To maximise visitor actions on your website - whether they go on to purchase with you or not - you first need to get them there. Then you can get them to take the actions you want them to take; be it place an order, opt-in to your email promotions or share a product or your content.
In order to build a relationship with your prospective customers (and maintain one with your existing customers), you need to communicate with them frequently. Blogs, email newsletters and social bookmarking are just a small number of the communication options you have.
Blogs
Blogging is something that every online merchant should be doing if they're not already. A blog can either sit on your domain, in a dedicated area within your website, or via any of the blogging software that's readily available on the internet. You can post blog articles about your business and the services you offer. You can talk about products, new arrivals, special offers, discounted deals, voucher codes, free reports and promotional videos.
Blogs are very powerful as part of an SEO strategy and rank extremely fast in search results. You can also synchronize your blog with your email newsletter, so that when a blog is created, newsletter subscribers are emailed alerting them of a new blog post.
Email newsletters and promotions
Generally speaking, your list will be split into two separate areas; 1) Front-end acquisition (before the sale) and 2) back-end marketing (after the sale).
1) The first email list is generated from an opt-in subscribe box on your website, be it in the template of the website or on a dedicated newsletter page. You can use basic ‘Sign up for our newsletter’ type text or you can push a free report, free 'how-to' guides or specific tips related to your products. Be creative for your specific website and products.
2) The second is a list of email addresses extracted from customer order information. Incidentally, when a customer buys from you they legally give you permission to contact them via email with additional, relevant information, products, promotions or special offers. In order to maximise your efforts to market to these people however, we would recommend that you ensure they’re still happy to hear from you.
When using the two email list model, legally you should display an ‘Unsubscribe’ link in the footer of emails you send out. If a recipient is not happy about you contacting them, they can simply click the link and they’re removed from your list.
How often should you email your customers?
The simple answer is as often as you can, but always provide information that is valuable to them. A word to the wise however; always test what works best for your business. The best performing campaigns we see are weekly or bi-weekly sends. If you bombard your customers too often with product offers, this can do more harm than good and your customers will unsubscribe from your email list and probably won’t return to your store in the future.
On-site articles
These are different to the SEO articles posted on article directories. They are of higher quality and are for your on-site visitors in addition to generating SEO traffic. Buyer’s guides, how-to and technical articles all written with persuasion to sell your products will rank well on the search engines.
Social bookmarking
Increasingly website visitors are using social bookmarking websites to communicate with one another, via websites such as Twitter and Facebook. So grab any of the free bookmark buttons available online and display it site-wide to ensure your content is as shareable as possible.
Thursday, 13 September 2012
Saturday, 8 September 2012
T-commerce: the next e-commerce revolution to “watch”
What is t-commerce, exactly?
If you look up t-commerce (or tcommerce) on a search engine, you’ll get results describing touch commerce (mobile), tablet commerce, Twitter commerce (we’re not joking), and television commerce.
Will the real t-commerce please stand up?
We won’t begin to argue that the other T’s aren’t valid. But on this blog, t-commerce denotes television commerce; anything to do with tablets is m-commerce (mobile commerce) and anything social is social commerce (unless it’s Facebook, which has already earned its own ‘F’).
T-commerce is exactly what you’d expect. It’s the use of television to facilitate transactions over the Internet. Research by PayPal in late 2011 found 49% of TV subscribers have an interest in purchasing goods and services through their television or other “screen” like smartphones and tablets.
From purchases or donations relevant to the programme being watched, through to coupons delivered during television ads, the likelihood is we’ll all have heard about t-commerce before too long. As new technologies emerge and more shows and television-related apps adopt in-programme shopping capabilities, we can expect even more innovation in the future.
If you look up t-commerce (or tcommerce) on a search engine, you’ll get results describing touch commerce (mobile), tablet commerce, Twitter commerce (we’re not joking), and television commerce.
Will the real t-commerce please stand up?
We won’t begin to argue that the other T’s aren’t valid. But on this blog, t-commerce denotes television commerce; anything to do with tablets is m-commerce (mobile commerce) and anything social is social commerce (unless it’s Facebook, which has already earned its own ‘F’).
T-commerce is exactly what you’d expect. It’s the use of television to facilitate transactions over the Internet. Research by PayPal in late 2011 found 49% of TV subscribers have an interest in purchasing goods and services through their television or other “screen” like smartphones and tablets.
From purchases or donations relevant to the programme being watched, through to coupons delivered during television ads, the likelihood is we’ll all have heard about t-commerce before too long. As new technologies emerge and more shows and television-related apps adopt in-programme shopping capabilities, we can expect even more innovation in the future.
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