Category Archives: Misc
How do you get more sales from your website?
Yeah a pretty good question, one we hear from most of our clients that come to us for help.
More and more these days, people are taking notice of what their websites are doing (or not doing) for them, 90% of business owners now see that and want their websites to generate sales for them. Where it began…?
Many sites are designed by creative teams of people whose job, as they saw it was to build websites that looked pretty, acted in some order fashion and/or mimicked client brochures. And to some degree, for the most part, followed a traditional look and feel that others had on their websites. Ok, so where to from here.
Well just lately, well in fact for the past five or so years, people have been looking at ways that they can have some business generated from their website – and this is where the whole design first and sell later comes into the forefront.
As I mentioned above, people went to website designers, the designer come up with a beautiful website which promised so much, but in reality has delivered nothing or very little in the way of business sales.
Lets review a typical website – lovely home page with pretty colours, a big “Welcome to” on the centre of the page, followed by content and links to other areas of their website…traditionally, there is an about us, what we do, our location, contact us, our services, our products…blah blah.. – sounds like a winning combination right…well…not really…lets consider a few things here…what do I want from my website, what is it that I want to achieve, and why have I gone out and spent hard earned money on my website? Do I just want a brochure but in electronic format….hmm maybe not…OK..stay with me, here I am getting to the meat and drink of what I trying to tell you…
What if I was to tell you this… if your best sales rep went to a meeting and all they talked about was what was inside your company brochure do you think that this sales rep would be successful..? – People that come to visit your website are effectively people that you are selling to…OK..we are getting closer..
Here is a typical point of difference with websites that sell and convert visitors into contacts and possible sales.
- They focus on telling people where they are
- They tell the user what they can achieve by visitors
- And they then give the visitor reasons to act
- They provide users with a clear channel of where things are located and how to access them
- They focus the content on “what’s in it for them”
- They display their USP, their “unique sales proposition” in the eye-line
- The are often a mirror image of their greatest sales reps
If we compare this list with the one from the brochure…where does your website fit?
Here are some statistics from our website tests..
- Business owners that have many websites doing specific jobs sell more
- Business owners that follow a sales process on their website sell more
- Business owners that have a 1 page website generate more sales than ones with 1 large website
- Sites that focus on lead generation verses lovely brochure sites win more sales
- Sites that are geared around helping others fix problems sell more online
Over the past decade, I have built my very own list of different types of website models (around 10 or so). Where most people go wrong is that they mix and match these different models which causes confusion, and with confusion people don’t act.
Good luck
Till next time, Dave.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
How do I start marketing my business?
I often hear from clients who want a price or a quote for a pay per click campaign (Google Adwords)…they have read somewhere that if they advertise in Google they will generate more sales from their website!
Hi Dave they say… “I want to start advertising in search engines so that we can make more money using pay per click. How much do you charge for this? ”
While the simple answer to this is to give them a rough price and hope you are the lowest in the quote contest, our approach is to gain a meeting with the person interested in the quote so that we can discuss with them their goals, products and services in more detail.
What I discovered many years ago is that per per click alone will not make you rich, the only way to make it successful online is to combine a number of activities together to help you gain as many sales and customers via your web marketing. No, this isn’t a magic formula, its more about designing a strategy around making the goals for the client happen!
While it is true that you may increase your sales from some of the additional advertising you do online, the bottleneck for 90% of our clients is making that website sell for them. If your website doesn’t sell well then you are wasting your time and money.
It puzzles me that people still do not understand that the most important element of the marketing is on their website! PPC and new visitors will only take you so far… in regards to making and generating more business and sales. If your web site is converting only 1% of all visitors no matter how many come looking you will still only covert that same percentage. The objective is to help you design a website that increases this most important element – your “website”. Improving your website alone, can really increase your sales and return on investment sometimes (if you have enough traffic already) without any need for huge spends in PPC traffic.
Eh…but how do I improve my website…? What analytical data do I track, how can I track what people are doing on my website, where can I get visitors from, how can I track my online videos, how can I get my website found on search engines, where are visitors viewing, what are they typing in to find my site, and what they are thinking while they are surfing around my site…What do I have on the home site that is stopping clients from contacting me? How do I know if it is working well for people at all? All of this tracking, reviewing and analysis is what all marketing companies should offer, but little if any (apart from us) do this.
Here is my top 4 suggestions to help your business grow online!
- Use a marketing company to help you improve your website.
- Use a marketing company to help you analyse your web traffic.
- Use a marketing company to create a search engine optimisation strategy for you.
- Use a marketing company to create a pay per click strategy for you.
Don’t get lost in the crowd – grow your business with expertise behind you
Tell next time…
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Usability & search drive 70% more revenue to hotel
How Redcow Marketing helped Museum Hotel improve their conversion rate by 100% and achieve a 70% increase in online sales.
The Museum Hotel’s Challenges:
The owner of Wellington NZ’s Museum Hotel – Chris Parkin – wanted…
- More bookings through his hotel’s website, more brand awareness, and more sales.
- To increase his website’s presence and make the most of its visitors.
- To reduce the fees he pays to third party travel sites for bookings, and to encourage guests to book from his website, instead.
Dave suggested they…
- Make better use of the hotel’s booking engine.
- Address usability and testing page enhancements to improve sales.
- Add sales elements on the website to improve the sales funnel, and add new content to the homepage and other vital areas that would enhance engagement.
- Work directly with the hotel’s booking engine provider to improve features.
- Work directly with the reservation staff and manager of the hotel to increase bookings.
- Address the site’s SEO content.
- Redesign the online advertising pay-per-click campaign.
First, they accessed the website’s analytical data to determine how much traffic was coming to the site, what levels of contact were made, what and how many bookings were generated, where people went when they visited, how long they were there, and where they left. All of this information helped to paint a picture of the site’s performance.
Dave reviewed the site for usability issues, friction, and confusion points, then looked for gaps in the website where they could enhance value, and studied the site’s flow of information.
Their major challenge was to make the website more interactive and focused – to get people moving into the booking engine as quickly as possible from the website itself; once there, the likelihood that a booking would be made was very high.
Dave proposed a new layout for the home page, then tried and tested different versions to find which one most effectively raised guests’ engagement levels with the site and booking engine.
The next step was to address the pages that were visited the most – providing feedback to the hotel on what those pages were lacking. They also added new tracking systems to monitor visitors and conversions levels, allowing them to track which parts of the pages people were more interested in, what keyword phrases were bringing in sales and customers, and other valuable information.
Finally, they added clearer navigation to aid the user experience, including new contact forms, maps and directions.
They rolled out these changes over the course of a few months, analyzing and tweaking along the way to enhance the overall package.
Results:
In 2009 their revenue increased by 56% from 2008
In 2010 their revenue increased by 11% from 2009
This is a massive revenue increase of 73% over two years
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Improve Your Website And Sell More
Did you know that you can increase your website’s ability to sell significantly by looking at implementing small changes to pages within it.
See how we helped Museum Hotel increase their bookings 20% month on month and improve their level of conversions by 100% on their website by improving the functionality, usability and engagement levels. We tell you how in our PDF attached.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Quick steps to SEO greatness
I was working with a client of mine on a project and he happened to mention that his wife was working on a website project to help families become more interested in playing golf.
His wife had being working with an website agency to promote this service and the site has just gone live. He wanted to get this site promoted in search engines such as Google. He sent me the link and asked for my help.
I asked if he would be able to give me some search phrases that his wife would like the site to be found for. He come back the next day and give me five lines of phrases. Out of these five lines the words he gave were very generic and in most cases they were just one word. I then asked him to resend me a list of search phrases that were more specific to what the site was promoting. The next thing I know a page document was sent to me with the note; ‘please take the content for phrases from this document’.
Ok, I reviewed the document and was able to determine some key phrases to focus on and then went about briefing my friend on some ways to help the site get found.
Here were my tips:
- Come up with a load of keyword rich search terms you want to be found for.
- Add these to your home page content and then start building paragraphs of text around these, making sure the content and paragraphs stay within a structure that is still well written.
- Make a headline on the home page that indicates in one good headline what this site will provide to the end users…make the headline all about what’s in it for them and if possible include some keywords that will also help your rankings.
Then I asked him to check his <title tag>, this is an area that the spiders of search engines see and report on but not normally noticed by the average user that views a website page. His title should include these same keywords separated by commas to make it more readable for the search engine spiders.
The next tag to review was the <meta-description>. This is important for rankings and clicks in search engines because this is what people see in the search results when your site comes up. In this area it is a good idea to have a call to action and to summarise what the visitor will find on your site.
Armed with these quick tips you will be on your way to SEO greatness! Good luck!
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
Website content for your homepage
Three things to look at on your home page.
When you review your website consider this… Most people will for the most part, have never seen or know anything about your business. In fact, for the majority of websites most visitors will probably find them by chance in Google, Yahoo, MSN or by a some other form of marketing of their business.
Ok, so when someone arrives at your site what will they see? Look at your own site for about 30 seconds and answer these questions from the visitor’s perspective.
- Where am I?
- What can I do here?
- Why should I act?
While these all seem really simple questions chances are your website and many other small to medium business sites do a poor job at providing the answers to visitors.
One of the favourites you see on websites is the ‘Welcome To…’. Let’s think about this for a second, you have only a matter of seconds to grab a visitors attention before they leave your site and look elsewhere, so instead of ‘Welcome To Jim’s Shop’ why not consider telling people very clearly where they are, what they can do here and why they should act now.
Let’s consider this, pretend you own a mechanic shop in Waikanae, here is what I would have on my home page…
‘Mechanic Shop in the Waikanae‘ as the main headline on your home page. Followed by a statement such as, ‘where you can have your car, truck and van serviced by our specialised and certified auto mechanics‘. And then something like, ‘Not only do we offer free pickup and delivery of your vehicle, once serviced we offer top quality support and 24 hr assistance just in case you car breaks down in the local area when you become a customer of ours!‘
This not only defines what you do, which tells the visitor ‘where they are’, then moves on and explains ‘what you have to offer’, (specialised and certified mechanics) and then provides them with a solid reason of ‘why they should utilise your services’ (by offering pick up and delivery).
It provides the reader with motivation, clarity of your offer and incentive to take action with you, all of which all help you generate sales from your website.
Dave Lemmon
Business Development Director
Redcow Marketing
Phone: 04 2935846
Mobile: 021 425 692
