Which of these stores would you feel comfortable buying from?

Both of these stores sell second-hand goods. When a storeowner takes pride in his or her establishment they build trust, and inadvertently tell the customer “Hey I’ve been around more than a week and plan on being here for years to come”. When I see a new business open up I look at the storefront, inside and out, partly because I’m looking for new clients and partly because I have a game I play, which I call how long until it closes. Many people actually play this game without ever knowing they do. In fact, you might have played it yourself on occasion. You play it every time you walk past a store that is in disrepair and don’t go inside, or walk out after taking a step inside. You don’t trust the proprietor with your sale.

Ask yourself, where would you feel comfortable buying from? This mindset needs to be carried to all aspects of a business’s sales activities—the physical storefront, any websites they maintain, all communications they send out, and how their customer service department handles complaints. Good enough is the mindset that will close a business down. How a business presents itself to customers is one of the most critical elements in ensuring success. This is especially true when you talk in terms of an online presence. The web has earned itself a reputation as a cheap alternative. For businesses, this is a double-edged sword. More customers will seek out your services online than in a brick and mortar store. However, they will have increased opportunities to shop elsewhere. As a business owner, you need to take extra care in ensuring that you are putting your best foot forward in your customers’ minds eye. When establishing your online identity, take a very critical view. Look at the leaders in your field. Does your presence match theirs? Will your customers feel confident in buying from your store when others are just a few clicks away?

Yes, budget is always a concern, especially when it comes to a brick and mortar location where renovations can run from the 10s to the 100s of thousands of dollars. However, a properly constructed website can easily alter its entire appearance, from the way in which customers interact within it, to, in the case of e-commerce websites, making purchases. These alterations can be made for financial commitments that range from a few hundred to the low thousands. With that said, there is no reason that your online presence is not operating at peak efficiency. This should fold over into your other online activities, such as e-mail newsletters and social media content.

It’s not hard to see and understand when you see them side by side. You need to build confidence from the first moment potential customers visit your website or walk past your store. Failure to do so will result in lost sales and potentially going out of businesses.

So how do you ensure you are getting the most out of your marketing dollars? You could try to manage this yourself, and if you do, you really need to ask yourself the hard questions about your business. Are you putting your best foot forward? Have you tried to save pennies and are losing dollars?

Overall, the best option is to hire a consultant. They have the technical expertise and experience, which will keep your overall costs down. By hiring a consultant, you will eliminate the learning curve of trying to muddle through it yourself, or a traditional web designer making estimations on how they think potential customers will react.

Get top quality marketing consultants with years of experience in both traditional and online marketing. First consultation is always free.

Over the years I’ve heard many smaller business owners disregard the idea of hiring an Internet consultant when setting up their web presence. So today I am going to fall back on a past client experience and review why having an experienced set of eyes on a project is important, for both the client and the developer.

A couple years ago I was working on behalf of another client when I stopped in at a development firm. Because of a scheduling conflict I was being asked to wait while the person I was there to see wrapped up with someone else. To pass my time, they had one of their developers show me some other projects they had been working on. One he showed me was an online ordering system for a pizza place. It was built entirely in Flash (ruh-ro raggy… “but what about mobile?” I asked myself), and the system used an interface that resembled an excel spreadsheet with buttons. As soon as my actual meeting was done, I was on the phone calling the pizza company and set up a meeting with the owner. After the meeting with him, where he took copious notes, he basically dismissed me out of hand, saying that he had a handle on the situation and thanked me for my concern but in no uncertain terms was he going to hire a consultant to “sponge” money from him. So the meeting ended with me giving him a business card and advising him to ensure that the development firm set up Google Analytics on the project.

A year went by when I got a call out of the blue from the same pizza company business owner asking me to stop in for a meeting. The meeting started out with the owner telling me no one could understand how the system worked, and that he had been losing money because of incorrect orders, where the fault was system, because the customers didn’t understand what they were ordering. To my surprise, he had followed my advice and had the development firm set up analytics on the site. When I pulled it up one thing was clear, almost 70% of his visitors were mobile. However, the sales conversion rate (amount of times the visitor made a purchase) was only 0.23%, when compared with 13.6% for desktops. To the owner this meant nothing, until I explained to him it was like a customer walking in the door of his business, looking at the menu and then walking out again without a purchase. So on mobile devices only 2 people were placing orders for every 1000 visits. The problem laid in, you guessed it, the Flash. First, the entire platform was not responsive, there was no mobile optimization done. Second, if you’ve ever used Flash on a mobile device before, especially a data driven application, it can be a bear to deal with. Furthermore, when we consider that this application was not built to function on a mobile device, and has a bad interface, we find the problem.

For more information on how and when people use mobile devices for shopping read Why Your Business Needs Mobile Optimization

Now this is not a tale of a bad developer putting the shine on an unwitting customer. First of all, the customer hired the wrong firm. The company that was hired specializes in maintaining large intranets, not e-commerce websites. Should this firm have turned away a contract they didn’t have experience in? Probably, we would, but with the economy the way it is, it is easy to see why they wouldn’t. Second, neither party understood the dynamics of customer interaction. They didn’t see that many people would be ordering pizza on the way home, to feed the family. Or that late night sales would be generated from those returning from a late night at the bars and wanted a hot pizza to be arriving on their return. A consultant would immediately foresee that these users would be engaging via a mobile device.

So the moral of this tale is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Had a consultant been involved from the beginning, the costs of rebuilding the system would have been avoided. Generally, a consultant’s time is negligible when compared with the overall project, and it ensures that both the developer and the client know what is expected of them and what they will be receiving as an end product.

So how do we develop an accurate customer history? Well first off, using 3^rd party services like Google Analytics generally won’t help. It’s not that their analytical power is not beneficial, but in the realm of personalization we are looking at each shopper as an individual more so than as a collective whole. The best and most effective way of doing this is by assigning a cookie to the consumer when they first interact with the website, and then updating the information associated with that cookie. There are then two methods for adding data to this collection. The first is just updating the cookie value itself and appending the most recent data to the end. The other, and more overall beneficial method is to store the data in your chosen platform where it can be retrieved and analyzed at will.

Generally, customers will engage with a product 5-7 times prior to making a purchase. Although, it is important to note that not all these engagements will occur inside your specific website. Many times these will happen on 3^rd party websites, such as blogs or product review websites where the consumer believes they are receiving unbiased information. Because of this, it is important to also track which website referred a customer in the beginning of a sales cycle through to the final sales conversion. This will also allow us to provide featured products to the visitor on their first visit based off of previous customer trends. Then, once the sale takes place, we record the customer’s unique identifier to the user account, if they haven’t logged in prior to this, and record the order id so we can correlate products. Why? With this information, we can draw correlations between what additional items a person purchases along with the primary item.

What kind of information besides product do we store? This will vary depending on your end goals, but as a good rule of thumb we want to record locations the visitor went within the website, categories visited, child categories, and products visited. We want to record the time the visitor spent on each page, and we want to know what page the visitor was last on prior to leaving the website.

Now that we have an idea of what kind of information we want to record, how do we begin integrating this into a personalized website? Let’s fall back to the beginning of this post where we talk about unengaged user attention span of 4-10 seconds. So we have less than 10 seconds to engage a customer to ensure that the featured products are those they have an interest in. We pull products from categories they visited previously, or if they visited a product we display that to specific product and those like it, to push them back into the sales cycle. It is important to note that we want to ensure that if a user clicks through any of these personally targeted products that we flag this interaction in our data. This gives us a good base on which to build further personalization around.

So this is a start. We will cover this concept in greater detail in later posts but I want to get your mind around something. This information does not stop being useful the moment the customer leaves the website. If in the course of tracking a visitor they subscribe or enter a user account, we can then begin sending target event-driven emails to them specifically geared to their viewing preference. We can then track how and if they forward that email further into their social circle. Remember, making a sale is not about luck, it is about tenacity.

When talking with clients, especially those who run a brick and mortar operation, one of the most important forms of targeted advertising is mobile. Why mobile? Well we use mobile when we are on the go, when we are in vicinity, and we can use it to opt-in from practically anywhere. That said, there is pretty much unanimous agreement on the importance. Now some of the younger generation (18-25) seem to think mobile is email, Facebook, Twitter, and well, it is but there is something to bear in mind. While a recent Nielsen report shows that 46% of mobile users have smartphones, there is also a study out by mobileSQUARED that shows that less than 40% of all email solicitations are opened. Now falling back on our high school math, we can see that 40% of a potential customer base, of 46% of the whole, gives us a 18.4% penetration. Not that bad when you consider the low cost of email advertising.

But is it the best? Well considering that there is a lower cost to social media, then probably not, but one thing to bear in mind when it comes to the social side is that people do not rely on reviews of their social circles as heavily as one might think. In a Lightspeed survey, only 7% of shoppers utilized a social review when making a shopping decision. So while the medium is ultra low cost, the benefits gained as far as references might go is not ideal. Mind you, this does not mean that there is not a call for a social aspect to a campaign. It just is not as great of a conversion generator as many have come to think of it as. You can review our post on mobile shopping where we break down how and when people utilized mobile devices for shopping for more information.

Then there is RSS. It is practically free and a great way to connect with users. Unfortunately, there are many less tech-savvy people out there with smartphones than tech savvy and when we consider that there is a 54% chance that a user would not be able to receive a RSS feed on their phone in the first place this removes this horse from the race of deepest penetration.

So where does that leave us? Well there is the old fashioned SMS text message. With a 160 characters of data limit and over a 102% penetration in mobile wireless in the United States.* What’s more, 90% of text messages are read within the first 3 minutes of delivery. Furthermore, 99% of text messages are eventually read by the recipient.**

Now that we have found the channel with the deepest penetration and read rate, it’s time to look at some of its negative aspects. First is cost. When compared to other marketing channels, such as email and social, it has a higher cost of implementation. There is the cost of short codes, without which a SMS campaign is almost certainly doomed to fail, the cost per message, and then there is campaign setup and list maintenance (much like a email campaign: Read our Email Marketing the Right Way for more information on this). When people opt-in to allow you to communicate with them, on a medium that they almost consistently pay attention to, we as marketers need to take advantage.

Ashley Furniture HomeStore held a Four-Day Secret Sale that was only promoted through their SMS and email marketing channels. At the end of the event, after subtracting the discounts from the coupons, the Ashley HomeStore SMS marketing channel generated a $122 return on investment for every dollar spent, while email only generated a $79 return on investment.***

Does this mean you should drop all your other mobile advertising channels besides SMS? Absolutely not. Email, Social Networking and Interest, and RSS are all great cost-effective channels. The issue is that not all channels are created equal within all customer segments. Just because we, as a user, prefer one over the other does not mean everyone will. A multichannel approach is what is best, but when setting up a campaign, do not forget about the old guy in the room, namely SMS. It is old, trusty, and relevant.

*CTIA Wireless Quick Facts, June 2011: Determined by number of active units divided by the total U.S. and territorial population (Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands)
**Neustar: Reaching the widest audience with common short code and SMS Mobile Marketing.
***mobileStorm: Ashley Furniture HomeStores Generates More Than $138K In Four Days by Using mobileStorm

With this great institutional shift to move into social network driven marketing, there has been a void that a savvy marketer can utilize to his/her advantage. To start off, the old salesman’s adage the money is in the list, is ever more true today with email marketing. Keeping a clean and relevant list is paramount—first for maximizing your ROI (return on investment), and second, to reduce the amount of potential spam complaints. While there are numerous effective ways to build a list, I always recommend trying to start with your existing customer base. If you don’t have a list already, incentivize your customers into subscribing. Creating some giveaways or competition are easy ploys to get the ball rolling. This is great because you know that existing customers are your prime demographic. If you are a brick and mortar, this is a great time to use in-store signage, be it point-of-sale or elsewhere.

Now if you’re new to email marketing, there is a cardinal rule you never want to forget. Once you get their email, you want to make the first contact with them immediately. Why? First and foremost, it tells you that their email is valid. Now if you’ve done some email marketing research, you’ll see people spouting about how either single opt-in or double opt-in campaigns are the way to go. A single opt-in allows the user to simply submit his/her email to become registered. Double opt-in requires the registrant to confirm his/her wish to receive further emails by clicking a confirmation in a validation email before being truly registered.

So what is the best method? There are pros and cons to each method. Single opt-in will grow you the largest list, but many times the list will be unresponsive. With a double opt-in approach, you are guaranteed that all registered users were at a valid email at the time of registration. Many in the industry will argue that single opt-in tends to go to trash email accounts that users never check. To that I say this, I have a trash email account I use to sign up for both single and double opt-in for websites that I’m not sure if I really want the content they are offering and then change it later if I find them to be legit.

Personally, I would say to maximize your overall reach, stick to a single opt-in with an immediate initial contact. It will reinforce your brand in the consumer’s eye and they will have the option to unsubscribe within the email in any case. Set the system up in such a way that if that initial email bounces they are removed from the list. If you want the most responsive list possible, stick with a double opt-in. Whatever method you use, good list maintenance is key. It never hurts to run an A/B split test (send half to a single opt-in and half to a double opt-in) and find out what your target demographic responds to. Armed with that information, you can make a easy selection of one method over the other.

Once you have your new growing list of willing subscribers, it is absolutely critical that you keep a regular content publication schedule. This will have three effects. First, the customer becomes accustomed to your emails and does not suddenly question why he/she is receiving one out of the blue. This cuts down on the chance of spam complaints. The second is you subconsciously will begin establishing a level of brand trust with the consumer. Thirdly, you will keep the amount of bounces per campaign down to a minimum. This will allow you to cull bad emails gradually instead of receiving a mass of bounces and spam complaints in one campaign. Even the most cared for email list will have an attrition rate of around 25% a year.

One area a lot of companies miss when they try to position a product in the marketplace is that customers are buying benefits while the manufacturer is selling features. Features only really come into effect when the benefits are the same across the board and you need something to point at and say “this is why we are better.” Benefits are what the end product produces for the customer. If your benefits outweigh the rest of the competition, you probably just made a sale, no matter how many additional features your competitors have over you.

Let’s talk cordless drills. A professional carpenter may be looking at aspects such as durability, battery life, recharge time and warranty- these are features. However, when you start talking about your product, as benefits, to a customer it becomes personal. Start solving their problems for them and they will buy your product. Telling the carpenter how the drill has less downtime and gets them off the job site quicker solves a problem while telling them there is a 3 hour quick charge does not.

When defining your target market, it is equally, if not more important, to find out why they need a product. Begin selling your customers solutions to their problems.

Recent research performed by the Nielsen company shows that 79% of smartphone and tablet owners have used their mobile devices to engaging in mobile shopping.

Before we delve too far into this, however, I think we need to establish some key foundation points when discussing mobile devices. All mobile devices are not created equal. A consumer is going to utilize a smartphone in a different way than they would a tablet. Why you ask? Two primary reasons, location and form factor (most people aren’t going to throw a tablet into their pocket or purse). Keep this in mind when considering how you are going to implement portions of your optimization plan. While many people bundle all mobile devices together, there are times when splitting the functionality and look of these elements can be in your overall best interest.

We are going to take a look at the categories of the Nielsen research and break them down into how these relate into both brick and mortal mobile optimization and online mobile optimization.

Using a Store Locator to Find a Store

73% of smartphone users and 42% of tablet users used a store locator on a mobile device. This is especially critical for retail locations or manufacturers that sell out of multiple locations. The 31% increase of smartphones over tablets suggests that these are customers on the go who are probably pretty deep in the sales cycle. These are customers who are as close to making a purchase as you can get them, so make sure this is as easy as possible. That means don’t ask for any information that is not absolutely necessary to give them the information they want! Tying this in with geo-location (built in GPS) on a device is a great option.

Checking Prices

62% of smartphone and 52% of tablet users report using their mobile devices to check prices before shopping. People are becoming more and more savvy shoppers. Gone are the days of attracting customers with the flashy Sunday shopper ads in the local newspaper. Your customers, whether they are online or walk-in traffic, will do research so make sure your prices are competitive for the services/products you offer.

Researching an Item Prior to Purchase

57% of smartphone and 66% of tablet users surveyed researched products prior to purchase. Make it easy on your customers, help them find relevant and honest information. For brick and mortar locations, this could be as easy as setting up QR Codes that link directly to custom reviews of a product. For online locations, consider tying your website into existing sources of information to keep your customers on site and shopping.

If you need a QR Code generator please don’t hesitate to use ours. It is free as well as easy to use and includes a URL plus Google Analytics option so you can track the effects of your marketing efforts.

Reading Reviews of a Recent or Future Purchase

45% of smartphone and 56% of tablet users read reviews of products of recent purchases, or for purchases they plan to make. In an online environment this is as easy as including customer reviews of a product on the same page and displaying product average ratings when available. Some online retailers attempt to limit bad reviews but this is not an approach I would recommend. Instead, embrace the power of the masses and remove products that have low ratings before they damage the relationship with your existing customers. When it comes to traditional brick and mortal sales, integrating customer reviews can be a little more work but can be accomplished with a multi-channel approach.

Using Lists while Shopping

42% of smartphones and 16% of tablet users used lists on mobile devices while shopping. This is important, especially for retailers that list products online but provide their products in a brick and mortar storefront. Lists are great and powerful things that prevent customers from forgetting to purchase items, and as such, you need to embrace this. Provide customers with a way to either easily save or e-mail themselves a list of products they found via your website. If a customer forgets it at your store there is no guarantee they won’t stop somewhere else to pick it up. The data you collect from letting your customer generate lists will allow you to more accurately target customers with relevant specials in the future with targeted emails for products they use!

Using Mobile Coupons

36% of smartphone and  11% of tablet users reported using a mobile coupon when making a purchase. While there are a number of ways to issue mobile coupons, some of the easiest methods are creating signup forms on your website, or submitting the coupons to online companies such as Yowza. The big thing here is retailers need to rethink how they redeem coupons. Tying in barcodes that can be displayed on a mobile device is a great way to ensure you are collecting customer data while providing customers with the satisfaction of getting a great deal.

Purchasing an Item on a Device

29% of smartphone and 42% of tablet users purchased items directly through their device. If you run any kind of e-commerce platform, you need to ensure customers can easily navigate and, more importantly, easily check out on from mobile devices. Here is one of those situations where you should make sure the process is targeted to the device. Smartphones have a small display, so a more vertical approach might be in order than when compared to a tablet. Remember, people want fast and simple so keep the information to only what is absolutely required.

Using a Device for Payment

27% of smartphone and 28% of tablet users used their devices for payment. While relatively new, these are becoming more popular. Think of the e-wallet by Google http://www.google.com/wallet/ or direct mobile billing. While this is relatively new more people have begun utilizing this for a payment method, especially on smaller regular  purchases, such as daily coffee house trips.

Using Social Media to Comment on a Purchase

23% of smartphone and 25% of tablet users commented on purchases with social media. While a study by Lightspeed Online Research Inc. showed that consumers only rely on social media reviews about 7% of the time prior to making a purchase, one cannot discount the group mentality of social networks. Generally, people communicate with like-minded individuals. So, while they might not consider the review, the brand exposure has the potential of hitting on a key target market.

Writing a Review of a Purchase

11% of smartphone and 22% of tablet users wrote a review of a purchase. When you consider the implications of local search and the relevance companies such as Google place on customer reviews, this is an essential factor to master for your business. Brick and mortar stores pushing customers to post reviews can have significant impact, both online and in the cash register.

This was at a time when almost all searches were performed on desktop systems and there was no real local search implemented, these advances in search technology in our assessment would have an even larger impact on the drop off between SERP rankings and click-throughs.

Of the obtained information, there were 36,389,567 search queries run with 19,434,540 click-throughs.

So what do the figures tell us? The #1 organic search result received 42.3% of all click-throughs whereas the #2 position received 11.92% of all click-throughs. That is just about 72% less than the #1 placed SERP. The #3 ranked result had a click-through rate of 8.44%, which is almost 80% less than the #1 result.

So enough of this percentage click-through nonsense you say. What does it mean in monthly visitors? On a search term that receives 10,000 searches a month, the #1 ranked result will receive 4230 visitors, the #2 ranked result will receive 1192, the #3 gets 844, #4 603, #5 486, #6 399, #7 337, #8 298, #9 283, #10 297. Then, on page two of the results, #11 only gets 66.

To put this into e-commerce terms, if you average $0.43 per visit a #1 ranking generates $1818.90, while a ranking of #11 (first place on page two) brings in a whopping $28.38. It’s easy to see how drastically your page rank will impact the performance and overall solvency of any business online.