Online Marketing
Maximize Sales With Your Affiliate Program
Now if you already have an affiliate program, you’ll want to learn to drive additional traffic to your online store by following these steps:
- Contact your top affiliates - ask them “what do you need to generate more sales for my business?” You might need to provide them banners, offers, exclusive content or more.
- Contact your non-performing affiliates - if you have a typical affiliate program, a majority of your affiliates are inactive. Try to make them active. Send them an email with a special bonus if they generate $50 of sales this month.
- Contact potential affiliates - either within your industry or the other key affiliates that join most companies’ programs. They are out there!
- Get help - work with your affiliate network’s professional services to use their experience to find new affiliates for you.
- Call your best affiliates and ask how you can earn more money together
- Pay an affiliate an extra bonus for a special one-time deal for more aggressive promotion
- Find new affiliates, especially popular sites, coupon sites and bloggers with a following. Tap into their traffic to find new customers for your online store.
Your affiliate program should be a top three online marketing channel for driving new customers to your online store - search engine optimization and paid search being the other two. If it is not driving the traffic and sales you think it should, you need to dedicate more time and resources to your program.
I love sales generated through my affiliate program! These sales are guaranteed to be profitable, require less direct effort from you as your affiliates are doing most of the work and create a huge strategic advantage for your company.
Another important note about this strategic advantage is that it is often under-the-radar from your competition. As opposed to most search engine marketing efforts, sales from you affiliate program are virtually unknown by your competition.
Here’s to your online (affiliate program) success,
David
How to develop a direct mail program for your online store
Direct mail is HUGE opportunity area for online retailers. Unfortunately, businesses often dismiss direct mail as too expensive. Too often online retailers rely too much on other marketing channels like email and organic search engine traffic, due to the low cost nature of the medium. Admittedly, this is easy to do.
It is important to realize that fortunes were built through the use of direct mail across all industries. For retailers, it is a proven media - think catalog companies’ successes like Lands End, of-the-month clubs, niche brick-and-mortar stores and more. In fact, I am aware of several pure-play online retailers that have recently and successfully launched print catalogs to great return-on-investment and increased market share in this down economy.
So we are on the same page, direct mail is printed material delivered directly into the physical mailbox. Usually, it is delivered via the post office but some marketers use other services too like UPS or FedEx.
Direct mail comes in many different formats - some typical (see below) and some not so typical - I have heard of sending watermelons, bricks, 3D shapes (like a mini trash can or a boomerang) and more.
Typical formats of direct mail for retailers include:
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The competitive advantage to any online retailer with a strong direct mail program is significant. Advantages include:
Finding New Customers:
- Tap into other companies’ customer lists - larger companies have their customer list for rent. So, if you are competing with a particular company, their customer list may be available to you for rent. Also, some similar companies or even direct competitors use a third party company to pool their customers’ data for direct marketing purposes. This could be a great cost-effective way to acquire new customers.
- Less clutter - as other businesses cut back on budgets on traditional media like direct mail, your mailings can stand out in your customers mind when they open their mailbox.
Driving Repeat Business:
- Building strong relationships with current customers - direct mail can allow you to speak to your customers at the right time with the right message or offer unlike any other media. Email is great, but the inbox is cluttered. If you can get your direct mail opened and read by your customers, you can establish a strong relationship that will lead to improved customer loyalty and more referrals to your business.
- Segmentation of efforts for targeted campaigns - this is often the secret sauce to establishing a strong relationship with current customers.
If you are new to direct mail best practices, then you might want to start with a direct mail campaign to your most loyal customers. If the return-on-investment is there, you might have a winning campaign and only then, try to roll it out to other targeted customer segments.
Here are nine proven campaign ideas for your current customers:
- Welcome campaign
- Happy Birthday campaign
- It has been a while since your last order campaign
- Private Sale (limited-time)
- VIP Customer Event
- Refer a friend and get $15 off your next order
- Editorial site event - e.g. “Customer Favorites for Summer 2010″
- Friends & Family event
- Sneak peek event
The ideas are infinite…
QUICK TIP:
One very practical tip that is well documented is that the use of multiple media improves customer response. For retailers, this means that sending emails and direct mail to reinforce your marketing message can improve the lift (or response) of your entire campaign.
If you have a special valuable offer, say a Friends & Family Sale Event, then try to get that message in front of your customers in as many ways as possible for the best response. You will like the results!
MORE ABOUT DIRECT MAIL:
Direct mail is a huge discussion, not able to be effectively covered in this e-book - there are sections of your local bookstore dedicated to this stuff! But, I wanted to give you enough in this section to get you aware and thinking about this powerful marketing channel. Don’t make the mistake of dismissing direct mail as too expensive for my business. It is not about the cost, it is about the return on investment!
Unlike other marketing efforts such as search engine optimization and paid search efforts where smart competitors can view your entire efforts and in effect, reverse engineer your efforts, the details of a targeted direct mail program are “under the radar”.
Herein lies a great competitive advantage!
Here’s to your online (I mean, offline) success,
David
Advertise using MySpace MyAds
Although Facebook and Twitter are the current darlings of the social networking arena, let us not forget about MySpace with over 70 Million users in the United States alone.MySpace is another extremely popular social networking site which has been overshadowed by the popularity of Facebook since about 2008.
And, there are still plenty of active users here for you to attract to your site through MySpace myAds. Still in BETA as of this writing (meaning they are still working out all the kinks), it is MySpace’s answer to monetizing their users. This is good news for you and potentially a great opportunity to drive traffic to your online store.
Consider it a gift to you that MySpace myAds isn’t too popular right now. In my opinion, there are not enough advertisers taking advantage of this opportunity. Their loss, your gain if you take action and try this ad platform!
Like Facebook, there are plenty of contextual advertising filters so your ad is shown to the most appropriate audience either on a CPC or CPM ad spend.
- Age
- Education level
- Gender
- Hobbies
- Interests
- Location - city, state, nationwide or zip code radius
- Parental status
- Relationship status
Currently, the big difference between advertising on MySpace versus Facebook is the cost-per-click costs. On MySpace, the bids start ~$0.05 and bids on Facebook start around $.20.
It is easy to get started and you can end your ads at any time. Don’t overlook this opportunity for your online store. Remember, fish where the fish are!
Good luck,
David Wauters
OnlineStoreCoach.com
Drive Traffic to Your Site with Facebook Ads
Facebook is currently the darling of the social networking space. It is easy to get started, everyone (and their not-so-computer-savvy mother) is on it and makes it easy to reconnect and stay connected with friends.
I am always interested in being where my customers are and Facebook is one of those places.
So, Facebook now offers an ad service called Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads really came into its own in 2009. Facebook needed to figure out how monetize the 400 Million active users on Facebook.com. Stop for a second - 400 Million active users throughout the world. Wow…that is huge.
To begin advertising on Facebook, click here for their getting started page. Your ads can be up and running within minutes.
There are many options for your ads - text based, text with images as well as contextual options, the genius of this ad opportunity, like geo-targeting (ability to advertise based on a person’s location) and target filters such as:
- Age
- Education
- Keywords
- Languages
- Location
- Relationship Interests
- Relationship Status
- Sex
- Workplace
Also, your advertising spend can be either CPC (cost-per-click) or CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) giving you several options. Personally, I like CPC because I find it easier to manage my campaign to my target return-on-investment.
And start using Facebook Ads soon before this ad marketplace gets too crowded, which will inevitably raise the cost-per-click rates.
Good luck,
David Wauters
OnlineStoreCoach.com
Advertise on shopping comparison websites
In the down economy, the usage of shopping comparison sites is up by consumers!
People are still willing to spend on a variety of products, but they want to make sure they are getting value for their money. And customers have been trained over the years to use shopping comparison sites to find the best deal.
So, you will want to make sure you are advertising on some of the top Shopping Comparison Sites(SCE) or online marketplaces such as:
- Bing cashback
- PriceGrabber.com
- Shopzilla.com
- Become.com
- Yahoo Shopping
- Shopping.com
- Shop.com
- Gifts.com
- Buy.com
- TheFind.com
- NexTag.com
- MyCoupons
- Pronto.com
- Smarter.com
- SortPrice.com
- Underbid.com
- Amazon Services Product Ads
Many of these SCE get most of their traffic from natural search engine results, their own pay-per-click efforts and partner sites. It is important to understand that they have a lot of traffic and you can tap into it if your budget allows. Just watch that ROI.
Managing many shopping comparison engines (SCE) to an acceptable ROI can be extremely challenging. Luckily, there are many third-party tools online from vendors who specialize in shopping comparison data feeds. Here is a partial list of vendors that can help you manage and optimize your SCE feeds through one interface.
Good luck,
David Wauters
OnlineStoreCoach.com
Affiliate Program - The Basics
Get an Affiliate Program to Work for You
GOOD NEWS:
If you don’t have an affiliate program for your online store, you could have your affiliate program up and running with 48 hours. Why is this important? There are tens of thousands of potential affiliates waiting to promote your products. Read more
Paid Search - PPC Quick Tip
Paid Search Tip
One of the fastest ways to get targeted traffic to your online store is from paid search. These PPC (pay-per-click) programs can be extremely effective when done correctly. Read more
