It’s Cyber Monday. Are you Ready to Take Advantage?

Quick reminder here. Today is Cyber Monday.

Many people will be doing their holiday shopping online today. Be sure to take advantage of it!

If you followed my previous post titled Cyber Monday Marketing Ideas for 2007, then you had better be following up with an email this morning to your customer base.

If you did not follow that post, there is still time to take advantage of this holiday shopping rush. It doesn’t matter what you do, but you gotta do something!

How to Read Your Visitors Minds With 100% Accuracy

If I told you that you could perform 5 easy steps that would allow you to read the mind of your website visitors you would want to hear them wouldn’t you?

Well guess what. I have a secret that is right under your nose and enables you to do just that using Google Analytics.

Google added a new feature to Analytics in October of this year. It’s called Site Search and by default, it is turned off. But you can turn it on in just 5 easy steps and with it, start tracking each and every keyword search performed on your website. In essence, you will be able to read the mind of each visitor to your website with extraordinary accuracy.

The result provides valuable insight which can help drive your business forward.

From creating new products or product variations that fit demand to properly listing products you already offer. Tracking site search (the actual search terms they enter into the search form on your site) can provide you with that and more.

It’s one thing to know what search terms visitors use to find your site in the search engines. It’s another thing entirely to know what search terms they use once they have arrived.

Look at This Basic Example

Let’s say you sell widgets and your widgets are provided in Red and Blue. You get a lot of what you think is qualified traffic to your website, however, not many of them and up purchasing. After analyzing your statistics, including site search, you find that the visitors are qualified, however 70% of them are searching for Silver widgets — and you don’t offer those.

It might be a good idea to start offering Silver widgets based on this data alone. By adding Silver widgets, you could meet the demands of 70% of the visitors to your website and providing the rest of your website contains the proper elements to convert them, the result should be an increase in sales.

5 Easy Steps to Enable Google Analytics Site Search Tracking

Enabling Site Search is very easy and anyone with a search form on their website can benefit from its use.
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Simple Hint to Convert More PayPal Sales

If you offer PayPal as your only payment option, or use PayPal’s Website Payment’s Pro to accept credit cards from customers, then try this.

With proper wording, and a little creativity, you can turn the standard “Pay Using PayPal …” notice (which can be seen as a barrier to purchase) into a more buyer friendly type phrase.

Try including the following phrase near your payment button options.

“With PayPal you can pay by Credit Card, Bank Account, or PayPal Balance.” (You can alter as needed to work with your payment options.)

It’s a simple phrase, but one that speaks more from the buyers perspective than from the seller’s.

It more clearly represents that the consumer can use a standard credit card to pay through PayPal and they do not need an actual PayPal account to do so.

Believe it or not, even with the exposure PayPal has, many consumers still do not realize that they can pay for an item using PayPal without actually having a PayPal account.

As a result, they oftentimes see the PayPal logo, and think “I don’t have a PayPal account, and I don’t want one right now” so I guess I’ll buy from someone else that lets me pay using a credit card.

Although it can’t hurt to remind buyers that “You do not need a PayPal account to pay using PayPal”, the above phrase goes a long way toward accomplishing just that.

Gift Cards That Cause Unhappy Customers

I was shopping on the Internet recently at a major online retailer and was dumbfounded to find the assumptions they were making on behalf of their customers.

I had no problems finding the items I needed. I also had no problems adding them to my cart or for that matter. In fact, I liked the way the site was working up to the point of the checkout process.

However, it was there (one of the most critical elements of the purchase process) that I ran into problems.

Problems that should not exist in any e-commerce website. Problems that were present because the company was thinking from the seller’s perspective when it should be thinking from the buyers perspective.

It can be wrapped up into something called the customer experience and their approach was no doubt causing some unhappy and confused customers — myself included.

Say Goodbye to Experience

I have been working on the Internet for over 12 years now and currently spend most of my waking time doing so. I analyze and work with e-commerce sites daily to help them cultivate ways to increase conversion. I’ve built numerous shopping carts, personally written thousands of programs, and worked with many others. Moving through sites has become second nature.

Yet, even with that experience, I found myself completely frustrated and lost during their checkout — specifically with regard to how they handle gift cards.

In fact, I actually called a support number (one more reason why I say you should always include a very visible customer service number on your website) to find out how to complete the checkout!

Now, I am probably one of the few that actually does this (calls customer service when I could simply leave the site and go to my local brick and mortar store). I only did it because I just had to find out why they were doing what they were doing, and clear myself of the thought that I suddenly “forgot” how to shop on the internet.

The Mysterious Gift Card

The sticking point during checkout was a gift card that was purchased at one of the brick and mortar stores for the chain. It could be used online or on the Internet.
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Customer Surveys Reveal Holes in the Dam

In its simplest form, a dam can be seen a structural system that controls water.

It can stop water completely, or it can be opened up to allow water to flow through in a controlled manner.

Although simple in nature, the dam is made up of many different complex systems. All systems work together as a single unit to achieve one task — control the flow of water.

Periodically, as with all complex systems, the dam needs to be inspected for potential risks that may present problems down the road. If found, these “risk areas” should be addressed before they become a real problem.

For example, if not found and corrected, a single hole in the dam could very quickly turn into an out of control emergency.

E-Commerce Websites are a lot Like Dams

Your website can be thought of in much the same way as a dam. It is simple in concept, yet contains an array of complex system that work together as a single unit, controlling the flow of traffic through it to achieve a desired goal — generate sales. A hole in any one system can jeopardize the entire outcome.

Water is the Lifeline to Survival

Remember, a dam controls water. In a website, traffic is your “water”. Your traffic contains both visitors and customers (customers actually buy, visitors just look). Whereas a dam controls water, your website should control traffic. Properly controlling that traffic will become the lifeline to your ultimate success.

How to Find the Holes in Your Website

If you were managing a dam, you would probably send out inspectors to analyze, take notes, gather data, and report on the integrity and stability of the structure.

But you’re not. You’re managing and running an e-commerce website. So, who do you periodically send out to gather and report data back to you? You send out “Inspector Survey.”
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