Tag: online marketing

5 Tips To Keep Online Customers Happy

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online customers

As online shopping continues to grow, it’s important to make sure that you provide a simple, seamless experience for your online customers.

Maybe you don’t have an online store. Perhaps you just have a handful of items or services that your offering to your visitors. Whatever the case, if you want repeat business, referrals and great reviews, keep your clients happy!

Consider the following five tips to help create a great user experience:

1. Make sure that your site is responsive. While Google is not longer directly penalizing websites that aren’t mobile responsive, having a site that is not responsive can hurt still affect your SEO rankings indirectly.  But it can hurt your user experience even more. People are using mobile devices like tablets and smartphones all the time. If your site does not respond and display well on these devices, users will become frustrated and buy from someone else.

2. Check your page load times. This tip kind of works hand-in-hand with the tip noted above. People want to see great pictures of your products and/or great descriptions of your products and services, but if it takes a long time to load, kiss the sale goodbye.

3. Do not make your users create an account. With more and more transactions happening online, the need to create an account or connect with the social media account has become prevalent. People are becoming fatigued with this process and are choosing, more and more often, to opt out rather than creating a new account. Make it as simple as possible for people to see what you are offering. You will get the information you need when they make a purchase, so don’t make it onerous for them to shop.

4. Watch the pop-ups. Depending on the type of site you have, you might have anywhere from one to several pop-ups on your page. Remember the golden rule. After all, don’t you find pop-ups annoying when you are trying to ascertain the contents of the site? Keep the pop-ups to a minimum to keep user frustrations also at a minimum.

5. Give people payment options. Limiting the way people can pay for your products or services will also limit the number of buyers. Be sure that people can pay with whatever method they choose, as easily as possible.

One final bonus tip: remember that people like to deal with people or businesses that they like, know, and trust. Do not treat your customers like strangers. Develop that relationship, build that trust and gain a loyal client.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

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Improve Your Email Open Rates – Part 3

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improve email open rates

A lesson in effortless selling.

Today we are bringing you the final installment of our three-part series about how to improve your email open rates.

Why do we send emails? Let’s face it; we are sending emails for a reason. It might be to get people to click a link. Or, it might be to get your visitors to purchase a product. Regardless of the motivation, we write emails because we want people to take action of some kind.

Check out these final seven tips to help get conversions from your emails:

1. Be sure that you are never putting short-term gains ahead of the trust your readers have placed in you. It can be difficult enough to build credibility and trust online. Don’t risk damaging your reputation for a short-sighted goal.

2. People purchase products to solve a problem, not because it is the next shiny object. The easiest way to make sure that you are getting buyers is to focus on the solutions your product provides, not what your product is.

3. Whether we like to admit it or not, scarcity forces people to take action. Make sure your offer is time sensitive.

4. Use analytics to your advantage. Use them to learn the exact point when your audience is prepared to take action and then insert the link to your offer.

5. Don’t just insert one link in your copy. Insert multiple links at various points within your sales copy to increase the chances of converting the reader. Yes, it might be obvious, but it works!

6. Remember to ask! People are more likely to act on something if they are asked to do so, so include that as a call to action within your copy.

7. In the “old days” of ad mail, statistics proved that adding a P.S. to any sales letter increased the chances of getting a sale. Email is no different. Add a postscript to every sales email that you send out. This gives you another opportunity to insert a call to action or to remind them of the time sensitivity of the offer.

And there you have it…

Everybody is busy. Everybody receives tons of emails in their inbox on a daily basis. And when it comes to priorities, your email is at the bottom.

The tips that we have provided for you during this series may not resolve all of your problems, but we can guarantee that by implementing them you should drastically improve your click through rate.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Get Better Results from A/B Testing

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AB Testing

Are you using email marketing in your business?

I’m sure you are. Digital communications and digital marketing constitute a large portion of business promotion.

Nearly everyone has some form of email communication, whether it is a newsletter, a product promotion, or business prospecting campaign. And, if you are looking to achieve better results, you should be employing some form of A/B testing.

Simply put, A/B testing is trying different subject lines. We all know, just like in the “old days” of print newspapers and magazines, headlines are what draw the reader into the story. With people receiving hundreds of emails every day, it’s important that your subject line is one that will attract the most opens. After all, if your email is being opened, you’re not engaging your audience, nor are you selling any product.

With this in mind, consider the following for points to improve your A/B testing:

1. How do you develop an A/B test concept that actually gives you the results you looking for? As marketers, just like most people immersed in their own industry, we can’t always trust our own ideas. One of the ways to develop a great a be split test is to engage a handful of your clients and ask them to work through your sales funnel. Then, have them go through a competitor’s sales funnel and let you know how yours compares and where it can be improved upon.

2. What were the results from your last A/B test? Like every other marketing campaign you undertake, it is critical to review your results. Take your last campaign and compare the open and engagement rate as compared to previous campaigns. If you’re results were better this time, why were they better? Conversely, if they were worse, what changed?

3. What was it about the more successful version that users preferred? Was it the topic you covered? Was it the way it was presented? Were there too many or too few words in the version that did not work as well? What did users prefer about the winning version?

4. Was there anything that they preferred about the version that did not perform as well? Never negate the value of something that doesn’t perform as well as you want or expect. We build on things that are less successful to create winners.

All marketing campaigns, in order to either be successful or to allow you to build success, require a “post-mortem”. By tearing apart all aspects of your campaign, you can more easily identify those elements that were successful and those that did not perform as expected. An email campaign is no different, and proper utilization of an A/B tool can be a trailblazer to a successful email marketing campaign.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

6 Steps To Improve Your Content Marketing

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content marketing

Is your content marketing working for you?

To be relevant online, it is important that you are continually providing fresh, new material. This is not only critical for search engine optimization, but also to keep the visitors to your website -your clients and prospects – engaged and interested. You have to give them a reason to keep coming back. After all, if they’ve already seen everything you have to offer, why would they come back? And, of course, if they don’t come back chances are they’re going to miss something new when you do put it out there.

But you can’t just randomly put up content. You need to be original. You need to be relevant. And, if you are sharing material that you have found in other places, you need to give attribution.

Ask the following six questions to improve the content that you are providing:

1. Do your visitors find your posts, white papers, infographics, webinars, etc. relevant and helpful?  Most people, when searching the Internet, are looking for answers to questions or problems. If you are providing something of value they are more likely to learn to trust you, to become regular visitors to your site, and eventually your client.

2. When someone lands on the blog portion of your site, what do they read first? There are lots of software solutions out there that can help you to track and identify this information. Some will give basic stats, such as the number of visitors to the site and others will provide you with live tracking of exactly where they scrolled to on the page.

3. What was it about the article noted above that first caught the visitor’s eye? Was it the title? Was it the associated image? Was it the actual material within the article? All of these are important factors that can lead to more readership and a better response to the article. Just like in print media, a headline is important to capture your audience, and images must be relevant to the material you are presenting.

4. Do you know if your visitors enjoy reading similar content from your competitors, and if so, which ones? Let’s face it, much of what is out there has been said by others in different ways. Searching cyberspace for answers is kind of like watching TV; 500 channels all showing the same or similar programming. So make sure that your content is presented in a way that attracts and retains more readers than your competitor.

5. What topics would your visitors like to see next? Delivering what you are client or prospect wants is key to keeping them loyal to you. There are many ways that you can find out what your website visitors are looking for. Consider dropping in an online poll, or use some of that tracking software I mentioned earlier to ascertain what types of articles are attracting the most readers.

6. Where do your visitors typically go to find content that is related to their interests, job, or industry? By discovering the answer to these questions, you can reach out to specific sites and associations that they are engaged with and offer to provide guest content from time to time. This serves not only to help your SEO with back links, but also helps you gain authority as an expert within the chosen industry.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

How To Get Discovered With Organic Search

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organic search

How is your company getting found online?

There are tons of articles out there about paid search. SEO, Adwords, display ads, paid ads on social media… We’ve heard and read about them all. And, done properly, any and all of these methods can be effective and done with in a pre-set budget.

But prior to the development of these methods and the incarnation of the tens of thousands of companies and individuals who provide these services, there was something called organic search.

Organic search is simply being found online without paying for positioning on search engines. In other words, as defined by Wikipedia, “Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements.”

Of course, even organic search requires a strategy in order to show up on the listings. However, these tactics can be undertaken without the need to hire outside help.

Search engines obviously require input data that allows your company to be found. Things like keywords and backlinks are still important, but can be created through website design and data, clever content, and having your site backlinked to other sources, which helps determine the popularity of your site.

Review the following four questions to find out how users discover your company through organic search:

1. When searching for your keywords, what do users notice first: your website, your ads, or your competitors? If they are finding your ads, it proves that your paid advertising is working, but says little about your organic search. If they’re finding your competitors first, it’s definitely time to review your site and your content to make sure that you are targeting the appropriate keywords for your business. If they’re finding your website first, you are getting good organic search results.

2. What words are standing out to users on the Google search page results? Regardless of whether your site is being found on the first two pages of search engine results, review the words that are showing up on the results and make sure that you are using the words and terms that are being found.

3. If, and when, users are clicking on your link what do they expect to find? Make sure that you are using keywords that are appropriate to your business. Falsifying your content to gain organic search results is not the way to go. Users will be upset at what is a thinly veiled attempt to gain traffic and will boycott your site.

4. Does your landing page (or homepage) meet the users’ expectations? As mentioned above, make sure that you are being found by users who are entering a search query that is true to your business. You have only a matter of seconds to capture the attention of a visitor to your site. If they are not drawn to keywords and content that matches their interest, they’ll move on to the next search result.

Organic search results are an important part of online business success. Make sure that you don’t neglect this function. Keep your content fresh and current; both search engines and users are looking for this!

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

5 Ways To Optimize Your Forms

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Are your forms working?

Following up on our last article, where we discussed the creation of better converting landing pages, we thought it timely to address the issue of optimizing the forms that appear on your site.

There has been a lot of trial and error, and a lot of research about how to create the best form to obtain opt-ins on your landing pages or website. It stands to reason that the form that works best for your needs is the one that is tailored specifically to your product or service offering. For instance, if your form is intended to invite a prospect to receive a quote or an evaluation of some sort, the form would obviously require more fields than if you are simply looking to gain email addresses for your mailing list through an offering of a free white paper or e-book.

Every day, we are invited to download free reports, e-books, white papers, etc. And, every day, we make decisions about whether we think that the value we will receive is worth the cost of our email address. Just like you, I have either declined the offer or have submitted my email address in order to receive the offering, only to unsubscribe later when I find that I’m receiving too many emails. But retaining prospects and clients on your email list is a subject that is separate from today’s focus.

So, back to making sure that your forms are actually working for you.

Review the following five points to optimize your forms:

1. Make sure that you have the right number of fields on your form.  As mentioned above, make sure that the number of fields on your form is appropriate to what you are offering. If you ask for too much information, your opt-in numbers will suffer.

2. Ensure that your forms are fully accessible to users who use a keyboard instead of a mouse.  Drop-down options are great, but you have to make sure that if somebody is using a keyboard that their arrow keys are fully functional for the form.

3. Test your forms.  Make sure that your forms work correctly and smoothly across all devices, screen sizes, and browsers. If your form does not display properly to some users, they will become frustrated and will give up.

4. How intuitive are your forms?  If the user makes a mistake when filling out your form, does it display error messages allowing them to correct the mistake immediately?

5. Is there anything about your form that would discourage the user from completing the process?  Let’s face it, we all are looking for forms that are simple and self-explanatory. We don’t want to have to work simply to provide someone with access to our email.

Using online techniques to market and promote our businesses is essential in this day and age. Encouraging people to become repeat visitors to our sites and to sign up for our offerings is an important component of online success. Make sure when you are developing your forms that you review these five elements to make sure that you are making the users experience as simple and as seamless as possible.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Snapchat for Business?

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What?  Snapchat can be used for business?

Yep, believe it or not, you can leverage this platform for your business.

This social media platform allows you to take and share videos.  But the videos disappear after a short period of time.  It was initially very popular with teens, but has now expanded its reach and proven itself to have applications that can help your business.

If it’s appropriate for your business, don’t hesitate to think outside of the box.  There’s nothing wrong with making your advertising fun.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Know Your Competition!

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know your competition

How Do You Measure Up To Your Competitors?

Who do your clients and prospects prefer?

Let’s face it… a free-enterprise based economy provides the environment for a number of businesses to exist within the same industry. Take a look at fast food hamburger joints as just one example. There are multiple choices, yet all of them have carved out their niche.

As entrepreneurs and business owners, we should not fear competition. Competition is what makes us focus our business on our specific target market, and drives us to do better for them.

As consumers of product, we are all familiar with what happens when a monopoly exists; often, we end up with higher prices and substandard service. And although we may dream of cornering the market in our given business sector, competition is healthy and keeps us always working to provide the best customer service and to keep current with trends and improvements within our industries.

Reviewing and improving our businesses is key to ensuring our long-term growth and sustainability.  Reaching out to your clients and prospects is the best way to gauge how your business is viewed.

The following seven questions should help you determine how you measure up to your competitors:

1. If your clients and prospects are familiar with other businesses providing the same products or services as yours, which do they prefer?

2. What is it that makes them prefer one company over the other?

3. What company do they believe does the better job of explaining the product or service offerings in a clear, concise way?

4. Which company does a better job of convincing the client or prospect to convert?

5. What is it that people like or dislike about your top competitor’s newest product or service?

6. What would convince them to switch to your company?

7. What is it that you are doing that might convince your current customers to switch to one of your competitors?

Keep this list handy and refer to it often. Consider polling your clients on these questions at least once a year to ensure that you are continuing to provide the types of products and services that keeps them in engaged with your company.

Competition is not the enemy; becoming complacent in your business, is!

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Six Questions to Measure Your Brand

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measure your brand

How is your brand perceived?

Presenting a unified brand – one that resonates with clients and prospects – is perhaps the number one element that will determine the success or the failure of your business.

As mentioned in previous articles, a brand is so much more than simply a logo. Your brand should define your company; what it represents, the guiding principles, and how you do business. It is a combination of colors, logo, and a clear representation of your core values.

When considering your brand, consider these following six questions to ensure an accurate depiction of your business.

1. How do clients and perspective clients perceive your company?

This is perhaps one of the most important factors. How your clients and prospects perceive your company will determine their interest in doing business with you.

2. What words would they use to describe you?
From time to time, ask your clients how they would describe your company. Also, you could consider an online poll to reach prospective clients and gauge their response.

3. Do those words match the way you want to be perceived?

Once you have the feedback from your clients and prospects about how they describe your company, compare their responses to what your intention is with your brand.

4. Does your brand appear trustworthy?

More and more, business is being done online. You must be sure that your brand is able to convey that you are trustworthy. But also remember that your off-line presence is just as important, so be sure to develop your brand to show authority and that your company can be trusted.

5. Would they recommend you?

One of the most important ways of marketing is that of word-of-mouth. Aside from the fact that it is the least expensive type of marketing, it is also more likely to create a better relationship with new clients due to the implied trust from the person who is recommending you. When reviewing your brand, engage your clients and ask them if they would consider recommending your business.

6. What do they like and dislike about the way you present your product or service?

Another key question that will help develop a strong, trustworthy brand is to ask your clients what they like-or don’t like-about how you are presenting your products or services in the marketplace. People like to do business with “winners”, so determining how you are seen through the eyes of your clients is critical.

Whether you are just starting your business or re-branding your business, keep these six questions in mind to help develop an identity that has strength and authority.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Using Facebook Live

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facebook live

As you are probably aware, Facebook is now offering live-streaming.

This addition to Facebook is not a surprise. Tons of social platforms offer livestreaming.

We all know that video has become a very popular way of sharing information. It has become a preferred way of communicating with people online as it tends to be more engaging – and, one hopes, more entertaining as well.

However, it is important to make sure that you are not just chasing the latest shiny bauble when utilizing video for your marketing needs. You must always keep to the fundamentals of marketing; Who is your audience? What is your message? What is the best social platform to engage and reach your audience?… You get the idea.

Livestreaming provides an opportunity to engage your audience in real time.  Whatever platform you choose, be wise when planning your livestream.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

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