Here are 7 simple marketing tips to help you boost your sales and profits quickly. All are easy to use and work for any business.

Tip 1:
You can constantly improve the effectiveness of your advertising by allocating 80 percent of your advertising budget to proven promotions and 20 percent to testing new things. When something new works better than your proven promotions, move it to the 80 percent group and start testing something else in the 20 percent category.

Tip 2:
Customers are usually receptive to more offers from you immediately after they buy. Follow up every sale with another offer for a product or service related to the one they just bought. Many will accept your offer …producing an easy sale for you.

Tip 3:
Make your sales presentation more believable (and more effective) by converting general statements into specific descriptions. Instead of “quick and easy”, explain exactly how quick and how easy. Also, reduce round numbers like “15 pounds” into specific odd numbers like “13.7 pounds”. It sounds more authentic.

Tip 4:
Most people are more interested in getting value for their money than in getting a bargain. Find some low-cost ways to enhance the perceived value of your product or service. Then test raising your price. Don’t be surprised if both your sales and your profit margin go up.

Tip 5:
Search for and test some alternative marketing methods you may be overlooking. That’s how one internet marketer discovered direct mail postcards. They proved to be a highly effective and very low-cost way to generate traffic to her web site. Plus they conceal her marketing efforts from competitors who can see (and copy) what she does online.

Tip 6:
You can make your sales message more effective by presenting everything in terms of the benefit it provides to customers. For example, don’t just list testimonials from satisfied customers. Point out that those testimonials prove you have an established history of delivering what you promise.

Tip 7:
Include a Questions and Answers page on your web site with the answers to frequently asked questions. It enables prospective customers to get instant answers to their questions …and reduces the number of questions you have to answer yourself.

One More …A Bonus Tip:
Avoid making any sales claim that sounds exaggerated …even if it is true. A bold claim creates doubt in your prospect’s mind and jeopardizes the sale. Reduce any bold claims to a more believable level. Each of these marketing tips reveals a simple, proven tactic you can use to boost your sales and profits quickly. All 7 are easy to use …and have proven highly effective for any type of business.

Posted by MixedSoup | 1 Comment »

You may have heard of the word ‘concepts’ but you never thought much about what is a concept and why you need it, right? Let me tell you, concepts are very important in life and of course in marketing. Let me teach you with an example…

You eat pizzas? Yummy! But think about pizzas, what does come to your mind? Nothing much. Pizza is a practical idea, not a concept. But ‘food’ is a concept. When you think of food, you can think about burgers, sandwiches etc. If you know a child, you know just the child, but if you know the parents, you will also know about the child’s brothers, sisters and relatives. Parents may be boring but gives rise to interesting topics. Like.. you cannot just eat ‘food’, but you need to eat some type of food. Food may be boring, but it is necessary so that you can think about more yumm, delicious things.

So when you are trying to promote a product, you need to understand the concept behind that product. Let me tell you a personal example. I was trying to promote a anti-virus software. It had good reputation and the price was very cheap. I promoted that product by giving emphasis to the advantage that it is ‘cheap’. But then I thought about the concept behind the product. The concept for an anti-virus software is to ‘provide security to users and prevent from malicious hacks’ and not to ‘be cheap’. So I switched from the point that it is ‘cheap’ to the point where it is advertised mainly as ‘the best security for your PC’. My sales boosted. So when I thought further about it, I understood that users who need real security for their PC do not care much about the cost, so the idea that this is cheap must be secondary. So why am I better now? Because I thought about the concepts.

If you are not thinking about the concepts you will not get creative ideas. Your mind will be too narrow. So what are you going to do now? Don’t say “This is a pretty good post” and walk away. Instead try this exercise, look around all the consumer goods around you… TV, phone, food items, etc. and try to evolve the concept behind it. Thinking about concepts is not a job, its a habit, so develop it!

Posted by MixedSoup | No Comments »

Online Branding for eSuccess

Irrespective of product’s presence - online or offline, branding plays an integral part behind its success. As in real life scenarios, your brand is your identity on the web and differentiates you from your competitors. Online branding decides the perception of targeted audience towards your ecommerce store.

Branding Online:

You can use following branding medium to communicate right message to your target audience:

Ecommerce Storefront:

Visitors remember online stores by their shopping experience. Build unique shopping experience by using innovative web site template with special emphasis on navigation, product display and product description. Since images convey more than words, self-explanatory images can become your major differentiation factor in online branding.

Domain Name:

Your domain name will be the name of your ecommerce store and is many a times used for effective online branding strategy. Choose a name that is unique, easy to remember and, if possible, highlights the type of products sold in your ecommerce store. If you have a selling preposition that out-smarts your competitors, you may add a word or two about it in the domain name.

Logo:

When we think of windows operating system, we are reminded of its logo before everything else. An appealing logo creates a lasting impression in the mind of your consumers and has a global appeal. A meaningful logo is always helpful in online branding.

Many successful online businesses have used images as their logos to make communication easier since we easily relate with these images and/or logos. Supporting your logo with page specific images can also have an additional effect on visitors. Display your logo at all prominent locations of your site to increase brand recognition.

Tips for Branding on the Web

You can take help from following tips while designing an online branding strategy:

Be Consistent:

Branding on the web would require targeting your visitor through multiple channels. You should be consistent in terms of your approach, your message and your treatment given to a viewer through all these channels.

Appeal to the Target Market Appeal to the Target Market:

Entire branding efforts should be focused on a section of a large consumer segment. Communicate your message clearly and precisely. Your message should appeal to your customer and make them realize the benefit of visiting your store.

Be Innovative:

Branding is all about being innovative. Understand the likes and dislikes of your target audience before you begin the work of branding your store on the web.

You brand your store for your consumers. Keep a close eye on the behavior of your visitors. Online Branding is a major factor, which will help you convert your visitors into consumers.

Posted by MixedSoup | No Comments »

On the Internet, even the smallest online store can compete with giant brand names like eBay® and Amazon.com®. Unfortunately, many new web merchants often counteract the power of the web as an equalizer by making some common goofs, gaffes, and guffaws that can make them look, well…amateurish. This article lists a few of those mistakes to help online store owners avoid the typical pitfalls executed by many ecommerce sites.

Mistake #1 – Too Many Under Construction Pages

Don’t launch your website until it is ready for prime time! Under construction pages can distract the online user and detract from the overall credibility of your site. It is a good idea to develop an action plan for introducing your web storefront to the world. Make sure that all key pages are included in your website launch and live up to your standards for design and content. It is equally important to ensure that all pages are ready for prime time before you market them with the major search engines. After all, would you enter your credit card and other personal information on a web site with lots of under construction pages? Once you lose first time visitors, it is hard to get them back.

Mistake #2 - Slow Loading Web Pages

If you are trying to make a good first impression, the last thing you want is a site that takes an eternity to load. Here are a few tips to ensure a zippy web experience for your customers:

• With today’s web page coding and design standards, images can and should be used sparingly. For example, cascading style sheets can be used to implement many design elements on your site, such as colors, icons, and much more. For the images that you do use, ensure that they are optimized for fast download.
• Use Flash animation sparingly. If Flash must be used make sure you provide an HTML or low bandwidth option for those browsing at slower connection speeds.
• At a minimum, compare the load time of your web pages to the load time of your competitors’ sites. If you site takes longer to load, make adjustments as needed.

Mistake #3 - Grammatical Errors and Lack of Compelling Content

On the web, content reigns supreme and can make or break your customer’s purchase decision. If you have poor content in your site, that is not conveying the proper message to potential customers about your products, how can you expect visitors to buy? Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes only add to the displeasure of online customers. Worse still, grammatical mistakes might even change the intended meaning of your content. Some key things you can do to help establish credibility with your visitors, include:

• Provide well-written, content that is easy to understand—even for international customers.
• Be straightforward; don’t try to oversell or hoodwink your visitors.
• Have an experienced copywriter write or edit the content for your website.
• Be sure to enlist the help of spell checker software to eradicate any spelling mistakes.

Mistake #4 – Confusing Shipping Options

Confusing shipping options and expensive shipping rates are two often-cited reasons that online shoppers abandon their shopping carts during the checkout process. (See Improve Shipping Options to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment.) Web merchants should take special care to be up front about shipping costs make the entire shipping process as simple possible for customers to understand. Try these tips:

• Provide shipping options from major carriers, such as UPS® and FedEx®.
• Display shipping policies and related information prominently on the storefront, especially in key pages during the checkout process.
• Allow customers to compute shipping rates as early as possible in the check out process.

Mistake #5 – Making Users Register Before They Shop

It is highly recommended that you do not ask visitors to register or provide other personal information before they can add items to the shopping cart. Making account creation or filling out a registration form mandatory—especially before your customers are ready to make a purchase—will turn many users off. Links like “Register Now,” or “Logon” (e.g., to an existing account) should appear only when the buyer has clicked on the checkout process button. Even if you are likely to track these visitors, use cookies to get information about users.

Posted by MixedSoup | No Comments »

Vital statistics

Consider the following:

• IMT Strategies reports that prospective customers find websites 10 times more often through search engines versus magazine ads, 38 times more frequently than direct mail, and 40 times more often than banner ads.
• Over 85% of the respondents to a Georgia Tech study indicated that prospects most often find websites through search engines and have intent to buy.
• More than 200 million searches are performed each day using the Google alone!

With information like this, it’s obvious that you can’t run the risk of your store not being ranked higher by the major search properties. Now consider these statistics:

• 78% of users will abandon their query if the first three pages of results do not yield an answer to their query.
• Fully 33% of users believe companies whose websites are found in top results are a major brand in their specific product/service category.

But with literally billions of pages indexed how do you make your site get higher rankings in organic search listings? This article summarizes some effective tactics you can employ for search engine friendly ecommerce.

Keywords are key

Your first step is to identify the major keywords that your customers will use in looking for your products and/or services. Tools like Wordtracker® (www.wordtracker.com) and Overture® (www.overture.com) can help you identify top keywords. Once keywords are established, you need to integrate them into the content present on your webstore and underlying code of the web pages in your site. This includes optimization of:

# Title Tags: A brief description, that includes keywords, should appear in the tag for each page. Since search engines look in this tag and compare it with the content of that web page, all pages in your webstore should have unique titles. Your title tags should contain one or more keywords that are a reflection of what the web page is all about. Never use long, irrelevant titles.

# Meta Tags: Meta tags, especially meta keyword and description tags, should be optimized with keywords that are consistent with the content of the web page. Again, you should write page specific meta tags optimized with right keywords for all the pages of your store.

# Page Content: Content of the page plays a important role for generating search engine friendly ecommerce store. Your keywords should also be included in the text of your web pages that is visible to site visitors. However, this should be done in an optimal manner—instead of overloading the text on the page with keywords or not using them at all.

# Filenames and URLs: It can really boost your rankings if your filenames contain important keywords. Note that most search engines are not able to index dynamic pages with variables like “%”, “&”, “$”, “ =”, “+”, or “?” in their web address. Therefore, if you have dynamic pages in your site make sure that you have mechanism to that make the dynamic page URL’s appear to search engines as static pages.

# ALT tag: Search engines rely on alt tags to understand the contents of the images in your site. Always use alt tags wherever images are used.

Other tactics

There are a variety of additional tactics you can employ to make your website search engine friendly and get it ranked in organic listings of search engines. These include developing an effective site map and adding H tags to the breadcrumb trails that guide search engine “crawlers” through the key pages in your site. Getting quality links to your site from other sites such as online directories, link exchanges, and other websites can also boost the “popularity” score of your pages – in turn giving you better rankings. Search engines also assign greater value to sites that update content frequently, so be sure to keep your site fresh to help it get noticed by the engines.

Don’t get penalized

A word of caution: there are some technical factors that can prevent your web pages from getting a good ranking and in some cases may even result in your entire site being banned from a particular search engine. Things to watch out for include:

• Overuse or misuse of “doorway” or “cloaking” pages
• Slow web page loading time
• Junk code (such as overuse of keywords)
• Improper web page coding structure (e.g., bad HTML, CSS)

Posted by MixedSoup | No Comments »

Just switch on the TV and you can’t avoid an ad. Millions of ad dollars are being poured in every year, but the question is… how many of them really reach you? How many of the ads impress you? Do you talk like, “Hey, did you see the ad for that XYZ product?”

Today, there is too much ad clutter. You cannot sell a product or service just by giving ads here and there. You need to be extremely different to make an impression on people’s minds. Make them talk about it, make them remember. Or else you are just wasting money.

Buzz Marketing is about making people talk about your stuff. If you can drive media attention by doing something unusual or outrageous then you get buzz. If you make a innovative product, you get buzz, a funny ad, again a buzz. People need something interesting to talk about to attract attention from their friends and family. You give them something to talk about and they will make your product popular for free. In buzz marketing, your product will get popular even after you stop your ad campaign.

Consider Britney, how did she get so famous? She gave something for the media to write about and something for the people to talk about. Whether -ve or +ve, she did it. She got famous. Thats Buzz

Posted by MixedSoup | No Comments »

Make Seasonal Sales Face the Off-Season Downfall

Seasonal sales are transitory and receipts from seasonal products considerably thin down during off-season. By making certain minor changes in your ecommerce store, you can make your offerings survive beyond a season.

In this article, we reveal certain techniques that can be adopted to make a seasonal product contribute to your revenue in off-Seasons as well:

1. Off-Season Discounts
Attractive discounts on products during off-seasons can compel visitors to buy from your store and maintain formidable seasonal sales level. Provide discount coupons that are only valid during the off seasons to make seasonal shoppers buy before/after the actual shopping season.

2. Free Shipping
You can provide free shipping on the purchase of selected off-seasonal products. Free shipping coupled with reasonable discount options can make a compelling preposition for seasonal shoppers to make off-seasonal purchases.

3. Display Products in Multiple Categories
A single product can be projected in many different ways and can carry many different usages. Display a product in multiple categories to increase the exposure and indirectly highlight the different usages of the product to the visitor.

4. Cross Selling
You can cross sell complimentary off-seasonal products with seasonal items to increase the sale of off-seasonal products. However, you have to be very cautions in cross selling and assure that you do not sell completely non-related products.

5. Web Site Promotion Tools
Aggressively use various website promotion tools like Newsletter, Bulk Email & Affiliate program to attract visitors to buy off-seasonal products. You can also provide special discounts to leads coming from such medium to further push the promotion.

You can use such strategies provided you are not constrained by the featured limitation of ecommerce shopping cart. It is recommended to choose a shopping cart that allows you to customize your store as per your needs with least of efforts.

Posted by MixedSoup | No Comments »

According to a recent survey by Internet Retailer magazine: “51% of all organizations (surveyed) say that replacing their e-commerce platform is a top priority.” The companies cited the need to deliver faster order processing, achieve higher sales conversions, and increase customer satisfaction as major reasons for moving to a new ecommerce solution. In general, online retailers are looking for a flexible and scalable solution that can help better maximize their marketing dollars.

However, when switching platforms, many merchants fail to take the steps needed to ensure that sales don’t drop and marketing programs transition smoothly. The following is a list of best practices to follow when migrating to another ecommerce platform:

Back Up Your Data

When migrating to a new platform organizations should backup their entire current site either locally or onto a different server. You will always want to maintain a copy of all data in the event of a hardware failure or data corruption.

Cutover Only When Ready

Leave your old storefront up and running; you should not immediately take it down. Shutting down the old storefront should be done in a strategic manner—and only after your new site is ready and has been thoroughly tested.

Migrating the Data

All of your product and inventory data should be uploaded into your new system. You will also need to consider the best method of resolving and/or migrating customer service inquiries, product returns, chargebacks, and other tasks.

Marketing Channels

Most online retailers have a comprehensive marketing plan. The plan should be reviewed and each of your marketing channels, such as pay-per-click programs, must be prepared to be “paused.” This way, after you have brought your new site live, you can quickly update landing page URLs as needed. The last thing you want to do is pay to send visitors to a 404 “page not found” error page.

Payment Considerations

This may be the right time to negotiate with your current merchant services account provider for better rates (or consider getting a new one). You might also want to consider additional payment methods, start accepting online checks or PayPal®; alternative payment options have been known to boost sales.

Test, Test, and Test Some More!

You will need to thoroughly test all aspects of your new site. At minimum you should ensure that:

• you can successfully process orders using each of the payment methods
• you can receive all the shipping quotes in real-time
• there are no broken links, misspellings , typos, etc. on the new site

It is also highly advisable that you test out your new site with real visitors in a controlled environment. One way to do this is to change the URLs of your pay-per-click marketing campaigns and shopping network advertisements to point to the new storefront. This will result in a controllable flow of traffic to the new site that can provide you with valuable data. You can use your web analytics software to produce reports that show top visitor paths, error logs, visitor drop-off locations, and most viewed content, which you can use to further optimize your new storefront.

Announce Your New Site

Once the new site and ecommerce solution is up and running, you should use this opportunity to your advantage. Send an email to all your past customers letting them know about the site redesign and/or any new features that they may find useful.

Posted by MixedSoup | No Comments »

If your marketing activity doesn’t include postcards, you’re overlooking a highly effective and very low-cost sales tool. Here are 12 of the many reasons postcards should be part of your marketing program…

1. Postcards Work for Any Business
Postcards can produce all kinds of sales activity for all types of businesses. For example, they can produce web site traffic for online marketers, floor traffic for retail stores, sales leads for direct marketers …and just about any other type of sales activity a business wants.

2. Designing Postcards is Simple and Uncomplicated
Designing an effective postcard is not complicated. It can be as simple as printing your best small ad on a 4 x 6 card and sending it to a list of potential prospects. Postcards usually work best when the message is brief and the postcard looks at first glance like a message from friend.

3. Printing Postcards is Easy and Inexpensive
You can print postcards with your own computer for about 1 or 2 cents each …or have them printed professionally for about 4 to 8 cents each.

4. There’s a Special Low Postage Rate for Postcards
You can send any quantity of postcards by First Class Mail in the US for only 23 cents each. The only requirement is that your postcards must be at least 3 1/2 x 5 inches but no larger than 4 1/4 x 6 inches.

5. Postcards Nearly Always Get Read
Because postcards are delivered “ready to read”, almost everybody will read it - even people who usually throw out other types of direct mail without opening it.

6. Postcards Produce Fast Results
Because postcards are simple and easy to use - they produce results fast. You can mail postcards within a few days of deciding to use them …and you’ll start getting sales activity 2 or 3 days later.

7. Postcards are effective for Generating Web site Traffic
One of the most effective postcard formats simply lists a few benefits of a product or service on the card and tells the reader to where they can get more information. This makes them ideal for generating traffic to a web site.

8. Postcard Multiply Themselves
Postcards are like small billboards - and they are easy to handle. They often get saved by recipients or passed on to others …providing additional exposure of your advertising message.

9. Markets Can Be Precisely Targeted With Postcards
You can accurately target your best markets by sending postcards only to mailing lists of prospects likely to be interested in what you’re offering …and who also have a history of acting on offers that interest them.

10. Postcard Marketing Results Are Easy To Measure
Postcards normally generate over 90 percent of their total response within 7 to 10 days. This enables you to quickly and accurately evaluate the results of a postcard campaign.

11. Postcards Put You in Control of Your Sales Activity
You can quickly boost (or reduce) your sales activity anytime you want by simply regulating the number of postcards you mail and how often you mail them.

12. Postcards Conceal Your Marketing from Competitors
Most advertising uses mass media where your competitors hear or see what you are doing - and copy it. Postcard marketing is personal. Only you and your prospects are aware of what you are doing.

Postcards may be one of the best kept secrets of modern marketing. They’re highly effective, very low-cost, simple to use …and they work for any business. You’re overlooking a profitable marketing tool if don’t use them.

Posted by MixedSoup | No Comments »

It happens all too often: a visitor adds products to the shopping cart in your online store but then leaves your site without completing the checkout process. In ecommerce circles, this peculiar phenomenon is referred to as “shopping cart abandonment,” and it is a widely recognized problem throughout the industry. In fact, recent ecommerce studies have shown that between 25 and 75 percent of shoppers abandon their online shopping carts before completing the checkout process.

Here are some tips that will help you reduce shopping cart abandonment:

Make pricing clearly visible

The merchant should take special care to include pricing and any terms and conditions right on the product page. The idea is to provide a complete picture to customers so they can make well-informed choices before entering the checkout process.

Advertise the security features of your storefront

Apprehensive online shoppers will not enter their precious financial data on your site unless they are sure that it will not leak out or be inappropriately used. Early in the checkout process, emphasize to shoppers that your web storefront is secure. Be sure to include any relevant third-party security compliance; the VeriSign® Secured Seal Program is a great example of how security features can be advertised to build trust.

Build a better check out page

You can increase the value of the page that summarizes your customers’ online order by highlighting satisfied customer testimonials, special shipping options, and discounts. Having these “visual cues” on your checkout pages will go a long way to increase the overall legitimacy of your web storefront in the mind of your customers.

Provide competitive shipping options

Confusing shipping options and expensive shipping rates are two often-cited reasons that online shoppers abandon their shopping carts during the checkout process. (See Improve Shipping Options to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment) For this reason, provide as many shipping options as possible, include various options for each shipping provider, and be sure to let customers compute shipping rates as early as possible in the check out process.

Streamline the checkout process

Make the checkout process simple and swift. Clearly label buttons for each step during checkout, and consider using a breadcrumb trail so that customers will know exactly where they are in the process. A lengthy checkout process will surely entice visitors to leave your store. Goal: Make it as easy as possible for customers to get to the final “buy” step!

Provide intuitive error messages

Customers and prospects will inevitably make mistakes when checking out of your web storefront. Help customers resolve errors via intuitive error messages that written in easy-to-understand language. Include a prominent telephone number for customer service in the event that customers are unable to help themselves. Prospects will surely leave your site if they are unable to figure out what to do next!

Track key shopping cart metrics

Track shopping cart metrics to determine at what stages the most common errors are occurring. Metrics that will help you combat shopping cart abandonment include the percentage of visitors that use the cart, the percentage of carts that become a purchase, the percentage of carts that start checkout, and the percentage of carts that start and complete checkout.

Listen to customer feedback

Soliciting and analyzing customer feedback will provide you with key insights pertaining to shopping cart abandonment from your online store. Some ways to get feedback include usability studies, focus groups, and surveys. You could also include a “Suggestion Box” that links to a web form on your site.

Posted by MixedSoup | 1 Comment »