Archive for July, 2008
Gas Prices Push Ecommerce Sales Up
July 25th, 2008
MatthewDepending on your perspective, online sales are up either despite or because of the economic slowdown. With gas prices continuing to climb, a growing number of shoppers are deciding to skip car trips to the mall in favor of online merchants.
Even as many brick-and-mortar stores are struggling, 11% of US consumers surveyed by Nielsen in June 2008 said they were shopping more on the Web as a result of gas prices.
“E-commerce is a bright spot,” said Jeffrey Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer. “While retail store growth is in the middle-low single digits, e-commerce is still growing at least in the mid to high teens.”
“With gas being such an issue, we know that mall traffic is down more than off-mall traffic,” said Mike Boylson, CMO of JCPenney, in a July 2008 New York Times article. Mr. Boylson said J.C. Penney had an 8.7% increase in Internet sales in Q1 2008, compared with a 7.4% decrease in sales at stores open at least one year. The Times also reported that Gap had an 11% decline in same-store sales in Q1 2008, but a 21% increase in online sales.
The effect of gas prices on consumer behavior has been building for a while. Some 13% of adult consumers in the US surveyed in January by Vertis Communications said they were buying more online.
Over one-half of respondents to an April 2008 Piper Jaffray study selected rising gas prices as an incentive to increase online buying, while slightly less than one-half (48%) cited lower prices as a reason for making Web purchases.
Another April survey by iCongo revealed that high gasoline prices were an incentive for 33% of shoppers to purchase more online.
Sports Sites Score Big
July 24th, 2008
Matthewit may not be a whole new ballgame, but the lineup is shifting.
Online sports properties have the perfect ingredients to engender the kind of customer engagement that all businesses crave. “Sports sites have a built-in audience of passionate fans who are loyal to the teams they follow,” says Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the new report, Sports Site Marketing: Ad Revenue Models Pull Ahead. “These fans have an insatiable thirst for facts, figures, statistics and trivia—and they like to share their knowledge and opinions with others.” Most importantly to marketers, sports fans are willing to pay for premium content and merchandise, and are used to the presence of sponsors and advertisers around sports events. “As the Internet continues to evolve toward ad-supported models,” says Mr. Verna, “sports sites will follow suit.” eMarketer estimates that total revenues for
“The increase will be largely due to the growth of ad-supported sports content models,” says Mr. Verna. eMarketer estimates that US sports site revenues from advertising will rise from 55% in 2007 to 66% in 2012.
“Additional revenues will come from ancillary sources such as ticket sales, merchandise and memorabilia, partnerships, and Website and production services that sports sites provide for third parties,” says Mr. Verna.
Vote For Patioshoppers.com
July 22nd, 2008
MatthewA good friend and client is up for entrepreneur of the year. Mr Todd Chism is a great guy and terrific business man. We have voted for him and so should you. Take a look http://www.entrepreneur.com/eoy/chism.aspx
Win a Dream Date With Justin
July 16th, 2008
Matthew
Conversion tricks/tips
July 14th, 2008
adminAttracting and converting website visitors is the key to your success online. Writing effective copy for your web site and marketing materials is an under-appreciated way to do this.
When building a website business most people make the mistake of focusing only on the technology. There are so many decisions to be made about servers, hosting providers, shopping carts, ad systems, content management, etc. that many people mistakenly de-prioritize copywriting.
But it’s not enough to put the appropriate search engine keywords on your webpage and string them together into quasi-English sentences. If that’s all that you do, you are missing a major opportunity.
Instead, you should look at the text on your website as a principal weapon in the war to attract and convert customers. This includes the text that displays on your homepage, on your interior pages, in your navigational menu entries, in your newsletters, and even in your ads. Each of these uses of text is an additional opportunity for you to communicate your marketing messages.
Copywriting is also important because it has two audiences: human website visitors AND search engine crawlers. It’s your job to make your website copy as attractive as possible to both audiences. Humans will reward you with sales and search engine robots will reward you with better search engine ranking.
Six Copywriting Success Strategies
While the technical issues and design of your site are clearly important, I’d suggest that you also be sure to devote copywriting resources as follows:
Sell Don’t Tell: Customers are not interested in your point of view on your product. They don’t care about all the fascinating features that your team worked so hard to include. What they are interested in is how the product can help improve their lives. This means that your copy should focus on the benefits to them, not on the features which you or your team might be most impressed with yourselves for creating.
Appeal to Emotion?!: The most successful copy touches the potential customer personally or emotionally. You want to catch their attention by appealing to their own self-interest and in as dramatic a fashion as is appropriate for the context. In other words, people are self-interested — so your copy needs to answer how your product or service will make them feel better about themselves. How does this product make my life easier, help me make more money, look better, lose weight, etc.
Headlines are Important: Spend extra time boiling your message down to its key components. Eye-catching headlines are your best chance to catch the eyes of passersby. While colors, font size and placement can all help attract the eye, too, it is the few critical words contained in the headline that ultimately attract clicks. (This is especially true in the plain text “subject” lines of email marketing pieces.)
Call to Action: Even the best writing will fail to help you reach your conversion goals if it does not include a call to action. Determine what action you want the visitor to take before you even start writing. Then be sure to finish your copy by posting a link or offering another specific next step for them to pursue the goal you have driven them toward.
Add Testimonials: Nobody likes to be alone. Especially in the anonymous online world customers appreciate companionship and validation. Collect and post testimonials from other customers to help provide them with the reassurance that they crave. This simple tool will help them to help you reach your conversion goals quicker.
Make It Lively: Save the boring, clinical, lawyer-speak for your next deposition. In a world of a million channels, you need to think like an entertainer. There are many ways to do this - you can use humor, sarcasm, controversy, drama, or photos and video to make your site feel alive — even if you only update it occasionally. Even the most formal or boring topics can be presented in an engaging manner. Your copy is a key ingredient in that mix. Additionally, because search engine rankings increasingly depend on other site’s linking back to you, it’s important to offer content that others will take note of and link back to.
If all of this attention to prose sounds like more verbal gymnastics than you’d like, the Internet can help. Copywriting duties can be easily outsourced online. Figure on paying anywhere from $20 to $200/hour for most copywriters, depending on their expertise level.
The goal of your website is to attract and convert customers. Following these guidelines will help you create compelling copy that builds your business, too. It’s easy and often fun to get caught up in the technical or design details of your e-commerce web site, but remember, there are many simple and even ugly web sites that make plenty of money online. That’s because their message (as presented in the copy) successfully attracts and converts customers.
If your copy presents your products in an interesting way with the customers’ needs first in your mind, you will make more money online, too.
New Ad
July 3rd, 2008
MatthewWe are coming out with some ads. This is one idea.
