Website conversion is quite simply the conversion of the incoming traffic to sales. It is the crucial indicator of the success of your business. Your website might be receiving tons of traffic but if you’re not able to convert them into sales, it’s all effort gone to waste. You’d be surprised at how many businesses spends tons of money to divert traffic but do not invest the time and money to convert them into sales.

How to increase conversions? There are many ways you can turn that visitor into not just a customer but a repeat customer. That means he or she will not just love your site but tell others and they tell others about your site. Get the picture? And that’s just one customer we’re talking about. Imagine if you could do that with all the traffic that comes into your site? We’re talking exponential sales!

So now before you scratch your head and start day dreaming about your booming business, let’s get down to the basics. Here are a few simple tips to jumpstart your website conversion rate:

Shopping cart. As obvious as this seems, most people do have a shopping cart. But the thing they overlook is the ‘add’ button next to it. You need to mention something like ‘Ad to shopping cart’ or ‘Add to the shopping basket’ etc. This is also known as the call to action and plays a crucial role in getting your visitor to do what you want them to do – shop!

Be honest. Let’s face it – if you don’t have stock of some product, mention it upfront. Customers will respect you for it for having not wasted their time. That’ll also save them the hassle of digging through the online catalogue and adding it to the shopping cart – only to find it’s not in stock. What a waste!

Easy accessibility. It is essential to get your site visibility on the Internet. I mean, there are hordes of e-commerce sites out there literally waiting to get their customers’ business. What makes you think your website is so special?

- Therefore use appropriate keywords to get traffic to your site.

- Optimize your website to ensure better search ranking.

- Use persuasive articles that get the reader’s attention.

Selling the ‘right’ products. When it comes to selling you want your website to do well, right? Well that’s only going to happen if you sell products that customers want. Also important is ensuring you’re selling to the right audience. Imagine selling mascara to a baby! Unthinkable, right?

Easy payment. Customers today have little patience. And we don’t mean it in a bad sense. It’s only natural they are impatient – there’s loads to do and the Internet is just a speck in their lives. If they wish to purchase something they want it done fast, smooth and hassle free. If you want your website to convert more sales, you’ll need to ensure the payment gateway on your website is fast, secure and reliable. Most importantly there should be no slow pages. This can literally kill any sale. If the customer can’t shop fast and secure on your site he or she will go to some other site.

Search functionality. Our customers are patient too. Contradictory? Not really. Not if you consider that if they do not find what they’re looking for, they’ll try searching for it on your website. But you don’t have search functionality in your website? All hell breaks loose and the customer has vanished from your site in no time! Sounds familiar? It’s time to get a search box included in your website This is basic but still many businesses think they can get away without one. Big mistake!

Customer behavior. Analyzing backend search logs to analyze customer behavior can really pay rich dividends. Do customers visit a particular product only during holiday season or during sales? Make sure to keep enough stock handy during these times. Or do customers try downloading an e-book only to leave it midway? An analysis will tell you if the cause is a broken link or slow internet speeds.

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

The information provide is not exhaustive but in the opinion of the author these core elements when implemented will service to act as a sure and solid foundation for your business whether it is home based or whether you are running your own business unit within a larger corporation. Pay attention to the four areas below and work out a plan to constantly refine and update.

Category Marketing : You should know and should take time to sit down and plan out which category of the market your product or service fits into. What is meant by this ? consider the manufacturer’s of cars – when they are planning to produce a new car they determine the category of car which will be produced at the design stage. That is to say, the car could be a Mini Car, a Sports Utility Vehicle, a Multi Purpose Vehicle, a Sports Car, a Soft Top convertible and so the list can goes on.

A car is not just a car – the master category of car (your product or service) can and must be split up to provide a solid foundation from which to launch your business. To define the category for your business, take a blank piece of paper, consider the example of the cars and try to come up with at least five different categories in which your product or service can be placed.

Market Segmentation : This deals with the other side of the spectrum after considering Category Marketing, this looks at the end users or the market place whereas Category Marketing focusses on you, your product and your company’s services. Marketing Segmentation looks at splitting up the target market into group for which you can use to target your product and service to.

The market can be segmented by Race, Age, Earning Capacity, Living Area, Maritial Status, Disposable Income etc, etc which when devised correctly will give you a firm base for which Category of product you can sell to a particular Market Segment.

Channel Marketing : Every product or service must pass through a Marketing Channel in order to reach the end user. Most successful businesses today use multiple channels through which to reach their target market and your business should be the same. Examples of marketing channels are Retail Store, Networking Events, Distribution Warehouses, Shopping Malls, Telephone, Mail and the Internet. You should consider what you wish your primary channel to market to be and focus on this and then work on having a few secondary channels to market.

Develop most of your sales and communication tools for your primary market which will be in line with the Category of product and the particular Market Segment which you are looking to address. I consider the internet to be one of the most important Marketing Channels no matter what business you are in and I find the vast majority of my clients on a worldwide basis this way as I have developed significant expertise in this field.

Ideal Client Profile : Based on your definition of all of the above you should be able to develop and ideal client profile, this will tell you the type of person who is most likely to buy from you and with whom you are able to develop and long term relationship. The client profile will show which segment(s) of the market your client come along with the category of product that they prefer to purchase from you. Along with this you will understand through which marketing channel they prefer to purchase from you.

When working on your business focusing in on these key points will serve you will to take your business results to the next level.

About the Author

Article source: ContentLog.com.

Author Stephen C Campbell is an Internet Marketer & Business Consultant, he coaches clients on how to use the internet to drive their offline business. Learn more about his resources at http://www.EmailMarketingInformationCenter.Com/

Copyright 2007 by My Personal CMO .com. All Rights Reserved.

If they seek referrals at all, most small business owners think only of their clients. Now, your existing clients can be a good source of referrals. And when you think about it, who better to sing your praises than someone who has actually experienced your rare abilities.

The problem though is that your existing clients don’t have much motivation. They may be in a position to send you referrals but they won’t think of you day in and day out, and that’s what your referral marketing effort really needs.

When it comes to figuring out a referral marketing system, the number one question you need to answer is this. Who is, or can be convinced to be, highly motivated to refer business to me.

When you look at it from that point of view you begin to realize that no matter who you approach you better be able to propose a motivation that has something in it for them.

In most cases, the best referral sources, those that can be motivated, are businesses like yours that sell to the same target market. These non-competing businesses should be looked at courted like one of your primary target market sectors.

You marketing efforts should include very specific plans to attract, educate and motivate this target market. . .just as it would for the end user of your product or service.

The payoff with this kind of thinking is two-fold. I believe that almost any prospect that comes your way by way of a referral will generally be more qualified and likely a better fit. In addition, a highly targeted marketing effort pointed at referral sources can be one of the best ways to leverage your limited time and marketing dollars.

Properly marketed to, a good referral marketing partner could potentially send you handfuls of clients for about the same effort most businesses expend to land one self-generated client.

There can be many ways to motivate this type of referral lead source. You likely have something they want or can at least propose a way for them to get more of what they want. I’m afraid it’s hard to say the same for your clients.

One of the best way to put this thinking on steroids is to think in terms of building your very own strategic referral partnership network. Try to fill every need your clients have by plugging in and referring members of your private network. If you do this, you will never need to search for business again.

This approach to referral marketing and the tools and tactics to put it into motion are fully detailed in Referral Flood – How to Create a Flood of New Business Without Spending One Dime On Advertising. If you want to uncover the insider’s roadmap to generating referrals, this is the place.

How do you grab people’s attention, arouse their interest, trigger their desire, and motivate them to take action? Answer that four-part question correctly and you’ve identified the secret to achieving tremendous sales and marketing success in your chosen business or field. To complicate matters, however, the potential answers are as numerous and multi-faceted as the growing number of niche markets, products and services, and marketing trends in our culture. While not all inclusive, the following list of priorities and small business marketing tips can help put your small business on a faster track to growth.

Marketing Tip #1: Gain Customer Confidence. Customer indecisiveness, skepticism, indifference, or confusion are among the top sales killers in the business world. It’s up to you to project an image of experience, quality, dependability, excellent customer service, and/or value to your prospective customers in order to win their confidence. If you haven’t clearly communicated the advantages and solid reasons for them to do business with you, then they’ll be hesitant to commit, and the sale will go to your competitor.

Marketing Tip #2: Penetrate awareness of your target audience by using some form of integrated marketing. In other words, the more ways the public hears about you, the better your chances are for achieving brand recognition, credibility, and greater market share. Effective marketing is partly the result of exposing your target group to your name and your selling points (unique selling proposition) as often as possible(frequency), in as many ways as possible, and as cost-effectively as possible.

Marketing Tip #3: Enthusiasm, in both print and in person, is contagious (and I’m not talking about using multiple exclamation points after sentences!!! That detracts from your credibility.) If you deeply believe in your products, services, your company, and yourself, then your prospects will pick up on that passionate attitude and feel confident and optimistic about doing business with you.

Marketing Tip #4: Purchasing is an emotional decision. Instill in your prospects good feelings about your company, your business relationship with them, and how you can improve their lives or solve their problem. Accomplishing that is at least as important in the sales process as focusing attention on product features and benefits.

Marketing Tip #5: Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations.

Marketing Tip #6: Impose a deadline. Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendency to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it’s often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.

Marketing Tip #7: Create a business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your strategic plan should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, and target market analysis (know your customers).

1. Email marketing

2. Lists

3. Opt in

If you do Internet marketing you should be doing email marketing. If you do email marketing you should be building one or more lists. If you are building a list or two they should be opt in. This just means that the person agrees to receive email from you.

If it is not opt in, or even double opt in, you could be accused of spamming. Do that enough times and you will be in danger of losing your list. I should know, it happened to me.

In the summer of 2003 I was using an autoresponder that claimed to email for customers with lists of over 1 million people. My list was made up of over 125,000 subscribers I bought 10,000 at a time. They all had a ISP, date and time stamp, so they were legitimate. I was protected, I thought.

Anyway I went away on vacation to Mexico and when I came back I had lost my list and my domain name. The autoresponder company had been shut down due to spam complaints from all of the members in total. OUCH!

So I went about building an opt in email list for marketing by getting my subscribers one at a time and making sure they confirmed they wanted email from me. I use AWeber for this and have not had one problem now in 4 years.

Here is what is great about doing it that way. I get a chance to sell 3 times.

1. On my subscription form

2. On my confirmation request email telling them to activate their subscription

3. On my thank you for confirming your subscription email

I like to offer a small bonus in the email requesting they confirm. There is so much junk mail that sometimes people just need a nudge to follow through and confirm.

And I even like to offer one more bonus on the thank you page and in the thank you for confirming email. Doing this builds some good will and keeps people from unsubscribing.

One other thing is to point them to your privacy page where you emphatically state that you hate spam just as much as they do. You will never share their contact information. I put this on my sign up form and again remind them of it in the request to confirm email. This will increase your confirmation rate for sure!

Another thing I like to do is spruce on the thank you page they get from AWeber. These are usually pretty cut and dried and people can get used to seeing it and clickin away before reading it. Liven it up a little with another bonus or a graphic or to. If you have a logo or a picture of yourself add it here. This just helps brand yourself, your company, and your product.

Finally when doing opt in email lists marketing make those first few emails you send really good. I mean so good that a person would be crazy for unsubscribing. If you have a blog post in it and get your list visiting it. If you email in html add some pictures, your logo again, affiliate banners, or anything to seem like your business is alive and fun to be around!

Hopefully this will make your opt in email list marketing more effective. As they say, the money is in the list and a quality one is worth the time it takes to build it right.

The key to attracting new customers to your business, whether online or off, lies in understanding a few simple things about how the brain works. Usually at an unconscious level, people are constantly scanning their environment to separate the relevant from the irrelevant, the safe from the potentially hazardous, the desirable from the unappealing. The major challenge for the small business marketer is discover what motivates their target audience, and then to speak as directly as possible to those fears, desires, goals, priorities, and needs.

But it Worked in the Movies

You’re only kidding yourself if you think you can be all things to all people. That insidious form of self deception falls in the same category as ‘If you build it, they will come’. Woody Allen is quoted as saying that ‘Eighty percent of success is showing up’, but bear in mind that comedy (and sometimes drama) is often based on exaggeration. Showing up — which can range from creating an Internet presence to attending networking meetings — is a good start, but it generally won’t get you too far unless you throw in a dash of originality, competitiveness, and a strategic plan of action.

Since people are constantly looking for specialized information, services, and products, a strategy worth pursuing is to devote at least 50% of your marketing efforts to reaching niche markets. Granted, marketing is no more of a ‘one size fits all’ endeavor than anything else, but what isn’t going to change is the fact that people are generally drawn to things that are customized, personalized, or otherwise geared to their personal preferences.

Are You Talking to Me?

Considering that your prospective clients and customers are continually scanning the Internet, the media, and their environment for information that’s relevant to them, why not tip the scales in your favor by tailoring your marketing message directly to the different niche markets you’re trying to reach? Whether it’s senior citizens, new homeowners, parents to be, recent graduates, newlyweds, or frustrated job hunters, capturing people’s attention can sometimes be as simple as recognizing them as individuals or as a member of a specific demographic group.

For example, have you ever inadvertently ignored someone who was saying to you ‘excuse me’ or ‘you dropped something’; but if they called you by your name, you’d immediately snap out of your haze and pay attention. Again, it’s just a matter of breaking through people’s filtering systems and being noticed. That’s often the number one step to effectively marketing your products, your services, or yourself. Actually, I’d break that down into three parts: get noticed, connect with your prospect, and put them in a receptive state of mind. If you convey the impression, right off the bat, that your service or product is tailor made for their needs, wants, or specific situation, then you may have fulfilled all three requirements in one fell swoop.

Once you’ve clearly and compellingly presented your case for making your prospect’s life easier, more secure, healthier, more comfortable, prosperous, convenient, happier, or more problem free, your remaining challenge is to anticipate objections, lower sales resistance, and inject your offer with a subtle, yet perceptible sense of urgency. If you’ve painted a vivid, benefits-filled picture of your service or product, their motivation to experience those advantages will help you convert them from a prospect to a customer.

There was a time when marketing directly to customers and potential customers was considered the poor stepchild of more sophisticated forms of advertising, and upscale businesses did not regard it as a viable, elegant solution to their marketing problems.

Savvy marketers soon realized, however, that mass direct marketing could provide immediate sales results, create a personal connection with customers, was more cost effective than billboard or display advertising when the object is to get immediate results, not just to create awareness. Perhaps most importantly, direct marketing lends itself to greater measurability and to testing variations in form and content to determine the best approach. Today it is universally regarded as one of the most effective forms of advertising.

Direct marketing can be any marketing method that takes the initiative aims to establish or maintain an immediate, one-to-one relationship with customers and prospective customers, rather than waiting for them to discover you in more general, impersonal forms of advertising.

Direct marketing is most powerful when it is used as part of a direct response strategy – that is, asks the recipient to take some immediate action – order a product, get a free gift, enter a contest, give a donation. Perhaps since the advent of the Sears catalog in 1893, the most popular and powerful form of direct response marketing has been via U.S. postal service.

Advent of eMarketing

But times have changed. Digital delivery is rewriting business rules and redefining direct marketing. The advent of electronic forms of communication such as email and the Internet have given marketers new and even more cost effective ways to become more focused and granular in their marketing efforts.

The rise of the Internet produced a gold rush not only in commerce, but in new expectations for online marketing. Many of those expectations were inflated: not all Internet marketing has proven to be created equal. Although successful while still a novelty, Internet advertising response rates are quickly eroding. Users are inundated with banner ads everywhere they go on the Internet.

While it is true that advertising on vertically targeted portals can produce better than average click-through rates, banner ads can be a difficult medium to achieve marketing goals.

Marketers looking for an effective way to reach customers online are turning to email. Email has quickly become a communication standard and the Internet’s most popular application. Both the number of email users and the usage rates are continuing to grow exponentially.

According to eMarketer, by the end of 2000, there were 96.6 million email users in the U.S. representing 43.8% of the total population of adults and teens. In an effort to realize the commercial potential of this powerful communication medium, U.S. companies spent $496 million on email advertising in 2000, a 177% increase from 1999.

Email is by far the dominant digital delivery application and is already used much more than traditional “snail mail”. Over 395 billion messages were delivered in the U.S. in 1999 as compared to 202 billion pieces of mail delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. Just one year later, in 2001, over 536 billion email messages were delivered – an increase of 35 percent in a single year – versus a growth in postal deliveries of less than 3%. In 2000, some 22 percent of email messages were commercial.