here have been a great transition from academia to the corporate world. When I arrived last Monday I couldn’t tell you what a drop-shipper was, or what off-price meant. Now just two weeks later I feel like I am really starting to get the hang of things.

Keep a look out for my blogs in the coming weeks. With my background in Internet technologies, I will be writing about many important topics relevant to wholesaler’s web sites including web hosting, online shopping carts, search engine optimization, current design styles, and of course, online marketing. Feel free to drop me an e-mail with any topic suggestions you might have. Bye for now.

Brad

If I was given a penny every time a prospect said “Justin, I’m getting the hits on my website, but nobody is buying,” I’d be a very rich man. First off, I’d like to congratulate you on knowing the importance of online marketing and realizing how it can help sustain and grow your business. Let me ask you a question: if you had a visitor to your warehouse or store and they didn’t buy, who’s fault is it? Exactly. So, you now have the targeted audience coming to your site and now you need to sell them. You can not only rely on the “contact us” form, hoping that
your buyers will find it and actually use it. Dress up the site with a variety of ways for the prospects to reach you. To effectively convert visitors into leads, you must provide your target audience with valuable offers and information in exchange for providing their basic contact information. Try to get inside of the heads of your buyers and understand what they are looking for, then provide a simple process for prospects to request access to it. Here are a few easy tools to use:

1) Purchase Online – this is the ultimate conversion. Most of you already have this, but make it visible and appealing for the prospects to proceed to the next step.

2) Make an order form for the prospects to access free samples or free trial services. Make sure you can capture contact info.

3) You could have them subscribe to an e-mail newsletter that will promote your sales and specials. Now you have their contact info.

4) Have the buyers register to access “premium content” – special prices or promotions on products that only the registered buyers will have access to.

5) “Call me now” or online chat to reach out to sales people. This will get you to the buyer when they are ready to make a purchase.

6) You can have a registration for seminars, webinars, or events that interest your potential customers.

Also, I recommend dressing up the “about us” section and making it easy to find. In this section, tell the buyers what differentiates you from your competitors. Tell them about your company and success stories of your clients. Don’t just say we are a leading wholesaler of such and such. That is what everyone else is saying. You should direct the buyer traffic to your products page, but 70% of the visitors will want to visit your “about us” page to find what differentiates your company from your competitors. These are just a few simple tools for you to use to capture leads that will turn into sales. Good Luck!

Justin