10 Hot Tips for Improving your Web Site Sales

More Marketing With Your Web Site

We have had a very positive response from our earlier article about marketing and the Internet, so we thought this might be a topic to pursue a little further.

Rather than talk about site design in a pseudo-technical way, I'd like to discuss site design in the context of creating sales.

So, here are some guides for your web site:

1) Use graphics lightly, and make sure they give the user something. I believe the ability to move around a site quickly will do wonders for the attention span of potential readers.

If you do use larger graphics, can you support that with text based information they can read while its downloading? For example, the latest product offering, or a hot-tip for using a product (perhaps leading to some great accessory they really need).

2) All web text is marketing copy. Yep, you should pay as much attention to the text on your web site as you do to your other collateral. So use all those standard "hot copy" tips you've learnt in marketing 101: make it newsy; use lots of verbs for a dynamic feel; keep it short and sweet; don't write over readers heads; make it intimate; make it memorable.

3) If you have a lot of text to get over, consider making it available in a downloadable format. You will often see sites which have lengthy articles broken into short pages which you can scan through. This does reduce load times, but it also makes it difficult for people to keep the information. You read the first 5 pages, then decide you would like a copy of the whole article - do you go back to the previous pages to print them? Do you have to print each page separately anyway? Do the page breaks make sense on your printer? Why not leave them a simple text file or MS-Word document, or one of the portable formats such as Acrobat.

4) Use interaction and conversation to gain information. Yes, I know interaction is the buzz word in the web, and every major site has some game or another, but unless it is absolutely relevant to your product all you are doing is increasing hits from games players - not customers. For example we request mail address for people making postings to our Q&A forums. You don't need to enter an email address, but it gives us an opportunity to put them on the newsline mailing list.

5) Assess and then declare your credibility. Since any company big or small can look the same on the Internet how do you prove your credibility over everyone else? Obviously use clients lists; testimonials; financial information; in particular (just like mail order) offer all the guarantees and warranties you can. And don't forget to include your name, address and phone number!

6) Give your customers plenty of opportunity to contact you. Right now I'll wager 5 to 1 odds that a randomly selected web site will have no contact information other than a "webmaster" type email address. From a marketing/sales perspective this is bizarre - you go to all the trouble of winding the customer up ready to buy and then...

One of the reasons that people shrink back from allowing orders and enquiries to be sent directly online is that they feel they might be swamped. I've heard this lots of times. This should not worry you:

• Your web presence will not generate thousands of orders in the first week
• It will take some time for your web site to generate even a few orders
• The build up of orders will be progressive and unlikely to be come in a big surge
• What the heck are you complaining about - you've got too many orders!!!! Heck, wish we all had that problem! If you have so many orders then even if you speak to them and tell them you can't deliver just yet you've still found potential business.
• If it gets really busy, or you are getting too many tyre-kicker enquiries and not enough real business changing your web site to remove attention from the response section is easy - its building the response to begin with that's hard

7) Guide your reader around the site. Even if you only have a few pages, make it easy for readers to move from topic to topic. The reader might need to go back and forwards between case studies, technical info and price lists to work out what it is they want to buy - make it easy for them. This is were web designing is more like a good piece of software than a good brochure.

8) Provide added value. You can do this with useful links; freebies and give-aways (like the agricutural calculator we talked about last month) or through relevant background materials. Your customer probably does not want a heavy sale pitch on their own time, they want something for themselves.

9) Special Offers. Not relevant for all purposes, but if you are developing the Internet business side then give your customers a reason for preferring to buy over the Internet rather than conventional means. You can offer reduced prices, special bundles; add-on options not available elsewhere - all the usual variations. One note of caution, don't just give away all your margin though - that is always a silly idea. There are many, many marketing incentive schemes you can use.

10) Finally, you have to evaluate the success of the web site against your other marketing activities. We all know Ogilvy's quote "I know half my advertising works, I just don't know which half" - the problem is just as bad (if not worse) on the web. In essence there are three things you care about:

• Ratio web visitors to enquiries
• Ratio of enquiries to sales
• Cost of web marketing against profit

If I look at the results from our own site, we actually sell very little (and yes we are going back over the whole thing!) But, what we do sell is always the high ticket items which net us the greatest margin. So our cost of marketing against profit is very good - certainly much better than our direct postal marketing.

There is another side too, the web site adds credibility. While customers may not want the products we market on the web site, they do come to us for the services. Why? Because the web site shows we know what we are talking about, they have been able to assess our skills and experience, the lack of b.s. by reading our on-line materials. When they do call us there is little selling required because they have already established who and what we are, we are just talking about price and specification.

Don't get screwed by your web consultants

Right now we would still recommend you go to a professional web designer to have your web site designed and managed. Despite the fact there are many PC products available for little or nothing which SEEM to do the work for you, there is actually much more than meets the eye behind the technical scenes.

So, how do you avoid getting ripped off by your web consultant? Remember the three choices:

You can have high quality, low-cost or early completion - now pick any two.

If your web consultant is promising all three - then steer clear because you are definitely going to be missing at least one those three options.

DON'T TOUCH THAT MOUSE! Windows tips for those who want to keep their hands on the keyboard

Another in our occasional series of really obvious (but only if you know them) keyboard short cuts This week, the top 10 function keys:

F1 Help
F2 Rename
F3 Find
F4 Drop down the list in a combo box
F5 Refresh
F6 Switch between windows in a module
F10 Go to menu mode

These core keys work almost anywhere, in any product. They are defined as part of the standard Windows interface. So, try them in Explorer, Word or wherever and you should get a (mostly) consistent result.

My personal favourites? F2 to rename files, much better than double- clicking slowly enough not to launch the file. F4 to drop down a selection list and then use the arrows keys to select. I now fill in nearly every popup dialog box entirely from the keyboard - much quicker than using a mouse.

How to save 1,000's! In 1 hour!!

At a customer site recently I was preparing some automated backup rotation routines. While checking through their existing pile of somewhat dis-organised backup tapes I was able to identify no less than 36 out-of-date backup tapes - 4mm DAT tapes at a cost of around £30 each. Yep, that's a thousand pounds!

Meanwhile, just over the office a technician was ripping out 386 motherboards and replacing them with new higher spec boards. The old 386 boards were just going straight in the bin. Well what would you do with them?

I know what I'd do - use them as Windows Terminals around a multi-user NT server. Cost around £150 to install the WinTerm software and instant high-spec PC. The old 386 doesn't even need Windows on it to begin with, doesn't need a big hard disk. It does need a network card, but even that can be slow.

If you haven't heard about Multi-User NT before, here's the summary. Take a reasonable spec server, install a special version of NT which supports multi-users (standard NT does not). Add on either Windows Terminals (a combined unit of dedicated monitor and network interface - but nothing else) or WinTerm software (turns a PC into a Windows Terminal).

The Windows Terminal does no local processing, instead it acts just like the old dumb ASCII terminals but for windows. All the processing takes place on the NT server. All the WinTerm does is handle the display and keyboard.

Now, another benefit of this approach is that you can use the same old 386 PC as a network print server for connecting in your existing printers. That way you get a double saving because you don't need to buy JetDirect print servers for all your old kit.

So, don't toss that 386, re-cycle it with WinTerm.