Tweaking the Steps Along Your Ecommerce Sales Path

Do you sell products and services via the Internet? Do you get the results you want?
If you didn’t get the results you want, it’s helpful to re-visit each step of your “sales path” to see where tweaks can be made.
For instance, let’s say your sales path starts with an email broadcast, which directs the reader to your website. Here are the different statistics you will want to analyze to see what’s working and what’s not.

1. Open Rate: Open rates, on average, hover around 35-40%. Since you are getting a 50% open rate, your results are above-average.If your statistics show that 25% are opening the email, that equates to a real open rate of 50%. We know this because only half of all email users will open their email in a way that the “beacon” can be sent back to the email server to say “This person opened an email.”
2. HOWEVER…just because someone opens an email doesn’t mean they read it. One way to calculate whether people are actually reading your emails is click-through rate (CTR). You can you get this statistic, either from your email company, or from your website statistics.  (I recommend you use Google Analytics, if you are not already using it. It’s free.)
3. Once they click through from the email to the page where you are making your offer, how long are they staying there? This number helps to guide you as to whether they’re actually reading the web page text or not. If your web page is too long and people may be turned off by all the text. Or perhaps the text isn’t formatted in a way that’s conducive to reading.
4. If they read the website text, does it answer all their questions? If not, they may click away and never return. Check your bounce rate.
5. Your call to action matters.  Let’s say you’re selling a class. Should the call to action be “buy now?” Maybe it would be better as “register now” or “click here to register.”
6. Sales rate: did they buy?

Every step along the sales path is an opportunity to tweak your technique. Your ecommerce path might start with web traffic from a search engine (so good SEO is important) or it might start with online referrals. Once you find the right combination of the steps above that brings the best results, you then repeat that over and over again.

I hope the infomation above will help if you intend to market on line.

Nicholas Agaba
Your Online Mentor
www.nic.qnetlife.net