build your own
online store
How to increase traffic at low cost
By Bruce Townsend, Marketing Manager, Actinic
Achieving business success online is not about how much money you can throw at the marketing budget. It’s all about attracting and keeping customers. There is no benefit in being extravagant, only in being smart. A strong customer focus, targeted cost-effective marketing and a little creative thinking will take you a long way towards establishing a successful ebusiness.
Get niche or get out
The adage, ‘get big, get niche or get out’ is nowhere
more true than on the web. The Internet can reduce costs to a minimum
and enable you to keep prices low, but the largest companies will
still achieve the greatest economies of scale. Unless you are the
biggest in your market, you will find it impossible to compete on
price alone – so don’t even try. Instead, look to offer
something that sets you apart from the competition. It may be a unique
range of hard-to-find products, free expert advice, first-rate personal
service – almost anything that adds value to your customers.
If you have such a proposition, the web will enable you to exploit
it more extensively than traditional channels, and you stand a much
better chance of winning a reasonable proportion of the available
business for a reasonable investment.
Extreme sports specialist Surf Wax (www.surf-wax.co.uk), the brainchild of Jo Morecroft, is a good example of a business that has flourished by choosing a specific niche; and it has been a key to their success. "Unless you can undercut on prices, don't go for selling products that everyone else is selling too", Jo advises.
Get Seen In Search
Search engines are the top source of new visitors to
web sites. According to comScore, 94% of UK internet users use
them, and 72% of those use Google. So getting good visibility on
Google is the most important thing you can do to market your site
online. You can get listed quickly and easily using pay-per-click
advertising, but the cost is relatively high. Colin McPhail of
winter sports retailer Snowlines (www.snowlines.co.uk) is one of
many who believe in site optimisation as a viable low-cost alternative. “If
you get your optimisation right then you’ll spend less and
do better in the organic rankings,” he states.
The best way to get into the non-paid listing is to get links from a few sites that are on Google already. Failing that, submit your site manually. Don't use automated submission tools, and don't join 'Link farms' that contain only links and adverts and no useful content.
Use a tool like Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com) to find out what words and phrases people use to search for your type of products. There is no value in getting a good ranking for phrases that are not used or not relevant. Then start optimising your pages for the most important terms – no more than 3-4 per page. Work each term naturally several times into the text of the page. Make sure the same terms are used in the HTML <Title> tag and in the Meta Description tag. Unless you have time on your hands, don’t worry about the Meta Keywords at this stage. No, really - they are almost worthless. Do use the key phrases in headings and subheadings (within heading tags – H1, H2 or H3), and in Alt tags for relevant images.
Most importantly, get links your site from other relevant and well rankings sites. There are many ways to do this. For example, offer a reciprocal link back to the other site; provide ‘link bait’ – useful content on your site that people would want to link to; take out pay-per-click adverts on the main search engines; and post on relevant forums and communities, putting a link to your site in your signature.
Keep them coming back
Repeat business is the most remunerative, because there
is no cost of acquisition. If you keep your customers
happy, they will come back and purchase again and again.
So, do everything you
can to keep them sweet. Chris Brown of www.gamble.co.uk,
which sells gambling-related products, attributes his
success in a large part
to good customer service. They offer 24-hour delivery
as standard, and reply personally to every email enquiry
within hours. According
to Chris, "This shows that real people are behind the computer
should anything go wrong, which helps boost a potential
customer's confidence enormously".
Snowlines also recognise the importance of getting the most out
of their existing customers, and they use email as an economic way
of keeping in touch with them. A low-cost plugin to their ecommerce
package provides them with a lot of flexibility in selecting users
for targeted email shots.
Creative use of technology
You don’t have to spend a fortune on technology to make it
work effectively for you. By using a low-cost ecommerce package,
you can work to a low budget and still have investment left for the
necessary marketing and promotion. The start up costs for Surf Wax,
which was built using Actinic Catalog, were under £1000.
Rather than spending money on consultants, sign up for relevant news feeds and email newsletters, and surf the net regularly. Watch what other people are doing, and look out for tips and ideas that you can copy and develop.
Make use of some of the many free products and services that can help you with your marketing. For example, Addthis.com will provide you with a free ‘Bookmark’ button for your site, to enable visitors to submit it to the main social bookmarking and news aggregation sites like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Digg. It will also track for you how many people use it, and which sites they submitted you to.
Monitor your performance
However smart you are with your marketing, you will
have to spend. To monitor your ROI and the performance of your
site, use
a free tool like Google Analytics, or a commercial
package like WebTrends. Use things like response forms and customer
surveys to monitor the
offline areas of the business. And make sure that the
software applications you use have good reporting facilities,
so that you can keep track
of what is going on.
However hard you try, things will go wrong. If a customer does phone
or email with a complaint, don’t be defensive – learn
from it. Listen carefully to their grievance, and do your utmost
to put things right.
