Breakthrough Ecommerce

What Tiger Wood’s Apology Can Teach You

Tell the truth, damn it!

photo credit: Chester Zoo

Tiger Wood’s lame apology was universally panned for being phoney.

Hey, even us guys could tell he was just blowing smoke up our collective fairways.  Not to mention some of his die hard fans who felt queasy about the whole thing.

So, if nearly everybody could see through this heavily choreographed charade, what does that have to do with increasing your website conversion rate? Read the rest of this entry »

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Make Your Images Bigger

Welcome to a new and ongoing series of tips on how to improve your online conversion rates.

Every week (roughly) I’ll be giving you one technique that you can use straightaway to improve your online results.

Tip number one is to make your images bigger, your thumbnails, your normal images and even your expanded images.

Images of less than 100 pixels square are pretty much ignored according to recent research.

Size Matters

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Conversion rates can be 400% higher or more when running a marketing campaign. This means there is more to website conversion rate improvement than conventional conversion rate practices such as landing page optimisation, and tweaking website design factors.

Offline and offsite marketing factors such as better advertising, better offers, better products etc are equally as effective.

The fact that marketing/ advertising campaigns can increase conversion rates by four or even eight fold seems obvious in hindsight. It’s really just marketing 101: If you’re marketing is any good it should be driving more highly qualified customers to your website who are more likely to convert at a higher rate. (If that isn’t happening then review your marketing and your landing pages.)

But the effect of good marketing brings up a number of key points that aren’t usually part of the current conversion rate improvement conversation.

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For most of this year I have been extremely busy. Too busy to blog regularly. Also, everyone I know is very busy. So it got me thinking:

“Who has time to blog?”

Not many of us as it turns out.

According to a recent Technorati survey, of the 100’s of millions of blogs it tracks over 95% have been abandoned. And while that still leaves about 10 million, only 1% of them are getting read.

Are we all too busy or did we just get bored? Read the rest of this entry »

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photo credit: bradleygee

“…  optimizing one site will take five people a whole year and cost $500,000 …” according to Craig Macdonald, CMO of Covario.

Mr Macdonald was talking about something else when he made this comment, but the impact of this casual remark immediately struck me.

Many companies seem to regard search engine optimisation as something that can be done on the cheap and by lowly paid personnel.

Well, you get what you pay for.

Everybody seems to recognise the importance of SEO, but few seem willing to pay to have it done properly and professionally.

Read the rest of this entry »

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photo credit: 1happysnapper

A while back, I posted about online marketers paying lip service to conversion rate optimisation. Several research reports had revealed yet again that many marketers were not making full use of analytics

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•    If results truly matter, then why are so many marketers leaving so much business on the table?

•    Why do they ignore the analytics gold at their fingertips?

With apologies to Steven Covey, here are seven observations of why many marketers ignore analytics:

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Most businesses are making it incredibly easy for organised criminals to steal critical data, according a new report from Verizon Business.

While organised crime is getting more and more innovative about online crime, many businesses seem to be going backwards and failing to comply with even the basic security standards.

The reasons seem to be a combination of ignorance, laziness and a surprising reluctance to invest in securing customer and company data.

Organised Crime is Coming to Get You

The Verizon report found that 285 million records were compromised last year (2008), and that 91% of the attacks were by organized criminals.

That is, security breaches are no longer the domain of teenage hackers just looking to make a name for themselves. Your data is now a major target of organised crime, which is investing considerable time, money and resources to get at your sensitive information. Read the rest of this entry »

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A while back, I put together a list of 10 free tools to enable you to build an online business for free. (Actually, it ended up being 21, but who’s counting.)

Anyway, I already have another 10 that I just have to tell you about, that are not only free but actually really very useful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Ecommerce, Freebies, Online Marketing | 2 Comments »

photo credit: ttarasiuk

Email is still the killer online marketing tactic, however, making sure your carefully crafted email gets through to the intended recipient, let alone read, is a real obstacle course.

Undelivered and bounced emails are the bane of most online marketers, and the reasons emails bounce can be endless and labyrinthine.

Given that email is still one of the most effective online marketing tools, it is well worth fine-tuning everything about your email campaigns to get the maximum return you can. (See Email is Still King of Online Marketing.)

Recently a fellow Goouze and Linkedin contact, Kathryn Millette, Internet Manager at R. G. Barry Corporation, asked why her latest email was triggering high spam scores and being bounced.

A quick look at Kathy’s email immediately revealed some obvious, but all too common problems. Read the rest of this entry »

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And the Top Five Things To Do First

Ninety nine percent of online advertising doesn’t work. Two more reports highlight the appalling click thru rates generated by online ads. One from Adtech and another from ABI.

photo credit: Pascale PirateChickan

After a study of more than 10 billion banner inquiries across Europe, Adtech found the average click-through rate fluctuates between 0.11% and 0.19%.

That’s a 99% failure rate for attracting visitors to your site. Any sporting coach with a 99% failure rate would quickly find themselves looking for a different line of work.

So why do so many people keep wasting huge amounts of money on something that is a total failure: In a word: HOPE.

But as a good friend of mine always used to say, “Hope is a t*#d with a cherry on top.”

For those of you who are ready to abandon hope and try the world of effective marketing then enter here. Read the rest of this entry »

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