Good web design implies more than just having an attractive website.  For that matter, a good pay-per-click campaign may get visitors to your website the first time. But will those visitors have a reason to become loyal to your website and return over and over again?

High-quality, professional web design means having a site that is not only attractive, but also creates and maintains loyal visitors and customers.  Inexperienced web designers frequently overlook this important aspect of good web design in a desperate effort to simply get website traffic.

Here are five ways to leverage good web design to create and maintain a high level of customer loyalty to your website and your business.

1. Good web design should make it easy for your customers to complain.  That’s right! A skilled, marketing-oriented web designer should make it easy for visitors to your website (prospects and current customers) to tell you what they don’t like about your site or your business.  Why?  Because up to 96% of dissatisfied customers will never complain. They will simply not buy from you again.

Fortunately, you can salvage a large percentage of these unhappy, but valuable customers if you make it super-easy for them to voice their complaints.  Your website can be the perfect place to give them this opportunity. If you conscientiously follow-up on each complaint in a professional, timely manner you will bring many of those unhappy customers back into the fold.  Plus, you’ll save your business the high cost of creating new customers to replace them.

Granted, no business owner likes to hear bad news – especially from customers.  Unfortunately, web designers who aren’t keenly focused on “marketing” their client’s business ever mention the importance of capturing customer complaints.  But you’ll find that even the unhappiest of customers will genuinely appreciate a super-easy way to voice their complaint – even more so if you respond to the complaint in a positive way.  It is a proven fact that as many as 95% of dissatisfied customers will actually become more loyal to your business if you make a sincere effort to make them happy again.

2. Good web design should include a way to gather feedback on the website at as many “touch points” as possible.  Did you know that one customer in four becomes dissatisfied with some aspect of a typical website experience or online transaction? But what’s worse is that a single dissatisfied customer tells 10 to 20 others about their experience online.

If the website designer builds in multiple opportunities on your website to collect customer feedback you will likely see the number of return visits soar.  Moreover, teturn visits are a reliable measure of online customer loyalty that eventually translates into more online conversions (sales).

3. Good web design should make it easier to know who your customers are.  This is another area where a lack of marketing focus among many website design companies can cost website owners loads of new business.  A good online marketer knows that there are basically three types of customers: 1) “Satisfied” customers (those who purchase and receive value for a good or service); 2) “Captive” customers (those who purchase a produce or service not available elsewhere); and 3) “Loyal” customers (those who will purchase a product or service over and over with little regard for competing offers).

A professional, marketing-focused web design should always include multiple opportunities to collect information about customers.  This helps the website owner know more about his or her customers and prospects which will ultimately reduce the overall cost of marketing to them over time.

4. Good web design should recognize the value of good information.  Visitors to your website always have a reason for being there – whether they remain there for 5 seconds or half an hour.  Usually what online visitors are looking for is information.  The web designer must always keep this in mind if the goal is to promote customer loyalty. A good website should be designed to deliver high-quality information about a product or service easily and with as few mouse clicks and scrolling as possible.

Finally, genuinely good information on a website loses its value if the web designer fails to properly organize it in a way that is easily consumable by the visitor.  It is true that online visitors do not “websites”, they “scan” them for points that are the most relevant to their needs.  If a relevant point is found only then will the visitor actually “read” the website content as if reading a book.

5. Good web design should translate your company’s overall theme to your website.  All too often web designers fail to set the proper theme for a business online.  This is even more common with smaller businesses that attempt to build their own website without the assistance of a good online marketer.  A theme can be set with a well thought out “credo” that is succinct, clear, and descriptive of the company’s mission.

A theme can also be set with a compelling tag line or slogan.  Can you guess the company that uses the tag line “Absolutely, positively, overnight.”  Probably 95% of adults on the street would recognize this slogan from Federal Express (FedEx).

Whatever a company’s theme, the web designer should make sure that it is carried across to its online marketing strategy (which includes the website, email marketing, social media, etc.).  This is important to avoid any chance that the company’s message will cause confusion among its target market.  Commissioning a website that has no relevance to a company’s overall marketing theme becomes a hindrance rather than a help to reaching the company’s business goals.

Mel Cooper, President, MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc.

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based online marketing agency and website design firm.

For more information about Search Engine Marketing please call us at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/
http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com
http://cgmsearchmarketing.com
http://melcooper.com

Mel Cooper - MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc.

Our company often gets calls from prospective clients who tell us they have had very poor experiences with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising programs such as Google Adwords. Those with the most painful experiences don’t even want to talk about the hundreds, even thousands of dollars they’ve poured into Google’s bank account. What these prospective clients don’t know is why their PPC ad campaigns were so costly and ineffective at driving traffic to their websites. In many cases it only takes one visit to a client’s website for us to understand why the business failed to generate a positive return on their PPC advertising investment.

One reason why PPC ad campaigns appear to fail is because many clients (as well as many web designers) do not understand the direct relationship between the effectiveness of Google Adwords and the quality of the web design at the company’s website. Since most all forms of online advertising are focused on driving traffic to a company’s website it is there that revenue-generating actions take place.

The purpose of good web design is to lead visitors to perform desired actions that generate revenue for the client. If the website fails to do this even after the client has paid Google for the traffic then it’s easy to blame Google Adwords for the poor performance. The statistics generated by Adwords for a campaign, however, may tell a different story. More often than not, we are able to pin-point the weak link in the online advertising strategy as being the lack of good web design.

What is Good Web Design
and How Do We Know?

So, what is good web design and how do we know what works best when coupled with Google Adwords? The short answer to this question is experience. If you found this article as a result of a paid search listing then our experience and skill at delivering this information to you using Google Adwords probably speaks for itself. Now, whether you perform an action that ultimately generates revenue for our company is not something we can predict with certainty (no one can!). But if we’ve presented enough compelling information to you that convinces you to call us, fill out one of our web forms, or bookmark our site for a return visit later on then we figure we’re on your “short list”.   There’s a chance you will consider us as your provider of online marketing services to your company.

On the other hand, if we haven’t delivered good, valuable, and compelling information to you in an easy-to-understand way then you probably won’t consider our company any further. If the statistics we collect from Adwords and elsewhere about our site tell us that is happening too often then we carefully test new ways to become more relevant, compelling, and valuable to visitors. Eventually, the conversions start to trend back up, more revenue is generated, and we continue to add more high-quality content to the site. In the meantime, our search ranking continues to rise with the regular addition of newer and better content that is designed to effectively communicate to our visitors.

Good Web Design Should Never
Be on “Auto-Pilot”

Good web design practices must be incorporated into any website to generate conversions from paid traffic. But good web design involves making sure that the site does not appear to be on “auto-pilot” that is, appear as though it is never updated with fresh information. There are two very specific reasons why this is true. First, Google awards a website with a “Quality Score” that influences the actual price you will pay when competing for keywords in Adwords. In short, this Quality Score is a reflection of your site’s relevancy to the keyword(s) you’re bidding on.

A low Quality Score for your website, for example, would likely cause you to pay more for a relevant keyword than you would if your site had a high Quality Score. So, it definitely pays to keep your website design fresh and updated up to maintain a high Quality Score.

The second reason why your website should never be on “auto-pilot” is because paid visitors are turned off by what appears to be outdated information. They are all looking for the most recent information available on a topic and have little patience for “yesterday’s news”.   They will simply click away. Unfortunately, by this time you have already paid for the traffic and have no chance for a conversion.

Summary

There is no substitute for good web design at a company’s website. Good website design compliments PPC advertising campaigns by taking your paid traffic and converting a high enough percentage of those visitors to pay for the campaign. Good web design, however, is not static no “design it and forget it” because online competition for your customers gets more fierce every day. Keeping your site’s design fresh and compelling on an ongoing basis is the price of success in the competitive online marketplace.

_____________________________

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc.  Headquartered in Montgomery, AL, MELCOOPER is an online marketing and website design firm.

For more information about the company’s search marketing and web design services please call 1-877-898-3957 or email Mel Cooper at mel@melcopoer.com.

You are welcomed to visit the company’s websites at:

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

http://web-design-montgomery.com

http://melcooper.com

Search Engine Marketing

But first, what is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is the strategy of making your company’s website highly prominent so that users can more easily find the products or services that your business offers.

Website prominence is reflected in your website’s Search Engine Ranking, or SER. SER, in turn, is determined by several key factors — all of which reflect the degree of relevancy of your website’s content to certain keywords. Your target customers use keywords in online search engines to find products or services they want to acquire from you.

Website Prominence
–> is measured by Search Engine Ranking
–> which is determined by a website’s Relevancy
–> to Keywords in the website’s content that describe your products or services.

Generally speaking, a highly prominent website yields high website traffic.

Unfortunately, keyword relevance is a highly competitive commodity when marketing your business online using a website. For that reason your website’s prominence which is reflected in its search ranking is not something that just happens. Achieving and maintaining a high search ranking requires constant focus on:

• Search rankings for competitors and how they achieved them;
• Changes in keyword search patterns used by your target customers;
• The level of website authority relative to the products or services you offer;
• The level of content quality and relevancy at your website; and
• The frequency of adding fresh, high-quality content to your website.

Paid Search Marketing vs. Organic Search Marketing

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Paid search marketing, more commonly referred to as “pay-per-click” or “PPC” advertising, is a strategy whereby you “bid” on one or more keywords relevant to your products or services. A bid that’s high enough will enable you place a small ad featuring a link to your website on the all-important first page of a search. Your PPC ad will appear when someone uses one of the keywords you bid on in a search.

Pay-Per-Click advertising works like this:

1. You open an account with a search engine company with which you want to place your ads. This is like selecting, say, The Wall Street Journal as the media where you want your ad to appear. But that is where the similarity ends.Currently there are three PPC media where you can run PPC ads: Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (Microsoft). Since Google presently owns about 70% of the online search market that’s the one MELCOOPER Consulting focuses on with its clients most frequently.
2. You establish a “budget” for your PPC ad campaign using a major credit card. Your budget places an approximate cap on how much your online advertising will cost you per day.
3. You bid on keywords that prospective customers will likely use to find your business online. This requires thorough keyword researech to avoid bidding on costly, unproductive keywords. The bid price is determined by how competitive the bidding is for a specific keyword in order to assure a first-page ranking in a search result.
4. Next, you write one or more small ads that include a link back to your website. Writing good ads that sell is both a skill and a talent – not everyone can do it well. Assuming your keyword bids were adequate enough these small ads will appear on the first page of a search result when one or more of your keywords are used by a prospect.
5. Finally, you pay the search engine company the bid price of a keyword only when that keyword results in a “click-through” from your PPC to your website. Search engines do not charge you for appearing on the first page of a search result. They only charge you if a prospect “clicks” on your PPC ad and is taken to your website.For example, suppose you bid .75 cents on the keyword “blue widgets”. If someone uses that keyword in a search that results in that person clicking-through to your website you pay the search engine .75 cents for that “click-through”. The trick is to:

• Attract as much high-quality traffic as possible to your website;
• Pay as little as possible for those high-quality click-throughs;
• Avoid wasting money on “click-throughs” that do not bring high-quality prospects to your website.

But please boys and girls, DO NOT try this at home!

Now that I have explained how PPC advertising works it is almost too tempting for many businesses to try PPC advertising on their own.

Note: It is a matter of policy that my company absolutely does NOT recommend that our clients undertake a PPC advertising campaign on their own.

Most small businesses simply don’t have the time or experience needed to effectively leverage this advertising strategy without making very costly mistakes. They risk blowing their entire advertising budget in a only a few days instead of the three-month period they may have planned. Despite claims by Google, Yahoo! and Bing about how “easy” their PPC programs are what they’re really telling you is how “easy” it is for them to drain your advertising budget – really fast.

With that word of caution, PPC advertising can be an extremely cost-effective way of bringing highly-qualified prospects to your website. Most businesses, however, would be well-advised to seek professional help in order to avoid costly mistakes and maximize their return on investment of every dollar spent to pull traffic to their website.

Organic Search Marketing

Organic, or “natural” search marketing is the search ranking a website achieves by the very nature of its relevancy and value relative to specific keywords used in an online search. A high organic search ranking is not one that is “paid for” in the same way that one pays for position in a PPC campaign. A high organic search ranking also does not normally occur soon after a website is published to the Internet. In fact, achieving a high organic search ranking generally requires at least 3 to 6 months of intensive work to “earn” a prominent ranking on the first page of a search result.

While a high organic search ranking takes hard work and a great deal of patience to achieve, there is another advantage to organic search that makes it all worthwhile. That advantage is the fact that “click-throughs” from organic search listings “convert” at a rate approximately 30% more frequently than do paid search listings. In other words, a prospect who clicks-through on an organic search listing is 30% more likely to become a paying customer than if the prospect clicked-through on a paid listing.

Why You Should NotChoose One Type of Search Marketing Over the Other

We used to tell our clients that they should start out using a paid search (PPC) campaign while waiting for their website’s organic search ranking to reach the first page of a search result for our keywords. At that point they could end their PPC campaigns and concentrate on keeping their organic rankings. But now that the competition for “first-page” ranking is so intense we advise our clients to not choose one type of search over the other. The reason for this should be clear to any competent online marketer.

A search result page only has so many available positions for an ad to appear. On Google’s search result page, for example, there are:

• Up to 10 possible organic search positions;
• Up to 3 paid search positions just above the organic listings;
• Up to 10 more paid search positions on the right side of the results page.

In short, there are only a maximum of 23 possible positions in which your paid or organic listing can appear. Needless to say there is a LOT of competition for a limited amount of advertising real estate on Google’s first-page.

Because of the limited real estate on Google’s first page we encourage our clients to “crowd out” as much of the competition as possible. They do this by investing in both paid and organic search listings on the same first-page of a search result so that their website listing appears in both places on the page. This strategy has a powerful psychological effect on prospective customers by giving them the impression that your website is highly authoritative and relevant. This only increases the likelihood that they will visit your website and ultimately become a paying customer.

Think of the brand “Coke” and all the places you are exposed to that brand name. This kind of advertising leaves less room for competing brands such as “Pepsi” or “7-Up” to make an impression on customers.

Conclusion

Search Engine Marketing can bring new customers to your business by making your website as prominent as possible at the very moment that prospects are actively searching for the products or services your business offers. It is no secret that most forms of traditional advertising (print, broadcast, outdoor, and direct mail) account for a shrinking share of a typical company’s overall advertising budget. Conversely, expenditures on Search Engine Marketing account for an increasing share of the advertising budget pie for one obvious reason: The Internet is where most consumers are now going to make purchasing decisions.

* * * * * * * * * *

Mel Cooper

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based online marketing agency and website design firm.

For more information about Search Engine Marketing please call us at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

http://cgmsearchmarketing.com

http://melcooper.com/searchenginemarketing/index.html

Dump the Yellow Pages!

Why Yellow Page Advertising is No Longer a Safe Bet for Advertising

1. Fewer people are using the Yellow Pages to find a providers of products or services. Yellow Page advertising has gone from one of the best advertising mediums for businesses to one of the worst in only the last ten to fifteen years.   Why?  Well, ask yourself, when did you last use the Yellow Pages to find a service or product provider?
2. There are too many phone book choices. There are so many phone books offering “Yellow Page” advertising you don’t know which book is best. Fact is, most consumers keep only one book and send the others to the trash can.  Still others keep the old book and throw out the new ones.
3. Yellow Page advertising Return On Investment (ROI) is difficult to track. Justifying your Yellow Page advertising is not easy unless you have a consistent, systematic way of collecting information from prospective clients and customers about how they found you.   More often than not, you don’t have the time to put pencil to paper to track and calculate the return on investment from your Yellow Page advertising.   Many businesses continue their Yellow Page advertising year after year out of fear or frustration.
4. Yellow Page advertising rates increase every year for the exact same ads. There’s nothing fair about this kind of advertising. First of all, anything printed and delivered on paper is bound to get more expensive.  Second, phone book publishers have to make up for the legions of former advertisers who have already jumped ship by charging you even more.  And third, God help you if you reduce your commitment to Yellow Page advertising (no matter how long you’ve been an advertiser). You’ll be rewarded by having your new ad(s) appear at the END of the smallest ads.

Here’s Why You Should Replace Your Yellow Page Advertising With Online Paid Search

• Online paid search advertising is one big reason why Yellow Page advertising is no longer cost-effective. More commonly referred to as “pay-per-click” or “PPC” advertising, paid search advertising involves paying Google, Yahoo!, or MSN for the privilege of promoting your firm’s website on the all-important first page of a search result.
• PPC advertising can deliver highly-qualified, prospective clients right to your door. Pay-per-Click advertising can produce new business for a fraction of the cost of Yellow Page advertising. I often describe PPC advertising this way:  It’s like having a billboard at a high-traffic intersection and only paying a few dollars or cents for each prospect who contacts your law office as a direct result of seeing that ad. PPC advertising works because it drives qualified traffic to your website or landing page at very low cost compared to virtually any other form of advertising. How cool is that?
  
• PPC allows you to pay for advertising that can be easily tracked for effectiveness. You no longer have to pay for advertising “impressions” (exposures to an ad) up front or get locked into year-long commitments with no way of knowing whether those impressions will result in new business.  You only pay a few dollars or cents for each prospective client that your PPC advertising brings to your online front door (your website).  Plus, you get new clients at precisely the moment those people need specific products or  services.
• PPC advertising can be changed “on-the-fly”. Unlike Yellow Page advertising, if a mistake is made in a PPC ad it can be fixed in a matter of minutes.  If a specific PPC ad is not producing results it can be replaced altogether.  In fact, we constantly change PPC ads as part of our testing methodology to find out how we can squeeze the most traffic out of our highest-performing online advertising.

Here’s How to Get Started With PPC Advertising

1. You need a solid, well-designed website. PPC advertising gets your prospective clients to your “online front door”, but your website must be compelling enough to finish the job of “converting” the prospect into a revenue-generating client.  The ideal “conversion” would be for the website visitor to pick up the phone and call the attorney’s office for an appointment.  Or, a conversion might be for the visitor to complete an online web form describing the legal service they need.  Regardless of how much (or how little) you may have invested in your law company’s website you would be well advised to get an expert opinion about its effectiveness in a search marketing strategy.   Hire a professional online search marketer to give you an appraisal of your site backed up with a written analysis and suggestions for improvement (if any).
2. You WILL need professional help setting up your PPC advertising campaigns. Here again, go with a good online marketer who has experience with PPC advertising who can help you get your campaigns started.  Anyone who says setting up a paid search campaign is easy probably hasn’t executed one before.  PPC advertising is actually a very complicated strategy that can cause an amateur to blow through an entire ad budget REALLY FAST with no conversions to show for it.  Always remember that Google and Yahoo! try to make their PPC programs sound so easy even a caveman can do it because it’s in their best interest to take as much of your money as possible – and as quickly as possible.
3. Focus your search strategy on “keywords” that prospective clients are actually using. A good PPC consultant will research and help you select the right keywords that are relevant to your specific law practice.  Finding the right keywords is actually an art unto itself – and is often misunderstood by businesses.  The keywords that you might think a client would use to find his practice online may not be the keywords that prospective clients are using online.  Good keyword research uncovers the keywords that are actually being used in order to maximize the effectiveness of the search advertising.
4. Finding the right keywords is only part of a successful search marketing strategy. A successful search marketing strategy requires good keyword research.  But keywords must be combined with attention-getting PPC ads and highly-relevant, compelling content at your website for any search strategy to produce a good ROI.  Your PPC consultant can help you develop one or more PPC “campaigns” that include all three elements to achieve the high-ranking search results you want to achieve.

What You Can Expect From an Effective PPC Campaign

• Your PPC strategy should get your advertising on the first page of a search. Once you and your PPC consultant have decided on the list of relevant keywords to focus on, you’ve bid on those keywords appropriately, written the text ads for each PPC campaign, and optimized your website or landing pages for those keywords it’s then time to run the ads.  This is probably the only easy part of the whole process since it requires a simple mouse click.  If you have bid correctly on your keywords your PPC ads will appear on the first page of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) within a few minutes.  It’s that fast!
• Your PPC consultant must monitor the performance of your PPC campaign(s). Among other things the consultant looks at CTR (Click-Through-Rate, or the number of times a user “clicks-through” to your firm’s website) relative to the number of times the ad is actually displayed on a search page (the number of “impressions”). Click-throughs are how prospective clients are driven to your firm’s website.
• The goal of PPC is to get users to click-through from you PPC ads to your firm’s website. Your website is where conversions will take place. However, a high CTR can potentially be be a bad thing (i.e. expensive!) if your consultant does not know how to interpret the statistics generated by the campaigns.  All the more reason why you should let a pro help you get started.

Conclusion

Search marketing is quickly becoming a very popular way for businesses to market their practices in a highly cost-effective manner – especially compared to Yellow Page advertising.  Now is the time to start moving your Yellow Page ad dollars over to search marketing and become much more competitive in the legal services marketplace.

Mel Cooper

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based online marketing agency and website design firm.

For more information about Search Engine Marketing please call us at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

http://cgmsearchmarketing.com

http://melcooper.com

Don't waste money on your website!

The Cost of a Website Is NOT the Total Cost of Online Marketing

Our company often gets calls that go something like this:

• Caller: “Hello, I’d like to know what you charge to do a website…”
  
• Us: “What is your budget for a new website?”
  
• Caller: “Well, we really don’t have a budget yet.  What do you charge for a ‘simple’ website?”
  
• Us: “I’m sorry, but we need to know more about your business before we can talk about price.  How much does your company normally spend on advertising annually and who is your target market? (If the caller has a new business we ask how much they are planning to spend for advertising during the first year.)
• Caller: “Well, we spend (or are planning to spend) about $__________ a month for (Yellow Page advertising, radio, TV, print ads, etc.).

It’s at this point that we explain to the caller what we refer to as the “Online Marketing Facts of Life”.  This is basically a collection of facts that accurately reflect the current compeititve marketplace that the Internet has now become.  If a business owner thoroughly understands these facts it could potentially save his or her company a lot of time, money, aggravation, and disappointment.

Here are the “Facts” that every business should understand before investing in a website:

The “Online Marketing Facts of Life”

Fact #1: Your business’ website is not a Yellow Page advertisement.  Unlike a Yellow Page ad your website exists within a virtual sea of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of similar businesses — all of which are competing for your customers.  And unlike a Yellow Page ad your website is dynamic (that is, it should change often).

Fact #2: Whether your website get’s noticed in this sea of competitors is determined by one thing:  keyword prominence.  If your customers search online using a keyword that is both popular and relevant to the products and/or services that you offer — and your search ranking for that keyword puts your business on the first page of a search result — then your chances of selling to those customers is high.  Conversely, if your website does not appear on the first page of a search result for a popular and relevant keyword then your chances for success are much, much lower.

Fact #3: Getting your website on the first page of a search result for a popular, relevant keyword doesn’t just happen.  It requires hard work -  work that many of your competitors are more than willing to do to drive you out of business.  Most companies retain a talented search engine marketer who knows how to optimize your website to achieve the keyword prominence that your business needs to be successful online.

Fact #4: Search engine marketing is like any other form of advertising.  Stop it and business eventually dries up.

Fact #5: Hide your head in the sand while “waiting for this whole Internet craze to blow over” will only get you one thing:  “Out of business (eventually)!  A LOT of money is being made by online businesses as well as traditional brick-and-mortar stores that are leveraging the most powerful marketing medium business has ever seen.  Ignore the rewards of online marketing at your own risk!

Why You May Want to Wait Before Buying a Website

Now, back to our caller who wants to know “how much do you charge for a ‘simple’ website”.  By the time we’re finished with the call we have either:

1. Persuaded the caller to hold on to their money until they’re ready to invest in online marketing (of which a website is a part), or
2. We proceed with more questions about the caller’s business in an effort to further qualify the prospect and come up with the best, and most cost-effective strategy for marketing their business online.

More often than not we wind up persuading such callers to hold on to their money if they are not willing to invest at least $2500.00 during the first year to reach their customers online — and that’s a bare-bones minimum investment.  Admittedly, this is a hard thing for us to do, but we simply prefer not to take a client’s money if we know there is little chance that the site will earn a decent return on investment for them — or for us.

Now, it is never our intent to skirt the issue of the cost of our web design services when people ask.  The truth is, when we speak to a prospect for the very first time we really don’t know what a website will cost because every site we design and build is different.  But as I’ve said we gently discourage a lot of prospects from buying a website until they understand the true cost of staying competitive with online marketing.  Many call us back with this renewed understanding and are willing to invest in an online marketing solution that will give them the best possible chances for success.

Summary

There is a virtual graveyard on the Internet where poorly-funded and poorly-designed websites go to die a slow death.  They are all alone and no one visits them.  Many of these websites are owned by businesses that were sold on the promise of online success for the “low, low price of only $199.00″ — or some other equally unreasonable claim.  Online success at a bargain basement price may have been possible ten years ago, but it definitely is not the case today.  The competition is greater, the rewards are MUCH higher, and the technology behind a successful online marketing strategy is vastly more sophisticated.

Mel Cooper

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc. , an online marketing agency and website design firm.  These companies serve Montgomery, Alabama; Birmingham, Alabama; and the Florida panhandle.

For more information about our Web Design and Search Engine Marketing services please call us toll-free at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/
http://melcooper.com/
http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

One of the the main reasons why consumers (or anyone for that matter) visit websites is to consume information.  If a consumer is in the market for a car, a house, a washing machine, or a blue widget he or she performs website searches over 80% of the time before making an actual purchase.  A college student or business manager may visit websites to conduct important research on a particular topic for academic or commercial reasons.  In all those cases the primary goal is to find information that is

1. Relevant to the topic of interest.;
2. Valuable to the user searching for the information;
3. Original to the degree that the information cannot likely be found in exactly the same form anywhere else.  That is, the information is not merely a copy of that which can easily be found elsewhere online.

If information on a website meets the three basic criteria of relevancy. value, and originality then the website will likely attract many times more visitors than a site that meets none or even just one or two of those criteria.  Every time a user visits a website he or she essentially casts a vote on how well (or how poorly) the site has delivered relevant, valuable, and original information to them.  But there is another, more critical decision-maker involved in determining the quality of the information on a website and whether users will be able to easily find the site when performing an online search.

Search Engines Determine the Ultimate Success of a Website

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! send out “bots”, or software “agents”, to constantly visit millions of websites that are published on the Internet.  The mission of these software bots is to determine the quality of the information on each of those sites.  Websites containing very poor quality information generally receive low search engine rankings – which translates into low website traffic.  Conversely,  web designs that deliver very high quality information (based on the three criteria previously mentioned) receive much higher search engine rankings.  High search rankings generally result in higher website traffic.

How these search engine bots perform the task of ranking websites involves extremely complex mathematical algorithms, or rules, with the sole objective being to deliver the most relevant, valuable, and original search results whenever a user performs an online search.

Here’s an example of how and why search engines from Google or Yahoo! rank websites.  Suppose you’re using Google to search  for information about the latest advances in stem cell research.  You might use the keywords “latest stem cell research” as part of your keyword search.  You would then expect Google to deliver the most relevant, valuable, and original information about subject of stem cell research on the first page of the search results.

In our example, if Google fails to deliver the highest quality information on the subject of “stem cell research” on the first page you might be disappointed because you would then have to work harder to find better quality information.  If this became a pattern with future searches you might eventually stop using Google and start using another search engine.  Google’s reputation would be damaged and it would soon no longer be able to sell online advertising to it’s customers who depend on Google’s ability to deliver highly relevant search results.

Delivering high quality search results is why search engines like Google constantly “crawl” and index websites. These search engines are constantly searching for the most relevant, valuable, and original information on any given topic.  Websites with the highest quality information are rewarded with high search page rankings while sites with poor quality information become virtually “invisible” to users of search engines.

Conclusion

A business that treats its website like a Yellow Page advertisement and makes no investment in delivering high quality information on the site should not expect to compete well in search engine rankings.  At best, such a business would have to pay premium prices for paid online advertising since their site would never likely achieve a high ranking naturally without paying for rank.  On the other hand, good web design including high quality information that meets the three essential criteria of relevancy, value, and originality stands a much better chance of achieving naturally high search rankings.  High rankings, in turn, lead to much higher website traffic compared to sites containing low quality information.

Mel Cooper

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based online marketing agency and website design firm.

For more information about Search Engine Marketing please call us at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/ 

http://melcooper.com/

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based online marketing agency and website design firm.

It’s a fact that every business has customers who complain about something.   A (very) small percentage of unhappy customers are chronic complainers who have nothing else to do but make life miserable for a business owner.   These customers should be encouraged to buy elsewhere.   The rest of those unhappy customers, however, represent golden opportunities for cementing long‐lasting relationships. Giving customers an easy way to complain via a business’ website can be one of the most effective ways to keep loyal customers.   Here’s how you can do that relatively easily.

How to Capture Customer Complaints Online

Offering customers a way to vent their dissatisfaction about a product, service, the way that a transaction was handled, or whatever can be as easy as creating a properly designed web form on the website.   This form should be reserved just for complaints, comments, and suggestions.  It should appear on the Contact Us page of the website where you would expect someone to find it.  When a customer submits a form it should be sent to a specific person with some authority in the business and who has clear instructions to handle those emails without delay (within, say, 24 hours).  Even better, the name of that person should be listed below the form and include a phone number.

The “complaints/comments/suggestion” web form should trigger an automatic reply email.  This email (also referred to as an “auto‐responder”) should assure the customer that the email has been received.   It should also assure the customer that the issue will be handled within a specific time period unless otherwise notified and include a phone number if too much time passes without a response from the company.

The Importance of Promoting an Invitation to Complain

The web form should be promoted both online and offline.   Customers need to know where they can complain – otherwise, the business defeats the whole purpose of having the web form in the first place.   If the complaint form is buried deep in the website then customers will get the idea that the business is really not serious about hearing complaints.   If the business has the attitude that every complaint represents an opportunity to deepen a customer relationship and improve the business overall then the idea of inviting complaints shouldn’t be hard to do.

The Benefits of Inviting Complaints on the Website

Inviting customers to submit their complaints on the business’ website has several important benefits.

1. Giving customers the opportunity to complain on the website is easy and relatively nonthreatening.  Up to 96% of dissatisfied customers will never complain – mostly because they want to avoid an unpleasant confrontation. These customers will simply buy what they need someplace else. The website can enable a business to recapture as many as 95% of those dissatisfied customers and subsequently deepen the relationship.
    
2. Offering customers a way to voice their complaints is a good thing.  Hopefully, you can get problems resolved quickly and is far better than having them post complaints on public micro‐blogs such as Twitter or on reviews websites such as Yelp for all the world to see. In the end, unhappy customers just want to get their complaints resolved fairly without making a Federal case out of it.   As ubiquitous as social networking blogs are these days it is to the business’ advantage to offer an easy, efficient way of resolving complaints through its own website than through a thirdparty online channel.
    
3. Openly inviting complaints inspires confidence with customers – even the happy ones.  Website visitors, in particular, have fewer reservations about a company when it’s clear the company wants to hear from satisfied customers as well as dissatisfied customers in order to serve them better.
    
4. Information received electronically from an online customer complaint form is easy to store, forward, analyze, process, and resolve. Electronic information reduces administrative costs and speeds problem resolution which, in turn, increases the likelihood of creating loyal customers.
    
5. An web form on a company’s website offers the customer a structure for communicating his or her dissatisfaction. Instead of having the customer send a rambling, free‐form email to a company email address, the web form provides some degree of order so that all of the pertinent information needed to resolve the issue is submitted.Fields on the web form should include, at minimum, the customer’s first name, last name, daytime phone number, home phone number, full mailing address, email address, and a multi‐line “comment” field for briefly describing the issue or complaint. The comment field should be limited to no more than 200‐300 words (about 1000‐1500 characters) to enforce brevity. An optional field for uploading supporting documents should be considered.

Conclusion

Businesses that leverage their websites (and other online media) to invite comments and complaints from dissatisfied customers recognize that customers have more power than ever to determine their continued viability in the marketplace.  Poor customer experiences can be communicated at the speed of the Internet and can significantly impact the reputation of a business.  Find creative ways to openly encourage the communication of complaints to turn unhappy customers into loyal customers — usually at a fraction of the cost of acquiring a brand new customer, or worse, rebuilding a reputation.

This article was authored by Mel Cooper,
founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President
of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery,
Alabama-based online marketing agency and
website design firm.

For more information about web design and development please visit the company’s websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com 

http://melcooper.com.

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

Technology has now made it possible for even the smallest retailers to build stronger, more loyal customer relationships that result in higher in-store traffic and more profitable sales.  One such technology is permission-based email marketing.  Email marketing can not only dramatically reduce the cost of touching retail store customers and prospects, but it can also enable the retailer to deliver compelling, “rich-media” content in ways that are impossible to do with traditional direct mail.  Furthermore, email marketing enables retailers to quickly and cost-effectively satisfy their customers’ desire for useful information and ultimately deepen relationships that drive in-store traffic.

Using Email to Build Loyal Relationships

According to the Journal of Product & Brand Management (2004) it is a fact that email marketing has a positive impact on brand loyalty.  Email-activated consumers tend to express their brand preference by visiting retail stores – the “brand” often being the store itself.  Absent any unsatisfactory customer experiences with the retailer, consumers make purchases from businesses with whom they are at least familiar.  Email marketing, like other forms of advertising, serves to cultivate familiarity and loyalty with the retail store, but at a much lower cost per sale compared to traditional direct mail and other forms of advertising.

Loyalty is further deepened when consumers are exposed to regular email communications.  Retailers should conduct email marketing campaigns no less frequently than once every three months.  Ideally, a retailer should execute a campaign once every six weeks to avoid being forgotten.  Sending email more frequently than one time per month, however, carries the risk of  annoying customers unless the email contains information that would be perceived as being exceptionally relevant or compelling.

Consumers are more likely to become repeat customers when they are exposed to regular “touches” using marketing devices such as email communications. This is significant since repeat customers spend, on average, about 67% more than first-time customers according to a study conducted in 2002 by Bain and Company.  Furthermore, by the time a repeat customer has made ten purchases he or she has referred as many as seven people to the business.

A regular email marketing strategy has been shown to bring customers back into the store more frequently for two reasons.  First, a well-written email can be seen as being a more personal method of communicating with the customer compared to other forms of traditional advertising including direct mail.  Second, an email is an implicit (or explicit) reminder to the customer that the retailer has something that will improve the customer’s life in some way.  The more often and more personal the reminder the more frequently the consumer will likely visit the store.

Email marketing increases customer loyalty because – contrary to popular belief – 67% of consumers appreciate regular, well-executed email marketing communications from retailers (according to Emarketer).  As long as the email content is perceived by the consumer as being relevant, entertaining, or valuable it will likely be appreciated.  Retailers enhance customer loyalty when they routinely provide information that reduces their customers’ efforts to search for relevant information.  Ultimately, loyal customers view email as being an effective way to stay in touch with the retailer and to stay abreast of new products or services.

How to Build an Email Marketing List

The key to any email marketing campaign is the quality of the email list.  We recommend that a list should NEVER be purchased since it is often difficult to know the true quality of the email addresses being purchased.  This is true even for lists that guarantee only so-called “opt-in” addresses.  A purchased list almost guarantees that someone who receives the email will consider it to be SPAM and ruin any positive impression that they might have had about the business.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways that a retailer can build a profitable, high-quality list for use in email marketing campaigns.  The easiest way to start building a list is at the point of sale.  Every customer should be invited to join the store’s “Preferred Customer Club” or whatever you wish to call your customer loyalty program.  Admittance to the “club” would require the customer to complete a brief form that includes an email address whenever possible.

Retailers can build high quality email lists at networking events such as chamber of commerce functions.  Asking for business cards at such events that include the person’s email address is a perfectly legitimate way of adding to a store’s email database.  Time should be set aside to key those addresses into the database so that they are available for the next email campaign.

In-store events offer an excellent opportunity to collect email addresses from highly qualified customers.  Registrations for admittance, door prizes, and other give-aways should always include a request for an email address.  Once the email addresses are collected and entered into the store database a “thank-you” email should be sent to the list to confirm the accuracy of each address.

Retailers should always give visitors to the store website a way to sign up for newsletters, discount coupons, gift certificates, downloadable “how-to” guides, and more.  This can be easily accomplished with a simple web form located above the fold on the site’s home page.  We recommend an online web form services by FormLogix and Caspio that make building web forms a snap.  In addition, FormLogix provides a secure online database to eliminate the need for the retailer to re-key submitted names and email addresses into a separate database.

The Cost-Effectiveness of Using Email Marketing to Build In-Store Traffic

Email marketing has changed the economics of marketing and made relationship marketing more viable for small businesses.  Even if production (design, copywriting, database maintenance) of the campaign is outsourced to an email marketing company such as MELCOOPER, the retail merchant avoids the high variable costs of postage, printing, paper, and delivery to the Post Office.  After allowing for any fixed costs of campaign production (whether performed in-house or outsourced), the cost of sending each additional email is virtually zero.

While email marketing helps retailers avoid the high variable costs associated with direct mail, this marketing tool can also offer measurable results in a few minutes or hours instead of costly days or weeks with direct mail.   The retailer can receive virtually instant reports on the effectiveness of the email campaign campaign as soon as it is executed.   Such reports can include who opened the email, who clicked from the email back to the store website to get more information, which emails bounced back due to invalid addresses, who forwarded the email to someone else, and much more.

Near instantaneous reporting allows a retailer to test headlines, calls to action, and other elements in an email marketing message in far less time – and for a tiny fraction of the cost – compared to traditional direct mail.  More importantly, immediate results help the retailer understand with a high degree of precision what offers are appealing to customers and which are not.  This information can have a direct bearing on building in-store traffic when the retailer understands exactly what motivates customers to visit the store at any give time.

Summary

Email marketing enables a retailer to proactively communicate with existing customers or prospects instead of passively waiting for them to return to the brick-and-mortar store.  But not only is email marketing a proactive communication medium, it is one that offers the significant cost advantages inherent in sending email over the Internet.  And finally, affordable email marketing management tools such as Constant Contact enable even small retailers to understand in near real-time what motivates customers to visit the store and make a purchase.

This article was written by Mel Cooper, President of MELCOOPER
Consulting, Inc.  MELCOOPER is an online marketing and web design
consultancy based in Montgomery, Alabama USA. Copyright 2009
MELCOOPER.

For more information about Online Marketing Strategies for Retail
Stores and Services please visit the company’s website at
http://melcooper.com/emailmarketing

1.  Invest valuable time and money in a website and then ignore its potential for business building.

Too often small retailers think that investing in a website is like “checking off a box”.  Once it’s done there’s no need to bother any further.  And what a mistake this is for retailers who struggle to stay competitive and keep customers coming into their stores.  A properly maintained website can have huge potential benefits that build customer loyalty and attract new business.

Suppose your store carries “blue widgets”.  A prospect looking for a local (or maybe not so local) retailer who carries blue widgets is more likely to shop the Internet for them – which should be no surprise to the slowing dying Yellow Page phone book business.  How high your store’s website is ranked by Google or Yahoo! is determined in part by how frequently your store’s website has been updated with new content (text, graphics, video, audio, etc.).  A site that has gone untouched for a year or so will usually result in a low search engine ranking (SER).

A second point to consider is that consumers who research purchases online are naturally drawn to sites that are fresh and up-to-date.  Such sites send the message that the retailer is anxious to offer an up-to-date, online channel of communication to customers.  A poorly maintained site sends a  far less favorable marketing message to potential customers and accounts for a high opportunity cost in missed sales for the retailer.

2.  Accept “lazy” performance from your website.

Many retail merchants make the mistake of expecting very little from their online marketing strategy where their website is concerned.  If they get a few hits a day from their website then they’re happy.  If they get a phone call a month from someone who saw their website they’re ecstatic!  The truth is that many retail store websites could probably do better – a LOT better!

So, how MUCH better could a typical retail store website perform for a retailer?  This is not as hard a question to answer as most web designers might have you think.  Web designers, after all,  are trained to create websites that are visually appealing.   That’s their job.  Online marketers, on the other hand, are trained to view sites from a marketing perspective and how well the information on the site produces “conversions”, or actions that lead to purchases (either online or offline).

Online marketers can employ sophisticated analytical tools that can tell them (and their retail client) which elements on a site are working and which are not. Furthermore, these tools can give a retail client a reasonable idea of what the potential is for their site based on the products and services that are being promoted on the site compared to the frequency of online searches for those products and services by consumers.

3.  The site lacks strong “calls to action” and compelling headlines.

One of the most important elements of most retail store websites is the “call to action”, or “CTA”.  A call to action is any element that directs an online visitor to perform a desired action.  In addition, an effective call to action element should be measurable to that you know what is working on your website and what is not working.

Call to action elements on a retail store website can have a number of forms.  A call to action element can be a button or link that triggers a sales video; a link or button that encourages a visitor to click “Next”, “Learn more”, “Continue”; or the ultimate online directive to “Buy Now”.  One of the most effective call to action elements is a web form that is combined with some form of compelling offer.

Headlines that are not universally understandable or don’t set expectations for what the online visitor should do next can result in poor website performance.  Good headlines should be compelling enough to naturally draw the reader to the next line of content on the page.  If it does not, then the headline fails and a conversion opportunity is likely missed.

4.  You don’t protect your intellectual property.

Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce. There are actually two types intellectual property:  Industrial and Copyright.

Original content on your website (content that you or someone in your business authored) falls into the Copyright category of intellectual property law.  Copyright law protects only the form of expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves.  The creativity protected by copyright law is creativity in the choice and arrangement of words, musical notes, colors and shapes.  So copyright law protects the owner of property rights against those who copy or otherwise take and use the form in which the original work was expressed by the author.

Copyrights on your website can extend to text, graphics, photographs, video files, audio files, and even programs in the coding of the website that were developed by you or your company.

5.  You use cheap or over-priced web hosting services.

Choosing a reliable web hosting service can be tricky unless you have access to a professional online marketer who has had some experience with a number of hosting services.  After all, it is in the marketer’s best interest to have your site served up on a reliable host so that the site’s productivity can be accurately measured.  A site that is frequently down because of server problems will not result in productive results for you, the client.

In the end, renting server space from a hosting provider is like buying anything else.  You can pay too little or too much.  Getting the help of a competent online marketer is probably the best way to avoid making a mistake.

6.  You try to do everything yourself.

Unless you are a master of time management and can get by with only a couple of hours of sleep a night you probably don’t have the time to manage a thriving retail store and build your business’ website, too.  And if somehow you do manage to get a site up you never have time to keep it properly maintained (See Mistake #1 above).

If your website – and your overall online marketing strategy – is really important to your business’ long-term success you would be well advised to find a professional online marketer with whom you can partner.  A good marketer will take a sincere interest in your business and do everything possible to generate a return on your investment.  After all, the marketer knows that a long, steady relationship with you will depend on how well he does his job month after month.  He also knows that you can fire him when results don’t occur as expected.

Finally, there are many online providers of what we refer to as “roll-your-own” or “do-it-yourself” websites.  Despite the hype, we have rarely seen such a website that didn’t look like it was built by someone who had little knowledge of what makes a website compelling and productive.  Sure, the prices for such website services are tempting, but they should only be considered for non-commercial purposes such as family or club websites that don’t depend on commercial traffic.

7.  You don’t include online video and other “rich media” technologies on your retail store website.

Incorporating video into a retail store website is not something reserved for large large retailers with expensive web development teams at their disposal.  In fact, free online video hosting services such as YouTube, Yahoo! Video, and other such service providers now enable virtually any size retailer to easily embed video on a store’s website, a blog, and even in email. By leveraging low-cost video and other “rich media” elements retailer’s of all sizes can supercharge their online marketing strategy to educate, engage, and persuade online contacts to become in-store customers.

As a business owner or manager you, along with your online marketer, should look at new technologies individually and consider whether they can actually improve the online customer experience in a measurable way.  If the customer experience can be improved in a cost-effective manner then you should be willing to give it a try.  After all, bad things tend to happen to businesses that stand still or fail to innovate for the benefit of their customers.

8.  You don’t have a backup.

Woops!  Your web hosting server just failed and your entire website has become unaccessible and unrecoverable.  What do you do next?

Well, if you don’t have a backup of your site (either your own or one performed routinely by your web hosting service) you can always consider falling on a dull butter knife!  But why not avoid that predicament in the first place by making sure you have a recent copy of your website content on hand yourself.  Your online marketer can be tasked to do this for you and you should insist that he or she deliver such copies to you every  time your site gets a significant update.

The good news is that most reputable hosting services perform comprehensive backups automatically on a daily or weekly basis, so the scenario described above rarely happens.  But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.  Having an extra level of backup is a good policy to adopt.

9.  You overlook your web performance statistics.

“Huh?  You mean our site can produce performance statistics?”, you may be asking yourself.

Yes!  Your site can produce useful statistical reports that can show you in black and white how well (or how poorly) your site is converting prospects into customers.  Your online marketer can add special coding to each of your website’s pages that will tell you, among other things:

-  How many unique visitors landed on your site.
-  How long each visitor stayed on your home page.
-  Whether a visitor “clicked-through” to another page.
-  Which pages were the most popular on your site.
-  How visitors were led to your site.
-  What links or buttons on your site were clicked the most often.
…and much more.

This kind of information is extremely valuable to retailers because it can tell them what product or service offers are the most appealing and which ones are generating no interest at all.  It can also highlight what words in an offer illicit the best responses from customer and prospects – information that can then be used in other forms of retail advertising.

10.  Your website isn’t worth your customer’s time and attention.

The cold, cruel truth is that visitors to your website don’t care how great you think your store is.  They don’t care if you think your products are the greatest on the planet and that your service is “world class”.  Nor do they care that you are the “#1 Retailer of Blue Widgets in the Entire World”.

The real question is “Are you worth your online customer’s time and attention?”  The answer to this question is communicated to your online customers in ways that are so subtle only a good online marketer could identify and help you appreciate them.  Here’s an example:

A small furniture company that specializes in solid oak furniture was having problems getting traffic to their website.  We were contacted by the owner of the store with an offer to take over the maintenance of their website with the expectation of improving their online traffic.  Along with the offer we included a list of ten minor changes that the store could make right away to their website that would likely produce a noticeable uptick in online traffic.

One of the changes we suggested was something so subtle the store owner nearly blew the suggestion off completely.  But, he told his in-house “website guru” (a college student who doubled as a sales clerk) to make the change anyway.  The results startled him.  The phones started ringing and visitors to the store actually mentioned that they saw the store’s website.

What was the subtle change we suggested?  We simply suggested moving the stores phone number from the bottom of the homepage to the very top and to display it in a big, black, 30 point font size.  Who would have thought this could make such a difference!

Summary

Retail merchants who fail to adopt a sound online marketing strategy that  includes a well-designed, well-maintained website – one that avoids the mistakes outlined in this report – will one day find themselves at the bottom of the search engine list.  Worse still, they may even be squeezed out of business altogether.

This article was written by Mel Cooper, President of MELCOOPER
Consulting, Inc. MELCOOPER is an online marketing and web design
consultancy based in Montgomery, Alabama USA. Copyright 2009
MELCOOPER.

For more information about Online Marketing Strategies for Retail
Stores and Services please visit the company’s websites at:
http://melcooper.com/

http://web-design-montgomery.com

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

Incorporating video into a retail store website is not something reserved for large large retailers with expensive web development teams at their disposal.  In fact, free online video hosting services such as YouTube, Yahoo! Video, and other such service providers now enable virtually any size retailer to easily embed video on a store’s website, a blog, and even in email. By leveraging low-cost video and other “rich media” elements retailer’s of all sizes can supercharge their online marketing strategy to educate, engage, and persuade online contacts to become in-store customers.

Why Retailers Should Incorporate Video Into Online Marketing Assets

Retailers should routinely incorporate video into their online marketing assets such as their website, the store blog, and in email for many practical reasons.  For example, it is a fact that when video clips appear in a store website the site is more likely to garner a favorable search engine ranking (SER).  The simple reason for this is that the site is more likely to receive more visits because video (no matter how good or bad it is) makes the site more compelling.  The more “popular” a site is the higher the SER.

Video hosted on YouTube can easily be used to drive traffic back to the retail store’s website.  This is because YouTube already enjoys a favorable search engine ranking – a fact that any retailer can easily leverage to his or her benefit.  A properly “tagged” YouTube video uploaded by the retailer that includes a “keyword rich” title and subject tags can potentially be viewed by millions of online visitors.  Some of those visitors may want to learn more about a retailer or product and click through to the store’s website.

Video should be included in retail store online marketing assets because it makes it easier for prospects and customers to remember the retailer. Video adds another dimension to a marketing message that stimulates the audience visually AND aurally while plain text only stimulates one of the senses. Video provides the “picture that paints a thousand words” and gives the audience the instant gratification they increasingly insist upon. The more senses that are stimulated and the faster the message is provided the more likely the audience is to remember it.

Incorporating video into retail store online marketing assets adds the powerful element of emotion to a retailer’s marketing message.  It is one thing to read advertising copy – even when it is accompanied by still photographs or other images, but it is something else altogether when the audience can see and hear a video message from the retailer.  Watching a video of the retailer describe the benefits of a new product can be a highly effective technique for persuading the audience to visit the brick-and-mortar store.

Video assets are extremely versatile in that they can be distributed in a number of ways online.  Email signature lines can include a call to action and a link to a current video currently being featured on the store’s website.  Blog posts can include the same kind of link – accompanied by a compelling link description – that makes it almost irresistible for a reader to not click on the link.  And each time someone clicks on the email or blog link this becomes new traffic back to the store’s website where the retailer gets another opportunity to ultimately drive traffic back to the brick-and-mortar store.

What Kinds of Videos Should a Retailer Produce?

Videos can be effectively used by retailers to produce many kinds of low-cost marketing messages.  A 45-second video introduction on the website home page by the retailer or a store sales person can instantly grab the attention of first-time online visitors.  Such a video puts a “face” on the retail business in much the same way that television ads featuring actual sales associates for BestBuy put a human face on that giant retailer’s business. Audience emotion becomes the trigger that keeps the online audience from clicking away before leaning more about the retailer’s business and offers.

A retailer can use online, 3-5 minute (no longer!) video segments very effectively to demonstrate new products and their usefulness to potential buyers.  This tends to communicate the retailer’s genuine interest in the customer and a desire to improve the customer’s life in some way by using the new product.  The retailer also has an opportunity to briefly describe relevant features and benefits in a way that would be almost impossible using any other type of marketing medium.

Videos can be used to share in-store seminars with prospects and customers. For example, home and garden centers frequently sponsor Spring time flower and gardening workshops that the store can videotape using a simple camcorder.  The video can later be edited down into 3-5 minute topical segments using relatively inexpensive video editing software (under $100).  Each segment can then be uploaded to YouTube and embedded into the store’s website.

Retailer’s should NOT be concerned about producing Steven Spielberg-quality videos.  In fact, a video that doesn’t look “produced” tends to have more marketing effectiveness than one that appears more “home-grown”.  In the end, the video is not about the production, but about the content and the message.  Anyone who doubts this should spend time looking at some of the videos on YouTube that get millions of hits per day.

How Retailer Can Include Video in the Online Marketing Assets

I have discussed “Why” retailer’s should produce online videos and basically “What” and “How” they should be produced.  The next step is to deploy the videos in an online marketing strategy.  I have already alluded to several ways that video hosted on YouTube and other video hosting services can be incorporated in to websites, emails, and blogs.  These services generally offer two ways to “share” videos: 1) Share via a simple link back to the video on the hosting site; and 2) Share via “embedding” directly into a web page.

A simple link to a YouTube video, for example, will take the audience to the exact page on YouTube’s site where the video can be viewed.  There are, however, some pluses and minuses to using a link to direct an audience to a video.  The minuses include the fact that the audience may get unnecessarily distracted by other “related” videos that will be presented on the same YouTube page as the intended video.  The pluses include the fact that a simple link is easy to deploy in a website, blog, or email.

A YouTube or Yahoo! video can be deployed by “embedding” special code into a web page instead of taking the audience to the hosting site (via a link) to view the video.  The embedded code allows a website visitor to view the video “inline” within the page itself and without being redirected to the YouTube or Yahoo! site.  The specific advantage is that the embedded video reduces the chance of the audience getting distracted by someone else’s video.  The drawback is that embedding code in a website may require a website programmer to pull off if the retailer lacks some basic website coding experience.

Summary

Even the smallest retailers should not ignore the tremendous marketing potential of using and leveraging video in all of their online marketing assets.  Producing videos can be done at relatively low cost on a periodic basis throughout the year to coincide with new product introductions, in-store events, or to just share some good news with customers.  A routine  video marketing plan keeps online content current, relevant, and compelling to online contacts that may ultimately become instore customers.

This article was written by Mel Cooper, President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc. MELCOOPER is an online marketing and web design consultancy based in Montgomery, Alabama USA. Copyright 2009 MELCOOPER.

For more information about Online Marketing Strategies for
Retail  Stores and Services please visit the company’s website
at   http://melcooper.com