Should your business be advertising on Facebook?

More and more businesses are discovering pay-per-click advertising on Facebook is a cost-effective way to get traffic to their websites. Generally, Facebook advertising is less competitive (and cheaper) than Google Adwords.

In fact, one of the ‘gurus’ of Adwords advertising during the past 5 years, Perry Marshall, is now turning his attention to Facebook. Perry has launched a new website - ‘Is Facebook for Me? (www.isfacebookforme.com.) It includes a short quiz to ascertain whether Facebook advertising would benefit your business.

If you’ve ever wondered:
Q: “Is Facebook for Me?”

Take this short quiz to get instant feedback on whether Facebook could be a main traffic source for your business. Discover:

- Can I advertise on Facebook and make a profit?
- Will my products appeal to Facebook users?
- How much time should I devote to understanding how to advertise on Facebook?

I recommend you visit this site and take the simple test - www.isfacebookforme.com.

You can’t make pigs fly

Website owners often think they can boost their sales by hiring a search engine optimisation expert to get them more traffic.

While more traffic is always good, you need to bear in mind the advice of Bruce Clay, who is regarded as the world’s leading expert in search engine optimisation.

To quote Bruce: “It is not the job of search engine optimisation to make a pig fly. It is the job of the SEO to genetically re-engineer the website so that it becomes an eagle.”

In other words, it’s a waste of money sending more traffic to a website if the site doesn’t work effectively to convert those visitors into sales.

It’s far better to invest money first to transform your website into an eagle… so it really flies.

It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic

To quote another top marketer: “Trying to increase sales simply by driving more traffic to a website with a poor customer conversion rate is like trying to keep a leaky bucket full by adding more water instead of plugging the holes”

Most New Zealand websites are full of holes. The priority is to get these plugged (or in some cases it’s better to build a new bucket).

If you’re serious about selling online, you do need to work on search engine optimisation too. But that should come AFTER you’ve got your website converting at the best rate possible. And bear in mind, SEO (done correctly) is expensive. It’s easier and cheaper to double your conversion rate than to double your traffic.

How to Recession-Proof Your Business Using the Internet

I have just published a new report called
‘How to Recession-Proof Your Business Using the Internet’.

The report is too long to post here (about 9 pages). So I’m offering it to you as PDF to download. The report is free and you don’t even have to give me your email to get it

But if you find it helpful, I would like to ask that you will forward it on to someone else who might also benefit from it.

The Report covers:

• How People’s Behaviour Changes in a Recession and How to Profit from It [Page 2]
• What You Should NEVER Do in a Recession and What to Do Instead [Page 3]
• The 4 Reasons Why You Need to Market Your Business on the Internet [Page 4]
• The Top 3 Ways to Market Your Business on the Internet [Page 6]

To get the Report, Click Here.

With email marketing, boring is usually better

If you are sending out an email newsletter or promotion, it’s tempting to go for a “flashy” high-tech design, rather than “boring” plain text.

But my experience over several years has convinced me this is usually a big mistake.  In fact, it was confirmed recently when I designed a slick, professional-looking email newsletter template according to my client’s directions (and against my better judgement). The newsletter looked fantastic. But a large percentage of them went straight into the recipients’ junk mail folders.

The important point is, every time you send an email to your subscribers, their email service checks to make sure it meets their deliverability standards. Emails that contains a lot of graphics and HTML automatically raise a red flag with email service providers, because that’s what a lot of spammers tend to use.

For example, SPAM Assassin, which is a spam detection software used by many email providers, will penalise your email if it has more than 30-40% HTML content.

Furthermore, most email clients now block images in emails by default, as a built in security precaution. In order for the recipient to view the graphics, they have to click on a button or link to allow it. (And why would you want to make a customer click anything just so they can read your email properly?)

Experienced email marketers know newsletters that focus on content rather than design achieve a higher sales conversion rates than newsletters with heavy HTML and graphics.

Your subscribers might be duly impressed by the design of your first email newsletter. But after that, the only reason they will keep reading your emails is if they contain something of interest to them. 

The bottom line is, if you want your email newsletters and promotions to get read, you should make them plain text… or if you must use HTML, keep the graphics to a minimum. Leave plenty of white space, so it’seasy for people to read.

Email marketing can be highly effective. But only if your messages get past your subscribers’ spam filters and they can actually read them. The most important thing about an email newsletter is not how nice the design is… it’s the content. That’s the only reason people will want to read it.

Why aren’t more websites designed with ordinary people in mind?

If you’ve ever tried to buy something online and have been asked to set up an account first, before you can make the purchase, you will appreciate this article by Jared Spool of www.uie.com.

The $300 Million Button: How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million

It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300 million a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.

The problem wasn’t as much about the form’s layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product.

The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they’ll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

“I’m Not Here To Be In a Relationship”

We conducted usability tests with people who needed to buy products from the site. We asked them to bring their shopping lists and we gave them the money to make the purchases. All they needed to do was complete the purchase.

We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, “I’m not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something.”

Some first-time shoppers couldn’t remember if it was their first time, becoming frustrated as each common email and password combination failed. We were surprised how much they resisted registering.

Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn’t want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn’t need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.)

Not So Good For Repeat Customers Either

Repeat customers weren’t any happier. Except for a very few who remembered their login information, most stumbled on the form. They couldn’t remember the email address or password they used. Remembering which email address they registered with was problematic - many had multiple email addresses or had changed them over the years.

When a shopper couldn’t remember the email address and password, they’d attempt at guessing what it could be multiple times. These guesses rarely succeeded. Some would eventually ask the site to send the password to their email address, which is a problem if you can’t remember which email address you initially registered with.

(Later, we did an analysis of the retailer’s database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.)

The form, intended to make shopping easier, turned out to only help a small percentage of the customers who encountered it. (Even many of those customers weren’t helped, since it took just as much effort to update any incorrect information, such as changed addresses or new credit cards.) Instead, the form just prevented sales - a lot of sales.

The $300,000,000 Fix

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

On my answering machine is the message I received from the CEO of the $25 billion retailer, the first week they saw the new sales numbers from the redesigned form. It’s a simple message: “Spool! You’re the man!” It didn’t need to be a complex message. All we did was change a button.”

‘Winning Websites for Small Businesses’ - a new handbook for New Zealand businesses

I have just finished writing a brand-new handbook for New Zealand businesses, called “Winning Websites for Small Businesses”.

I don’t believe there’s any other publication in New Zealand quite like this handbook because it’s aimed specifically at the unique needs of the New Zealand marketplace.

If you have a website for your business and it’s not getting you the amount of visitors, leads, or sales that you wish it was - this handbook has been written for you!

I’ve basically tried to summarise everything I know about website design and selling on the Internet, in a user-friendly way that is easy for the ordinary business person to understand.

This handbook is not about website design in the ordinary sense. It is about how to build a website that SELLS - and there’s a big difference

If you are keen to find out more about this handbook (and if you’re a New Zealand business that has a website, then you should be) then go to www.winningwebsites.co.nz.

How To Harness The Power Of Email Marketing To Connect With Your Prospective Customers

Why do you have a website?

That’s a question you need to consider carefully in the age of e-commerce.

Almost every business has an online presence now. But few are making the most of their sites. Most are a virtual replica of the company brochure - with product and service information, photos and contact information.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But if it’s all your website does, it probably won’t repay the investment of time and money you put into creating it.

Smart businesses are now realising the most powerful feature of a website is to collect email addresses.

Think about it.

When someone visits your site, the chances of you getting the order the first time they land on your site are slim. They’ll have a look around and might be interested in what you have to offer - but they’ll probably go away and think about it before spending money.

What you need to do, before those visitors click away, is to get their email address so you can keep in touch.

You can follow up, establish a relationship and increase your chances of converting them into customers.

So how do you collect your visitors’ email addresses?

The best way is to offer something free. It can be free information, a free gift or a free service. When people sign up for the free offer, they provide their name and email addresses.

The culture of the Web is built around free stuff. It’s what the big-time Internet marketers have been doing for years. It’s known as the law of “giving and selling”. Now, small businesses are finding it works for them, too.

You need to be creative here.

Depending on your business, you’ll know the kind of free information or gifts your prospective customers are looking for.

For example, a restaurant could offer recipes or discount vouchers. A plumbing business might offer advice on how to avoid costly repairs. A garage could offer car maintenance tips. A small business site could offer a collection of relevant articles, sent out month by month.

The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

This whole process is easier if your website already provides some free information for visitors. In fact, people go online primarily to look for information, rather than to buy. So the more useful content your site provides, the better.

Okay, it takes a bit more work to provide information on your site. But it will set you ahead of your competition. And the investment will repay you many times over.

After visitors have read the useful information on your site, you are then in a position to ask them to sign up for more valuable information or special offers, in future. The idea is to turn that stranger into a friend, into a customer, then into a loyal customer.

The best way to achieve this is by a regular email newsletter.

You may be intimidated by the idea of writing a newsletter. But it’s not as difficult as it seems. The secret is to write like you talk. That doesn’t mean you can break all the rules of grammar or spell words wrongly. No one wants to take the advice of someone who can’t write or spell. But a casual writing style is the way to go with email newsletters.

If you really find it too daunting to write your own newsletter, you might want to seek out a professional writer to help.

Some business people are still wary of using email marketing. They confuse it with spam - the term for email messages sent to thousands of people who didn’t ask for and don’t want to read them.

But permission email marketing is totally different from spam. We’re talking about emailing people who have signed up to go on your list.

Don’t be afraid to email your regular customers, either

They won’t go away because you emailed them. They’re more likely to go away because you didn’t email them and they forgot about you.

The real power of email is that it connects you with people in an amazingly personal way - if you use it properly.

So to summarise, the keys to successful email marketing are:

- get the email addresses of people who visit your website
- send these people useful information on a regular basis
- over time, build your relationship to the point where they feel comfortable buying your products or service.

Do this, and you can’t help but grow your business.