Blog @ EmaginOnline

How to Improve Your Website Sales in a Recession

The Holy Mantra: Increase sales and conversions without increasing advertising budgets.

1.    Stop worrying about traffic. 

Using you media budget you can drivesubstantial traffic to your best site. Little of that will convert and give you an acceptable return on your investment if you you dont focus on the quality of that traffic.

So stop and take a look at how much traffic you receive versus how many sales (or leads) you get. This simple metric is your conversion rate and it’s crucial. 

If your conversion rate is low – let’s say 1% then doubling the number of sales by improving your conversion rate to 2% is much easier, quicker and cheaper than doubling your traffic. 

2.    Measure, measure, measure. 

Once you are focussed on conversions rather than just hits or visitors you need to get smart about measuring. Our second recession busting tip is – measure, measure, measure.

With modern website analytical tools you can get phenomenal insight into what’s happening on your website and this insight lets you make informed decisions on how to get more of what’s working and less of what isn’t working.

Make sure you have configured these tools properly and spend some time reviewing the data.

3.    Segment your traffic. 

Knowing your website’s conversion rate is one thing but knowing the conversion rate of your PPC traffic vs organic traffic vs rich media ads vs brand traffic is infinitely more powerful. 

Overnight you can discover that one type of traffic converts twice as much as another type of traffic. And by the morning you can switch your budget to the traffic that works. 

4.    Find the barriers

Barriers to conversion will exist on your site. Your website analytics can help you do this with amazing clarity. Please don’t think this doesn’t apply to you, because no matter how good your website is, and now matter how well designed it is, you will have barriers to entry.

5.    Act.

“It is not the strong, nor the intelligent who survive, but those who are quickest to adapt.” - Charles Darwin. 

By now you should have a clear understanding of how well your traffic is converting, the performance of each of your individual traffic sources and where your barriers to entry are. Now you need to act.

Optimise your traffic and remove those barriers and you will start seeing big improvements in your sales or leads. Even just making minor modifications to your Adwords key phrases based on a better understanding of which ones sell and which ones sink can be immensely powerful.

SEM

Hi Friends,

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Years

A few search engine marketers have come together to present the SEM Challenge,
which is described as a project for the search engine marketing
community to use their online skills to make a real difference in the
offline world.

The initiative is working with charity organization FORGE,
which works with displaced communities in Africa. The challenge itself
is to meet their budget gap of $100,000 through a pro-bono SEM campaign
designed to increase awareness and donations.

This is our chance to contribute to a good cause. Our business is about building awareness for our customers. Now we can make a difference to the needy.

Given the financial meltdown globally, some charitable foundations are suffering cashflow problems because of their our benefactors invesments.

If you have any ideas on how our community can help this cause, feel free to post.

“Band Aid By SEM Practioners”
 

SEM

Excerpts from eMarketer:

For marketers, the key benefit of social media marketing is connecting with consumers. Among executives surveyed by the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), 85.4% cited customer engagement as the main benefit of social media marketing, followed by direct customer communications (65%), speedy feedback/results (59.9%) and learning customer preferences (59.1%).

Brand building and reach—two terms typically associated with advertising—fell much lower on the list, at 48.2% and 37.2% of respondents, respectively.

Web 2.0