Growing Online Sales the Modern Way
Saturday, 29 January 2011 00:00
Chris Barling of Actinic provides some suggestions on how to improve online sales using methods other than the obvious SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing tools.
In the past, advice on growing online sales tended to focus on search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click marketing (PPC) and maybe email marketing together with selling through affiliates. All of these remain important but in recent years a number of other opportunities have arisen.
Increasing conversion using customer feedback
Asking customers for their views about products or services and then making them available on your web site addresses the trust issue involved with ecommerce and consequently can be an excellent way to improve conversion.
As well as growing sales, you can tease out useful information for your business. Having comments on your site, you will receive additional search engine benefits, especially since Google has introduced new tags to specifically identify customer feedback directly into search results.
Social media
Over the last few years, the use of social media, in particular Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has been growing like crazy.
Social networks work the way we humans do. They involve speaking to each other and interacting, and this explains their rapid growth. Like with personal interactions, you’ve got to be sensitive. You need to be interesting, or you will be ignored, you need to respond to comments back or you will seem rude.
We hear many stories of huge viral waves of interest, but the probability of achieving this is so low that it’s best to ignore the possibility.
Social networks are interested in revenue, and free participation shouldn’t confuse the fact. As a result, they want their advertising to succeed, so this is one of the first things to try. Facebook provides a choice of pay-per-impression or pay-per-click and Twitter allows advertising too – all to closely targeted audiences. There is definitely scope for getting ahead of the competition as its early days.
The video opportunity
ComScore states that in early 2010 a total of 5.5 billion videos were watched in the UK in one month alone. The compound growth rate is currently 37% per annum.
Video provides a great opportunity, with the chance to use it at practically every touch point on both prospects and customers. You can attract new prospects by posting videos on YouTube or other vertical sites, and also from recommendations between viewers. So put your URL in the video and make it easy for viewers to forward your link.
Videos are an excellent way to qualify leads, avoiding wasted sales time. When customers see the product they are less likely to make a mistake, so returns can be reduced.
Audio and podcasts
It’s possible to argue that podcasts are an easier to make, and cheaper alternative to video. And they do allow you longer exposure for your brand and expertise as you can string together more than one element in each recording to produce a download with really ‘meaty’ content. For example a customer interview, a ‘how to’ or FAQ session and an interview with an independent expert might give a podcast that’s 15 minutes long. Do this on a regular basis and you’ll build a following.
Customer forums
Customer forums allow customers to feedback about products and services as well as interact among themselves, including helping each other with support and advice. It’s important you already have reasonable scale before you attempt to start a forum as it looks bad if your community is a ghost town. -- But if you have a large enough group of interested people to maintain a decent flow of conversation, you will automatically create a group of engaged advocates.
My company, Actinic, has such a forum for our ecommerce and EPOS customers and it’s a lively and very informative place. Members are sometimes critical of us as a company but we take that on the chin.
Summary
These ideas cover a whole variety of topics, not all of which will be relevant to your business. It’s important that you find what will lead to sales growth for your own business. The other side of the coin is that there’s opportunity out there. In the jungle of online sales, you can’t afford the competition to get there first.
Written by Chris Barling, CEO of ecommerce and EPOS supplier, Actinic. Originally published on New Media Knowledge.