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July 16, 2010
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:
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July 15, 2010
Last night I was at my favorite neighborhood watering hole with my husband and a few friends. We were just hanging out drinking beers when a guy came up to our table and said “my friend really likes your shirt.” Matt (my husband) happened to be wearing a t-shirt he designed for Ex-Boyfriend (our ecommerce company). He said “thanks”. The guy persisted “She really wants that shirt. She wants to know if she can have it.” (From the guy’s table we could hear his friend going “penguins!“.)
Matt went over to the other table, explained that he actually designed the shirt and sells them online and handed over a business card. The woman still insisted that she wanted Matt’s shirt. (Which at this point was probably kinda gross and sweaty since he’d worn it all day and it was July.) Matt said “You really want this shirt? You can have it, but you have to tell all your friends I gave you my shirt and send them all to my website.” So Matt gave this woman the shirt off his back and gave a table full of strangers a story to remember.
This story reminds me of two things: Crafting an MBA’s post about being your own fan and another blog I read called Word of Mouth Supergenius. CMBA’s post talks about how you respond when strangers compliment something you designed and Word of Mouth talks about how you should do things that are memorable and unexpected. Handing a new fan your product for free is certainly something they’ll remember and talk about. Would you try this if a stranger complimented something you were wearing? What if you just kept gift cards on hand and gave them one, along with your business card? Is there something else memorable or unexpected you could hand out with your business cards?
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July 13, 2010
Back to the theme of time is money today. It’s a point I’ve tried to stress in several posts lately. Your labor has value and if you are trying to run a successful business, you have to start seeing it that way. This means that when you waste your time, you waste your money. So here are 5 ways you may be wasting your time, and thus, your money:
1. Complaining
It can be therapeutic, but, unfortunately, not very useful. We all indulge sometimes, but don’t let it eat away at your day. It doesn’t matter if shop X has a pendant with a swan on it and you think you invented the concept of swan pendants, because right now shop X is winning. They probably aren’t obsessing over your pendants. They’re spending their time marketing, or shipping orders, or trend spotting so they can direct the development of their product line.
It doesn’t really matter what other people are doing that you feel is unfair or hackish or stupid. It’s not useful to bitch about how slow your week has been in terms of sales. These things won’t help you sell more product or grow your brand. It makes you come off as a whiner, and no one likes that.
Feel free to get it out of your system over drinks at happy hour, but never let this kind of thing consume your day.
2. Being Disorganized
If you’ve been hoarding supplies like a pack rat and you can never find your packing tape, or you have all your inventory crammed into a too-small box, you’re probably spending more time drowning in your clutter and trying to find your products to ship than you are getting stuff done.
A streamlined, well-organized workspace is essential to running a productive business. This means streamlining your space and your processes. (I touched on this point a little when I talked about product packaging eating up your time/money.)
Make a list of all your tasks and think about how you can make them more efficient. Go through your workspace and get rid of stuff you’re not using. Go through your inventory and sort it in a way that makes products easy to find.
You should also make a list of conversations you have repeatedly with customers and find a way to reduce your call/email volume.
3. Message Boards/Blogs
You can easily waste your whole day reading blogs and forums and get nothing done. Worst of all, you may be getting crappy advice. Trim your feed reader down to the most useful business blogs and be critical of the advice you see on forums.
Is the person doling out the advice truly successful in your mind? How much product do they even sell — 50 units/day, 50 units/month? Does what they have to say even make sense for your business?
4. “Free” Marketing Endeavors
If running a successful business was free and easy everyone would do it. Sometimes you do have to invest money to increase sales, be it in advertising, PR help, a wholesale rep, an affiliate program, a web designer, etc.
You could spend all day long posting on Craigs List and flyering your neighborhood, and while this may not pull much cash straight out of your pocket, it may not put any in there either and now you’ve wasted your time, thus costing you money. Keep in mind that lots of successful businesses got that way by taking out business loans or working with investors, so they could afford to set up their operation properly, they probably didn’t rocket to success with zero budget.
It’s important to look critically at “free” marketing and see if it’s really free. If guest blogging takes up 10 hours/week and gets you only 5 orders as a result, and you think your time is worth $20/hour, you just spent $40 to get each order. You need to compare that with other marketing options like Adwords, where you can maybe get orders for $10 per conversion. You also need to track the lifetime value of marketing efforts and consider the true value of your marketing efforts so you can compare apples to apples.
5. Refusing to Outsource
Trying to do it all yourself may not be the most cost-effective way to run your business. Are there things you can outsource to a pro who can do a better job than you? Are there tedious simple tasks you can outsource to an unskilled worker?
Think about all the stuff on your to do list and see which items you might want to get someone else to do. Then see if you can get an hourly freelancer to take on some of your tasks, thus freeing you up to work on more important aspects of your business.
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July 12, 2010
It’s very important to recognize that your time is worth money. With that in mind, having constant inquiries from customers can get expensive. In order to save time, and thus money, it’s helpful to evaluate what you can do to reduce the number of customer calls and customer emails you have to respond to each day. In my ecommerce business we had 3 questions that came up over and over:
1. Where is my stuff?
2. How do I return this?
3. Why am I being charged customs?
We had answers to these questions in our FAQ but most customers were not reading it, and instead calling and emailing. Here’s what we did to make it easier for customers to find answers to these questions:
1. Added delivery time details to product pages and check out
Customers want to know when they will receive their items so it’s important to set expectations. We would get customers who’d place an order and then email the next day to ask where their shipment was. Since my ecommerce business makes everything to order we aren’t able to ship immediately.
It now says on every page of our site that orders ship in 3-7 days. We also say on our check out pages that all items are made to order and we are a small business, so we need 3-7 days to ship orders. We explain that a delivery confirmation email will be sent as soon as an order goes out, so our customers can track their packages. We also remind customers to check their spam folder for these notices.
2. Put Return Information on Invoices
My ecommerce business sells apparel so we get a lot of returns due to sizing issues. To make returns easier, we have return instructions printed on the invoices that go out in our shipments. We instruct our customers to go to oursite.com/returns and fill out a simple form to do a return request.
This makes the return easy for the customer and streamlines the returns process for us. Since implementing this solution we’ve had almost no emails or calls about returns.
3. Warn International Customers About Customs
My ecommerce business is US-based, so customers outside the US frequently get hit with customs fees. If they are not used to shopping internationally, this can come as a shock.
When our customers select a shipment location outside the US a notice appears telling them that their country may charge customs fees. We explain that we cannot calculate or control these charges, since they are dictated by our customers’ home governments.
This notice has significantly reduced the number of complaints we’ve received about customs charges.
4. Links to our FAQ From Our Contact Page
We linked the portions of our FAQ that address our most commonly asked questions right on our contact page. For example, it says “Have an order status question? Please read this.” It makes those answers extra easy for customers to find and encourages them to read our published answers before emailing us.
What questions do you hear most frequently? What changes can you make to your website to reduce your call and email volume?
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July 9, 2010
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:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
July 7, 2010
Yesterday I talked about how a lot of inexperienced ecommerce business owners discount the importance of what I call ‘secondary conversions’ (newsletter sign-ups, Twitter follows, etc). When I talk about secondary conversions, I am referring to any action a site visitor takes to express interest in your brand, other than making a purchase.
I also talk a lot on this blog about conversion rate optimization. Usually I’m talking about ways you can optimize your web presence to increase sales (primary conversions), but today’s post is about what you can do to also encourage those secondary conversions.
Have Your Own Website
I will be saying this from now until the end of time. You simply cannot score those secondary conversions without your own website. You might get a few, but you’d get a zillion times more if you had your own website. The reason is simple. Etsy (and other sites like it) won’t let you put live links to your Facebook or newsletter on your shop page, so even if you share this info, customers have to copy and paste the URL. Most people will not do this. It’s too much effort. This means you need your own site with links to things like your Facebook and blog.
Motivate ‘Em
It’s not enough to just have a sign-up box for your newsletter or a link to your Facebook. You have to give people a reason to engage and let them know what to expect. You’ll see on the top right side of Smaller Box we have a newsletter sign-up, and the short but sweet copy indicates what the newsletter has in it and how often it goes out. That quells concerns about getting too many emails or getting emails with no relevant information.
If you’ve got a blog, have an “about” snippet that indicates what type of content you post. If you have a Facebook page, have a “new fan” landing page that tells visitors what they’ll get from becoming your fan. (Pre-sales, coupon codes, collection sneak peeks, etc.)
Some brands offer an instant discount code when people join their mailing list. Some brands automatically enter their Twitter followers in a monthly giveaway.
Whatever your plan is, make sure you clearly explain incentives for engaging with you and make sure it’s clear how often your fans will hear from you.
Make It Easy and Accessible
Make it easy to connect with you. That means having links to things like your blog, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. on every page of your site, preferably above the fold. (You can see examples of this here on the top left.) Many visitors won’t be coming to your site via your home page, you can’t expect having secondary conversion opportunities on the home page alone will capture everyone.
I recommend that you use a sign-up box, rather than a sign-up page (as I’ve done on Smaller Box). That way people can enter their email from any where and automatically be added to your list in one step.
Use widgets like AddThis, so customers are reminded to share your content. You can also install Facebook’s “like” widget so people can share your pages with just one click, and without leaving your site.
Preach to the Converted
If you already have people engaged in one type of conversion, it’s easier to get them engaged in a second one. This means you should link your social media profiles in your newsletter. You should ask your Facebook fans or Twitter followers to join your mailing list.
Your “welcome to my list” email should contain links to your social media profiles and blog. Your check-out process should have a check box that lets customers sign up for your newsletter.
As you integrate all these different communication streams, you increase your visibility with people who already are forming a favorable opinion of your brand. Each connection represents another opportunity to get those customers to make purchases at a later date.
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July 6, 2010
 I’ve tried to make this point in past posts: marketing is a cumulative effort. When I read comments in the small business blogosphere, the comments I see over and over again are “where are my sales?” and “how can I get more sales?” and “I tried marketing activity X and I didn’t get a flurry of sales!” So many inexperienced online retailers think only about immediate sales, and not the activities that lead to steady business. Thus, I see them dropping an ad they ran on Adwords or a blog as soon as they don’t see an immediate jump in sales, totally discounting secondary types of conversions. I see them dropping the idea of sponsoring giveaways and contests, because they don’t immediately deliver buckets of cash.
Expecting people who saw an ad for your brand once to click-through and buy immediately is like expecting sex on a first date; sometimes it happens, but it’s NOT to be expected. Usually you see someone for a while and you score with them eventually, later, after they’ve gotten to know you and trust you. Getting ecommerce customers is the same way. This means you need consistent visibility and casual contact with prospective customers.
So how can you tell if your marketing activities are leading to the right kind of visibility and leading to relationships that will end in sales? Here are a few indicators you should look for as you’re running your marketing campaigns.
Increase in blog readership
Sometimes prospective customers start out by reading your blog or following your RSS feed. This is why you want to be consistent about posting to your blog and posting content your prospective customers find interesting.
Increase in social media connections
If a site visitor likes your brand, she may follow you on Twitter or fan you on Facebook. Maybe she’s waiting for you to announce a coupon code. Maybe she’s thinking she’ll buy later and wants to keep track of your brand in the meantime.
Increase in newsletter subscription rate
The great thing about newsletter subscribes is that you can actually track the source of your sign ups. This means you’ll know if a banner ad on a certain blog led to these sign ups or if they came from organic search traffic. When a site visitor joins your newsletter, that’s a strong indicator that she plans to buy from you at some point. Maybe next week, maybe at Christmas. This is still a very valuable type of conversion and should not be overlooked.
Increase in buzz
The more people that come to your website and take an interest in your product line, the more buzz you’ll see. This usually comes across as traffic from social bookmarking sites, web-based email clients, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. It basically means people are coming to your site and telling their friends about it. Maybe their friends are telling their friends, and so on. This type of traffic is a really important part of building a consistent presence for your brand and tends to result in an increase in business over time.
Final thoughts:
One of the top search terms that results in sales on my ecommerce website is my company’s brand name. That means the customer had heard of my company, sought it out, and came to buy stuff. There’s no way to know how they heard of us originally, but I attribute these conversions to the overall effectiveness of my various marketing efforts.
Facebook is my ecommerce site’s #7 source of traffic. Stumbleupon is #4. Twitter is in the top 25. This means people that visit our website share our URL like crazy. So each time someone visits our site, it’s okay if they aren’t buying today, there’s a very good chance they’re sharing our URL and getting our site seen by someone who will make a purchase.
Lastly, I’m able to maximize the effectiveness of my marketing efforts because I have my own website. If I sold on Etsy I wouldn’t be able to give people one-click access to my social media accounts, blog and newsletter. It’s extremely important to have a site that lends itself to these types of secondary conversions, so that you can get sales from late stage buyers later, after they’ve become more familiar with your brand or arrived at an occasion that necessitates a purchase.
Additional Reading: Tracking the Value of Your Marketing Efforts
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July 2, 2010
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:
This content is copyrighted. See my content sharing policy here.
July 1, 2010
Many of my readers on Smaller Box are artists/designers who are trying to become successful business owners. I see a lot of frustration from readers because sales aren’t where they’d like them to be. I relate to this because my creative business started out the same way.
Last year, things changed for my creative business and they changed dramatically. We stopped thinking like artists and we started thinking like business people. Here’s what we did differently:
1. We outsourced production and fulfillment so we could focus on product design and marketing.
2. We invested in our business — both time and money. We paid for advertising. We dedicated time to devising an organized PR strategy and executed it ourselves. We took the time to really educate ourselves about online marketing (SEO, affiliate programs, Google Products, etc.) and developed and executed a strategy for that.
3. Most importantly, we started designing what people wanted to buy. We abandoned our own notions of good taste and personal preference and started paying more attention to what was popular. We put out some work that wasn’t really our taste, but it sold and it sold well.
As a result, we went from shipping a few items each week to shipping several orders every single day. We sold over $25,000 in product last year and more than doubled sales this year. Starting next year, my partner will be leaving his day job to manage our ecommerce business full-time. Our site traffic has also more than tripled.
My point is this: you have to really ask yourself “Do I want to be in business, or do I want to create?” There isn’t a right or wrong answer to this, but the answer should dictate your direction with your venture in selling your creations online.
So you wanna be creative…
If your primary goal is to create and you hope that money will follow, be prepared to accept that there is every chance it won’t. You can make the things that you think are most innovative and most beautiful and most interesting, but there may not be a large market for it.
If you’re in it to follow a passion, don’t fret so much about sales and marketing. In fact, you probably don’t even want to read this blog. There are better blogs out there about design and art and following your passion. I’m writing this blog based on my experiences and I’m not in the “make art” camp.
This isn’t meant as a criticism of the “make art” path. I’m just trying to be up front about the differences between valuing your artistic integrity and pursing a money-making venture.
So you wanna be in business…
Hey cool, just like me; high five. If you really want to run a profitable business, forget about trying to stick a square peg in a round hole. If what you’re trying to sell isn’t selling, sell something else. Stop trying to find a market for something that isn’t selling well. Instead, find a market that buys stuff and make what they want to buy. This may mean changing your creative style, this may mean changing your product line.
Stop being cheap. If running a business was cheap or free everyone would do it. You can’t expect to grow a business with zero budget. Invest in things that can help your business grow. If you’ve got no site traffic, pay for some advertising. If your web design sucks, hire a professional designer. If you can’t make a press list or write a media pitch to save your life, pay someone to help you. Pay for good-looking business cards that don’t have the printer’s logo on them. Invest in promotional items that reinforce your branding.
Accept that you’re going to have to do some boring crap. Things like internet marketing and accounting can be very tedious. Online marketing can be extremely technical and somewhat intimidating. It’s definitely more fun to hang out on artisan forums and complain about how the universe hates you because you only sold 5 things this month. Reading about 301 redirects is much less immediately satisfying. That said, the boring stuff is what’s going to grow your business and make you money.
Finding a happy medium…
My rant above may have left you with the impression that I’m all about profit margins and soulless-ness. It’s not a totally fair representation. I’m still in a creative business and we still design 100% of our products by hand. We can’t help but infuse some of our own style into what we do because we’re the ones creating. What we try to do each day is find a happy medium between what we love and what we know sells, and sometimes we do a bit of both.
If you’re in it to make money, I’m not saying you have to abandon all of your creative integrity and spend all of your time doing boring business-y stuff. I’m saying you may have to learn to compromise with your design sense and invest the time and money in getting your truly marketable products out there.
This article is bunk, I do what I love and it’s selling like hotcakes!
First of all, congrats! That’s awesome. Second of all, be prepared for that to not always be the case. Trends change and even the most successful artists can be left in the dust when public taste changes direction. To be a successful commercial artist, it’s important to be adaptable and update your product offerings and aesthetic sense with the times.Another point is this: if you’re selling a ton of product now, and you’re not doing any marketing, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do any marketing. Chances are more marketing for an already successful line will lead to a massive increase in revenue. If you’re in it to make money, this is the goal, right? |
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