As we are all cautiously optimistic about the prospects for 2011, Marketsmith thinks it is a good time for merchants to review current operations and look for some low hanging fruit to support growth in the first half of 2011.
- Make sure your website is functioning on all cylinders – in a recent audit of a client’s website, we discovered there were 107,446 broken link. These errors slowed down page loads, resulted in product pictures not appearing or in visitors hitting a dead end on the site, all of which can lower overall conversion rates.
- Add a new email strategy to your mix – By segmenting customer purchase history and behaviors according to our proprietary model, which we call onboarding, we were able to move one time buyers up to two time buyers and increase overall response by over 20% for a client.
- Look at how your paid search words are performing down to a contribution level – When keywords are evaluated on a contribution level not just a return on advertising sales, it becomes clear very quickly which ones are truly profitable, which ones are necessary and which ones should be abandoned.
- Beef up downstream marketing efforts – Look at your customer touchpoints and see where you are losing interest and/or response. Use retargeting, explore sweepstakes through Facebook pages, do a customer survey to find out how your Brand communications are perceived.
- Perform a competitive shipping analysis – Make sure your shipping prices and policies are in line with those of your competitors. But also make sure that your pricing and policies are consistent with your business objectives. It is important to evaluate the potential loss of sales with loss of contribution.
Marketsmith has specific analyses and processes using all of the above strategies to increase revenues and improve bottom line performance for our clients. Call us today to help you identify and take advantage of that low hanging fruit.
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