What’s The Best Way To Figure Out If Your Website Is Working For You Or Not?

The big trend now is a shift away from traditional PRINT media like magazines and newspapers to the internet. People like to search and find information online these days, especially for a product or a service.

Okay, let’s work it out… Leads will come from your web-site in a number of ways:

1) Someone calls your business. To find out how many calls you get a week from your website, you can:

1. Use a separate phone number and note how many calls to that line (using a PABX, or a tally sheet), or
2. You can pay for a special VOIP service that records the number of calls, or
3. Train your staff to ask that important question "How did you find about us?"

2) Someone fills in your ‘Contact Us’ form (this is better than listing your email address on your website). Then record how many form enquiries you get each month.

3) Someone takes some other online action, like makes an online purchase, or enters their details to download a catalogue, etc. However, if someone subscribes to your e-newsletter – typically that is not a warm lead (as you usually only have their first name and email address only at this stage).

NEXT. Okay, you’ve got some tracking in place now – but then you discover that you are not getting as many enquires as you should… so we need to take the next step and IDENTIFY what’s happening on your website.

I’ll reveal exactly how you do this in my next post… as they say… "Stay tuned…"

How The Lifetime Customer Value Principle Can Make You A Rich Business Person…

The most difficult and expensive sale we ever make to a customer is the first one. In that first, important, transaction we earn or lose the trust of the customer.

Think back about your own consumer experiences – have you ever been just a little concerned about your first purchase from a business? It might have been from that florist delivery service you’ve never used before, or that tradesperson you’ve hired, or even product related concerns, say about a new computer or air-conditioning unit.

For example:

Mary is a new customer. Mary spends $60 with you, but it costs you $20 to supply the product or service and $40 to acquire Mary as a customer. You might think that acquiring Mary was pointless, i.e. no profit was made. But if I was to tell you that Mary needs to repurchase or revisit every six weeks spending $60 each time, with a profit to you of $40, plus Mary begins refers other people to your business, essentially costing you zero in advertising costs… Well, I’m sure you can see the benefits here.

When you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing, instead of focusing on that initial, single transaction, you should really focus on the Lifetime return for the investment made.

Lifetime Customer Value = average customer spend X number of times of repurchases in a year X the number of years a customer stays with your business (on average). PLUS Referrals!

Using our Mary example:

LTV = $60 X (52 weeks in a year / 6 weeks) X 5 years = $2,600

Would you spend that $40 to acquire Mary if she was worth $2,600 to your business PLUS referrals? I hope you said YES!

If you understand this significant marketing principle, you’ll see that you can now justify a much greater advertising/marketing investment when you look at your returns in this way, and this provides the engine for significant business growth.

Often your competitors are too cheap to make this important investment, and this can give you a competitive advantage.

Mobile/Internet Shopping – How Will It Affect Retailing?

What do you think about the above article from the Wall St Journal? It’s an important shopping trend not only for US consumers but for Australian shoppers as well.

Retailers, resellers, wholesalers, manufacturers and anyone that sells a ‘product’ will be affected by the growing trend towards researching and even purchasing online. Once wary and shy consumers are now experienced online consumers by the use of ebay, Google, Gumtree and even Facebook.

Whilst many traditional brick’s'morter retailers look at online shopping as a possible way to reduce their overheads (offering more stock without increasing floor space and reducing staff costs) it means they are now competing even more.

This means that the retail experience for the customer has to be even better so that consumers WANT to make the trip to a retail store. Retailers who don’t improve the customer experience and customer service will struggle to maintain revenue and will ultimately go out-of-business.