Breakthrough Ecommerce

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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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.

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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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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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A recent survey by Datran Media shows that good old email is still the number one tactic for producing online marketing results.

Over 80% of the marketers surveyed said email was the most effective online marketing tactic, followed by search at over 57% and display ads at 42%.

(Interestingly the survey didn’t ask how much they spent on improving onsite conversion factors, but that’s a whole other story.)

Email’s dominance is not particularly surprising; it has always been a highly effective online marketing tactic.

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