This doesn’t have to be the case.

Here are five ways in which your online channels can help your offline sales.

 1.     Market research

Imagine if every one of your catalogues, adverts, stores, or salespeople could keep incredibly detailed records of the way customers experience your sales efforts, what disappoints them, what please them and ultimately what leads to happy regular customers.

Wouldn’t you use this to improve your profits? If you sell online, much of this information is already be available to you through web analytics.

For instance, if your website has an onsite search facility, what products do customers consistently search for that you don’t stock? Whatever these brands or products are, there is an untapped online demand and there’s reason to think that there could be an offline demand as well.

2.     Learn to analyse, test and optimise

Some areas in life allow you to learn more quickly than others: an aspiring novelist can spend years crafting a book before he discovers whether it really connects with his audience, whereas a stand up comic can immediately test the impact of a new gag.

Analysis, testing and optimising are not exclusively online activities, but the wealth of tools and the ease of implementation allow you to learn and experiment at an incredible pace.

To trial different styles of product descriptions in a catalogue, you have to wait months before you can measure your results. Running the same trial on your online store, you can begin to gain meaningful insight in days. A typical store manager may get to test out a few new ideas in his first year in management; in the same period, an e-commerce director can become a seasoned split tester with a strong understanding of how to best implement and learn from split tests and, more importantly, a real track record of increasing profits.

If your company sells through online and offline channels, make sure that this experience isn’t going to waste. For instance, could your online team be assisting in the split testing of your catalogues, or your sales letters?

 3.     Gain leads

Increasingly consumers are turning to online research, even if they intend to make their purchase offline. Make sure that your offline channels can be easily found by on the web through clear contact details, phone numbers, store locators and catalogue request forms.

Not only do these ensure a smooth path for those wanting to make an offline purchase, but they can even increase your online conversion rate by making it easier for your customers to shop in whichever channel they prefer.

 4.     Build relationships

Social media gives you opportunities to build trust, loyalty and brand awareness with many of your online and offline customers. Not everyone on Facebook shops exclusively online; there are big opportunities to promote all of your channels.

Look for opportunities to build lasting relationships online with your customers through honest, helpful product support and special offers (both online and offline) to your social media followers. A little wit and character shouldn’t hurt either – as long as it’s appropriate: think carefully before making a joke to promote your funeral service company!

 5.     Benefit from the power of online advertising

There’s a reason that online advertising is growing so quickly: it works. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it can only support your online channels. One study in the US found that approximately

“70 per cent of online ad campaigns led to a double-digit boost in offline sales”

Another went even further, suggesting that

“for every $1 of e-commerce revenue generated from paid search, marketers can expect to see approximately another $6 of in-store revenue.”

The message is clear: online ads definitely can boost offline sales.

Are you making the most of this opportunity?

Do you have any thoughts, recommendations, success stories or questions? We’d love to hear from you in our comments below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you missed our earlier posts in this series you can find them here:

Part 1,  Part 2

In the second of our three part guide to Multi Channel Funnels we explain these changes and how to account for them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In December we’ll publish the final part of our series:

Part 3: Beginning to use the new data to increase your profits

Our three part guide introduces Multi Channel Funnels, a powerful new feature in Google Analytics, which gives a new depth of insight into which of your marketing activities have the most influence. Armed with this new data you’ll be able to further optimise your advertising spending and increase your profits!

In this, the first of out three videos, we explain the principles behind Multi Channel Funnels and familiarise you with the new reports available in Google Analytics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In November and December we’ll publish parts two and three of our series:

Part 2: Understanding how Multi Channel Funnels affects data across your existing analytics reports

Part 3: Beginning to use the new data to increase your profits

We also run a training course in Multi Channel Funnels. If you want to get the very best out of these new tools and ensure that your whole team are up to speed, why not get in touch?

Mel Henson

The difference that online copy can make to online conversion rates is not always well understood. However, changing the words on your website is often one of the easiest changes you can make – no technies or code changes required.

In this post, I interview Mel Henson, Founder of Words that Sell, which provides copy for e-commerce websites. Mel’s company works with companies like Aspace, Cotton Traders, David Nieper, Donald Russell, House of Bath, Lyco, Muddy Puddles, SHOP.COM, Race-World.com and Turtle Mats.

Hi Mel, Can you tell me a bit about you and Words that Sell?

Like AWA we’re specialists in home shopping. When a retailer needs a large volume of high quality copy for products on the website – typically 150 or more – we take all the stress away. Our team of trained writers, editors and project managers means that we’re geared up to make everything go smoothly and deliver the content on brief, on budget and on time.

As for me, I have been lucky enough to work both agency and client-side, but for the last 12 years I have been a professional copywriter to multi-channel retailers. This year my book, Flicks and Clicks – How to Create Websites and Catalogues that Sell More.

What it’s the difference between great copy and great online copy?

Good copy depends on two things – understanding the customer and knowing your product. Copy is the bit in between that tells the customer about the product in the most compelling way possible. It’s often called ‘salesmanship in print’.

Online copy has to do that job just as much as traditional offline copy. The two main differences are the format and keywords. Format comes out of the web design and its content management system. The art of using keywords in copy is to sprinkle in just enough to make the search engine spiders notice you but not too many that it becomes dull to read. You can’t bore your customers into buying!

What sort of difference can good online copy make to an e-commerce website?

They say that retail is detail, and often the difference between success and failure is down to a small increase in the margins. Websites work like a funnel, pushing their visitors towards the sale.

Copy is at the thin end of the funnel – the very point where a customer is teetering on the brink, making up their mind whether to buy or not. If the copy can ‘speak’ to the customer, and persuade just one in a hundred to buy who might otherwise not, that’s a 1% increase in sales. If your average conversion rate is 2%, then copy has just helped you increase your revenue by 50%.

Why do you think companies often underestimate the job of writing copy?

Mark Twain said ‘If it reads easy, it was writ hard’. In other words, the more effort and skill that’s gone into the writing, the easier it looks to write. (It’s no coincidence that the highest paid journalists work for The Sun). I always love working for clients who have tried to write their own copy, because they have a much better appreciation of how difficult it is to get the message right – and just how long it takes.

Are great copywriters born or made?

Like any skill, copywriting is something that can be taught, although some people will always be better than others. For any copywriter, some life experience helps a lot because it helps them understand human nature and often the best writers have had a job in sales in the past.

It’s also true that practice makes perfect. I trained my first writers for Words that Sell over three years ago, and it’s been great to see them improve over that time. Different writers often have strengths in different areas. I have some ex-journalists on the team who are great at writing newsletters, brand overviews, category overviews and buyers guides. There are others who are really good when it comes to more technical products.

What businesses do you admire for their copywriting?

I’m always impressed by Betterware. They sell products that solve problems people didn’t know they had, and it’s full of active headlines that get straight to the benefit, like Keep jewellery jumble free Achieve smooth feet, Speedy cooking without the cleaning. Their website doesn’t look pretty but it certainly sells. I’m a fan of copy where there is real passion and a distinctive tone of voice that fits with their brand values, like Lakeland, Hotel Chocolat, Boden, Joules, Fur, Fin & Feather and Wiggly Wigglers.

What are your plans for Words that Sell?

At heart I believe that better copy is good for business and good for people, and I’m expanding the team so that we can do more. I’m also looking at new software to make it easier for clients to upload copy to their website,and tightening up our project management systems to make sure every project runs like clockwork.

Great, Mel. Thanks very much for your time and I wish you well with Words That Sell

You’re welcome.

Hi Reuben, could you tell me about yourself, and the business, Coalters, you run?

I originally came here to study engineering at York University, and after that moved down to London to work in within the banking sector, where I stayed for 11 years.

During my time in London, I completed a MBA at INSEAD, and 6 years ago I returned to York to start an estate agency. I now run Coalters, a York estate agents.

I am married, with two children, as well as being a keen cyclist and cycle most Saturdays with the York Pedallers.

What do you think makes a successful website for an estate agent?

For me it’s a process of attracting suitable traffic and then converting that traffic into a positive outcome. For Coalters that outcome is for property sellers, buyers, landlords or tenants to contact us.

I learnt a lot of what I know from setting up a web-only estate agency as well as following other internet-only businesses. I realised through a process of trial and error and watching how other websites did it, that you had to simplify the process of getting the visitor to ‘convert’.

Often, our old website had far too many call-to-actions, and too many different navigation paths. With Coalters, I have tried to simplify everything, and re-design the navigation so that ‘all roads lead to Rome’

What have you done to optimise your website and what results have you achieved?

As I said, I learnt a lot of building a website for our previous Web-only estate agency. So with the Coalters’ web site I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted to achieve.

In the course of improving the website, we have managed to double our number of requests for valuations.

I have used tools like Google Analytics, ClickTale and especially Google Website Optimiser to test different versions of the same page.

Coalters Home Page

We have successfully tested introducing video onto the home page, and that’s worked really well. We got a 15% uplift when we got the guy in the video to point to the “Book your free valuation now” button.

We tested different colour buttons, different sizes, having arrows to point at each field the visitor has to fill in as well as varying levels of contrast in the main navigation buttons.

Coalters Property Detail Page

On the property details page, we have experimented with very aggressive messaging as well as quite subtle versions, and what we have found that converts highest, in split tests, is a third version that I would call  “reasonably disruptive”.

But I wouldn’t have known this without testing the three versions side-by-side.

What have you learnt and what has surprised you most?

What has been great is having bets in the office as to which version will convert the best. We watch the results come in minute-by-minute and are often surprised.

Once we know which version is the clear winner, part of me isn’t that surprised as with hindsight, I now understand why this particular generated the best results. But you have to run the tests to get that 20/20 hindsight vision.

I suppose there’s always a bit of post-rationalisation that goes on.

A lot of companies don’t focus on optimising their website, why do you think this is?

I think you need a basic understanding of what split-testing is and the technology involved. But most companies still treat their website as ‘brochureware’ and just say to themselves we can put a tick in the box marked ‘got a website’.

Another thing, businesses don’t focus on the call to actions and some don’t really get the whole idea of testing different versions.

Partly, it might be about resource and cost, but for us the doubling of the number of enquiries we receive has been easily worth the time and money we have spent.

What are the next steps for the Coalters website and the business

I have got some new ideas for the home page to try out, including replacing static graphics with videos. It will be interesting to see whether we get an uplift in enquiries and by how much.

But it’s an ongoing process that never stops, just continuing to tweak small things and see what the impact is.

Great, Reuben. Thanks very much for your time and I wish you well with Coalters

You’re welcome.

__________________________________________________________________

You might also like: An overview of multi-variate testing tools

When we asked them what they thought about working with us, well, we were chuffed to hear what they had to say.

So we’ve put together a little video clip of what Tamsin Daniel, Head of Marketing at Bettys had to say about us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’d like to get the results that Bettys are now enjoying, give us a call on 0800 990 3580 or email info @ appliedwebanalytics.com

E-commerce websites can also benefit from this form of merchandising.

The way in which you organize and promote your product categories can have a significant impact on how well categories perform in terms of product page views, add to baskets and ultimately, transactions.

In this post, I explain how you use data contained within your web analytics tool (in this case, Google Analytics) can be exploited to analyse the performance of your product categories and give a boost to your online merchandising.

After doing this analysis, you will be able to answer the following questions, and possibly some more I haven’t thought of.

1. Which categories drove most value over a particular time period?
2. Which categories may have driven more value if you had highlighted them more?
3. Having viewed a category, at which point did users drop off?

Armed with this data, you’ll be able to promote those ‘overperforming’ categories, and re-position ‘underperformers’ that that aren’t doing as well. What’s more, these changes to your categories will require little or no website development.

Unlike a lot of analysis and website optimisation, these improvements you can (usually) implement yourselves, and start enjoying the benefits of better category and product page performance straight away.

OK, so how do we do this…?

To quote Stephen Covey, let’s start with the end in mind. In other words, what data do we need to perform the analysis?

Below is an example of what we data we want to collect.

1. Category name
2. Category Views: The number of visits to the site that included a visit to the particular category.
3. Product Views: Number of times that any product page was viewed within the same visit as the given category page was viewed.
4. Baskets: Number of times that any product was added to the basket within the same visit as the category was viewed.
5. Transactions: Number of transactions that took place in the same visit as the category was viewed.
6. Revenue: Amount of revenue from transactions placed in the same visit as the category was viewed.

The example above tells us, looking at Category 2

• 10,338 visits to the site included a view of the ‘Category 2’ category.
• In 4,201 of those visits, the visitor also viewed at least one product page.
• In 1,112 of those visits, the visitor also added at least one product to their basket.
• 598 of the visits that included a view of ‘Category 2’ also included a transaction.
• The revenue brought into the site from visits that had included a view of ‘Weekend Treats’ was £21,121,36.

Note: if a visitor looked at both the ‘Category 1’ and ‘Category 2’, and then spent £100, that money would be included in both lines. Therefore, the £ values are very useful as a guide of the effectiveness of each category, but should not be treated as genuine monetary values.

Once we have this data, we can turn the relationships between category, product and basket views as well as transactions and revenue into percentages, like this.

The above table includes the following columns:

1. Category name
2. Category:Product: Answers the question ‘what percentage of these category viewers also viewed a product page?’
3. Category:Basket: What percentage of this category’s viewers added a product to their basket?
4. Category:Buy: What percentage of this category’s viewers actually made a purchase?
5. £ Per Category View: What was the average revenue we received from visitors who had viewed this category?

Note: it is worth noting again that if a visitor viewed 2 categories, the value would be allotted to both rather than split between them.

In order to collect this data, there are a number of steps to follow

Step 1: Download all the unique pageviews of your product categories

Using the Top Content/Content Drilldown (tbc) report within Google Analytics, you need to download all the unique page views of all categories.

To avoid downloading pageviews of pages that are not categories, you will need to filter the report before you download.

You will need to study the URL structure of the website you are analysing, and then use RegEx (regular expressions) to ensure only category pageviews are being displayed in the Content Drilldown report.

Step 2 : Use 2 x Advanced Segments and 1 x Custom Report to filter category pageviews

In order to segment category views by those category views that result in one or more product pages and how many views of the basket pages there have been, you will need to create two Advanced Segments.

Again, you will need to study your website’ URL structure to isolate product page and basket page views. The screenshots below are provided for example only, and your Page Value is likely to be different.

Product page view – Advanced Segment

Basket view – Advanced Segment

In order to capture the transactions and revenue for category views, you will need to create a custom report.

See below for details.

Pageviews, Transactions and Revenue – Custom Report

Again you will need to filter this custom report for only category views.

Step Three: Download data and manipulate in Excel

Having set up the new two Advanced Segments and one Custom Reports, you need to download the following data into your spreadsheet.

This is the same spreadsheet into which you have downloaded your unique pageviews by Category.

You should organize the segmented data into four worksheets in Excel, like this:-

Now you want to bring all this data into one dataset, to produce this:-

Using Excel’s VLOOKUP functions, populate the empty “Product views”,”Baskets” and “Transactions” columns into your Category Views worksheet.

Once you have populated these columns, it’s straightforward to calculate the relationship between Category views, Product views, Baskets and Transactions, to produce this.

To easily identify interesting variations in your data, by using colour, you can apply Conditional Formatting and Color Series in Excel).

Conditional Formatting and Color Series

Step 4: Analyze, generate insight and take action

With the data in place, you can sort the columns to produce the following views

• Sort the Category:Transaction column to identify those categories where propensity to buy is highest, and lowest
• Sort the Category: Basket column to identify those categories where propensity to add to basket is higher, and lowest
• Sort £ Per Category View column to identify those categories that generate the most revenue

Having done this, you can then compare these segments with the actual layout of your categories on your website, and decide how you are to going to re-position or promote certain categories.

Combine this approach with the knowledge you and your team have of your products, and see what improvements you can make to your merchandising.

Let us know if you think this post has been useful and how you might use this approach to analyse your online merchandising.