Filter The Noise

Focus on the 4 steps below to make the web an effective, revenue generating channel for your business.

1. Develop Great Content

Potential customers are searching for information and they are using search engines to find information that meets their needs. Search engines give more weight to targeted, valuable content, so if you want your business to be towards the top of the search results, you need to have valuable content on your chosen topic. When you re-design your web site: Focus on the information need of your visitors, not on making the sale.

2. Establish Creditability and Trust

The Internet is a low trust environment and means potential customers will ask questions to convince themselves that they can trust you. You need to build credibility immediately, or people will leave.

Questions they will ask themselves might include:

• Does this business really exist?
• How long has this business been around, and will they still be here tomorrow?
• If I buy or contact this business, will my details be safe?
• Will I receive my purchases, or will the promises made by the business be held?
• What type of post-sales support will I receive after receiving the product?

How to establish and foster creditability and trust:

1. DEFINE WHO YOU ARE AND WHAT YOU DO.
2. Educate visitors and provide FREE advise via a company blog.
3. Display how long you’ve been in business. Include photos of your team, board of directors, etc.
4. Use Customer Testimonials strategically throughout the web site.
5. Put your business contact details on every page.
6. Include any memberships you have and/or business associations you belong to (e.g. Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, Housing and Building Association, etc.)
7. Create a Community (e.g. Forums)—an extremely powerful credibility tool, as it often achieves points 1, 3 and 4 all at once. Plus you allow customers to talk to each other and spread the word first hand to new customers.
8. Capture Customer Feedback—give visitors a mechanism to contact you easily to provide feedback or ask questions.

3. Convert Browsers to Buyers

Conversion is the art of turning an information seeker into a customer. It’s hard work, but developing your content and establishing your credibility, go a long way to helping with conversion. Identify your conversion goals and design you web site around those goals. Your web site should have at least two goals.

A primary goal is brings in money to your business:

• A sale in your online shop
• A reservation for a seminar or workshop

A secondary goal gives you an opportunity to achieve your primary goal later:

• Request more information (RFI) form
• Email newsletter subscription
• RSS subscription to a blog
• Registration to a forum
• Everybody likes FREE stuff, so if you can offer something in exchange for information you collect.

The key things you can work on to improve conversion are:

• Identify and refine your “Conversion funnel”. A Conversion funnel is the path you identify that begins where the customer is starting down the path to conversion, and ends after the conversion is made. A funnel needs to be designed to build comfort in the purchase, not be too many steps or be too complicated, but also not be too short. Funnels that are too short result in a “half-baked” customer who isn’t sure if they want to buy yet!
• Use “Calls to Action”. A call to action is something like “Buy now”, “Click here”, or “Get started today”. You should include these both in your site to start users down the conversion funnel but also within the conversion funnel to drive them to action.
• Use the secondary goal to “catch” people who fall out of the primary conversion funnel. By placing secondary goals strategically in the site, you can catch those potential customers who aren’t 100% convinced.

4. Provide Great Customer Service

Getting new customers is the most important piece of your business because the cost of acquisition of a customer is always higher than the cost of retention. For you to go out and go through the previous 3 steps and get a new customer is time consuming and requires effort—and money. So the last step is about how you can keep your customers happier and retain their business for as long as possible, as cost-effectively as possible. Key things to remember are:

• Customers are expensive to acquire
• Customers can find your competitors online very easily
• Customers online are impatient—they want service NOW
• The Customer has the “high ground” because the Internet gives them greater power to choose and compare you with your competitors

There are several key ways to increase your customers’ retention rates, including:

• Run loyalty building advertising campaigns. Loyalty campaigns are targeted marketing campaigns that leverage your knowledge of your customer. An example of such a marketing campaign is a birthday campaign that goes out before my birthday to offer me a special deal: “Happy Birthday: Buy one T-shirt and get one free in your birthday month”
• Provide exemplary service with fast response times. When you receive a lead, inquiry or support request, react as quickly as possible. Better yet, you should be receiving emails and SMS's notifying you of customers’ requests.
• Don’t waste time—provide useful FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) to allow your customers to find answers to their simpler questions without having to contact you.
• Build a relationship. Use the right tools to keep track of your correspondences with customers, and make sure you can share knowledge about your customers.

Each of these 4 items work in concert with one another, linking together to create a winning process that helps you generate more leads and ultimately make more money out of your online business. Watch your web site analytics and adjust accordingly.