Having a varied product line with a range of options and price points is a great way to grow your business. At Ex-Boyfriend we’ve found that every time we add a new product to our collection we see even more business. Some other entrepreneurs I talked to described the same experience.

Charlene Anderson says “The best thing I did to grow my online business last year was add a new but related product line to my store. Artists and craftspeople (my niche) very seldom stick to one medium so having expanded product lines has allowed me to weather the recession intact.”

Alissa White of matchasource.com added gift sets to her line and says “The investment paid off when the holiday season hit. I sold the kit in three colors on matchasource.com and on Amazon. The kit was also sent out to media and bloggers who wrote favorable reviews which still send referrals to my door.”

Do It Yourself:
Think about items you can add to your shop that compliment your current offerings. This will allow your site to rank on search engines for more related terms and give customers a larger variety of items to choose from.

Be sure to pick things that make sense for your shop to carry and make sure you select items you can easily keep in stock.

Think about re-packaging your items as gifts, kits or sets so customers see your products in another light.

Tried This Tactic?
Added a new item to your line or re-packaged existing items in a new way? Let us know how it worked out for you.

<< Read Part 1: Self-Promotion
<< Read Part 2: Twitter
<< Read Part 3: Giving Customers VIP Deals
Read Part 5: Success by Association >>
Read Part 6: Well-Timed Campaigns >>
Read Part 7: Stimulating the Senses >>
Read Part 8: Harnessing the Press >>

It’s So Good – C’est Si Bon Greeting Card by Letterpress

Everyone loves to save some cash, especially in this economy. That’s why special deals are a great way to boost sales. Some entrepreneurs I spoke with found success offering specials both on site, via email and via social media.

Special Offers Page
FatWallet.com’s “Best Deals” page has been a huge hit with their customers. This page is fast becoming one of the most popular on their site. Although Fat Wallet is a deals and discounts website, you can use this tactic too. Last week I wrote an article about how a “special offers” page can help you boost conversions. Take another look in case you missed it.

Free Shipping, Free Returns!
Overstockart.com recently implemented a free shipping, free returns policy. “Since the inception of this practice they haven’t noticed an increase in their return rates, but actually an increase in their sales. They like to say this way people can see if the painting “fits” in their home before feeling like they’re completely committed.” The increase in sales without an increase in returns is particularly interesting to note. I wrote an article on the free shipping, free returns model back in January. My article includes advice on alternatives to this model, although this model is ideal if you can manage to implement it.

Discounts by Email
Gary West Meats says that sending a newsletter each month to their mailing list subscribers has yielded a 63% boost in sales! They’ve found that Tuesdays and Fridays are especially great days for sending promotions and that customers responded best to promotions for gift items and discounts on the item of their choice. “Everyone likes something different so they can choose what they want to buy that way.”

Want to start an email marketing program or improve your existing one? Here are some articles on that topic.

Tried these tactics?
Discuss your experiences with offering deals and discounts in the comments below.

<< Read Part 1: Self-Promotion
<< Read Part 2: Twitter
Read Part 4: Expanding Your Line >>
Read Part 5: Success by Association >>
Read Part 6: Well-Timed Campaigns >>
Read Part 7: Stimulating the Senses >>
Read Part 8: Harnessing the Press >>

Twitter is a popular tool for small business. I sometimes talk about how to use Twitter the right way and point out examples of Twitter being misused. Here are a couple of business that found success with this tool.

Sharing Special Offers
Scanmyphotos.com attributes much of its growth to Twitter. They use Twitter to promote their site and send out special offers. Their offer of “1,000 free photo scans to users who post review and share their feedback” helped gain thousands of new loyal fans who eventually became customers.

Meeting New Customers
Kuru Footwear uses Twitter to look for potential new customers. They monitor Twitter for Tweets related to walking shoes and reach out to those people. Kuru often sends prospects to their page on “Best Walking Shoes” which discusses walking shoes, what to look for in the best walking shoes, and how Kuru is designed to be an excellent walking shoe. This type of educational content is a great way to establish your brand as an authority on the products you sell.

Do It Yourself:
Use Twitter for both sharing offers and engaging with customers. Monitor Twitter for keywords that pertain to your business and reach out to customers that may be interested in your products. Be sure to send them to landing pages with informative content rather than pages that appear to just be selling them something. A discount code can also help nudge a customer towards making a purchase.

Tried this tactic?
Discuss your successful experiences with Twitter in the comments below.

<< Read Part 1: Self-Promotion
Read Part 3: Giving Customers VIP Deals >>
Read Part 4: Expanding Your Line >>
Read Part 5: Success by Association >>
Read Part 6: Well-Timed Campaigns >>
Read Part 7: Stimulating the Senses >>
Read Part 8: Harnessing the Press >>

For the next two weeks I’ll be running a series called “The Best Thing I Did For My Business.” In this series I’ll be sharing experiences from real life online retailers as they explain the best thing they did in the last year to grow their business.

Sextoy.com owner Dave Levine had a unique problem for his online business: How do you get word of mouth for a business people are shy to discuss? Levine says “People don’t want to talk about “sex toys” but they do want to talk about Hollywood parties, hot girls, and entrepreneurs. So by promoting myself, I found it much easier to get press.”

Levine has appeared on several reality TVs hows including Millionaire Matchmaker and Joan Rivers’ How’d You Get So Rich. By making a name for himself in the spotlight, his business reaped the benefits. Levine also says that SEO has been a huge impact on the growth of his business.

Do It Yourself:
You too can help your business by drawing attention to yourself. Although this strategy is often easier for extroverts, the web makes it easy to appear outgoing, even if you’re shy when you’re not behind a computer.

Go where your customers are and get involved in their scene either online or off. Make friends (real or virtual) at conventions, online forums, blogs, parties, etc. Being visible is a great way to create visibility for your business.

Tried this tactic?
Discuss your experiences with self-promotion and how it helped grow your business in the comments below.

Read Part 2: Twitter >>
Read Part 3: Giving Customers VIP Deals >>
Read Part 4: Expanding Your Line >>
Read Part 5: Success by Association >>
Read Part 6: Well-Timed Campaigns >>
Read Part 7: Stimulating the Senses >>
Read Part 8: Harnessing the Press >>

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• If Your Products Disappeared Tomorrow… – I really liked this post, it’s good for getting you thinking. Probably my favorite one this week.
• Thoughts on How to Price Your Product or Service
• The Right Way to Pitch a Media Outlet
• The Benefits of Inline Form Validation – Makes some great points about the advantage of inline error messages on forms vs javascript alerts.
• Why Writing a Press Release and Sending it to a Bunch of People Won’t Work

The difference between a successful and failed PR pitch often has to do with approach. If you email a contact asking them if they will write about you, you’re going about it the wrong way. Don’t ask if they will write about you. Explain to them why they SHOULD write about you. How is the story you’re pitching compelling for their readers?

You will not be able to do this if:
- You didn’t actually read the publication you’re pitching
- You sent the same pitch to dozens of different media outlets with different audiences
- You don’t know the answer to this question yourself

One important element of branding is visual consistency. Most big companies have brand identity standards that dictate what colors, images and fonts can be used throughout the company website, marketing materials, ads, etc. It’s not a bad idea to implement these types of standards for your brand. Select colors, fonts, a logo and other visual elements that are consistent with the image you hope to achieve for your brand.

Take Smaller Box for example. This site uses a modern, sans-serif font for our copy. Everything is chocolate brown, pale blue and yellow. Our handwritten nav bar font and hand-drawn visual elements in our site design contribute to the modern DIY aesthetic this blog promotes. If we had printed invoices, they might look like this. Here is what a banner ad might look like:

My point with showing you this and pointing out these details is that all of these visual elements help create a brand. You see this all the time with other brands and probably don’t even notice. They’d never paint the walls lime green at Victoria’s Secret. They’d never send you an invoice on hot pink paper if you placed an order at the Tiffany’s website. The way brands use color, fonts, and graphic elements help them achieve a strong brand. You can do this with your brand too. Here are a few places to try it:

1. Product Packaging
When an order leaves your shop and goes into the mail how does it emante your brand. Is the merchandise wrapped in your brand’s signature color tissue paper? Does the invoice sport your brand fonts, colors and logos? Do promotional inserts carry your aesthetic forward?  Do you have custom printed mailers with your logo?

2. Web Design
Your website needs to look like your brand. The background color, the logos, the fonts, the graphics. It all needs to work. Should you use light, airy, ethereal fonts and colors? Should you use a serif font and dark, bold solid colors? You have to think about the image you want your brand to project and design accordingly.

3. Marketing Materials/Print Collateral
Your banner ads, your promotional postcards, your business cards, your print ads all need to have the same look. They should have the same visual elements that represent your brand. These little pieces are a preview of your brand so the image you want to achieve has to start there.

American Apparel is a great example of this in action. All of their ads have a similar look. They use the same fonts. The models are young, urban and gritty. The pictures have a soft focus. The girls don’t usually wear much make up. They’re usually shot on a white background or in a bedroom. The ads all reinforce the brand’s image. You can use this same technique to project your brand’s image.

Not a design wizard yourself? Hiring a graphic designer is a great way to get a professional brand identity package.  A design professional will work with you to put together visual elements (fonts, colors, logo, ads, business cards, etc.) that best represent your brand. You can hire Smaller Box’s designer to create a brand identity package for you, just drop us a line.

Over the weekend I realized I needed some new handbags to go with all my new spring clothing. So I took to the web in search of some new stuff. I found two options I really liked. One shop had several items I liked but they were more expensive. Another shop had items I liked (though maybe slightly less) but they were quite a bit less expensive.

I ended up buying from the second shop. The first shop could’ve had my business IF they’d had a discount available for large orders. (I was ordering 5 new bags.) They might’ve still been more expensive, but it’s a psychological thing. I’m well aware of this being the case but it’s still there. I want to feel like I’m getting special treatment for buying a lot of product. I’m probably much like the customers that visit your e-tail shop, and this is why I recommend you add a “specials” page to your website. I especially recommend offering specials for higher volume orders.

Here are some compelling reasons to consider this:

1. Show appreciation to super fans
In my example above, I described how I, as a potential new brand super fan, got turned off by the lack of special offers from a retail site. Offering a discount for large orders is a great way to make big spenders feel like VIPs.

2. Increase average order size
A discount for a larger order might nudge customers to buy a second or third item. Maybe they had a hard time deciding between two products and your 10% off deal is just the push they need to take them both.

3. Keep them on your site
Here’s a common scenario (I know I do this): Customer shops your site, they add items to cart, they get to check out and see there’s a coupon box. Now they feel like some customers are getting a deal and they aren’t because they don’t have a coupon. They open a new browser window, off to search for coupons. Doh! Now they’ve left your website and they might even run across a competitor’s website that has a better offer.

You can curb this behavior by adding a link to your current offers right next to your coupon field at check out. You need not share every single deal you have. If you sent a special to your mailing list that you only want those customers to see, you don’t have to put that out there.

Having any sort of offers there will help keep people on your site and make them feel like they’re getting the same deals that others are getting. You can offer things like a 10% off orders over $50.00 or free shipping on orders over $100.00. Offering a couple of different options is a good way to incentivize customers at different price points.

I recently wrote a post about how it’s important to direct your marketing efforts towards your target customer demographic. Some readers said they weren’t sure who their target market was, so today’s post provides tips on how to figure that out.

1. Google it

Don’t have any clue who your target market is or what they’re interested in? It’s time to start Googling. Start by searching for what you sell. Let’s say it’s stained glass wind chimes for example. Pay attention to who else sells wind chimes and what kinds of other items they sell. Maybe you’ll notice new agey sites sell them or gardening sites. Also pay attention to what types of blogs are writing stories about wind chimes. Are they home decor blogs? Are sound engineer blogs discussing them? All of these pieces help you identify target markets. By the time you’re done you might break your target market up into:
- New Agers
- Gardeners
- Interior Decorators/Designers
- New Home Owners
- Musicians

Now you have a little more direction on where to advertise, what to blog about (gardening, interior decorating, etc.), and what types of media to send pitches to.

2. Read all about it
Start reading publications that talk about the types of items you sell. If you sell corsets, start reading blogs and magazines about steampunk, goth, bondage, etc. If you sell mosaic wall hangings start reading Dwell or Better Homes and Gardens. You want to consume the same materials your target market’s consuming so you understand them better and understand their interests. If you don’t know what your customers read, go back to step 1 or try out steps 3 and 4.

3. Ask your customers
If you want to know more about your customers, you should ask them. Sites like polldaddy.com make is easy and free to create surveys, so go make one. Ask past customers where they like to buy their clothing, what magazines they read, what web sites they visit, where they live, how much their household income is, what gender they are, how old are they. Ask questions that will get you a clearer understanding of who exactly is buying your products and what they’re interested in.

4. Spy on the competition
Your competitors’ websites provide a wealth of market research. Visit the sites of competitors that are successful and see what they’re blogging about. See where they’ve gotten press. Follow them on Twitter and see what they tweet about. All of these pieces should help you put together a clearer picture of who buys what you sell and how to get their attention.

Still stuck? Visit my consulting services page. I can help you come up with a personalized plan to research your market or do market research for you.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Creative Places to Ask for Customer Feedback
• Tips to Improve Your Checkout Process
• Can Product Images Improve Conversion? Showing Products in Context
• Edit Your Invoices, Get 15% More Qualified Traffic – great step by step instruction on how to use cross-promotion (on your invoices) to boost sales.
• Tips for Converting Abandoned Orders
• Create an E-Commerce Website with a WordPress Plugin
• Craft MBA contemplates using Twitter for conversations vs broadcasting
• 9 Common SEO Mistakes
• Everything About SEO – an extremely comprehensive guide to SEO