The Single Entry Point Blog

Tuning your marketing to perform.

Save Your Sanity: Book a Meeting to Revisit your Goals

by Kristina Smith on April 18, 2012

Managing business objectives with conflicting departmental or personal priorities can be a real challenge. Sales wants more upselling in the checkout process, the management team wants to see ROI from Pinterest yesterday, and you’re busy trying to get an email campaign out the right people, at the right time, with the right CTA.

You know you can’t be everything to everyone, but maybe a way to step back and prioritize is to (re)visit your business’s key objectives. Your list of KPIs may be a mile long, but overall, what are the company’s real, top-level, make-or-break, goals?

Meeting sales targets via conversions? Generating a certain number of leads? Bringing on so many new advertisers? Achieving a percentage of repeat customers? What is tangible and quantifiable?

With so many marketing vehicles and variations on determining performance available, it can be difficult to choose the best performers, spend just the right amount of money trying new things, and strike underperformers from the budget.

If you can streamline your goals and get everyone on the same page, you can tackle your projects and marketing decisions in more efficient ways, and devote your time to the channels and strategies that actually help you achieve your goals. Anything else is gravy.

Posted in Analytics, CRM, Email, Web
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Lose Customers 3 Easy Ways

by Kristina Smith on April 4, 2012

We’ve talked about shopping your site before, but it bears repeating. If you haven’t taken the time recently to review your e-commerce process, read on.

Successful e-commerce sites think about the customer – the user experience – first. Sloppy navigation, inadequate instructions, or an excessive number of steps are almost guaranteed to have your customers surfing to the competition.

Making the buying process complicated, withholding information, and annoying potential customers are easy ways to lose the sale. To avoid this, think of me as your potential customer, and answer these questions:

MAKE IT COMPLICATED

  • When I’m shopping, can I add items to my shopping cart without creating an account first?
  • If I opt to create an account, can I save my cart and come back later to check out?
  • Do I have to verify my email address before buying?

WITHHOLD INFORMATION

  • Can I easily find exact shipping fees to my location?
  • If I have questions, is there a phone number or live chat option?
  • Do you offer reviews from other customers?
  • When I buy, do you provide me tracking information for my purchase? When?

ANNOY

  • Can I see a product in different colours, or zoom in?
  • If a product, size or colour is sold out, is that indicated while I’m shopping or do I find out later as I’m checking out?
  • Do you ask me for personal information that is irrelevant to my buying from you?

Your web analytics software can give you a clear idea of the sales funnel, and where customers are abandoning their purchases. Beyond that – set up correctly – web analytics can be used to dig further down into the customer experience, for example, by indicating which products visitors leave your site immediately after viewing (this may indicate a problem with the copy, images, or lack of product detail),

For help in optimizing your analytics to really see into your customers’ minds, contact the e-commerce specialists at Single Entry Point.

Posted in Analytics, Web
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