Archive for March, 2009

Execute Your Plan

March 17th, 2009 by Heather Maloney

In our edition of eNudge News that included 4 Keys for Business Growth in 2009, the 2nd key was:

Execute [Your Marketing] Plan without fail.

Of course, you can’t keep to your marketing plan if you don’t have one. If you don’t have one, stop reading this now, and instead read our article that takes you through a step by step process for creating a email communication plan – you can expand that to include all your marketing communications; e.g. letter drops, newspaper ads, Google Adword campaigns etc. Then come back here and keep reading!

To help ensure that you execute your plan:

  1. Keep in mind the following points:
    • if you are not communicating with your customers and prospects on a regular basis, your competitors might be talking to them instead.
    • if you provide a wide range of products and services, it is easy for your existing customers to be unaware of some of the products and services you offer. Increase the understanding of your clients through value added ways of talking about the breadth of your products and services.
    • even if your audience doesn’t read every element of every one of your communications, they still get the message that you are thriving, and are interested in them.
  2. Use the eNudge Communication Plan function to store details of your future electronic messages. This allows you to add to the information when useful input comes to hand. It’s a great help having lots of useful input and ideas when you start writing your message.
  3. Diairise the job of writing your communications, giving the writer plenty of time to get it ready.

What are your tips to help others execute their marketing plan?

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The 300 million dollar button

March 9th, 2009 by Heather Maloney

An article I read recently about shopping carts has radically changed my view on the best process for the final step of checking out. The Contact Point shopping cart requires a customer to ‘register’ with the website or log in with their email address and a password if they are a returning customer, in order to finalise their purchase.

It turns out that many many people are put off by the requirement to register, but by simply changing this screen to give the customer one more option – to continue their purchase without registering – provided an online business an increase of 300 million dollars (that’s USD) in sales over a one year period.

This quote from the article sums up my [previous] view of the issue:

The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they’ll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?

Instead, their research showed that the requirement to register was resented by a large percentage of their test audience, who felt that they weren’t there to be in a relationship; they just wanted to make a purchase quickly. Returning customers also had issues because they couldn’t remember their username and password, so a large number of return visitors ended up registering again; thus making it harder for the retailer to do anything useful with the data on return visits.

We’ve taken this research on board in the Contact Point Shopping Cart, and have already implemented a change across 3 shop sites, allowing customers to purchase without registering. For an example, check out the Melbourne Storm Shop.

Some of our client sites will still want to ensure that customers register, for reasons of additional functionality such as shopping lists, and storing sensitive information. In the remaining circumstances, we will be in touch with you over the next few weeks to discuss implementing the change.

What do you think? Has the requirement to register ever put you off from making a purchase online?

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