Great article taken from Anthill Magazine. Written by Peter Noble…..

I scoured the shelves of my local supermarket on the hunt for light globes the other week. They didn’t have what I was after, so I jumped in my car and headed to a different supermarket — still no luck. On a mission, I headed to a third supermarket — same deal. Eventually, I left empty-handed and somewhat defeated. Staff at the supermarkets didn’t know what I was looking for. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t bother trying to find someone to explain.

I’m not alone. Every day, consumers come and go from shops, unable to find what they want. And retailers can’t capture data on these largely anonymous shoppers so they lose the sale – and don’t even know why.

But online retailers are immune to such problems experienced by their bricks and mortar cousins. Spend enough on technology and, with a few clicks, you can learn how a consumer came to your site, how long they browsed your virtual shelves and, most importantly, whether someone like me left with the light globes they came for.

But most Australian retailers with ecommerce sites are clueless about just how much valuable information they can capture about consumers. And they’re losing out as a result. Armed with this level of detail, you can monitor buying patterns and control stock levels. Marketing becomes easier. And you can upgrade your site to reflect consumer tastes.

Unfortunately, it comes down to money. Tight-fisted retailers aren’t forking out enough in the initial online development stage to turn consumers onto their brand – and this under-capitalisation is creating a virtual world of beige. Look around – so many ecommerce sites look strikingly similar to their competitors’.

Retailers need to be prepared for an initial investment of $100,000 or more to build an ecommerce site that will stack up against the best of the bunch. Don’t sound so shocked. Retailers think nothing of forking out several hundred thousand dollars on establishing a new bricks and mortar store – yet somehow presume ecommerce sites can run on the smell of an oily rag.

The investment is worth it. Australians spent $23 billion shopping online in 2008, but that figure is expected to skyrocket to $32 billion by 2012 – growing nine percent per year.

But sales could be far higher. UK and US ecommerce sites rake in seven to eight percent of all retail sales there, compared to just three percent of all retail sales in Australia.

It’s easy to see why. With the odd exception, Australian retailers have rushed to erect haphazard ecommerce sites that are sterile, clinical and communicate nothing about their brand. Most lack a merchandising strategy. Several insist that consumers hand over all their personal information before purchases can be made; turning consumers off in the process. Shoppers don’t care if your site records what they bought from you last time – they only care about this purchase.

Consumers also need to feel secure shopping on your site. And you’ve got to be transparent. Make sure consumers know what your delivery costs are up-front, before they start the transaction.

So often, the virtual shopping funnel doesn’t give consumers a memorable experience or tell them everything they need to know about your products. Remember, there isn’t someone greeting your customer at the front door of your virtual store, pointing out where the light globes are. But with the help of technology, there practically could be.

Australian retailers ignore this advice at their peril. Frustrated consumers are voting with their mice, with huge numbers choosing to spend their hard-earned cash on overseas sites that give them a far more enjoyable shopping experience. Last year, 43 percent of total online spend went overseas. No wonder brands based in the UK and US dominate the top 10 retail sites visited by Australian shoppers.

This should be serious cause for concern. Given that retail sales are up six percent compared with the same time last year (according to ABS figures), there’s serious money to be made online, so retailers can’t afford not to get their ecommerce strategy spot on.

And those retailers smart enough to fork out on their ecommerce site to ensure that it offers more than just a cold, heartless transaction will be onto a winner. Those brave enough to bite the bullet here in Australia will be duly rewarded.

Our team at NSM Digital provide many of our clients with a service known as conversion optimisation.  We apply these principles to new website designs as well as to existing sites with one aim in mind, increasing the percentage of visitors that complete their goals. Now there are many factors that impact on your conversion rates, however one of these is reassurances.

For many of you, your website is your initial selling tool, or should we say your shopfront as well as your salesperson. There’s a lot riding on how your website performs when someone gets there as to whether they will contact you to find out more or make a purchase online.

Consumers are naturally more likely to doubt your ability to fulfil their needs than they are to trust your business to get them what they want. Providing positive reassurances is one of the best ways to alleviate doubt in your visitors’ minds. Think about this list of potential reassurances and how many of them you could add to your website:

1. Customer Testimonials
2. Achievment Awards
3. Leading innovation
4. Featured in the Press
5. Safe and Secure website
6. Safe and Secure Credit Card gateway
7. Money-Back Guarantee
8. Satisfaction Guarantee
9. Price Guarantee
10. Great Return Policy
11. Years established
12. Australian Made and Owned

The list could go on! Now I guarantee that almost every one of you who has a website could list at least one of these reassurances.  Some reassurances you will want to place throughout your entire site, you could have a testimonial, achievement award and 50 years in business reassurance shown throughout all pages. Make sure people can see them and you will establish trust with your business.

You wouldn’t purchase a computer from a guy in a trenchcoat, at the back of an alleyway from the back of his truck if you were looking for someone to provide you with knowledge and great service. Or maybe you would? My point is, show them that you’ re reliable, they can trust you and you know what you’re talking about. It will do wonders to your conversion rates and ensure that you get the most out of your website visitors and the money you spend to get them there!

Want to know more about conversion optimisation? Contact our Sunshine Coast web design team today!

Whether you’re a small business or large corporation, you MUST know what’s going on with your website in order to make educated decisions on how to market online or where your website is letting you down.

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that enables you to track everything to do with your website from how many visitors you received to the time they spend on your site, where they came from and even what screen resolution they’re using.

STOP! If you don’t have analytics installed in your site, Click Here to Contact NSM Digital and we will install analytics to your site free of charge to help you identify which areas of your website need improvement!

Now to continue, here are some reasons why you NEED analytics in your website:

1. Return On Investment – Whether you currently market online or not, chances are your website visitors will come from a range of sources. They may come from a search engine or from a business listing you put in an online directory, either way analytics enables you to track the quality of visitors coming from different sources. By using analytics correctly you can compare how many visitors from paid Search Engine Marketing enquired about a product versus your online business listing. If both of them are costing you money, you can make educated decisions about where you should spend your money to receive the greatest return. Think about how many places your visitors could come from, wouldn’t it be great to know which ones are more likely to spend on your products or services?
2. Search Engine Marketing and SEO – These two methods of online marketing are great ways to drive traffic to your website. You can utilise website analytics in order to determine which keyword searches are driving you the most traffic and delivering the visitors that are most likely to purchase. This will give you great insight into where to focus your search marketing efforts which can be a sole contributor to increasing sales for many businesses.
3. Conversion Optimisation – When digging further into the world of analytics, one of the most effective tools is conversion tracking. Conversion tracking enables you to establish ‘goals’ for your website and measure the percentage of visitors that complete that goal. Your goal might be to complete your email contact form or make a purchase from your online store. Either way conversion tracking can record the steps users take to complete these goals and if they don’t finish the process, where they drop out along the way. This enables you to identify which areas of your website are letting you down and can equip an expert team like NSM Digital with the knowledge to make improvements and turn more of your visitors into purchasers.

We have only uncovered the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using analytics effectively, however I believe it is fair to say that if you don’t have analytics installed in your website, you understand why you need to have it done today!

Firstly I must give credit to Australian Anthill as I have taken this from their article on the topic. I found it interesting however so thought it was worth sharing with our readers!

According to Anthill, this research involved thousands of participants across varying industries in South Africa, Singapore, Canada, the US and Australia. These results may or may not surprise you depending on where you come up with your great business ideas!

At first you may think this is simply a trivial fact however there may be uses for this inside the workplace to improve productivity as Anthill points out. So let’s get to the list! The top 5 places people have their best ideas are:

1. Shower, bath, bathroom (57%)
2. Bed (51%)
3. Driving or Passenger (42%)
4. Walking (28%)
5. Exercise, running, swimming (25%)

Take notice of one particular thing; they all involve the person doing another action that is unrelated to just thinking solely about the problem at hand. The fact of the matter is, work is not where people come up with their best ideas. Often a dull, boring office leads to very small inspiration or creativity which could limit opportunities to develop what could be winning formulas.

Wall, through Anthill, offers this advice for organisations, useful for small to large businesses when creating ideas in the workplace:

1. Create the creative space and bring in easy chairs or bean bags
2. Go for walking meetings
3. Take a packed lunch and go to a park
4. Have one team member act as the facilitator, using a tried and tested idea generation and evaluation method.

So next time you or your staff are looking for inspiration to solve your problems, think about how you can implement these practices into your Sunshine Coast business and dig for inspiration when it comes to web design, logo design or your next online marketing campaign. Or you could just Contact NSM Digital and let us do the hard work for you!

If you do any reading about web design or keep up-to-date with the latest internet trends, you would have no doubt heard the term web 2.0 by now. While buzz words such as 2.0 are a great way of categorising trends or changes in the online marketplace, defining them can be another issue altogether.

So what is it that makes a website 2.0? How do we define what 2.0 is?

Many people refer to web 2.0 as being related to the way in which a website is designed. Shadows on buttons and banners, reflections on images and bright colours are what many people refer to as having a 2.0 website. Having these features however does not shift your site into the web 2.0 category. Whilst these features are commonly shared amongst the leaders in web 2.0 it is not these factors that seperate them from the bunch.

Web 2.0 refers to the utilisation of dynamic, user-generated content. Unlike a static website that you might see for the likes of a building business or mechanic, web 2.0 takes actions generated by website visitors to create dynamic content which in turn increases the interactivity, social networking capabilities and frequency of updated content. It is these factors that make web 2.0 sites so successful.

A great example is Facebook, which is purely driven off user-generated content. Without your friends taking any actions or posting any comments, you would have nothing to look at in facebook. However, it is the regularity of people taking actions that are published throughout Facebook that keeps your home page and profile updated and gets users hooked.

While you may not be looking to create the next Facebook, the use of user-generated content and web 2.0 principles can be a great way to improve the website design for your Sunshine Coast business and establish your market presence while leaving a great, positive impact on your visitors.

This week we aim to get you thinking about one question – ‘What is the value of my customers?’

Sounds like a pretty straightforward question right? For most business owners and marketers, this isn’t the case. In this post we will show you how to determine the value of your customers as well as make better decisions when spending your valued online marketing budget.

The term customers can be phrased in a number of ways depending on your business – website visitors, subscribed newsletter leads, mobile subscription acquisitions or a purchasing visitor. Before doing any marketing you need to understand the value of your customers and how much you are prepared to or able to pay to acquire them.

A large majority of website owners and online marketers rate a good media buy or marketing campaign in terms of how many visitors landed on their page. Now this may be great for a large corporation wishing to do a branding campaign, but the fact of the matter is, most of us don’t have million dollar marketing budgets to do that, we need to turn our visitors into dollars or we are wasting our valuable time and money.

Working out the average value of your customers is relatively simple, you just need to divide your total sales by your total customers (what you define as a customer/acquisition). Here are a few examples to get you started on working out your own:

• Example 1 – Robin sells sports clothing online. Over the last 6 months she has made $500,000 in sales from 5,000 purchasers. Her average customer value is $100.
• Example 2 – John has an email database he sends advertisers offers to. He makes $6,000 off each email he sends to his database of 6,000 subscribers. Each subscriber stays in his database for an average of 3 email sends before they unsubscribe. This means his average customer value is $6,000 / 6,000 members X 3 email sends which equals $3.

As you can see in some cases you need to determine the lifetime of a customer to determine their average value which complicates the process a little. Once you have worked this out it is time to get into the good stuff!

Once you determine the value of your customers, you are then able to work out what you can afford to pay for each customer that you get. You want to make a profit, so ideally you want to pay less than you are earning.

Now to the most important step, you must calculate and track your cost-per-customer or cost-per-acquisition. To do this you need to divide your marketing spend by the number of acquisitions that you get over a period of time. Let’s use Robin from Example 1 again to show how this is done:

• Last week Robin spent $20,000 on marketing. By looking at her sales reports she can see that she got 400 new customer purchases. Therefore her cost-per-customer equates to $50. So Robin will make an average of $50 per customer.

In a case like Robin’s you may not think it essential to determine your cost-per-customer or customer value providing you are making more sales than your expenses. However, by doing this you can dig deeper into determining your true customer value which will help you to make better decisions from your marketing efforts.

If you know that 5% of people who are referred from a specific source make a purchase, you can determine what the cost-per-customer is likely to be and how profitable this will be for your business.

Talk to our team further about how you can track detailed customer acquisition information and make it effective for your business. After all, we are the experts in online marketing in the sunshine coast.

Stay tuned and learn!

Online marketing is essentially made up of 3 functions or goals that you are trying to achieve. The 3 Basic Functions are:

1. Increase Website Traffic and/or Brand Awareness
2. Convert visitors to your desired goal (making sales, building database, customer enquiry)
3. Customer Relationship Management

Let’s have a look at these functions a little closer. ‘Increasing Website Traffic and/or Brand Awareness’ refers to driving more traffic to your website. Now this is pretty self explanatory, when you advertise your product or website online, your first goal is to encourage users to click through to your website. The most crucial area as a business is to make sure that you target the right demographics so that you spend your money wisely and increase your return on investment. There are many different online marketing strategies that can be used, as we will discuss further in later posts.

The second function, ‘Convert visitors to your desired goal’, relates to your website visitor completing the action that you want them to. A few different goal examples are listed below:

Goal 1 – Mary has an online shop that sells shoes. Users are able to purchase shoes from her online store. Her goal is to convert a website visitor into a sale. Therefore a user has successfully completed her goal once they have finished the process to make a purchase.
Goal 2 – Robert runs an online competitions website. He generates his revenue by emailing special offers to his email database. His goal for any new user that visits his site, is to subscribe them to his email database. Once they have completed the newsletter sign-up process his goal has been achieved.
Goal 3 – John has his own building business. He must meet with all his potential customers to work out the plans for a house that he must build them. John’s goal is for a customer to contact him directly after they visit the website. His preferred contact method is via phone and his secondary method is via email.

As you can see above, each business owner operates a very different business from one another, however to be successful they must all drive website visitors to complete their goals. At the end of the day, if you do not convert users to your desired goal, your business will fail. There are a number of different strategies when it comes to increasing the conversion rate of your website visitors such as incentives and promotions, however the most essential is conversion optimisation. Ensure that your site is easy to navigate and directs users to where you want them to go. Keep an eye out for future posts as we dive deep into the world of conversion optimisation! Until then, visit our page on Conversion Optimisation to find out more.

Finally, ‘Customer Relationship Management‘ aims to increase the value of your customers and keep them associated with your business. Have a look at this example to see the importance of keeping contact with your customers:

‘If your average customer value is $20 and you can increase this by $2, for each 1,000 customers you receive, your business will make an extra $2,000 in revenue a 10% increase in profits.’

So as you can see, a small increase in the average customer value can mean a big increase for your business. One of the most common and easy methods of customer relationship management is through email marketing. Keeping contact with your customers on a regular basis (weekly, fortnightly, monthly depending on your business) is one of the best ways to keep them in touch with your brand and inform them of the latest products and specials and increase their likeliness to purchase your products or use your services. We will discuss more on customer relationship management in future posts.

As a business owner or marketing manager, you need to keep sight of the 3 Basic Functions and ensure that your online marketing is fulfilling each step to its highest potential. Make a list of the strategies you are using for each function and think about how you can improve them. Once you can be confident that you are, I guarantee you will see a greater return on investment and an increase in revenue that you never would have made.

Stay tuned and Learn!

Welcome to the new NSM Digital Internet Marketing Blog! Our team will regularly post new topics for our readers covering a range of topics from the digital industry including online marketing, conversion optimisation, search engine optimisation and the latest trends and products from around the world.

Learn how to drive more traffic to your website, how to make changes to increase your conversion rates, what new online products can help your business and how you can generate more revenue for your business online.

Best of all you are getting this information straight from a digital marketing consultancy, which means we’re more than happy to help if you have any questions regarding blog posts, or want help with how to implement changes that we discuss in future blog posts.

Feel free to CONTACT US anytime.

Stay tuned and learn!

The team at NSM Digital.