It starts with a clean, professional, easy to use website.

Then you launch a new product line, so you add a new button/ad/page, etc. Innocent enough right?

Next your company receives an award from an industry publication. Why not show it off on the homepage?

Then you read an article about a Google Adsense millionaire. Why not throw a few ads in, and pick up some extra revenue?

Then one customer complains that your Privacy Policy was too hard to find. So you put a huge red button in your header linking to it.

Before you’re aware, your website is unprioritized, cluttered mess… a frankensite.

Take a step back, and remind yourself the primary purpose of your website. Is it to solicit leads? For a customer to make a purchase? To educate customers about your brand?

Now take a critical look at every button, page, color, word, or ad on your site. Does it attract or detract from your primary purpose?

Remedy #1 - Focus on the Few, Not the Many

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” — Mother Theresa

People know millions of children are starving in Africa, yet rarely act on this knowledge. But what if one of these children showed up on their doorstep? Who wouldn’t act to help this child? The emotional connection with a single child trumps the astonishing, but paralyzing knowledge that millions of children are starving.

Sometimes we’re so fixated on the mass of data before us we forget there are people behind the pageviews. Have you ever stood behind someone as they used your website? Don’t just watch how they interact with the site, watch their demeanor. Ask them how they felt about the experience. Clickpaths rarely tell the whole story. What happens between the clicks matters. How the customer feels about the experience matters even more. Try focusing on just a few experiences, whether by observing people directly, or using a visual analytics tool such as Clicktale.

Remedy #2 - Ditch the Averages

General averages are often used for high level KPI reports for management, and rightfully so. Your CEO doesn’t want to know the conversion rate of your blue widget page, he wants the big picture. However, focusing solely on averages without extracting specific segments often results in information you cannot act upon.

Consider the following metrics and their usefulness:

• Useless: Your website bounce rate is 25%
• Better: Your website bounce rate from first time visitors is 40%
• Actionable: Your blue widget landing page bounce rate for first time visitors is 70%

The problem with general averages (the first example above) is they hide specific problems (the last example). By making the data more granular, you discover that a specific landing page is problematic. You now have information you can act upon. By tackling problems on a granular level, you’ll slowly improve the more broad averages as well.

Remedy #3 - Let Business Needs Drive Strategy

A trap I often fall into is wasting hours scouring analytics reports for that one business-altering, earth shattering insight. Unfortunately, excessively mining analytics for insights is often a waste of time.

For instance, suppose your international conversation rate reports shows unusually low conversation rates from visitors in Mexico. While you may think you’ve found an action item (increase Mexico visitor conversion rate), this may not be inline with overall business objectives. Sometimes going after international business is very expensive (due to shipping, customs, and customer service costs). There are often unknown variables as well, such as a low credit card adoption rate in Mexico)

Here’s a different approach:

• Start with a known business problem or opportunity, and consult the analytics for the solution

Rather than:

• Consulting analytics reports find business problems and opportunities that don’t align with strategy
  

Contrast the prior example with this. Your company has made a strategic decision to sell more blue widgets because the margin is better than green widgets. Upon research, your analytics reports show that repeat visitors buy green widgets at twice the rate of blue ones. This discovery can now be made meaningful by optimizing clickpaths of return visitors towards a green widget purchase. Based on this knowledge, you begin marketing your green widgets to your sources of repeat traffic, such as visitors who come through email newsletters.

Conclusion

There’s other great ways of getting your analytics unstuck, but I hope the ideas above will help you make sense out of the madness that confronts you each day. How about you, what are your methods of dealing with an analytics overdose?

Social media can no longer be ignored, even by traditional marketing agencies and old-school business. But before you make the plunge into this powerful, but often misunderstood marketing tactic, ask yourself these 7 important questions.

1. Can you have a conversation? I recently saw a wall comment posted to a major clothing retail chain’s Facebook page, questioning whether the company was going out of business. As of today, the comment still has not been responded to. Obviously, they are not interested in having a conversation, or managing their brand reputation for that matter. If you want to do social media, make sure you have the time to listen and respond, not just push out content.
2. Do you have the time? Managing a Twitter or Facebook account can easily suck hours of productivity from an aimless employee charged with the task of managing it. Are you willing to invest the necessary time, but able to limit fruitless, unproductive chatter? Are you able to commit to the long-haul? Social media is more of a commitment than a campaign, if you start, expect to finish and stick with it for the long run.
3. Are you saying anything worth listening to? If you’re thinking of using Facebook updates as another channel for press releases or pure advertising, think again. Your friends and followers will quickly see through this sham. The key is to strive for interactions. If your updates contain only push content (e.g. “Come buy our new widgets!”) your followers will quickly tire. Much can be accomplished by transforming push into pull content (e.g. “please comment with your opinion on our new widget!”)
4. Can you stomach the negative? A certain openness is required for social media marketing to work. If the thought of an irate customer posting a negative comment on your Facebook wall scares you to tears, SMM might not be for you. In my experience though, nearly every time I’ve witnessed negative comments on a company profile page, the true fans jump in and defend the organization, sometimes before even the company does.
5. What role will customer service play? Once customers know they can reach you through social media, you will undoubtedly need to get customer service involved. How will you handle the inevitable customer service issues that surface? In my experience, giving at least a few senior customer service representatives the ability to interact instills a sense of ownership, ensuring that customer service will view social media with the same importance as they view a phone call or email.
6. Are you joining the right conversations? You don’t have to be everywhere. Consider first polling your customers and finding out what social media sites they use. Only join those that have a critical mass, there’s no point in talking to no one.
7. Can you accept a fuzzy ROI? Social media ROI can’t and shouldn’t be tracked in the same way as other online marketing venues. Say goodbye to the CPMs and CPCs from typical online marketing channels. Tangible revenue can be tracked in some ways, but much like traditional offline advertising, you’ll never really see the full picture of brand awareness benefits. Make sure your company management sees some of the more subjective ROI indicators, such as positive comments and the extent of conversations.

Social media is surely worth the time and effort, as long as you understand the cost. SMM isn’t free, it takes a serious investment. Before you get into social media, make sure you truly get it.

So now you’ve committed to testing your website. Where do you start? What do you test? While you’ll ultimately have to answer these questions for yourself, below are 7 Do’s and Don’ts to help guide a successful testing strategy.

1. Do Test Properly: So you tweaked your homepage and sales shot up 50% from the prior week. Success? Not really. There’s too many moving parts here to consider. Did you run a sale during the same period, or send an email? In order to determine whether a new version of a page outperforms an old one, you must run both pages at the same time under the same conditions, and split test them using software such as Google free website optimizer. Before you advance any further with your testing strategy, get acquainted with Google’s powerful testing tool.
2. Don’t Be Afraid to Fail: In testing & optimization, failure is success. Although you may be disappointed that the new landing page you created underperformed against the old one, had you not tested it, you would have caused unknown damage to your sales.
3. Do Be Patient: Let your test run until you have a statistically significant winner. It’s tempting to end a test early when your favored version is winning, but fight the urge. Once your test has started, set it and forget it.
4. Do Use Testing to Settle Disagreements: Testing is the ultimate equalizer of opinion’s, especially those of the HiPPO’s. Rather than argue endlessly with clients or managers about what route is best, offer an unbiased test of each option. I can’t overemphasize the value of this approach. Eventually, you will reprogram the thinking of your company from “let’s do it!” to “let’s test it!”
5. Do Prioritize What You Test: When determining what to test, prioritization is crucial. Focus on the highest traffic pages first, those which are higher up in the conversion funnel. Bryan Eisenberg of GrokDotCom suggests testing the following pages first:
   • Your Top 5 High Bounce Rate Pages
   • Your Top 5 High Exit Rate Pages
   • Your Top 5 Lowest Time Spent Pages
   • Your Top 5 key pages (i.e., checkout, cart, registration, top product)
6. Don’t Test Too Many Variations: While you can run a multi-variant test that allows you to test dozens of different versions of a page at once, such a test will require too much time to determine a statistically significant winner. Only test variations that you have reason to believe will impact the bottom line.
7. Do Project out Benefits: After you’ve found a clear winner in a test, estimate the value of that change over a future time period in order to justify testing to management. Like other marketing activities, you’ll need to prove the ROI of your testing activities. Suppose a change to your site navigation increase your conversion rate by 10%. Calculate what that means for your business over a period of a year, and communicate your success to stakeholders.

Optimization testing separates good websites from great websites. Following the tips above will help you attain your testing goals. Have your own testing advice? Leave a comment below.

1. It’s biased: If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In other words, the SEO consultant believes that natural search is the key to your growth, while the social media guru says Facebook is the goose that lays the golden eggs.
2. It’s unprioritized: It’s easy to be overwhelmed by a mega-list of recommendations. I’m a fan of top 10 (or top whatever) lists, but they do have a tendency to produce unprioritzed advice that can easily swamp the small business owner.

With plethora of marketing options (e.g. email, SEO, PPC, social media)  competing for your attention, how do you decide how to allocate resources? Here’s some guiding principles: (that are prioritized, of course)

1. Strategy before Tactics: You need to know where you’re going before you choose the vehicle to get there. Some marketing vehicles are better than others depending on what you’re doing, and who you’re trying to reach. If you’re shooting for a 55+ audience, twitter probably isn’t the best place to start. If a consultant says you should be doing such and such, first stop to consider whether their recommendations gel with your strategy.
2. Leverage what’s already working: Is 50% of your business coming from natural search? There’s a good chance there’s still some low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking. A 10% improvement on your top performing marketing tactic is more effective than a 50% improvement on your worst performing one. Study and live by the 80/20 rule.
3. Budget for the future: While the point above may imply only sticking with what’s safe, such would be a short-sighted plan. It’s easy to get too comfortable with what you already know, and ignore what’s up and coming. It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma: why seek something new and improved when what you already have is working fine? Because you never know how long it’s going to work. Plan for obsolescence.
4. Imitate the Innovators: If the competition is already engaging in a certain tactic, there’s a good chance you could be missing the boat. You don’t always have to be the first in order to be the best. Stay on top of what your competitors are doing.
5. Fail Quickly, Fail Inexpensively: There’s no harm in trying something new that doesn’t work, just cut your losses early. Don’t invest too heavily, despite what any of your peers say, until you see promising results.
6. Demand Tangible Results: While the benefit of every marketing activity is not as easily quantified, you should be seeing results in some way. Don’t accept “branding” as an excuse for poorly performing banner ads, or “higher link-popularity” for ineffective search engine optimization. Insist on bottom line results.

The good news for internet business owners is there’s 1,000 things they can be doing right now to improve their business, the bad news is that not all 1,000 are equally important. Choose wisely, because the order in which you execute is critical for success.

Second 1 - Impressions: First impressions are forming. What loads first? Your header logo? Your navigation? Ads? As your page finishes loading, your visitor is already unconsciously judging your site based on the quality of your website design. Though average visitors know nothing about web design best practices, they are quite good at identifying poorly designed sites, and abandoning them for lack of trust. After all, if your site design sucks, what does that say about your products or services? The first impression is often the last.

Second 2 - Definition: Here comes the big question, “Who are you and what do you do?” At this point the visitor needs to know the purpose of your site and what sets you apart. Your landing page must communicate unique value, not just what you sell. Keep in mind visitors come in from all directions, so don’t ignore the backdoors such as product and category pages. Does your website header (viewable on all pages) have a unique value offering or only your homepage?

Second 3 - Relevance: Relevance is key at this at this moment. Can your visitor continue to follow the “scent” of what they were looking for after arriving on your page? However they got to your site, whether by Google or a link on another page, your visitor is learning whether or not you keep your promises. For example, if they arrived from a Google search for “gourmet coffee”, can they find a reference or picture that matches this phrase?

Second 4 - The Hook: They’re starting to get it. Now what’s the hook? Based on personality type, the hook is different for many. Some are looking for the deal. “Free shipping” or “10% today only” might resonate with this crowd. Others are hungry for an emotional connection. These folks vicariously envision themselves enjoying your product through your lifestyle and contextual images. And still others are looking for solutions, fast, easy, and painless. They need reassurance that you understand their needs.

Second 5 - Action: Your visitor is now asking “what do I do now?” You’ve kept their attention for this long (ok, only 4 seconds) but now you need to solicit action. Strong calls to action are critical in this moment. The MIA (most important action) needs to be painfully obvious. There should be no question what you want them to do.

The good news is they’ve made it this far, the bad news is everything repeats on the next page - relevance > hook > action.

Do you doubt that visitors make decisions this quickly? Try it for yourself using StumbleUpon (the equivalent of Channel surfing for the internet). You’ll be surprised to see how quickly you judge and abandon a website.

Will you only get 5 seconds from all your first time visitors? Of course not, each visitor is different, and this is only a speculative scenario. But all visitors have one thing in common: they have no desire to have their time wasted by unconvincing websites. They have better things to do.

As much as customer service is all the rage, and heralded as the new marketing, it’s still viewed as a cost-center by most online businesses. This I believe, is entirely due to a defensive approach to customer care.

Defensive customer service can be defined as any type of reactive customer servicing such as answering calls, responding to email inquiries, or responding to live chat sessions.

Providing good defensive customer service will never result in a flood of new business for two reasons:

1. You will only have personal contact with a fraction of your total customers. (those who have questions, problems, etc.) Only this small segment will be impacted by your excellent service. Note the uniqueness of this situation, in a brick-and-mortar world, you do have personal contact with each and every customer.
2. Good service is an expectation. Yes, some companies like Zappos go above and beyond customer expectations with extraordinarily helpful service, including referring customers to competitors for products they don’t stock. But for the most part, good service is a requirement for doing business.

At it’s very best, good defensive customer service will only prevent you from losing what you already have. It will not, by itself, create hoards of new word of mouth business. Unless… you change the paradigm.

What if you were able to reduce needless, defensive interactions through high-cost touch points (phone, chat, email) and with the time saved, start a offensive customer care plan that will actually add value?

Consider these powerful, yet rarely used tactics:

• VIP Recognition: Do your top customers know that they’re your top customers? They should. An outgoing phone call to a VIP customer is ten times as valuable as taking an incoming call. Come up with a system in which you regularly recognize these VIPs, and do something special for them.
• Customer Welcoming: Want to knock their socks off? Give brand new customers a call shortly after they place their order. Thank them for trusting your business and ask for feedback.
• Give them Feedback on their Feedback: It’s not uncommon for an online business to ask for customer feedback, but rarely do businesses respond to such suggestions. C28 makes it a habit to respond to every single customer suggestion left on their website. The response from customers is utter shock. “You actually read those suggestions?” most say.
• Customer Apology Program: Mistakes happen. Unfortunately, sincere apologies usually don’t. Learning the art of an effective apology will greatly exceed the expectations of your customers. Imagine getting a call from a manager, who apologizes for a lost shipment, and offers a discount on the order for the inconvenience. This is not expected. This adds value.

Sounds great, but how can you possibly have time to implement the ideas above? Here’s some ideas for reducing the load of defensive customer interactions.

1. Have a thorough FAQ / Knowledge Base: Every reasonable question should be answered in advance on your site. Ask your customer service team for help with this, they know what type of inquiries occur repetitively.
2. Answer questions contextually: FAQ pages are good, but few people have the patience to search through your site looking for an answer. By placing answers to common questions within the context of where the question is raised, you’ll prevent countless unnecessary calls and emails. For example, if customers are constantly asking when their shipment will arrive, include an estimated delivery date on the order confirmation page or shipping receipt.
3. Let customers help each other: Shoes.com brilliantly allows shoppers to ask questions about a specific product that can be answered by someone who owns that product. After all, who really knows a product more, someone who owns it or a customer service rep?

Start small. Over the next month, can you shift 5% of your customer service time from defensive to offensive tactics? 10% the next month, and so on? Give your customers the attention and care they deserve. I guarantee you’ll see a difference.

We rarely think of it this way, but every button, every subject line, every headline on our website is a promise. Whether or not that promise is kept determines whether we win the trust of our visitors, or lose them for good.

To illustrate, let’s take a look at a fictional shopping scenario, not unlike an experience that happened to me recently.

1. Customer receives an email from electronics retailer with subject line “HDTV’s Starting at $700″
2. Customer opens email and finds a graphic showing only 1 TV and no details. BROKEN PROMISE: Subject line promised an HDTV for $700, but email contains no support for this theme
3. Customer clicks on Button that says “Shop HDTV’s”, and is taken to the website’s homepage, which differs completely in the look and feel of the email creative. BROKEN PROMISE: Button claimed to let visitors begin shopping the TV models, instead they’re left stranded on a seemingly unrelated page
4. Visitor reaches HDTV category page displaying dozens of HDTV models. The $700 model is the last item on page 5. BROKEN PROMISE: This retailer made it very difficult find the $700 TV model promised in the subject line
5. Once on product page, customer clicks “Add to Cart”
6. Customer lands on a page upselling the extended warranty. BROKEN PROMISE: Customer received no confirmation that item has been added to cart

Here’s some other common examples of broken promises:

• Homepage gets SEO’d for a specific product, and ranks. Yet when a Google searcher lands on this page, they must again navigate to a category page in order to find what they were searching for
• Shopping Cart total changes when shipping & tax charges are added late in the checkout process
• Item is shown to be out of stock after added to the shopping cart, yet product page did not indicate a stockout
• Customer opt-ins to email list, and doesn’t receive follow up for weeks

Keeping your promises requires staying consistent. So what elements must be kept consistent in order to ensure a smooth transition from page to page? Here’s 4 to keep in mind:

1. Consistent Design: Even the design of a web page makes a promise, that is, it implies a specific theme will be kept constant during the experience. Colors, graphics, fonts all need to stay constant in order to make the visitor feel safe and secure.
2. Consistent Voice: Your visitors will notice, maybe subconsciously, if the writing style changes from page to page, or step to step. Keep it consistent by having one writer do everything.
3. Consistent Messaging: Don’t call your promo a “48 Hour Closeout Sale” in your email and a “2 Day Clearance Event” on your landing page.
4. Create Logical Flow: Create a logical flow by setting expectations for the next page. One way to do this is ensuring that the call to action text on first page equals header on the subsequent page. For example, if the button on your email reads “Compare HDTV’s”, the header of the landing page should read the same. This ensures continuity, lessening the chance that a visitor will feel they landed on the wrong page.

There’s a fine line between making big promises and setting the bar too high. Take a fresh look at your site today through the eyes of a promise maker. Are you keeping them?

In other words, the people most likely to give feedback are the people who spend the most money. So what’s the problem with this? Simply put, these are the people who’ll give you the least helpful advice. Let me explain…

Here’s the 2 types of people that volunteer feedback:

1. the first time customer, who is excited about your products/services
2. the long time customer, who has an ongoing relationship with your business

Here’s the problem: if we only receive feedback from the paying customers, what is everyone else thinking? After all, if your products suck, or your website is broken, people leave, they don’t hang around to give input.

Here’s 3 types of people you’ll never get feedback from:

1. The bouncers: These are the people who hit your site and leave immediately.
2. The lost and confused: These folks are interested, but they can’t figure out your site. Many people in this group adopt a “it’s probably my fault” mentality rather than blaming your website for being confusing. Because they blame themselves, they’ll never tell you when something is wrong.
3. The unmotivated: This group is somewhat interested, however they need extra motivation to act. Because they are only casual visitors, they probably won’t leave feedback.
   

The sad truth is that most businesses never truly get the right type of feedback. In other words, they hear only what they want to hear. That’s not to say that they never receive criticism through standard feedback channels, they just never really get a full picture of experiences with their brand.

Here’s the million dollar question: how can you get feedback from people who, well, don’t exactly want to give feedback? How can you possibly listen to those who aren’t talking? Here’s 4 ideas:

1. Watch your bounce rates: High bounce rates just might be the only feedback you’ll ever get. This is usually a sign of lack of continuity between your ads and landing pages. For example, your ad may over-promise or your landing page may not carry through the theme of your ad.
2. Preempt visitors with a survey: It can be annoying when you’re greeted with a survey the first time you visit a site, but at times its worth the risk to get priceless feedback. My survey tool of choice is 4Q by Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions.
3. Email your inactive customers: You know those customers who haven’t bought from you in ages? Why not email them and ask why they stopped buying? With this group you have nothing to lose.
4. Putt a Feedback Button…everywhere: Don’t just bury your feedback button in the footer of your site, place it in every possible area of confusion. Ask for feedback everywhere, early, and often. For general website feedback, I like Kamplye.

Feedback is the grease that keeps your business moving. More importantly, feedback from the right people is the grease that keeps your business growing. Take some time today to ensure that you’re not just getting one-sided input from your customers.

Below are 10 eCommerce startup mistakes I’ve encountered while working with online businesses. Specifically, many of these blunders are made by companies who are taking a traditional business online for the first time.

#1 - Blowing the budget on web development and neglecting marketing:

In the brick and mortar world, you get free traffic just by setting up shop on the street corner. The same does not apply for eCommerce. The “if you build it, they will come” mentality still exists in the minds of zealous, first time internet entrepreneurs. If you want a successful website, plan on spending as much on marketing and optimization in the first year as you pay for developing the site.

#2 - Getting Stuck in Endless Cycles of Design Revisions:

In traditional marketing or store operations, you have to get it right the first time, because it’s too expensive to redo your store signage a week after you open. However, the tools available to you online allow you to easily evolve and optimize your website overtime. As General George Patton once said, “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” The same applies to websites. Don’t expect a perfect website on day one. Rather than focusing on perfection, make a commitment to optimization after the website launches.

#3 - Forgetting people can’t touch your products:

This point may seem painfully obvious, but its often overlooked because companies know their products a little too well. It’s amazing how many eCommerce sites neglect appropriate zoom-in photos, contextual photos, and product descriptions. Take a look at the top performing websites in your niche, and pay close attention to how they describe and picture their products.

#4 - Not realizing website visitors aren’t as committed as store visitors

It’s easy for business owners to imagine a website visitor in the same way they perceive an in-store visitor. This is a serious mistake. While it’s not uncommon for retail stores to experience conversion rates of over 50% (half of the people who enter the store buy). a 3% conversion rate for website, would be considered acceptable. Why this disparity? It all comes down to commitment. The amount of commitment required to get in the car and drive yourself  to a retail store is much greater than the commitment from a casual surfer who clicks on your website from Google. In the physical world, your competitor is 10 minutes away. Online, they’re a few clicks away.

What does this mean? It means that any obstacle, large or small, that gets in the way of buying process will cause lost sales. It also means that you must add value to the customer experience, especially if you sell the same products as your competitors.

#5 - Using Print media for online media:

You know that killer flyer you made for your big sale event? Odds are it makes a terrible email blast. What about the retail catalog you invested so much on? It too, is likely very ineffective as an online version. Print and online media may be similar in some ways, but there are more differences than similarities. When choosing a designer for your website or online marketing projects, make sure they have significant experience with online creative, not just print media.

#6 - Ignoring Online Trust Issues:

In the face to face real world security, and privacy are rarely top concerns for customers. eCommerce, however, is inherently “taxed” with a low-trust environment, causing visitors to doubt the legitimacy of your site. You must go the extra mile to assuage these perfectly rational fears. This includes assuring customers of their information is secure, and that you value their privacy.

#7 - Having a “Home Page equals the Website” mentality:

In countless situations, I have seen companies place too much emphasis on the homepage, particularly the graphics, and woefully neglect other critical pages such as the product or category pages. A recent company I work with was surprised to learn that total pageviews of their homepage represented less than 4% of overall pageviews on their website. Yes, the homepage is important, but don’t go overboard and ignore other essentials.

#8 -Chasing After Every Internet Fad

Don’t go chasing after the latest and greatest internet marketing tactic or ecommerce feature. Yes, there are many exciting new tools and marketing tactics out there, but focus on the sure-fire methods first, such as search marketing, email marketing, and website usability. There’s much to be said about innovation and trying new things, but take every opportunity with a grain of salt, considering the opportunity cost.

#9 - Not Understanding or Caring about Web Analytics:

You can read a balance sheet, now make a commitment to understanding basic website analytics. In a physical store, the idea of analyzing customer activity is far fetched and impractical. For this reason, business owners often never realize the potential of not just monitoring but acting upon web analytics data. It’s vital that someone in the organization can understand and interpret web analytics.

#10 - Failing to Integrate your In-Store & Online Channels Early on:

Many large click-and-mortar retailers are still struggling to seamlessly integrate their in-store and online channels. Channel conflict, price discrepancies, and a siloing mentality are common, causing brand confusion for your customers. Many store managers believe promoting an eCommerce website will steal store sales. Make sure to educate your store staffers early on, highlighting the many synergies of online and in-store retailing.

I’ve listed 10 “don’t s”, now what about what you should do? If you had one tip to give an ecommerce startup business, what would it be?

Too many websites have identity issues. That is, it’s too hard to figure out what the heck the site does, or what sets them apart from the crowd. Simply put, if prospects can’t understand what your business does within a few seconds of arriving on your page, you’ve lost them for good.

Identity issues are more problematic when visitors arrive through certain types of traffic than others. For example, a Google searcher who lands on Amazon.com after searching for “online bookstore” is much less likely to need assurance about what Amazon does. (even though the homepage does not explicitly say anything about selling books)

On the other hand, suppose a friend forwards a link to another friend with a vague message such as “check out this site, I think you’ll like it!.” Unless your site clearly identifies your purpose, you’ll never get the full effect of this word of mouth marketing.

So how can you easily explain your business and unique value to first time visitors? Here’s 7 easy ways:

• Use a 1 line identity slogan near your brand logo: Having a one sentence definition below or beside the brand logo in your site header is priceless. The Recylced Retriever sums up their purpose with the short statement “eco-friendliness for pet lovers.” Fugitive Toys declares themselves to be “an urban vinyl toy store.” It may be hard to sum up your business in a few words, but there is tremendous value in these succinct identity statements.
• Have an Easy to Scan About Us page: Visitors who are interested in digging deeper will likely seek out your about us page. Going into your company history on your about page is great, but make sure you succinctly define who you at the top of the page. Also, don’t get too creative with what you call your About page. If you don’t want to call it “about us”, stick with something like “Who We Are” or “What We Do”. Here’s some more tips for creating a powerful About us page.
• Explain How it Works: If your business model is particularly unique, a “How It Works” page may be necessarily. Here’s a great example from Fashion Hire, which lets customer rent, rather than buy, expensive designer handbags.
• Use a Short, Informational Video: A short (1 minute or less) video explaining your business and unique value proposition can engage customers who are otherwise too lazy to browse around your site to find information. Lulu, which offers on demand print content, clearly explains their business model with a short demonstration video.
• Show your stuff: If you sell a physical product, show contextual product photographs (products in use, rather than just on display) on your most frequently trafficked landing pages. Remember that customers are always entering your website through side and back doors via search engines, so make sure you optimize your top landing pages with first time visitors in mind.
• Create a Carefully Crafted Title tag: In addition to SEO value, your title tag is an effective way to communicate your purpose. Don’t waste this important page element by only filling it with only your brand name.
• Integrate identity into your brand: If you’re still brainstorming on what to call your business, consider integrating your purpose into your brand name. Knituition communicates their purpose (they sell knitted products) through their domain name.

It all comes down to not making the costly assumption that your website is as intuitive as you think it is. Always remember a good percentage of your visitors are there for the first time, so assume only one thing - they know absolutely nothing.

Once you’ve answered who you are, the next step is to communicate why you’re different. The world doesn’t need another widget shop, so explain why you build a better mousetrap.

Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Your site will be flooded with traffic this holiday season. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Don’t forget to email and remind customers to come back and use their discounts.

Loosen Up & Emphasize Your Return Policy: While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas gift purchases. Be sure to let visitors know early and often about your policy, such as on product pages and the shopping cart.

Review Past Failures & Successes: Try this as you plan your busy holiday season. Take a look at you and your competitor’s website’s through the lens of the Wayback machine. What worked and didn’t work last year? What can you improve upon?

Communicate with Fulfillment & Customer Service: Don’t surprise your customer service and fulfillment staff with a unplanned for 24 hour blowout sale. (I’m talking from experience ). Taking 10,000 orders in a day is great, but if your warehouse can only ship 1,000, you’re in trouble. Work with your operations team in order to smooth out the volume spikes. One company I work for emails promotional offers to their customers by region, over a 2 week time period. This ensures that not everyone gets the offer at once, resulting in too many orders to fulfill in too short of time.

Use a Website Monitoring Service: Odds are, your website will go down at least once during the busy holiday season. If you’re not big enough to have a 24 hour IT department monitoring your server, signup for a website monitoring service such as Alertsite, who will email or text message you if your site goes down.

Put All New Web Development on Hold: December is not the time to be re-coding your shopping cart. Send your developer on a much needed vacation. Well, not really, but do put a temporary hiatus on all major web development projects. The 4th quarter is the time to optimize, not innovate.

Post Shipping Cut-off Dates Prominently: This is quite possibly the most important information to communicate to customers during the holidays. Check with your shipping carriers to determine what the cutoff days are for the various methods of shipping. As you get closer to Christmas, consider offering discounted priority shipping services to extend your selling period.

Do a Security Once-Over: Hackers don’t take time off for the holidays, in fact they probably work even harder. For this reason, have a professional audit your website for security flaws. Services like McAfee’s Scan Alert do a good job at detecting most eCommerce vulnerabilities.

Monitor those 404 and 500 Errors: Talk with your webmaster and ask him to setup a script that notifies him every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they received over 1,000 errors in one day. These errors can be costly, especially at Christmas time.

Allow Gift Receipts: Gift givers hate revealing how much they spent on a gift. Make sure you allow customers to click a Gift receipt option that will hide the prices on the packing list from the recipient.

Allow Gift Messages: Let your customers add a personal message to their gift. For simplicity, you can have the message appear on the packing list which will already be included in the box.

Holiday Graphical Themes: Show some holiday spirit and redesign some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. Hopefully, this will get visitors in a buying mood.

Get Creative with your Creative: Every email blast you send doesn’t have to offer a discount or promotion. Consider sending out a gift guide or a Top 10 gift lists.

Promote your Wish List Feature: Start promoting your wish list feature, encouraging customers to share these wish list’s with family and friends.

Increase Server Capacity: Talk with your web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. You don’t want to end up like Walmart or Amazon on  cyber Monday. Here’s a sad, but funny example of Macy’s servers getting overloaded.

Checkup on your Domain, Web hosting, SSL and Merchant Accounts: Letting your domain name expire mid-December will create a Christmas you’ll never forget. It’s not a bad idea to double check that your web hosting, SSL certificates, domains, and merchant account to ensure everything is all in order.

Audit Your Product Catalog: Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks. Small problems turn into big problems in the chaos of a busy Christmas season.

Seasonal SEO and PPC Landing Pages: Don’t forget to optimize your SEO and PPC campaigns for seasonal keywords. Visitors searching habits change around the holidays, so your marketing strategy should as well. Also, don’t fall into the trap of bidding wars, or allowing your ads to fall too low on the page.

Offer Online Gift Certificates: If your site doesn’t offer online gift certificates, and your visitors don’t find that perfect gift, they will just leave. Gift certificates make great last minute gifts. In addition, they’re a great way to drive sales at the beginning of next year.

Suggest Gifts by Person: Product category based navigation does little to help a frustrated gift giver find an idea for that hard to shop for person on their list. To help generate gift ideas, organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.

Suggest Gifts by Price: In addition, organize gifts for budget conscience customers by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business. Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order value.

Bundle Products: Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle. You can add value to your customer’s experience by simplifying the gift buying process through product bundling.

Offer Gift Wrapping: Many don’t like the idea of sending gifts to friends or family wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap or Styrofoam popcorn. If you can, offer gift wrapping services to your online customers. Be sure to charge enough to cover the labor and material costs for this additional service.

Emphasize Urgency: Let your customers know it’s not safe to wait until the last minute. To prevent shipping issues or product stock outs, encourage your customers to shop early.

Mystery Shop your Site: Ask a friend to mystery shop your site or hire a professional service. Mystery shopping should include ordering, contacting customer service, and returning the product back to you. You might be surprised to learn about a few problems.

Need an outside perspective on how you can maximize your site’s holiday sales? Here’s one final self promotional tip Checkout Palmer Web Marketing’s 3 Things or MySitePlan website review services.

You have plenty of other blog posts to read or emails in your inbox beckoning for your attention. Even if you commit to reading this you may be distracted by a ringing cellphone or a text message. Or maybe your brain will suddenly remember that proposal you had promised to send out 3 hours ago. Just as you may abandon this post, at this very moment, dozens of visitors may be leaving your website for similar reasons.

When optimizing our websites, we often focus (and rightly so) on elements such as web forms, buttons, product pages, shopping carts, etc. It’s easy to forget the countless external factors that affect the attention of our customers.

Preventing Controllable Distractions

Many distractions, such as calls from customers or bosses can’t be prevented, but some are within our control, such as:

• Ads on your website. If you’re currently using ads to supplement your income on a e-commerce site, seriously consider the professionalism and effectiveness of this tactic, as ads offer one more needless distraction.
• Cluttered checkout. This could include not removing navigation during the checkout process, or showing too many upsells/crossells too late in the checkout process.
• Make Your Site Design Good, but Not Too Good. Web design can be a double-edged sword. Professional, attractive, and usable design will put the focus where it belongs, on the products. On the other hand, overly animated or creative design can be a distraction, focusing too much attention on the website rather than what’s being sold.
• Too many fields, too little time. Do your web forms stay on a need to know basis, or are you quizzing your customers for information you’ll never use?
  

Are You Stressing Urgency?

Does your website give visitors any sense of urgency to complete a transaction? If you’re running a sale, do you clearly communicate the end date? If you’re offering merchandise at a permanent mark-down price, have you reminded customers this item will not be re-stocked? Customers assume there’s safety in later. It’s our job to refute that idea, and close the sale now.

Have a Killer UVP

If visitors feel your product is a commodity, you have already lost the battle for their attention. From the moment a prospect lands on your website, you must differentiate the heck out of their experience.  If your unique value proposition (e.g. free shipping on returns, 110% price guarantee, 10% of sales donated to charity, etc.) is not clearly communicated as early as possible, then customers are prone to choose another option, namely your competitor with a lower price. While you can never prevent interruptions, the best you can do is convince a customer that what they are currently doing (shopping on your site) is more important than that pressing distraction.

Does your Site Have An Express Lane?

Try this experiment: Time yourself on how quickly you can complete a transaction on your website. Better yet, ask someone unfamiliar with your site to place an order as fast as they can. If its not humanly possible to complete a transaction in a short period of time (say 3 minutes), then the odds of your visitors abandoning their effort due to distractions greatly increases.

Re-capturing Lost Opportunities

Of course there is no foolproof way to prevent external distractions, but there are some effective tactics for re-capturing lost prospects. One of my clients sends personalized emails to every customer who abandons their shopping cart, asking if there was a problem preventing them from completing their purchase. One of the more typical responses, not surprisingly, goes something like this, “There’s nothing wrong with your website, I just got distracted and didn’t finish my purchase.” In addition to sending cart reminders, make it a priority to capture email addresses. Personally, I will subscribe to a website that I find interesting at the moment, but I’m too busy to buy or dig deeper. Another tactic would be encouraging bookmarks, whether browser based or through a social bookmarking service such as Delicious.

Quite possibly, this very blog post is an interruption in your day, maybe distracting you from accomplishing something more important. But since I kept your attention this long, hopefully you’ll take away a practical tidbit from this article, or will leave a comment with your own input.

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With web forms playing such an important role in the completing goals, it goes without saying that we should optimize the heck out of them. Below are 25 tips for doing just that.

1. Ditch the Captchas: Captcha’s are great for blocking spam, but some evidence suggests they are just as good at blocking conversions. A little spam isn’t the end of the world, and definitely isn’t worth losing conversions over. If you must use a Captcha, make sure it’s easy to read.
2. Remove Unnecessary Fields: Do you really need to ask for your customers date of birth and gender? Even if your customers aren’t concerned about privacy issues, odds are they’re lazy and might just abandon your excessively inquisitive form. Here’s some great advice from Get Elastic on registration forms.
3. Keep It Simple: Just because we can use CSS to do all sorts of fancy things with text boxes, doesn’t mean we should. Keeping form fields simple will ensure that customers understand their purpose and won’t confuse them with design elements.
4. Clear the Clear Button: Having a clear button next to the submit button just makes it easier for customers to accidentally delete what they’ve entered. Skip this unnecessary feature.
5. Cancel the Cancel Button: In the case of long or multi-part form pages, such as checkouts, don’t give customers the option to cancel their decision. That’s equivalent to a commission driven salesperson asking, “Do you really want to buy this?”
6. Label Required Fields: People want to do as little as possible. For this reason, let your customers know what they are required to fill out with an asterisk or similar label.
7. Use Point of Action References: If customers are getting confused by the information you’re asking for in a particular field, include a small note with a popup link with more information. For example, one of the most common POA references is an explanation of the 3 digit CVV code found on the back of credit cards.
8. Show Formatting Examples: Some fields should have notes showing how to format them, depending on your database requirements. For example, you might want phone number formatted in a certain way, with or without parenthesis, dashes, etc. In general though, keep these formatting requirements to a minimum in order to keep it simple for customers.
9. Make it International Friendly: Forms requiring an address can be confusing if they’re built only with US residents in mind. Check out these detailed guidelines for building international friendly forms.
10. Allow Easy Forward and Backward Movement: Customers rarely maneuver through our website the way we intend them to. In order words, they hit the back button, the forward button, refresh, etc. Depending on how your forms pass data, this could cause error messages such as “this page has expired”. Make sure you test the forward and backward flow of any multiple page forms on your site.
11. Logical Tab Sequence: Don’t you hate it when you hit tab, and rather than going to the next field, the focus moves somewhere else on the page? This problem is likely due to the way the form is laid out with HTML tables. Make sure your forms tabs in a logical sequence to prevent customers from accidentally skipping fields.
12. Server Side Validation: There’s 2 ways to ensure that your visitors are entering correct data into fields. You can use client-side scripting (such as Javascript which is browser dependent) or server side error processing. In addition to server side validation being less reliant on the user’s browser settings, it’s also more secure.
13. Clear Error Messages: When displaying error messages when customers enter invalid data, make sure your messages are clear and well placed. This means saying “Please enter an email address” rather than something vague like “you must fill out all fields.” A best practice is taking them right back to the field with incorrect data, and displaying the error message next to it.
14. Show What’s Needed When Its Needed: It’s best to hide form fields until you know they are absolutely needed. For example, if you already know your user is from the US, you can dynamically hide the province field and show the state drop down box instead.
15. Logical List Order: When using drop down lists or radio button lists, make sure you order them in a logical way, listing items higher if they are selected more often. In other words, if 90% of your customers buy from the USA, don’t list Afghanistan as your first option, and United States at the very bottom.
16. AJAX Validation: Some sites have begun to validate form inputs as soon as the user tabs out of the field. This can be very effective, since it does not break the flow of the process. Its easier to correct an error immediately after entering it rather than after the whole form is completed.
17. Remember Me Feature: For login forms, allow customers to choose a “remember me” option, which uses a cookie to fill in login information the next time. Who wants to remember all those passwords anyway?
18. Set Focus: When a page loads containing a forms, sending the cursor to the first required field will prevent users from having to click into the field in order to start typing. This can be accomplished with a simple JavaScript function.
19. Avoid Obnoxious Password Requirements: Ever received this annoying error? “Your password must contain at least one letter, number, and be least X number of digits.” Requiring passwords to be formatted a certain way may help security, but it will likely discourage return visits since visitors must now remember an unfamiliar password.
20. Progress Indicators: For forms that span multiple pages, include a progress indicator letting people know where they are in the process. These are most commonly seen during checkout and would include steps such as “Shipping Info > Payment Info > Receipt Confirmation.”
21. Minimize Scrolling & Pages: A good case can be made to limit the number of pages in a a multi-part form in order to prevent customers from abandoning. However, an opposing case can also be made than ridiculously long, single pages forms that require scrolling can scare off customers. There’s no sure-fire rule here, its a perfect opportunity to perform your own a/b test.
22. Strong Call to Action Buttons: Sometimes “Submit” just doesn’t cut it. In other words, be specific and action oriented with your form buttons.
23. Use External Labels: Have you ever used a form that labeled the field with text that disappears when you click into it? This can be a great space saver, but extremely confusing if a customer forgets what the field is for since the label has disappeared. Here’s a great example of why external form labels are more effective.
24. Prioritize Size and Location of Multiple Button Forms: On a form with multiple action buttons, make sure you emphasize the most important button leading to the conversion. For example, if your final order confirmation screen has 2 buttons, “Finalize Order” and “Edit Order”, make sure the “Finalize Order” button is larger and more prominent.
25. Clear Confirmations: Have you ever filled out a long, tedious form, clicked submit, only to be returned to what seems like the same page with the form empty? You can do everything right with your form, but if you drop the ball on the confirmation, your customers will be helplessly confused. In addition to making a clear confirmation message, check out these other tips to prevent wasting your confirmation page.

So what are your thoughts? Have any other form optimization tips to add?

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E-commerce in particular lends itself to a low trust environment. After all, when you make a purchase online, you’re giving money to someone you can’t see, for a products that you can’t touch. Needless to say, trust is a crucial aspect of transacting business online.

Duct Tape Marketing recently interviewed Steven M.R. Covey on his book The Speed of Trust. Covey speaks of a “low-trust tax” which makes all business processes less efficient. Inspired by this concept, I came up with 10 ways to avoid paying a low-trust tax with your e-commerce site. If you have any ideas of how to inspire trust on your website, please leave a comment below.

1. Have a Real About Page: I’m not talking about a vague paragraph describing what you do. I’m referring to a personal, detailed explanation of who you are. Share your mission, your passion, and your vision with customers. This information becomes a powerful word of mouth tool when customers are telling friends and family about your products or services. Consider even showing pictures of yourself and your staff to add an extra personal touch.
2. Ability to Reach Management: Customers love to know that they can influence the management of a company. Providing an email address to reach a manager or even the owner shows you are committed to listening. But don’t stop there, why not publicly thank customers who have recommended new site features that you added. Even better than a company who listens is a company who responds to customer feedback.
3. Security Logos: Simple, yes, but having a few trusted logos from the BBB, McAfee, or your SSL provider inspire confidence for your customers. For first time visitors, these logos may be the only thing they recognize, and the trust they have with these brands spills over in favor of your company.
4. Professional Design: Even if customers don’t have any artistic inclinations, they intuitively know if your website design sucks. Your website doesn’t have to do a fancy song and dance, it just needs a professional, clean design that instills confidence in your brand.
5. Unfiltered Customer Reviews: This means allowing the bad reviews, not just the 5 stars ones. Negative product reviews serve to establish the credibility of your website. Sure, you might lose a sale on that product but you gain credibility when customers see your review system is unbiased.
6. Logical Navigation: If the information architecture of your site doesn’t make sense, customers will doubt your ability to serve them. In the same way that cleanliness and layout affects a brick and mortar experience, problems such as poor navigation, broken links and broken images erode customer confidence in your brand.
7. Tell them Who Else Buys: Social proof is a timeless persuasion tactics that just plain works. In addition to traditional testimonials, try using a real-time display of who’s ordering like Aweber’s “Who Just Ordered” feature.
8. Lenient Return Policy: Zappos has mastered the art of using the return policy as a marketing tool. Yes, its expensive to pay for 365 day return shipping on refunds & exchanges, but the confidence this liberal policy gives customers is priceless. Take it one step further by showing how few customers actually do return products using a tool such as Shoeline.com’s Return-O-Meter.
9. A Ubiquitous Privacy Policy: Having an effective privacy policy means not just burying the page in the footer of your website, but rather linking to it anytime you ask for personal information.
10. Check the Other 9: When was the last time you checked the other 9 Google search results below your website for your brand name? If there’s negative information, have you tried to resolve these complaints? If all else fails, try pushing the negative results to the second page with these 10 tips.

You.

As much as we want to believe website optimization is all about tactics and strategy, often the key to success lies in our own behavior. In order for optimization to occur, we first have to properly collect and interpret data about our websites. However, if the daily processes which we use to collect data are overly systematic and rigid, inevitably out of the box thinking will cease to exist.

Let face it, we all get into ruts by doing things in the same old way. So how can we change perspectives and see our website through a different lens? Here’s 12 ways to help you look at your website as if it were the first time.

1. Stand Behind Someone Browsing your Site: One of my favorite ways to inspire ideas is to hand my laptop over to my wife, and have her browse through a client’s website. As she does, I watch her browse the site and ask her questions. Because she interacts with the website as a much less experienced user, she often does things I wouldn’t expect.
2. Stand Beside Someone Browsing your Site: Want to perform a low budget eye tracking study? Perform a similar experiment like the one above, yet this time focus more on the person than the website. Stand beside a friend or family member as they maneuver through your site for the first time. Pay close attention to where their eyes go as they browse. Are their eyes attracted to the page elements you would expect? Interact with them and quiz them on their impression of the website.
3. Record Your Visitors: Screen recording allows you to see your website through the eyes of your visitors and offers an experience that traditional analytics software just can’t. The ability to see micro-actions, such as the cursor moving or visitors interacting with a form, is absolutely priceless, and something you will never glean from log files or Javascript based programs. ClickTale offers a free version of their screen recording analytics.
4. Change analytics programs: Using the same analytics tools over and over can get you into a repetitive rut. I’ve found that looking at the same data with a different analytics program can yield insightful results. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft’s new Adcenter Analytics.
5. Try a slower internet connection: We forget how using a slower internet connection creates a shockingly different user experience. When page elements, such as images, embedded videos, or flash files hesitate to load, visitors may think your website is broken. For a disturbing reminder of a slow internet connection, check out this free application.
6. Get an Analytics Buddy: Give a trusted friend or colleague access to your analytics data for an hour or two, and offer to do the same for them. They’ll likely interpret the data a much different way than you, shedding light on previously unnoticed trends.
7. Use a Different Web Browser: As much as I love Firefox, I intentionally use other browsers on occasion. Sometimes even simple design modifications can cause rendering problems in less fortunate browsers such as such as Internet Explorer. Regularly viewing your website in multiple browsers will prevent simple rendering issues from going unnoticed for very long. Try BrowserShots for a quick screen shot of your website in all the popular browsers or give Google’s new Chrome browser a spin.
8. Change your Screen Resolution: Using your web analytics, take a look at the 5 most common screen resolutions of your site visitors. If possible, adjust your screen resolution to that size and take a spin through your website. You might be surprised that certain mission critical site features such as add to cart or checkout buttons are obscured or below the page fold. Webconfs.com offers a nice little tool to simulate different screen resolutions.
9. Adjust your Color Settings: Color settings on monitors vary greatly, frequently causing certain colors to have insufficient contrast with the background. Try adjusting the settings on your monitor, or using another monitor altogether.
10. Browse with Script Errors On: You know those ugly little JavaScript errors that popup now and then? Make sure your internet browser it set to display them so know when one of your pages is broken.
11. Use a Mobile Device: How usable is your website for a mobile user? Does it render properly? If not, try using a service such as Mofuse that can generate a functional mobile site based on an RSS feed.
12. Work at a Different time: Apparently, I’m not alone in discovering creativity late at night. Taking a hard look at your website or your analytics reports when you feel the most inspired can yield surprising results.

Think about how you would react if you were actually able to visit your website for the first time? What would you tell yourself? Hopefully the tips above will help you uncover previously unknown issues with your website and improve upon them.

Have you used any of the tactics above? What other methods can inspire out of the box thinking and creativity?

Because we’re so focused on the primary conversion goal of our website, we often forget many of our visitors come to our website with a different agenda in mind. Although we’d prefer that 100% of our visitors make a purchase or generate a lead, its in our best interest to help visitors complete the task that’s most important to them at the time.

FACT: Your ability to convert visitors for secondary goals affects your ability to convert visitors for your primary goal.

For example, if a customer tried unsuccessfully to find a store location on your website, how likely are they to make an online purchase? Judgments are made quickly about your site, so if a simple task can’t be accomplished, some may assume your site is broken or poorly made.

What type of alternative goals are we talking about? Here’s a few that come to mind:

• Finding a store location
• Checking for new products
• Learning about the company / brand
• Researching in-store purchase
• Finding a job
• Tracking an order
• Contacting customer service
• Finding an answer in an online knowledge base
• Adding a product review

So how do you go about optimizing for alternative conversion goals? Here’s quick checklist:

1. First, identify all your alternative goals. To help with this, study your navigation paths from the top entry points on your site. You may also consider directly asking visitors their intent, using a survey tool such as Avinash Kaushik’s excellent 4Q tool.
2. Setup Google analytics goals or similar tracking through your analytics software, allowing you to see visitors as they funnel their way to the goal in mind
3. Looking through the lens of this goal, try to identify possible obstacles. For example, if you learn that 10% of your site visitors are looking for a store location, but your locations page is buried in the footer of your website, you’ve found a potential stumbling block.
4. Determine the goal completion page. In other words, after a visitor completes this goal, where do they end up?
5. After a visitor reaches the goal completion page, ask yourself “How can I steer this visitor towards the primary goal of the website?” For example, after a customers adds a favorable product review, you can suggest similar items to the one they just purchased.

Potentially, you could have hundreds of various alternative goals on your website. Start with optimizing the most common ones, and go from there. If you delight your visitors in these areas, you’ll undoubtedly build a bridge to future conversions.

1. They convert better
2. They spend more
3. They’re more likely to tell others
4. They’re free (you already paid to acquire them)

Here’s 10 ideas for creating loyal visitors by creating a magnetic website:

1. Consistency: If customers know that content is updated at a certain time consistently, you’ll train them to return to the same place at the same time.
2. Get Email Opt-ins: An obvious point, but I can’t overemphasize its importance. Consider an email opt-in almost as important as a purchase. (or whatever your primary conversion goal is) Browse through your site with an eye for this secondary conversion action, asking yourself how you can better encourage email opt-ins. Can you offer an incentive such as a freebie or a contest? Maybe you just need to place your sign up form in more places?
3. Trigger Based Emails: Event triggered emails, in contrast with regularly scheduled marketing emails, are a great tactic for bringing in highly targeted traffic. Here’s a few trigger based email examples. You can email customers (who have opted in) notifications when:
   • A Certain product is re-stocked
   • Before a product sells out
   • Similar products are added
   • Someone abandons a shopping cart
   • Someone abandons a wish list
   • Order confirmations
   • Shipping confirmations
     
4. Daily Specials: Wouldn’t it be cool if part of your customers’ daily routine was checking your “daily deal” page every morning? By offering item of the day (or week) special, you’ll consistently attract curious deal shoppers.
5. Social Communities: Allowing your customers to interact with each other creates an automated mechanism for repeat traffic. By yourself, you probably can’t create enough content to keep visitors coming back daily, but a self-sufficient community can. Forums, mini-social networks, & online street teams are great ways to attract and keep a loyal following.
6. What’s New Section: Your loyal visitors don’t like digging to discover what’s changed since their last visit. Ensure that your homepage, category pages, and product pages all clearly label new items and allow visitors to sort or filter by newness. Having dedicated section highlighting new products or website features would be ideal.
7. Freebies: Free branded content such as wallpapers, screen savers, myspace layouts, and web banners provide sticky content and great viral branding tools. If content such as this doesn’t fit your brand, consider posting useful “how to” videos or articles.
8. Blogs: The benefits of blogging are numerous, even for eCommerce retailers. It’s sometimes hard for customers to see real people behind a website, but not so with a blog, which allows your personality to shine through. By allowing customers to comment on posts, you’ll create two way conversations that will keep them coming back.
9. RSS: RSS can be used not just for blog updates, but also to keep customers current with new products, company news, or sales. CompUSA lets customers subscribe to over 30 RSS categories, creating a truly personalized data feed from company to customer. Using RSS in combination with a Daily special (see #4 above) can be especially powerful.
10. Make Customers Part of R & D: We often think of customers as the last link in the chain of business processes. But why not make them apart of research and development as well, ensuring that your products are made by customers for customers? Threadless pioneered this approach with community based product development, allowing their community to submit and vote on t-shirt designs. C28 asks their street teamers to vote on new clothing designs and uses the feedback to modify designs and production quantities. Allowing customers to influence product development creates an incredibly interactive experience that customers won’t be able to get enough of.
11. Ask for a Bookmark: If all else fails, just flat out ask customers to bookmark your site. In addition to browser bookmarking, suggest other popular social bookmarking sites such as Delicious.

Before you make any changes, delve into your analytics to determine just how well you’re doing with attracting repeat visitors. Take a look at your ratio of new vs. returning visitors, and make this your benchmark to improve upon.

What other tactics can be used to attract repeat traffic? Leave a comment with some tips of your own.

Assumption #1: People will know how to find your website

We often assume that people have memorized or bookmarked our web address. But what happens when people forget, or are using a different computer and don’t have access to bookmarks? In addition to ranking on Google for your brand/company name, do you rank for common misspellings and variations? One company I work with uses uses pay per click to bid on at least a dozen variations / typos of their brand name, which is often misunderstood when spoken. What about your domain name? Especially if your URL contains dashes (example-url.com) or a top level domain of anything besides “.com”, consider buying up every reasonable variation you can afford, and redirecting it to the correct address.

Assumption #2: People know what you sell

How many times have you landed on the homepage of a website, and were unable to understand the primary purpose, product, or service? We often neglect to succinctly inform our customers about our product or service, which leads to a prompt bounce from visitors.

Assumption #3 : Everything will go as planned

Here’s an experiment. Try going through your website conversion funnel (checkout process, contact us form, etc) and do everything wrong. For example, enter an invalid zip code, click on things that weren’t meant to be clicked on, click the back, forward, and refresh buttons on your browser excessively. You might be surprised what you see. How well does your site handle errors? When people stray off the beaten path, can they get back?

Assumption #4: People know where to click

Don’t assume that because you know where to click, everyone knows where to click. Creative can be beautiful and attention grabbing, yet completely worthless if people don’t know what to do next. The power of a strong call to action button on a landing page is priceless.

Assumption #5: People know how to get home

Yes, most people know that clicking the company logo will take them to the homepage, but not everyone. Recently, I performed a test on a website and found that 45% of visitors preferred clicking on a link that actually said “Home” instead of the company logo. Even worse is when interior pages offer no link at all back to the homepage.

Assumption #6: People know where they are

People don’t always start on your homepage, and navigate step by step to their destination. Maybe they landed on an interior page from a search engine, and they have no idea where to go next. Breadcrumb navigation helps orient visitors, and establishes a navigational hierarchy.

Assumption #7: People know how to buy

This one is quite common, unfortunately. Many eCommerce sites assume the visitor will be on the shopping cart page to checkout. However, my experience has found that customers will look for a “checkout” button from any page of a site whenever they are ready to complete a purchase. If it’s not painfully obvious where to go, you might just lose a sale.

Assumption #8: People will volunteer loads of personal information

It’s important to think like a customer when building registration forms or checkout pages. Is the information you’re asking for so important that you’re willing to lose a customer because of it? The truth is, you will lose a certain percentage of customers for every additional piece of unnecessary information you ask for.

Assumption #9: People will contact customer service if they have a question or problem

Actually no, they will probably just leave and never return. In my experience, one customer question or complaint usually represents at least 10 other unspoken ones of the same nature. It’s best not to count on customers to tell you about problems, but rather to discover them yourself.

Assumption #10: People will come back

Even if people love your site, don’t assume they’ll be back unless you give them a good reason. This is why it’s so crucial to capture an email address, since it provides a proactive follow up mechanism. Other tactics to help bring in repeat visitors include having an RSS feed, a section highlighting what’s new, and constantly updated, fresh content. I can’t tell you how many incredible sites I’ve visited and completely forgotten about. When a do remember them, I often can’t remember the url or brand name. (see assumption #1)

To follow my own advice, I’m not going to assume that you’ve already subscribed to the Palmer Web Marketing feed. If you haven’t, why not subscribe now?

In a perfect world, a website redesign might never be necessary. After all, a redesign implies someone wasn’t monitoring the performance, and tweaking and optimizing as needed. However, inevitably the topic of a redesign will come up. Here’s 8 questions to ask yourself before embarking on a website overhaul project.

1. What are the problems with the current site? - Why are you thinking about a redesign in the first place? Make sure you answer this question with fact rather than feeling based reasons. You may be tired of the look and feel of your website, but what do your customers think?
2. What do your customers say about your current site? - What feedback are you getting from your current customers? Your customers may not be professional web designers, but even a novice can point out a bad website. In order to get feedback, try taking some surveys or polls from your site visitors.
3. What is the purpose of this redesign? - Try to avoid vague objectives such as “the site needs to be updated” or “because we do it every year.” Is your goal to improve conversion rates? Reduce bounces rates? Increase search traffic? Ideally, your redesign goal should be inline with the overall purpose of your website. Be sure to set measurable goals that you can easily revisit after the launch.
4. Can these problems be fixed with optimization rather than a full redesign? - Just because your search engine rankings need improvement doesn’t mean you must redesign your site. Maybe it can simply be fixed for a fraction of the cost. It’s easy to over react to a problem and assume everything needs to be scrapped, when it can be optimized instead.
5. How will the redesign affect my search engine rankings? - Too often, SEO is an afterthought of a website redesign. While SEO is certainly not the only consideration when considering a website overhaul, there are many search related ramifications of a site redesign. Make sure you understand how these changes can impact your search traffic before you begin a project.
6. Have you considered the opportunity cost as well as the financial cost? - Depending on the complexity of your website, site redesigns can take a significant amount of time. During this development time, will the current site be neglected? In my experience, its very difficult to focus on maintaining and optimizing an old website at the same time you’re building a new one.
7. Will it be hard for my customers to relearn my new site? - Nobody loves change. Will customers be confused by the new layout? If the changes are drastic, expect the learning curve phenomenon. In other words, things may get worse before they get better.
8. How will I judge if the new website has succeeded? - This is perhaps the most important question of all. If it’s not asked and answered properly, you may get stuck in an endless cycle of website revisions, never reaching a goal because the goal wasn’t defined in the first place. Be sure to answer this question before you launch the new site. Are you prepared to switch back to the previous design if the site is a failure?

As you can probably tell by now, I’m a big fan of website optimization vs drastic, sometimes unnecessary website overhauls. Don’t get me wrong though, there are certainly times when a situation warrants a complete redesign.

What has been your experience with optimization vs. redesigns? Under what conditions would you justify scrapping a design and starting over?

Who Just Ordered Feature

We all know testimonials are a proven way to boost confidence in your products. Email marketing company Aweber has found another way to leverage the well-known social proof buying trigger. Aweber’s Who Just Ordered feature shows, in-real time, the first name, city, and state of customers who have just signed up for their service.

This innovative feature counters one of the major draw-backs of online shopping, the lack of a shared shopping experience with other customers. For example, if I’m in a department store, I can easily see where people are going, and what they’re buying. On the web, I cannot. We all want to know we’re not the only one buying something. (I’m not the only one who sneaks a peak in other people’s shopping carts, right?)

Showing Press Recognition & Awards

While many online stores have a press page buried deep within the site, few retailers actually brag prominently about recognition they’ve received. Romanicos Chocolate, on the other hand, highlights awards they’ve received on their homepage. This is a great tactic to raise the value of the brand in the eyes of a first time visitor. Even if a visitor has never had an interaction with your company before, seeing other well known brands or people endorsing your products helps your website’s credibility.

Shipping Assurances

Questions regarding shipping and fulfillment can cloud a customer’s mind and become an obstacle for ordering. “Where does it ship from?”, “How long will it take?”, “What method will it ship?” are just a few of the common questions. For me, there’s nothing worse than placing an order, and having the retailer sit on it for days before they ship it. Kids Bargains assures customers with an ad on their homepage that orders ship quickly. Such a reminder is perfect for deadline sensitive customers who need their order by a certain date.

Seen any other tactics used by online retailers to boost confidence? Please share them in the comment section below.

Need help boosting the confidence of your site visitors? Get 3 recommendations from Palmer Web Marketing.

Not many years ago, successful pay per click campaigns could basically run on auto-pilot. As this marketing medium has matured, good ROI has become increasingly difficult to achieve. This post will focus on some tactics to keep your campaigns afloat in these competitive and changing times.

1. SEO Your PPC Landing Pages: Recent changes to Google’s quality score now look at on-page text and load time to determine relevancy, and therefore your final click price and ad position. By applying basic on-page SEO tactics and web usability best practices to your landing pages, you can save a bundle and improve your ad position.
   
2. Turn Off Auto-Matching: Apparently, Google doesn’t think PPC marketers are good enough at picking keywords, so they want to do it for us. They’ve done quite a good job at spinning this one, but don’t fall for it. With auto-matching, Google will automatically show your ads for queries that they think are related to words you already bid on.
3. Set Cost Per Conversion Goals by Product Category: How much are you willing to pay a customer? Looking at your gross and net operating margins, set a goal on how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer through Pay per click. Then stick with it, and adjust or cut your ad groups in order to meet this goal. Taking this a step further, determine how much you can afford to pay for each product category. For example, you can obviously pay more to acquire a PPC sale for a 70% margin product vs. a 30% one.
4. Calculate Your Lifetime Customer Value: In addition to understanding your customer acquisition cost, it’s crucial to know the long term value of customers you acquire through PPC. For example, on average how many times will your typical customer buy per year? Sometimes marketers are willing to take a hit on the first sale if they know the customer will generate many future sales. Recently, I analyzed an Adwords campaign, and broke it down by LTV for each adgroup. The results were surprising. I discovered that many groups were performing well up-front (low cost per conversion), but weren’t ever generating future orders. In contrast, some groups were generating poor up-front results, but great LTV.
5. Recognize Cross-Channel & Untrackable Conversions: Because ROI tracking is so easy, we sometimes think its infallible. Realize that customers who click on your ads will often convert through other channels such as through your call-center, store, or catalog. In addition, its nearly impossible to track sales from customers who use multiple PCs (home, office, laptop). For example, a customer may find your website from work, but make their first purchase at home after typing in your URL directly.
6. Dis-Allow Trademark Bidding for Affiliates: If you utilize affiliate marketing, take a close look at your pay per click bidding policy for affiliates. If you’re not careful, affiliates will bid on your brand name terms, (keywords that you likely already rank organically for). This type of affiliate theft adds unnecessary marketing costs, since you’re now paying affiliates for a sale you would have likely received without them.
7. Use Appropriate Data Samples for Decisions: One mistake I see frequently is making decisions to cut or increase PPC spending based on an inadequate amount of data. Before making a drastic decision, make sure you view several months worth click and conversion activity. I frequently come across ad groups that perform well one month, and terrible the next.
8. Turn Off the Content Network: In my experience, the content network is extremely difficult to generate acceptable ROI with. Even if you’ve had success with the content network, be sure to separate it from your keyword campaigns, as mixing them will blur the ROI between the two.
9. Test Your Ad Copy, But Not Too Much: A/B testing your ads is so easy, there’s no reason not to do it. However, don’t stress about changes that are too small to track. Changing insignificant words in your ad copy may show slight changes in click-through rates, but the results are likely random.
10. Test Landing Pages: More importantly, test which landing pages result in better conversion. You can accomplish this by creating an identical ad, yet linking to a different destination.
11. Make Your Ads Less Appealing: Yes, you read that right. If your goal is good ROI, then you actually don’t want everyone to click on your ad, only qualified customers. This might mean adding the price of your product to your ad, with the intention of filtering out discount shoppers. The key is to qualify your clicks, not to cast a wide net. This is especially important with high volume, broad keywords.
12. Build Custom, Focused Landing Pages: One of the major advantages to PPC vs. organic SEO is the ability to send visitors exactly where you want to. Make sure your landing pages feature the same keywords you bid on in order to reinforce relevance. In addition, ensure that the next step is impossible to miss, featuring a strong call to action.
13. Use Negative Keywords Exhaustively: Not bidding on keywords can be as important as bidding on them. Use Google’s ad preview tool to help determine whether your ads are showing up for irrelevant queries. Here’s some great tools to help find negative keywords.
14. Avoid Bidding Wars: Focus on ROI, not your ego. The number one spot doesn’t always convert best. In fact, some think spots #2, and #3 outperform #1, since it tends to get clicked automatically.
15. Use Phrase Match & Exact Match: More and more, I’m finding it difficult to achieve good results using broad match keywords. Instead of a shot-gun approach, use phrase match or exact match to focus in on specifc phrases.
16. Don’t Compete with Your Organic Listings: If you rank in the top 3 organic positions for a keyword, you’re probably better off bidding for the 4 or 5 spot with PPC rather than competing with your natural listing.
17. Don’t Worry about Click Fraud: Yes, click fraud happens. It happens in some industries more than others. However, its best just to consider it a cost of doing business with paid search. If you focus too much of your time trying to catch it, or you know its happening and you can’t do anything about it, maybe you shouldn’t be using PPC in the first place.
18. Use PPC for Organic SEO Research: Let your paid and natural search campaigns feed off each other. As you analyze your top performing PPC keywords, consider optimizing for them organically. PPC makes great testing ground for SEO, since you can roughly gauge the success of keywords before going into all the trouble of optimizing for them.
19. Use Keyword Management Software: Campaign management software such as Google’s adwords editor simplifies repetitive tasks that are mundane in the web-based Adwords admin. Microsoft adCenter is now allowing beta pilot signups for a similar future product.
20. Track Secondary Conversions: It goes without saying that sales conversions should be tracked. However, what about that other 97% percent of visitors that don’t buy on the first visit? The next best thing to a purchase is often an opt-in, since a certain percentage of your opt-in list will eventually buy. Consider tracking “mini-conversions” such as email or RSS signups.
21. Double Check your Ads and Landing Pages: Over time, links get broken, copy gets out-dated, and products go out of stock. For these reasons, its important to test your ads on a regular basis, removing ads that should not longer be showing.
22. Watch your Traffic from Parked Domains: Take a look at your clicks and conversions from parked domains. While there is some debate about this, many marketers find this traffic is lower quality, and converts poorly. See this Adwords help page for how to turn this off.
23. Track Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords: Make sure you separate your branded keyword campaigns from your non-branded ones. Realize that while branded keywords usually boast a much lower cost per conversion, they are often the result of other marketing campaigns.
    
24. Use Your Time Wisely: Whether your paid search program is managed in-house, or by a third party, your time resources are limited. Make sure you spend that time effectively, doing the things that will make the most difference. The Rimm-Kaufman Group suggests a break-down of how to allocate your time between term list management, bid management, landing page/site layout, and ad copy tweaks.
25. Make Big Promises; Overdeliver: Seth Godin recently wrote brilliant post on these four words that applies well to PPC. Your ads need to make big promises in order to get clicks. Your landing pages need over deliver on the promise of your ads, then make more big promises to keep visitors engaged. Your product pages need to fulfill the expectations from your landing pages, and so on. Top this off with a product that actually exceeds expectations supported by great service, and you’ve got yourself a winning formula for any type of marketing.

What PPC tactics have worked for you lately? I’d love to see another 25 tips in the comment section

About PWM

Justin Palmer is a Google Adwords consultant, who specializes in helping small businesses improve the ROI of their Pay per click campaigns.

We want to believe there’s a magic SEO tactic that, if used, will revolutionize our results. On the contrary, a sound, long-term strategy consisting of great content combined with long-term SEO will win out. Below are 6 tips for ensuring long-term SEO success.

1. Build links steadily, not suddenly: We’ve known for years that overly aggressive link building can trigger ranking penalties. If Google sees optimization happening too quickly, they may penalize you for what they consider unnatural link building practices. Even successful link-baiting campaigns can sometimes backfire, resulting in too many links in too short of time. In reality, the safest bet is slowly developing high quality links over a longer period of time.
2. Focus on long tail keywords first, then broaden your approach: Suppose you were trying to rank for the keyword “ipod”. With the competition you face, its unlikely you rank for this word anytime in the next 5 years, even with aggressive SEO. Rather than shooting for the stars and landing on the moon, consider taking a different approach. By starting out optimizing for your primary keyword in addition to a modifier (e.g. color ipod, ipod 60GB, etc), you’re more likely to rank in a reasonable amount of time. Since this modified keyword phrase contains your primary keyword (ipod), you will also slowly start gaining ground on your original target. In a way, you’re shooting for the moon with the intention of gradually working your way to the stars.
3. Diversify your Target Keyphrases: Sure, your top keywords may be performing well today, but what about a few years from now when your competitors catch up, Google changes their algorithm, or some other external factor pops up? Rather than keeping all your eggs in one basket, begin researching now what you’d like to rank for a year or two down the road.
4. Create landing pages before you need them: Ever get an idea for a new keyword, but don’t have time to build a page? You may not have the time to fully create and optimize a page at the time, but why not at least create the page, throw a few internal links at it, and come back and optimize it later? I’ve found that this strategy gets the clock ticking with Google, since they obviously place value on the age of the page itself. Even if you can’t get to it for 3 months, you’re better since the page has now been given time to age in the index.
5. Use Reactive vs. Proactive keyword research: Even the best keyword research will never yield perfect results. That keyword phrase that you thought would be easy to rank for sometimes ends up being more work that its worth. Or worse yet, once you are ranking you discover it isn’t converting to sales. A reactive SEO keyword research method would take a different approach. Rather than doing a perfect job of keyword research upfront, you analyze the traffic you are currently getting and re-optimize your pages accordingly. As I analyze the top keywords bringing traffic to my blog, I’ve realized 90% of the keywords I never intended on optimizing for, it just happened. But once I see it happening, I reoptimize the posts, adding some internal links and on-page tweaks.
6. Content first, SEO second: Yes, it sounds trite, but if you focus on your content good rankings will follow. Quite frequently, potential clients contact me and ask them to review their website, believing they have an SEO problem. On the contrary, they have a content or usability problem, and SEO is the last thing they should be paying for. It’s important to not get caught in an SEO tunnel vision mindset. SEO will help good companies be better. SEO will do nothing for sites that have nothing to offer in the first place.

What advice do you have for long term SEO results? Be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.

What is your site’s stumbling block? Confusing navigation? Broken links? A tedious checkout? Odds are, there’s something hindering the performance of your website. Since it’s usually challenging to catch our own mistakes, here’s 6 ideas for how to discover them with the help of others.

1. Use Screen Recording Software: One of the most powerful research tools I use for companies is in-house usability testing. Here’s how it works: First, we obtain a small number of users willing to be part of the research, ideally people who are unfamiliar with the company’s website. Then we sit them down on a computer and ask them to perform actions on the site. Common actions include making a purchase, contacting customer service, or looking up order tracking info. We record their on-screen actions using free screen capture software by CamStudio. Then we review the recordings, noticing how long it takes for visitors to complete an action. Using this method, it’s easy to observe when customers are lost or confused. On each and every occasion we’ve used this method, we’ve discovered a problematic issue needing attention.
2. Use Visual Web Analytics: Traditional analytics are great, but alternative web analytics solutions offering a more visual approach are becoming increasingly useful. Google Analytics offers a sometimes overlooked Site Overlay feature that does a decent job of showing site owners just how people travel through their site. Visual analytics allows you to see where people go and under what conditions. This approach creates big picture perspective of how customers are interacting with your site.
3. Ask Your Customer Service Team: Don’t forget that your customer service team usually has the best read on the pulse of your customers. They hear day-in and day-out what people complain about. Make sure there always exists a feedback loop from the customer, to customer service, to the management of your operation.
4. See What Others See: Not everyone who visits your site is using Internet Explorer, a Windows machine, and 1024 x 768 resolution. BrowserShots.org offers a free, innovative way to see your site in dozens of different configurations, including different browsers, OS’s, and with or without Flash and JavaScript. You might be unpleasantly surprised by the differences in the way browsers render your site. Users with smaller screen resolutions will often not notice site features that are below the page fold. Seeing your site in a variety of perspectives will help you cast a wide net, optimizing for as many user configurations as reasonably possible.
5. Setup Error Notifications: The larger your site, the more likely you are to experience errors resulting from broken hyperlinks or programming issues. Talk with your web developer and ask him to setup a system that notifies you every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they discovered the disconcerting fact that they were receiving hundreds of errors per day.
6. Ask an Expert: Lastly, it never hurts to get the opinion of another professional. While many small businesses can’t necessarily afford a full or even part time web usability consultant, hiring an expert for a few hours to review your website can be eye-opening. Many of my customers who purchase MySitePlan do so in order to get a second opinion in preparation for a site redesign, or they’re just looking for ways to improve that they haven’t considered before.

No one loves a shocking revelation about a dysfunctional website feature. To make matters worse, it’s usually someone else, a customer or a collegue that discovers these issues and informs us. Hopefully, the suggestions above will help you discover any existing problems with your website and resolve them quickly.

For this 3 Things entry, let’s take examine creative sales boosting tips retailers are using on their product pages to squeak out more conversions.

Multiple Add to Cart Buttons

If there’s one thing I learned as a salesperson after working 5 years in retail, it’s that you should ask for the sale early and often. On a product page, I suppose the Add to Cart button would be roughly equivalent to asking for the sale. Most product pages contain an add to cart button in a prominent location at the top right corner of the page.

However, what happens if a visitor scrolls down to read a product description, view more images, or to read customer reviews? There is now no longer a call to action in sight. Lately, I ‘ve been seeing quite a few product pages with multiple Add to Cart buttons. Checkout TigerDirect’s product page for an example of multiple add buttons.

Low-Stock Indicators

In a retail environment, it’s not difficult to ascertain how many of a given item is in-stock, you simply look on the shelf or ask a sales associate. But how many eCommerce stores take advantage of consumers fear of stockouts? In other words, if there’s only a few left in stock, why doesn’t the site encourage you to order NOW!?

T-shirt seller Glarkware drives urgency with their Stock Level indicator available on every product page. After the customer clicks their size, they are shown an estimate of how many are available in that size. I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing that a low stock indicator discourages customers from abandoning that item in the shopping cart.

Future Gift Reminders

The next best thing to selling a product today is selling it tomorrow. Delightful Deliveries, an online gift oriented store, boasts an innovative Gift Reminder tool on every product page, allowing customers to setup email notifications reminding them to purchase an item on a future date. Customers can choose the occasion (birthday, anniversary, etc), the date, and how many days in advance to be notified.

What 3 Things does your site need? Get 3 recommendations from Palmer Web Marketing.