There are lots of bad ecommerce home pages, right?
But one of them has to be the worst, right?
Well, I found it.
Domino’s Pizza. Having a lazy weekend, I wanted to order a pizza. While with pizza ordering by phone is probably easier, I thought I’d try the online experience, given I am an ecommerce consultant and all…
When I got to the homepage, a great big flash animation came up. “Click here for transformation”. This flash animation was full screen transparent, so I could see the big “Order online” button I wanted. I had three choices – click on the close link which was obscured by being positioned over some other text, click on “Click here for transformation”. Transform? Into what? I’m interested in transforming from hungry to full, that’s all. You literally could do nothing else without first dealing with this piece of flashturbation. Once you click on it, all it does is show you some animation. There’s no campaign, no offer, no competition, not even an especially good animation. And once it’s finished, you still need to find the obscure close button.
Dominos, I will put $5,000 of my personal money on the line. Run an A/B split test on that homepage – one with the animation, one without. My bet says that removing that animation as the sole variable of the test will boost sales at least 5%.
Why is this the worst? Because it’s not some backyard outfit. It’s not some dodgy “my cousin knows web stuff and installed OSCommerce for me” setup. This is a multinational company who cleary invested some serious money into their site, which in general isn’t a terrible site. Why oh why do they actually go out of their way to actively prevent their users from spending money with them?
PS. I tried to send them feedback. They want my full name, address and phone number as compulsory fields just to give feedback.
Categories: Marketing | Date: Dec 11th, 2007 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment
A great webinar about SEO, 50 minutes long.
Courtesy of Stephan Spencer.
Categories: Marketing | Date: Jul 26th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
It’s always a tricky part for the small ecommerce site owner. How much should I spend on advertising?
I’ve been doing some work in the last few weeks for a client, setting up some advertising for a client’s ecommerce site. A part of that was Google adwords. He’s operating in an extremely competitive niche, you need to pay at least $5/click to get in the top spots, sometimes more. Ouch!
So, at $5/click, is it worth even running the campaign at all? It’s pretty easy to work this answer out. Well, kind of.
The biggest question you need to ask is: how much is a new customer worth? For some sites, this is relatively easy to work out. If you are selling a subscription, or your customers tend to be single purchase (no repeat business) then you can probably work it out easily enough. If you do get repeat business, then it becomes a bit trickier. What’s the life time value of your customers? There’s books written on this subject, so I’m not going to attempt to tackle the subject. One thing to bear in mind: don’t assume that the first transaction with the customer should be profitable. If you average customer buys 5 times a year at average $100 each, and an average margin of 20%, then your customer is worth $100/year. You should be more than comfortable spending at least $20, if not a lot more, to buy each customer.
The other big question is how well are you converting? For my client, let’s say we work out we can afford to pay $150 per customer. At $5/click, that means we need to be converting at 3.3% to be profitable. So the other big thing to focus on is conversions – how can you increase the number of customers actually buying? Fortunately there’s many ways to do this.
The higher your conversions, the more you can pay on advertising, the more customers you can get, and the faster your business can grow.
Categories: Marketing | Date: Jul 19th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
Like most shop owners, I’ve pretty much abandoned banner ads in favor of pay per click advertising. I’m a huge fan of accountability. The most interesting consulting job I’ve worked on was designing a highly complex marketing measurement system which would be able to trace the exact impact of every marketing dollar spent – and this client spent over one billion a year (that’s not a typo).
However, the niggle in the back of my mind with accountable advertising is always “but what about the brand?”. The older I get the more I realize the importance of brand, how much of an impact it has.
Here’s an interesting article on the psychology of branding, about a study which demonstrates that banner ads, despite not being noticed, can have a measurable positive impact on our perception of a brand. Fascinating!
Categories: Marketing | Date: May 29th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
Running an ecommerce site, there’s so much to do. Copy often gets thrown by the wayside, chucked up in 5 minutes with little thought. We’ve all been guilty of it. Here’s a good example of some small copy changes.
When some politicians in the US wanted to abolish the estate tax, they were getting little support from voters. What switched that around? They started calling it the “death tax”. Suddenly it became a subject people were passionate about. Death is a very emotional word which captures people, estate is, if anything, an alienating word with implications of pomp and wealth.
What “death tax” term can you use to engage your visitors, and turn them into customers?
Categories: Marketing | Date: May 24th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
When search engine optimizing your site, choosing the right keywords is one of the most important steps. How’s this for an interesting statistic to make you think twice:
The top 50% of searches generate 80% of the search volume while the bottom 20% of searches generate 60% of the sales! – Search Engine Journal, Rob Sullivan, 12/30/2005
Categories: Marketing | Date: May 7th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
Hopefully if you have a shop up and running you are doing a newsletter to your customers (and if not, why not?)
The problem is as always beating the spam filters. There’s obvious ones such as not using “FREE” in your text. And if you are selling Viagra, good luck to you!
I’ve been research “red flags” for spam filters. Here’s a small one that is easy to do but is a big red flag – using exclamation marks and question marks in your subject. They are big indicators of spam by a lot of spam filters.
So, if you are selling “FREE Viagra!!!???!!!” I don’t think you’re gonna make it! 
Categories: Marketing | Date: May 6th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
A great article about trying to be all thing to all people – which we all know doesn’t work, but so many of us try it anyway!
(via grokdotcom)
Categories: Marketing | Date: Apr 29th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
An interesting video about a poor customer service experience. There’s nothing spectacular about it, but it shows you how little things can lose a customer. So many companies (such as HP in this one) will spend millions on advertising, but then alienate the customer once they have them hooked.
View the video here.
Categories: Marketing | Date: Apr 26th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments
I was in my Gmail account today (which I love) and noticed this ad (a friend had sent me an email mentioning a projector).
Hmmm. I wonder if that’s against Google’s Terms of Service? If not, it’s not very ethical in my opinion, to try and bypass a click.
.
Categories: Marketing | Date: Apr 25th, 2007 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment