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We have teamed up
with Tangerine Trees business consultancy Ltd
to bring you some help, advice and top tips over
the coming weeks. Shropshire
has a wide variety of businesses big and small
with a wide variety of businesses and services.
Anyone who runs a business needs all they help
they can get - well maybe shropshirelive.com can
help.
This article takes a look at how you can grow
your online business.
Article continues
below...
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creating a site worth visiting
Does your site pass the crucial
8-second test? When visitors land on the homepage, is the
web copy compelling enough to make them stay and read what
you have to say?
Less than 1% of website visitors take
any action. Let me say that again. Less than 1% of all the
visitors who land on your website will contact you, bookmark
your site, subscribe to your newsletter or make a purchase.
And once they’ve gone, they may never come back. So
you must provide compelling reasons for them to hand over
their contact details.
Think how you use the internet yourself.
In the last few days you may have made a couple of online
purchases, and they were probably purchases of things you’ve
bought before or buy regularly. The majority of your time
online is spent finding information – researching potential
purchases, reviewing the competition, checking your back account,
etc. So why would your prospective customers behave any differently?
Even if your site is 100% commerce,
it must also be a source of high-quality information about
your area of expertise. This could include downloadable reports,
copies of your press releases, product reviews, top tips and
even competitions.
Customers often don’t know what
questions to ask (imagine the last time you had to make a
purchase you knew very little about), and this inevitably
makes us nervous and uncomfortable. So help them out by explaining
the benefits, the application, the value, the ways to get
best results, comparison of brand, etc.
bringing visitors to your site
Do you have accurate statistics
on your current visitor numbers? Whilst a simple visitor counter
is useful, it is much more beneficial to understand the path
your visitors follow through the site, the time they spend
there and the links they click. If you don’t already
have this information, you could try a package like wwwstatisfy.com,
which is completely free and easy to understand.
If you’ve never tried the revolution
in advertising that is Pay per Click, this is something you
really need to get good at. Pay per Click is the perfect online
demonstration of testing and measuring your marketing, as
you only pay when visitors click on your link. You can measure
your adverts click-rate and constantly try to improve your
advert copy to increase the number of clicks. You can also
include negative key words so your advert doesn’t show
against irrelevant search entries. Visit Google Adwords to
learn more about how the system works.
The “importance” of your
site is a key part of where your site appears in the “natural”
search results on search engines, but it also plays a big
part in where your Pay per Click advert appears, regardless
of the amount you bid. To check your current Google ranking
score, download the Google Toolbar, which includes the Page
Rank gauge. You should be aiming for a page rank of over three.
And the best way to do this is to increase your “importance”
by adding incoming-only links. Reciprocal links are disregarded
by the search engines, so incoming-only are 3-way links will
increase your ranking. Visit to see who currently links to
you. Registering your details in online directories or posting
classified ads is also a good way to improve your search engine
optimisation, but ensure they are good quality sites, otherwise
they won’t appear.
Although banner advertising is often
considered to be appropriate only to big companies, it could
really work for your business. By testing headlines and offers
in Pay per Click, you’ll know what generates the best
response and you can trial banner advertising. Always ensure
your advertising is “direct response”, that is
asking visitors to click for a specific purpose, instead of
just in the hope that they’ll like your site!
what to do
when they get there
As so few visitors will stay long enough to really read the
content of your site, you must attempt to capture email addresses
at every opportunity so that you can keep in touch with them
and build the relationship directly. Newsletters are very
common now and don’t often form a strong enough reason
in themselves, so in order to get your visitors to hand over
their details, make sure you are offering valuable information
in the form of reviews and reports. Newsletters shouldn’t
be disregarded completely though, as they are an excellent
way to keep in touch regularly with visitors.
The opt-in approaches you use on your
site are also a great way for visitors to self-qualify their
interest. For example if you are a financial adviser, visitors
downloading information on repairing adverse credit will be
looking for a different relationship than those who download
advice on buying overseas property.
Another point to remember when visitors
are navigating your site is your ordering process. Are you
making it difficult for people to buy from you? A look at
your shopping cart abandonment rate will give you an indication
of current statistics, and your hosting company can help with
this.
When you’ve got that elusive customer
all the way from information to ordering to checkout, how
can you increase their order as much as possible? Point of
sale purchases work in the real world and the online world
are equally successful. You can introduce a linked system
that shows “other customers who bought XYZ also bought…”,
or if your business is less focused on online sales, you can
ensure there are constant reminders of your full offering
throughout the site.
And if it wasn’t daunting
enough to collect all those email addresses, how do you keep
in touch afterwards, without employing half a dozen more staff
or having a nervous breakdown? Autoresponders are the answer.
A quick search on any of the search engines will present dozens
of autoresponder providers, and you can learn more about how
these automated message systems work.
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Kathryn Lennon is the Managing Director of Tangerine
Trees. She has written a book called "Selling For
Entrepreneurs" it helps the reader learn from people
just like them - entrepreneurs - with passion and enthusiasm
for the subject, but without the training or patience
for “traditional” selling, who have lived
through the rejections and knock-backs to tell the tale!
It details every aspect of the
sales process, from planning to presentation to closing.
As well as learning nuts and bolts of selling. You
can click here to buy the book.
To find out more information visit -
the tangerine trees website.
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Read the first article - 13
ways to get more customers.
Read the third article -
love thy customer
We would like suggestions for business
topics that you would like to see featured here in the future,
so why
not get in touch.
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