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Ten things you must know about your website

December 5, 2008 By James Quinn-Hawtin Leave a Comment

Any serious shop owner will know: how many people enter the shop; the conversion rate; the minimum number of shoppers needed to break even; which promotions worked; which promotions tanked; what the competition is doing; and, when more staff need to be hired for busy times.

Whether you sell jeans, make jewellery, design offices or coach executives, your website is your virtual shop front. Just like a real shop front or office it must be properly managed, maintained and regularly evaluated.

Here are ten questions about your website (and email marketing) that are critical to your online success:

  1. How many people visit your website every month/week/day?
  2. How do they find your website? (if they came from a search engine, what keywords did they search for?)
  3. Why are they visiting?
  4. Which visitors are converting the best (and/or staying the longest) and why?
  5. When was the last time you updated the website?
  6. If your web designer disappears tomorrow (it happens!) do you have up-to-date Control Panel, FTP, Domain Name Management and Content Management System access details so that you can hand it over to a new web designer?
  7. How many people downloaded your ebook and/or signed up to your newsletter/articles last week?
  8. When you send out an email campaign, what is your average open rate? Which topics and subject lines produce the best open rates?
  9. For what keywords has your website been optimised? (Are you using these when writing new content?)
  10. How does your website compare against your competitors’? What are they doing that you can learn from?

Most business owners and managers with whom I talk can answer, at best, three of the above.  Bail up your web designer or website manager and ensure that you have access to the necessary statistics.  If in doubt, take me up on my free consultation offer.

Christmas is getting close!  What is Santa bringing you?

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: conversion, Email Marketing, promotions, statistics

Don’t read this email. No, don’t! Stop! Don’t click!

November 15, 2008 By James Quinn-Hawtin 1 Comment

Many of my clients are beginning to follow my lead in sending out regular correspondence to their existing customers and their prospects. The motivation is not so much to “sell, sell, sell!” but to cultivate genuine relationships over a period of time by providing their readers with useful and interesting information.

One of the challenges involved in email marketing, however, is getting people to open the email. We average a respectable 45% open rate for our mailouts but every now and then dip down into the 30′s or shoot above 50%. I find it interesting to analyse the statistics that our software gives us to identify what subject lines produce spikes in our open rate and which ones result in slumps.

While you may think that any mention of ‘sex’ would result in spam filters going out of their way to block an email, our August email ‘Who is the Sexiest Web Designer?’ resulted in 54% of our list opening the email – our highest ever.

The suggestive ‘”We shouldn’t be this excited about a website! Its wrong isn’t it?….”‘ the week prior managed 52% and the drama-filled ‘How I saved my reputation with one click (a useful tip for the future)’ was opened by 53%.

Conversely, the mention of email spam in the subject ‘Wasting time sorting through email spam? We’ve got the solution’ resulted in our second biggest slump at 35% and the ernest, but long, subject line ‘An outrageously simple way to track the success of your advertising (9 out of 10 advertisers don’t do it!)’ has been awarded, so far, only 33% (tragically, I consider this one of the most important and useful free bits of advice I’ve sent out).

So what works? Subject lines with a bit of fun, sass, sex-appeal or drama seem to work best. Topics that seem too boring, too serious or sales-oriented seem to get trashed. Don’t expect anyone to open an email entitled, simply, ‘Newsletter’!

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: E-Mail Marketing, Email Marketing