Website Marketing
Digital Summit 09
Earlier this year we attended the Clemenger Digital Summit here in Auckland. An interesting event that drew a huge audience of over 500 with a follow up one in Wellington. The focus was upon new media and some innovative case studies. Of the dozen or so superb presentations, I’ve selected the opening talk below to show you.
Blogs or Websites – What’s Best?
There’s numerous options today to be seen on the web. Traditionally, you went out and hired a ‘web designer’ to build you a slick website. They examined your brand and discussed design criteria, then built a 4 or 6 page site for a fee ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 or more..
Easy 15% More Sales for Online Shop
Online underwear merchant Bare Necessities in the US, long renown for running successful, highly segmented and targeted email campaigns, tried something new – Coordinating a personalized full colour, hard copy postcard campaign with their e-mail, to a segment of its customer file. The result? A huge increase in sales from those who received both marketing messages.
Direct Traffic is Better Than Google Traffic
Not all web traffic is equal and understanding the value of direct traffic can help online retailers hone their marketing.
“Direct traffic” is web traffic you get from people who already know about your website or store. They either click a bookmark to come to your site or type your site’s URL directly into their browser’s address bar. By comparison, “search engine traffic” comes from people that probably don’t know about your site. They were looking for a keyword or phrase and your site just showed up in the results on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN’s Live Search.
Google sends the most leads to your site, Right?
Hands up those that believe that Google is the main method of driving people to your website and that the more you spend on GoogleAds and SEO, the better?
Sorry to disappoint. Yes, many people will use Google to find out about you or get to your website. But, the bigger question is what gets those same individuals to do a search in the first place? What’s the ‘original’ motivator that got them to your website the very first time to buy your product or service? Surprisingly, it’s most often offline forces. e.g. Printed materials, TV, Word of mouth referrals etc.
Read more on Google sends the most leads to your site, Right?…
Why Online Advertising is Failing us
It appears that we humans are quite adaptable. In a relatively short time, nearly all of us have learned to ignore ads on the internet. 
The best way to prove this is through eye tracking studies that capture exactly what we are looking at on a web page (left). Those areas in red and orange are what we look at. Areas outside this are being ignored. This human trait does a superb job of filtering out of unwelcome, unrequested marketing messages.
Latest eCommerce Conversion Rates
Here are the top 10 (US) converting websites for March 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by toolbar user to final conversion. To date no figures are available for NZ websites, although we expect the 10 best sites here to be much lower.
Most Still Prefer Real Stores
Whether you’re a retailer or service provider, your website is what people will most often turn to after learning about you through the various online or offline media channels. First impressions and offer counts, as is your ability to quickly provide them with the products or information they came looking for.
Is a 35% Response Rate Rise Enough?
I read an email from a copywriter recently, claiming a 35% improvement in response rates for a client campaign. Sounds interesting I thought, this guy must know his stuff.
However statistics aren’t always what they seem and this is commonly the case on the web where bold claims are commonplace. It’s a great place for scammers. In this case the 35% claim was technically correct, but I eventually discovered that the 35% came from an increase in response from 1.0 to 1.35%, which in real world terms for this particular client, only turned into a few more sales. A small handful of dollars…
My Website isn’t generating leads!
Here’s a typical small business complaint
"My web site isn’t working! No one is visiting and I’m not getting any new clients. What’s the best way for me to get found on the Internet; should I buy GoogleAds; start a blog?"
All advice and opinions here are offered freely on a no-liability basis.
