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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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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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.

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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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photo credit: kimberlyfaye

More than 90 percent of all online marketers and businesses are leaving vast amounts of money and business on the table by ignoring conversion rate optimisation.

A recent survey by Alterian found that less than half of the marketers they surveyed use any sort of analytics.

Of those that do, many find it hard to interpret the data, and less than 10% regard analytics as a vital tool in improving their business results.

Alarming as the results are, they are not surprising. Optimising conversion rates and using analytics go hand in hand. Read the rest of this entry »

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photo credit: saguayo

I could have easily come up with a 1001 tips, but that might have been too much to digest in one sitting. As I say on my main site, most online businesses are suffering from”The Death of a Thousand Cuts“. With conversion rates till stuck at around 2.0 percent, for the vast majority of online businesses, there is still plenty of work to do. So, in no particular order here are are the first 101 tips to boost your online results: Read the rest of this entry »

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