I would guess not. I would guess that nobody has been brave enough to try. It doesnt stop people trying to sell to two sets of fanatical fans online in the same place though.

The joys of modern e-commerce platforms allow you to target you customers very nicely by setting up specialist sites pitched at very tight knit groups of customers. As far as the internet is concerned your chances are better as the master of one trade and not the jack of all.

There are some key advantages to this method:

• You can use language on the site that empathises with your target customers needs
• Adwords are generally cheaper and link building is easier at the niche level
• The appearance of a store devoted to a particular thing builds confidence
• Finding the right products is much easier for the customer

The net result of this is an improved sales conversion rate.

Ill give you an example of  how we work in the world of Motorsport Clothing.  It will give you a taste of how you can apply this process to product highly targeted specialist sites.  Using this process can help to give you improved conversions.

The Motorsport Clothing Network.

OutletF1
A site specialising in end of season f1 merchandise
It gets promoted once a year – at the end of season, for bargain hunters looking for a great deal. Visit outletf1

Ford Rally Clothing
Rally fans are a very partisan bunch, they love the teams and more importantly the drivers. By devoting an entire site to the teamthe products they want are easy to find and cross promotion becomes easier. Visit Ford Rally Clothing

Mclarenf1
Mclaren is a very British affair this year with two British world champions leading the way. Based on takes full opportunity of the xenophobic tendencies of its supporters. The product descriptions have been written by a genuine Mclaren fan helping to build trust. Visit Mclaren Clothing

Williams F1 Clothing

Aston Martin Clothing
A super desirable brand with a site designed to highlight the emotions associated with owning a piece of a supercar legend. Visit Aston Martin clothing

I was speaking to somebody the other day about the pro’s and cons of particular couriers.  I gave my opinion on a courier called Home Delivery Network. I thought might be a good fit for the products they were shipping as they had a reputation for low delivery damage.

At the next meeting I was told  “we’ve done some research online and found out that HDNL are rubbish”

I searched for “Home Delivery Network Reviews” and came up with this truly awful review.

So I use DHL for our internal deliveries… how did they fare?

So what about ParcelForce the preferred carrier of the person I was speaking to.

So were do we go from here.

Management of online reviews is set to become a hot topic in the next few years.  Strong brands can get away with bad reviews to a certain extent, but a bad review can signal the death of a weak product or service.

Equally as a consumer, to state the obvious,  make sure you look at similar products before jumping to bad review conclusions.

As the saying goes “Everybody shouts if your drains smell but nobody takes the time to tell you your drains smell great”

Whats the best review you have ever seen?

The new year is always a great time to refocus your efforts and polish up your marketing plan. I spent a lot of time over Christmas pondering what e-tailers must do in order to have a successful project. Here’s my thoughts:

Do every one of these 4 things well and you cannot fail

• Have a truly great product,  unique service,  or a notable offer (the last resort is lowest price).
• Provide good quality listings and a simple checkout. Good enough to not put people off.
• Get found. Don’t wait for customers, go and find them.
• Provide awesome customer service whatever the cost.

To be clear, if you mess up any one of these you will fail. Do these right and you will win.

Are you covering each of these rules?

One of my greatest pleasures is seeing my clients get a result from online marketing. Coaching them in how to follow marketing strategies which work is fulfilling.  I am lucky enough to help people do this every single day and it feels great.

I am going to be helping a bunch more people in the new year as I am speaking at the eBootcamp event on February 25th.  You could be one of those people.

If you know you want to do more business online but feel ill equipped to make it happen this course is tailor made for you.

If your business has more than 5 staff then Business Link has made funding available, up to £1000.

e-Bootcamp – Leading your business online


This is not a conference. It’s an in-depth, fast-paced, training seminar designed to give you the tools you need to move to the next level. Full of candid, no-holds-barred content from experts in online business, you will walk away empowered to use your website for real business.
e-bootcamp.co.uk

As a special treat if you use the promotional code SUPP1 when you contact the bootcamp team and book  you will receive 3 books from my favourite online marketing guru Seth  Godin.

• Seth Godin: The Dip
• Seth Godin: Permission Marketing
• Seth Godin: Tribes

Give me a call or email me and I’ll be happy to give you more details.

I purchased some new speakers at the weekend. I really really like the ebuyer.com site and its one of my favourite places to buy online.

Along with sites like Play.com, ASOS.com, MyDeco and more recently Argos they provide a  real source of inspiration and ideas.

These sites are first on my list when it comes to best practice in e-commerce and looking at which features need adding to our own e-commerce platform.

As I ordered I saw a few interesting things:

A fantastically well written review

I always check countless reviews before purchasing. In this case every single review was a 5 star (all 176 of them). The best review I saw contained the words.

There’s only 2 things that should make a man cry. The first being seeing your first child being born, the second being the moment you plug these speakers in and turn on the music.

This sort of phrase is something you just dont get in fake reviews, and filled me with enormous confidence in my purchase.

If you buy something and you love it always right a review… Its great karma.

Uber Delivery

Order up until 11pm for next day delivery, that is an incredible service.  I pretty sure that delivery flexibility is going to play and increasing part in the e-commerce wars. Look no further than ASOS who recently announced a same day delivery service to customers in London.

Buyer Remorse?

When I purchased the set they showed only 1 set left in stock. The moment I ordered they didn’t go out of stock, in fact the price went up by £70 and showed over 200 in stock.

I guessed that one of two things must have happened, which are both great tactics.

1.When they run out of stock they move to a drop shipping setup where a wholesaler ships on there behalf

2.Is this a very clever tool for removing buyers remorse? 

Buyer’s remorse is an emotional condition whereby a person feels remorse or regret after a purchase. It is frequently associated with the purchase of higher value items which could be considered unnecessary although it may also stem from a sense of not wishing to be “wrong”. (wikipedia)

All of a sudden I haven’t brought something expensive, but got a bargain. This is not a tactic I have seen before but may be one worth considering.

They turned up undamaged & ontime

This simple fact is enough to keep me coming back to Ebuyer again.

What do you think the best tools are for combating buyers remorse?

Louis Vuitton is on a mission. It has singled itself out as the spearhead of campaign to manage its brand online, and the largely un-regulated search engines are its enemy.

Louis Vuitton has a  problem with the google adwords results. They hate the fact that google is profiting from allowing people to use the Louis Vuitton brand name in adwords. They also feel that Google is profiting from giving people who infringe trademarks, with fakes, the ability to promote.

Google generates $21 Billion a year from adwords so as you can guess they dont really want to change anything unless they have to.

What you will notice is that the words Louis Vuitton doesnt appear in the title. As you can see there are plenty of way to circumvent that if you need to.

Unfortunately for Louis Vuitton the European Court of Justice has ruled against them, so its business as usual. This issue is far from dead though with appeals already in place.

If you need help with working these methods into your adwords contact us today

I love google, they are one of the new wonders of the world in my eyes. I use about 10 google products on a daily basis, from searching, email, google docs, google reader through to more obscure google services like insights.

Seeing as google pretty much owns the world of internet searches and those searches may be bringing you 100% of your visitors its pretty important when they change something.

Google is about to roll out a significant update to its search engine, the biggest change since 2005. Its been christened “Caffiene” and its available for the public to try out right now. So what is changing that you need to worry about?

Speed

The speed it returns your results is going to get twice as fast. In reality its always been pretty quick so not a big one for us users.

Autocomplete

You may well have seen this in action on googles existing search as it can be turned on. In simple terms autocomplete guesses what your searching for as your typing and gives you suggestions based on that.

Social & Realtime

Its no big secret in search engine circles that Google has a little bit of Twitter envy. The new search engine will be looking much closer at the twitter and facebook . Realtime search results are one of the significant missing parts of the current google setup.

My personal feeling here is that some kind of social ranking will be measured. People who have more follwers than they are following shows authority and google will take note of that.

Theres never been a more important time to setup and manage your twitter and facebook pages.

Potentially big changes in your position

The likelihood is that you may well be moving up or down in the search engine rankings. So far all my clients appear to have been effected by the updates positively.  Google has been waging a war since day one with the search engine optimisers and every year google gets cleverer at pushing out the spam.  Good quality backlinks, strong internet brand recognition and authority are all fundamental in keeping up top.

Try the update now

If theres anything else you’d like to know theres a great post about the changes here

When I am lucky enough to get a client who is really clear about customers and what they can do for them it really helps a project along.

Strachan and Windram have just released there new e-promo website and its been designed with a very simple goal in mind; “Get wealthy people to call us”.

Wealth Management is an incredibly broad area of business but what was really clear that the best way they could grow was to go after customers that could help the best.

I’ll tell you the methods they used to accomplish this in the following article.

Step 1 – Clearly identifying the audience

They had some very clear groups of people they wanted to target; A1 customers who they could always provide maximum benefit to. They have great experience working with Entrepreneurs and Sports Pro’s and had some great products for Company Directors on making much much more from existing pensions.

Step 2 – Its about you

The copy is completely customer focused. Its clear from the first sentence that they are offering services that will help you make the most of what you have, rather than telling customers how great they are. Each of the key groups identified as important are given there own bespoke content.

Step 3 – Building Trust

The site is littered with symbols of trust, including industry logos and case studies from existing clients.

Step 4 – The call to action

Its tough selling high value intangible products like investments over the Internet. A key strategy was to show the “Life Plan” service as  a boxed product. This simple product became the focus of the call to action which was clearly by phone.

Step 5 – Continual marketing

New articles are produced and published by the Strachan Windram team. Each time an article or case study is produced it is emailed to the entire Strachan Windram customer base automatically. Because the articles are tightly targeted they rank very well in search engines. Regular coaching of the team in writing good articles ensures the standard remains high.

Want to find out how you can get your site working hard?

Contact us today for a free consultation.

Sometimes when your really involved in a project its easy to get stuck in “cant see the wood for the trees syndrome”. In this zone its easy to become obsessed by adding new features, new site designs and continual revisions to copy that you feel are going to improve your sales enormously.

On the wall next to my desk I have a piece of paper with my simple rules of e-commerce which I always revisit to remind myself whats really important.

Here’s my 5 simple rules:

Rule 1:  Its not about you, its about them

Its wrong to use your site to tell people how great you are and how great your products are. Its been proven a million times before that talking in terms of your customer works better. Look at your site or the products and ask “Whats in it for me?”

Rule 2: What is remarkable?

What are you really good at? Can you offer the best delivery times in your market, the latest ordering, best returns policy, cheapest prices, latest products. What do you do well enough that somebody would write about you on another website or tell friends.

Rule 3: Get found.

I spoke to somebody the other day who proudly claimed to be “Northampton’s best kept secret”. What an idiot i thought, you don’t get rich by being a secret. Get out and about, speak to people, promote. If you have rule 2 sorted properly then shout about it as loudly as you can.

I ordered an item just last week from a really ugly site, just because it was the only one I could find that sold what I wanted.

Rule 4: Don’t give them a reason not to buy

How many times have you visited a site and it looked great and the prices were good only to find checkout was a pain and it wouldn’t tell you what the delivery price is until you log in. Show the site to some friends and see what they think when they use it. Have a look at these reasons why people leave you.

Rule 5: Remember that thing you did that worked really well on another site?

Its painful sometimes to keep doing the same things over and over again. But its less painful when your profits skyrocket because you stuck to something that’s proven to work.  I’m not advocating stopping new ideas here, but new development is expensive and time consuming. Better to start quick with an old idea than never get going with a new one.

In my opinion, if you follow these basics methods you cant go too far wrong.

Do you have any rules you follow? I’d love to hear them.

I remember first hearing about IKEA in the early 90′s. My friends were telling me about this great shop,  it had really cool cheap furniture with really stupid names.

On my first visit I was blown away, there was simply nothing else like it. How could the local store possibly compete with this furniture monster?

In those days IKEA were considered an overnight success but I read a very interesting article that gave some great facts about IKEA that confirm that if you keep at it and the ideas good it will happen.

Great facts from that article:

• The big idea came about because IKEA’s owner couldn’t fit the chair he brought in his car
• Its estimated that 1 in 10 babies were conceived on an IKEA bed.
• IKEA floundered for 30 YEARS before it found success overseas.

A great quote

The second great quote i came accross was from the founder of the LinkedIn business network:

‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.’

I’m positive the first IKEA  flat pack chair wasn’t the best chair ever, but he got it out to market. This quote  shouldn’t give you an excuse for not giving your website everything you’ve got.

What I hope it re-inforces is that your site will never be finished. Testing and measuring the successful elements of your sites design as early as possible are the key to fine tuning it to your audience.

Got any great quotes or stories tell us about them here