Is your site selling your products?

If you answered no, why isnt it? Weak copy, poor design/organisation, poor customer focus, internal company issues, no site visitors ...?

If you answered yes - Are you being objective? The vast majority aren't and could be improved to sell more. You want to sell more right?

The difference between a failing business and a successful one is primarily quantity of product sales. If you make enough sales and therefore income to pay off your costs, you survive. To be successful you must go beyond this survival point and get higher sales and therefore higher income and profits. Whilst most offline businesses seem to see this situation clearly and work actively to increase sales, it seems a large proportion of businesses online don't or at least dont on their website.

For example, retail stores are intensely focused on their customers. They are constantly striving to improve and increase sales of their products to customer. They often work on an income per area of space basis. This puts emphasis firmly on maximizing their selling space and offering.

We could learn from this approach online and focus on making sales and improving our offering. Whilst introducing same income per area equation is probably too much for online world and small screens, greater emphasis on sales and sales income should be welcomed. That doesnt mean squeezing ads and text into every conceivable web space, it means maximizing your web space with compelling offers, good communication, a clear message, intuitive layout and navigation, focus on potential customers, etc. All things that encourage and nurture website usage and ultimately make sales.

So how do you make your website sell your products? Well, of course you need to be marketing your site and products effectively to get potential customers to your site. Once you have these visitors, you need to actively sell your products to them. Sales dont happen on their own, your site has to sell them. That means work has to be put into your site and for it to say what your potential customers want to hear.

With aid of a few questions, you can identify weak elements on your site that arent actively selling your products and do whatever is necessary to make them sell. Lets be clear about it, your objective is to sell as many of your products as possible in shortest time possible. (If you dont have a website yet, use questions and their results to build a website around).

How Much Should You Pay for a Click? Andy Quick

You have a web site ready for action. Your product catalog, order tracking, credit card payment system, and fulfillment process are all in place. Now all you need is traffic! Many web entrepreneurs have learned that magic nut to crack is attraction: get a steady flow of customers who explore your site and eventually purchase goods. The overhead costs of most web businesses are minimal relative to brick and mortar stores. However, variable marketing costs can over shadow sales revenues by orders of magnitudes. Unfortunately, unlike saying in movie Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will not come!" Luckily, industry has learned this lesson; some hard way, and others in spite of losers. Dot-coms are clearly not darlings of capital markets any longer; however, there is still money to be made! If you plan to start a web business or already have one but are not sure how to increase traffic and make money at same time, you should consider a science-driven approach. What does that mean? Read on…

How to Lose $500 in 12 Hours

One weekend, my business partner and I created an affiliate commerce site. The site comprised a list of links to other online retailers. People go to our site, pick a link to a jewelry store for example, buy something, and in turn we receive a commission from sale. The process of creating site, signing up affiliate agreements, and turning it on was a cinch. The cost was virtually nothing. We, being new to this whole web business concept, thought we had an incredibly smart marketing idea: pay to have our site come up in an ad box on a major search engine (Google) every time someone searched on word "gifts". The word gifts is searched for 49,000 times per day! We figured we would have a good flow of visitors and money would start rolling in. For certain, we would at least break even. We sunk $500 in one day and let it rip. Here's what happened:

Our investment in Google - $ 500 Number of times our ad was displayed (impressions) - 36,964 Number of times people actually clicked on our ad when they saw it (click-throughs) - 429 Number of times a person visiting our site made a purchase - 10 Our total sales revenue- $ 77 Our total gross profit - $ (428)

The whole process took less than 12 hours. At least we learned a lesson quickly at a relatively low cost. Let's look at this event from a slightly different perspective, putting costs in terms of number of visitors:

Our investment in Google - $ 500 Number of times our ad was displayed (impressions) - 36,964 Number of times people actually clicked on our ad when they saw it (click-throughs) - 429 Ad cost per visitor - $ 1.17 Number of times a person visiting our site made a purchase - 10 Average sale per purchase - $ 7.70 Average revenue per visitor - $ 0.18 Average gross profit per visitor - $ (0.99)

We were basically giving $1 away for each visitor that came to site. Not a winning business model. However, taking this information, we can assess which marketing techniques can work best for business. Let's add 2 additional critical data points to our table:

Our investment in Google - $ 500 Number of times our ad was displayed (impressions)- 36,964 Number of times people actually clicked on our ad when they saw it (click-throughs) - 429 Percentage people who clicked on our ad (click-through rate)- % 1.16 Ad cost per visitor - $ 1.17 Number of times a person visiting our site made a purchase - 10 Percentage of visitors who purchased something (conversion rate)-% 2.3 Average sale per purchase- $ 7.70 Average revenue per visitor- $ 0.18 Average gross profit per visitor- $ (0.99)

Running Numbers

Putting this all together, you can create a formula for estimating gross margin per visitor for a specific marketing campaign:

Average Gross Margin per Visitor = Average revenue per visitor - Advertising Cost per Visitor Advertising Cost per Visitor = Campaign Costs /(Impressions x Click- through rate)

Average revenue per visitor = Conversion rate x Average sale per purchase

Putting it together:

Average Gross Margin per Visitor = (Conversion rate x Average sale per purchase) – (Campaign Costs / Impressions x Click-through rate)

Using our Google example, average gross margin per visitor would be calculated as:

Average Gross Margin per Visitor = (0.023 x $ 7.7) - $500 / (36,964 x .016) = (0.99)

Remember, this formula can only be used for a single type of campaign. Depending upon your target audience and type of campaign, all of above variables can change. When we launched our Google campaign, we used impression-based advertising, that is, we paid Google a certain amount of money for every 1,000 impressions of our ad (about $15 per 1,000 impressions in our example). However, just because our ad was displayed inside someone's browser did not mean they would click on ad itself.