What do top internet businesses do that the rest of us can do without busting our budgets?
We've highlighted ten areas where top internet businesses excel. We can all model this excellence and use it to build our own successful Ecommerce businesses.
If you think it is enough to get busy on Twitter and expand your social network marketing, you really need to read the rest of this article! Top internet businesses...
1. Keep it simple - look at Google's design, for example. No flash here, no whirling advertisements or distracting pop-ups. Clean design makes it easy for me (the customer) to understand the way the site functions. On Ecommerce sites, a good product search facility makes it easy for me to find what I want to buy and nothing distracts me from doing so.
2. Give great service. Top internet businesses make it immediately clear that I can email, talk or chat to a real person. This is an area where small and medium Ecommerce companies often beat the big boys. I particularly like the ability to chat to a real person live. Sitewizard, whose customer service is superb, use livechat in a very unobtrusive and helpful way. But at time of writing their live chat facility isn't on the home page - you have to look for it on their support pages. This is a wasted sales opportunity.
3. Provide great value: neighbourhood book stores - how we'd love to have one on every corner. Nothing beats a good browse. But the fact is, most books these days cost less on Amazon, and the cost factor will continue to be an important factor in any kind of Ecommerce venture. Part of the convenience of shopping online is the ease with which I can compare prices for similar goods and services.
4. Make it easy to buy - do you really need my mobile number, my business address, my home telephone number, my age and my dietary requirements before I can buy your goods? Make the checkout process slick, quick and easy, ask for as little mandatory information from your customer as you can get way with, and watch your conversion rates soar. I still see sites where so much information is required that I go and shop elsewhere. You may think it's great that you can ring me at home to follow up with your sales and marketing processes, but from my point of view that's the very last thing I want to happen.
5. Automate. Your business is time consuming. There's always more to do. Automate as much of it as possible. Logistics - getting a request from your customer translated into the delivery of goods to the right place at the right time, with as little human intervention as possible - is the key area to get right. If you or your atff neen to pore over every individual order, something's not working how it should. Design your logistics into your Ecommerce website - it isn't an optional tack-on at the end.
6. Understand (at least the basics of) internet marketing and search engine optimization. Meta tag descriptions, keywords, focused content, inbound links - isn't all that stuff old hat? Not if you want to run a top internet business, it isn't. Seek professional help, do it well, do it consistently, and do it as part of a worked out business strategy. If you want to learn, there is no better place than here.
7. Provide a safe shopping experience. Some shoppers, me included, are quite interested in what you are going to be doing with my email address and financial information. Let your customers know, loudly and frequently, that their infromation is safe, that you have good security measures in place, that you aren't going to sell their email address to the highest bidder. They do this well at Blinds, Poles and Tracks.
8. Measure and Test. Where do your customers come from? Which pages do they land on? At what point do they leave your site? Answers to these and a thousand other questions are what the top internet businesses are looking for, and what they act upon. Google Analytics is easy to set up in its most basic form - ensure that you do. Once you know some answers regarding your website visitors, you need to test new solutions that will increase conversion rates. In fact, testign is a huge subject in itself, and the customer experience of your website should be tested well before you ever go live - but that's a subject for another article.
9. Have a great product. You can use all of the internet marketing and website design tools in the world, but in the end you need a good product. A good product, simply put, is one that meets and hopefully exceeds your customers' expectations. If you have a good product, you can put your heart and soul into marketing it.
10. Communicate. Yes, there is a place for social network marketing in building a top internet business. The key is subtlety and using the right tools for the right job. Again, this is a huge subject in itself, but you could start by asking yourself if you, as a consumer, want to be bombarded by people selling you stuff when you are on Facebook (for example). The best place to build a community is usually on your own website. Twitter and other tools, when used well, can help you to do that.
Resources
If you are just starting out, and if you are willing to work to build a genuine small online business with long-term value and profits, there is no better place for you than here... For small businesses who want to go online.
If you are a small to medium business who wants help in building a new website or revitalising your current one, we recommend our Ecommerce partners.
If you are a medium to large corporation looking for a full suite of services to improve your online business, call Bentley Green on 0800 75 66 996.
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