Monthly Archives: July 2014

5 Tips on Working With A Web Designer To Redesign Your Website

Posted on July 27, 2014

Are planning on redesigning your business website? Will you be working with a web designer? If yes, then you must know that most web designers love to start out with a clean slate.  However, you must insist on incorporating crucial links, effective copy and high-ranking web pages into your new website.  Here are five tips that can make working with a web designer easy:

1. Do not make things worse

While analyzing your e-commerce website, some businesses can be very easily satisfied and become complacent, while others can interfere too much with things that are already working well. Avoid both these extremes during the resigning process. Ask your service provider to provide you with solid reasons, why your website needs a redesign. Check the facts or go through case studies to find out if a revamp can actually result in more sales.

2. Who will manage the redesign?

Without an effective project plan, a complete architectural restyling cannot be possible. The same is true of an ecommerce site redsign. The entire redesign project should be carefully handled, if you want a successful outcome. Ask your service provider who will be in-charge of handling the project. Lack of clarity in this, could mean that you are responsible. Insist on the hiring of an experienced project manager who will completely control the scope, schedule and budget of the project.

3. Recycle the best parts of your site

While redesigning, remember not to discard your old website. Do not allow your webs designers to get on with their own version of your website, while the important information in your old website is neglected. Use your old site as a basis for research and spend a few hours reviewing the analytics. If you are already running a successful online store, then your website should be doing something right. If you are still confused, talk to your customers and enquire what they like and dislike about your site. Continue reading →

How to Identify, Find & Evaluate Your Target Market?

Posted on July 19, 2014

As a business, trying to satisfy a wide array of different needs at the same time is not an effective strategy. However, by splitting up your customers into different group of similar people can help your business to effectively market your services/products specifically to the customers who will be most profitable to your company.
But how do you identity, find and then evaluate your target market? Here is how you do it…..

Identify your target market

How do you go about identifying your target market? You look for groups with similar characteristics and then identify the different segments among your existing customers. You can segment your consumers by income, age or gender. The location is also a key factor and can help you decide if you are targeting local consumers or international customers. Through segmentation, you can clearly understand what aspects of your business offers appeal to each of the consumer groups and accordingly adapt your product/service to exactly match their requirements.

This may mean modifying your product or making changes to your service, reliability, delivery or any other specific need that is important to a particular market segment. At times, you may also need to adjust the way you market your business offers (Changing your pricing policy or using distribution channels that reach your target audience more effectively). While reaching out to different customer segments, remember to also adapt your promotional media messages accordingly.

Find and evaluate potential customers

When it comes to identifying the right groups of customers that your business should be targeting, knowledge is everything. This is where Market Research can help you. With market research, you can understand the needs, spending habits and tastes of different groups of prospective consumers. This will reveal which customer segments are most likely to buy your products/services and the exact kind of marketing and sales actions that they will respond to.

A SWOT analysis can also help your business evaluate your weaknesses and strengths as a business and identify the threats and opportunities that are looming in your targeted market. This will give you a clear picture if your business is in a position to carry out a strong marketing and sales campaign with your targeted customers. A SWOT analysis can also show you how you measure up against your competitors. Continue reading →

What Should You Measure on your Website?

Posted on July 11, 2014

When it comes to a business website, only building a site is not good enough. You need to get “feedback” from your users in order to know if you are running a successful website. How do you find out? You use Web Analytics. With a simple web analytics system in place, you can gather data about the visitors to your website and you can start learning about them. Web analytics can help you answer questions like Who are your visitors? Where are they coming from? And how are they interacting with your site?

There are really a million things that you can measure on your business website, but the following are the most important:

  1. Visitors: A visitor to your site is calculated from the time a computer accesses your website until the time when they leave. If that same visitor returns, it will be again recorded in the “total visits” figure
  2. Unique visitors: This filters out repeat visits from the same person
  3. Page views and actions: Page Views are metrics used to track when your website loads a single page. Actions on the other hand measures the things that take place within a page – like placing a bid on eBay, liking a blog post or playing a video file
  4. Referrers: One of the major ways in which a website receives visitors is from other sites that link to them. Such sites are known as Referrers. Analyzing referrer data can tell you which sites are the most valuable for sending your site traffic
  5. Searches: This refers to search engines like Google, who will send you loads of traffic. Through searches, you can find out which keywords people are using to find your business website
  6. Geography: Finding out where your visitors are coming from can be eye-opening. Maybe your site is getting a sudden traffic surge from a new part on the globe. Through web analytics you can find out why such a thing is happening and leverage the new business ventures that if offers
  7. Goals: Goals can help you track when your visitors complete a specific action. For example, when a visitor makes a purchase from your online store, you can accurately record how much the purchase was actually worth
  8. Campaigns: You can use campaign tracking to show what happens to the visitors that your site has received from each different advert. This will give you a clear picture of which ads are sending you the most number of customers
  9. Advanced filtering: With this option, you can easily split your visitors into groups. You can filter out visitors by their location, how they found your website or even by the Smartphone they are using. The options are limitless
  10. Social media: You can find out what your customers are saying about your business by using tools to monitor conversations on popular social networks like Facebook or Twitter. You can also get complete statistics.

Continue reading →

Reach Out to Your Target Audience with Accurate Mailing Lists

Posted on July 4, 2014

Are you tired of handling exhaustive mailing lists? Are there errors in your lists? Have you been unable to reach out to your target audience? If yes, then you need professional mailing list compilation services, as inaccurate mailing lists can spoil your marketing efforts and reduce your overall profit level. While an accurate mailing list can help you to effectively reach out to your target audience, quick mailing list compilation services can enable you to proactively respond to changing market conditions.

9 reasons why you must outsource mailing list compilation

With outsourcing, you can enjoy the freedom to focus on your core business operations, while getting access to superior results in your mailing lists. Here are nine reasons why you must give outsourcing mailing list compilation a serious thought:

  1. Conduct successful direct marketing campaigns with lists that are accurately complied to reach out to your target audience
  2. Avail compiling services from any source – electronic documents, data from the internet, printed directories and even cleaned raw data
  3. Get your mailing lists compiled within a super fast turnaround time
  4. Enjoy value-add services like updating/validating an existing database
  5. Get customized mailing list compilation services as per your specific industry requirements and unique business processes
  6. Avail mailing list compilation services from multiple input sources, be it online or printed directories
  7. Get expert professionals to split or combine data in the fields of your mailing lists as per your requirements
  8. Verify your existing mailing lists and check for inaccuracies
  9. Remove obsolete data from your mailing lists, perform mailing list de-duplication and add missing components

Continue reading →