Testimonials are one of the most powerful ways to drive new business. The reason is to do with trust: trust, or lack of it, is one of the big barriers to doing business, especially online where not only are identity-theft and other scams a real (if over-exaggerated) fear for many people, but in the vast majority of cases you never even know the name of the person you’re buying from, let alone meet them, see them, or even speak to them.
If there’s one thing you should learn and take to heart when it comes to increasing profits in your business, it’s that email marketing works. If you use email marketing you’ll make more sales and make more money. It’s that simple. But (and it’s a big but) email marketing works only if you do it and do it regularly.
Here’s what I mean.
Have you ever had the experience of seeing a movie trailer and thinking “That looks great”, but when you actually go to see it you find it doesn’t amount to much? Flat characters, boring story, terrible acting, and you come away feeling bitterly disappointed. Or maybe you’ve sometime heard great things about a restaurant, perhaps by reading a review, and you went only to find the food was tasteless, the service awful and the prices much higher than the experience was worth.
One of the problems with having a site ranking highly in the SERPs or being popular because of your activity and exposure on the various Social Media platforms is you get loads of traffic… but while it’s relevant to the overall theme of your site it’s not well matched in any specific way with your home page. In other words it’s trying to be all things to all visitors and so ends up being not particularly compelling for anyone.
When we talk about sales conversions we tend to look at the whole idea of a “conversion” as being a single event.
But very often it simply isn’t that at all, and is in fact a more complex process involving at least two steps – and often many more. If you send an email for people to click on a link to visit a sales page and then click on a button to buy something, you have at least two steps – the sales letter, and then filling in the payment details on the shopping cart.
Most websites simply are not fit for purpose. They’re designed from the wrong premise, that the site needs to have a certain “look” that ties in with the company’s “brand”.
The correct premise is to first decide what you want the website to do. Once you have the answer to that, it will tell you what your site needs to look like to achieve its purpose.
Form follows function, after all. So here’s a simple seven-point checklist, to make sure you’re up to speed on the Internet Marketing basics.
If you’ve studied online marketing for any length of time you’ll have come across the phrase “squeeze page”, which sometimes goes by the name “opt-in page”. Whatever you call it, essentially the page has a simple purpose, and that’s to gather the contact details of prospective customers so you can follow-up with them.
