The single most important component of your web-based business is your website's conversion rate. What is a conversion?
Marty Note
This is an important list of common ways to increase conversion. I might move cart work up to #2 or #3, but I can understand why the author has it lower down. Shopping carts are painful to change. Touch your shopping cart now and you are NUTS since the biggest deadline we all have is around the corner (12.25).
Here are some quick fix conversion additions I would make after $30M in online sales over seven years:
* Free Shipping All Orders, All Shipments (don't fight it).
* Better Email Marketing (see http://www.bronto.com tips).
* Better email tool (Bronto is best).
* FASTER website (Offload images/video to Akami or similar).
* More SOCIAL (Facebook LIKES, G+ and Twitter everywhere).
* More SOCIAL (bring my friends into my shopping experience).
* REVIEWS - (critical for ecomm and must have some bad).
* Review the Reviewer - (makes reviews trusted).
* Coordinate social, email, catalog and website (always friction).
* Keywords In Navigation, Titles and H1 (can always be better).
* Breadcrumbs (great spider food).
* Merchandise and simplify internal search (big bucks here).
Pick any 3 from the list above and your website's sales will increase before this Christmas. Do them all before Christmas and I owe you lunch for a week (lol).
Good luck. Try to get some sleep between now and Valentine's Day :).
Put On the Beret, Clinch the Fist and REVOLT
I love the linked article's feisty "pick a fight" attitude. I also agree that we've lost our way. I'm reading Seth Godin's new book The Icarus Deception and Seth doesn't mince words with how lost we've become.
The irony of having so many "phone home" tools such as social media marketing and becoming even more distant isn't lost on me :). We featured The Great Social Customer Service Study a few weeks ago on Atlantic BT's Blog and the results to Tweets for help were miserable by most major brands.
There are secrets in Seth's book including:
* YOU are the most important "product" you sell.
* YOU are exposed warts and all the time now.
* YOU are in control.
YOU in the bullets above could be your personal brand or the work you do for your company. Your humanity, expressed in real and flawed ways, is what matters now. Greatness is required and only available to those willing to risk, fail and risk more to earn the AWESOME badge.
Internet marketing will beat the perfectionism out of you.
No one can afford perfection's tyranny in their Internet marketing. Sistine Chapel an Internet marketing effort and you lose. To "Sistine Chapel" means you take too much time and become obsessed with every detail.
Create Sistine Chapels and you end up with beautiful chapels no one ever sees because, while you were busy creating perfection, competitors scaled and are now beating you senseless.
The other day I explained the conundrum as, "As perfect as we can be NOW," as a way of defining an Internet marketer's philosophy. You must create great stuff FAST.
The loop back to the REVOLT article linked here is it is impossible to cost reduce your way to greatness. IMPOSSIBLE. Greatness in Internet marketing comes from having the courage to fail, learn and fail bigger.
And the only species willing to do such an incongruous thing is humans. When we do the crazy thing (fail, learn, fail bigger) we express our humanity and THAT is what creates connection in this crazy web world.
Join the HUMANITY Revolt!