The DiMotta Method

Home Pages Don't Cause Conversions....Analyze the Buy Flow

I've seen time and time again owners and marketing managers change the homepage and whatever homepage creates the best conversion, that's what wins. That's an ok (an antiquated) way of testing but there is way too much activity between the homepage and the order placed (even if you are selling just one product/service) to tie orders to the homepage. And even if it is the only thing you have tested that week, the likelihood some other external or internal factor (even accuracy of the test data) didn't affect the results is slim to none these days.

The fact is that homepages have the job of getting customers to the next step and so on and so on. When you know what buyflow creates your best conversions, you know how to analyze your tests. For example, you might have 3 main buyflows:

1. Buyflow Scenario 1 (The Browser): Homepage, Category Page, Category Page, Product Pages, Category Page, Product Pages, Cart, Checkout, Cart, Checkout, Order Confirmation Page.

2. Buyflow Scenario 2 (Get In and Get Out): Homepage, Search, Product Page, Cart, Checkout, Order Confirmation.

3. Buyflow Scenario 3 (I Want a Discount): Homepage or Clearance Page, Clearance Category, Product Pages, Cart, Checkout, Order Confirmation.

You get the hang of this I hope. There are usually 5-7 key buyflow scenarios which you can designate as personas. Buyflow Scenario 1 might be Bob, the Browser and Buyflow Scenario 2 could be Sam, Get In and Get Out.

If you make a homepage change, you need to know how your homepage change ultimately affects all of your key scenarios because you may have really made it easy on Bob, The Browser to make a purchase but you've lost traction with Sam, Get In and Out guy that was giving you a high overall LTV.

The fact is that website testing must be done with a 360 view. It's not linear by any means. What you do to the homepage has affects down the line that can then create ups or downs on orders. Know your main scenarios before you set up a test and test each page through buyflows to see where the improvements and breaks happen.

As always, I'm available at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail.

Top Five Website Metrics I Bet You Don’t Know… And You Should!

Besides your basic metrics, Visitors/Revenue/Conversions/AOV
and some of your mid level basics, Revenue by Source, Cart Abandonment, etc.,
the below metrics should be on your radar to track monthly or quarterly. You
may be missing opportunities in your marketing plan in 2012 if you don’t add
these to your list.

1. Mobile
Visits and Revenues – Mobile analytics are available on Google, Omniture,
Coremetrics and all the major web analytics platforms at this point.
Ensuring you undestand the % of total traffic and total sales can bring to
light the need to go mobile if you haven’t already. If you have gone
mobile, be sure you are getting your money’s worth by evaluating revenues
and conversions and what products people are buying.

2. Search
Visits and Revenues – Search data is again available on all website
analytics platforms and rarely utilized. Talk about easy and low hanging
fruit to find searches that occur yet don’t convert. I have found this to
be one of the most underutilized pieces of data available and yet when
utilized, the steps to improve search are easy and highly actionable.

3. Top Visited and Exited Pages – Do you know where your customers really are in
your website and where they exit? Knowing this allows you to optimize
pages that matter not just overall aggregate changes that you hope will
bring the whole shebang of revenue up. You can do those too but given you
can find your hottest pages by views and exits (and bounce rate too), you
can evaluate it’s index value or revenue allocated to that page and review
a heat map of that report (if you can’t, get CrazyEgg now), there’s no
reason not to make immediate impact on the top line with this information.

4. Checkout
(Not Cart) Abandonments – you might know how many people abandoned an item
in the cart but do you know how many people actually abandon your site
from the checkout page? Knowing this data point and seeing if there have
been improvements or declines in the last 12 to 24 months can be a strong
indicator of making changes on those checkout pages. Having reporting
tapping into where errors are made on these pages as well as where people
stop in the process are great metrics to have. However there’s excellent
information out there on best practices for checkout pages so start with
those, ensure you have a guest checkout method (unless you are up there
with Amazon), and don’t require information from a customer that isn’t
pertinent to the sale itself. You can always get that information later.
Support returning customers and new customers and don’t ever force a
customer a direction they don’t want to go. For example, returning
customers might want to save their data by creating an account or they may
want to use guest checkout each and every time they come to your site.
Paypal and other payment method users don’t want to waste their time
entering information on your site when they already have it on Paypal –
ensure they don’t need to waste time because if you don’t, they will.

5. Product Cart Added Versus Ordered Rates – You may know how many Widget A, B and Cs
have sold but do you know how many were added to the cart and then sold.
There’s a two step process here and if you break it down just right, you
can pinpoint better factors in either strong order rates or weak order
rates. If you know a customer added a product to their cart but didn’t
order, you can narrow that down to a shipping, promotion code, checkout
error or some sort of external uncontrollable reason. If you know that a
product has a low add to cart rate but a high conversion rate, you know
that this product might be tough to find in the process of shopping, price
is too high or the content isn’t clear. Break this two step product
conversion process down and you’re on your way to making the right
changes.

6. Social Traffic & Revenues – Odds are you are tracking
your likes/followers but you aren’t tracking visitors and revenues from facebook
and twitter. You might not think Facebook/Twitter should be utilized as a direct
marketing channel but you are among the few at this point. Soft selling is key
but selling is an absolute must. New Products, Discounts, Exclusive Offers and Sweepstakes
are all opportunities to get your facebook and twitter followers to the site and
create some revenue. Be sure to add tracking to your links and track these channels
often. Track these channels daily or weekly to tie posts and marketing efforts
to revenues.

 

 

As always, I'm available at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail.

Top Six Questions To Ask Your Customers Now

Validate your 2012 goals and help come up with them by finding out what your customers think. These questions will help guide you to executing on the right priorities regardless of the hard widget you're selling. <br><br>

1. This is the famous NPS question. How likely are you to refer us to a friend or family member on a scale of 1(not likely) to 10 (highly likely)? -- This question tells me how I'm doing and ultimately lets me know if my services to the customer are ok. Because these customers purchased, this question gives me a feel for the service after the purchase including getting the product to the customer in a reasonable period of time, handling issues with a strong customer focus and measuring if the customers were happy with the product.

2. What prompted you to purchase the (product name here or general category)? Fill in with a selection of answers to choose from plus an other with open box feedback. Answers should be developed from your key product experts in house that know the basic reasons for making a purchase.
-- This is a big one for marketing. You need to drive messanging on the site and in your traffic generators (adwords, seo, affiliate banners, emails, etc.) by yanking on the right customer triggers. Also you need to have sections on your site that speak to these core triggers. I've found several sites that have not taken the time to do this because driving pages this way is different from basic product categorization. For example, some customers want a hammock that is perfect for a hot and humid climate and will hang on trees yet the hammock categories are rope, nicaraguan, mayan, etc. There is a mis-alignment and thus there's a chance of losing the customer.

3. What drove you to purchase with us today? Generally you're developing multiple choice answers like Price, Selection, Promotion, FREE Shipping, as well 1-2 industry specific answers and an Other with open box feedback.
-- This is a major opportunity to understand where your strengths and weaknesses are as a company and how they align with your vision. If you don't want to be the lowest price player but people buy from you because of price, there are usually two reasons: A. Customers cannot figure out how to shop items any other way than price (usually bad because they are buying the lowest price in that category or close to it) and B. You are the lowest so your vision was not achieved. Figure out what's best for your company and your customer or the customers you truly want. Usually a further anaylysis of competitive prices as well as LTV on different customer buyers (cheapos, middle of the road and high end buyers) is needed to further understand this metric.

4. How often do you purchase our products? Weekly, Monthly, Every couple months, Couple times a year, One time, Other and open box feedback.
-- Perfect way guidance (butted up against real data) to build post transaction emails in a timely manner. You have to start somewhere on the timing so don't over analyze, execute on a starting point and test from there. Usually after transaction emails take time to develop results so 3-6 months per timing is perfect. If you have a large enough audience (you need to attempt at least 100 orders in X timeframe to make a statistically valid result), you can break up the audience and test timing. Don't test too close (like 30 versusu 35 days) because it likely won't matter.

5. What is the best promotion we can offer you for your next purchase? FREE Shipping, % or $ Discount, Cheap Expedited Shipping, BOGO, Volume Discounts, Other and open box feedback.
-- Perfect opportunity for not only post transaction bouncebacks (product flyers, emails, etc.) but also a testing ground for onsite offers, affiliate coupons, etc. These are usually top offers that you want to integrate into a post email offer provided after the items have shipped (usually 5-10 days post the order). A lot of times FREE Shipping will become #1 and prove a need to evaluate Total Gross Margins (All Revenues minus Product/Shipping COGS) to figure out if it produces a higher Total Gross Margin $ in the end.

6. We are considering expanding into these other categories because we believe we can bring greater satisfaction to our customers but we'd like to get your feedback on these categories. Please take a look at each category and rate it from 1 (not likely to purchase) to 5 (highly like to purchase). You would list each product or category to gauge interest. Product expansions are very popular right now and add almost immediate value especially if you add from existing supplier relationships or drop ship partners. It's a major opportunity for small businesses who've already developed a strong enough and efficient process of their core product purchases right now.
-- This is one of my favorite questions from the standpoint that it addresses growth rather than keeping the business humming along. You can ask the question on products, categories, or anything else that is in your true growth strategy. Remember new categories can also feed and service the old categories as much as old categories do the same for new categories. Bundling or Product Packaging is a very effective means of becoming unique and increasing Average Order Sizes by giving customers a value of a package that they can't refuse. This question can help you find new categories that will allow you to do this beyond the packaging you can achieve with what you have today.

Ask these questions to a new group of customers each quarter and develop a quarter over quarter comparison. Let this information sit beside the P&L, supplier feedback, internal feedback, and expert feedback to find commonalities. Those common threads will create a short list of 3-5 tactics to follow in each quarter.

As always, I'm available at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail. Reach out anytime.

Jennifer DiMotta

Easy Six Steps To Boost Top Products & Make Winners Bigger Winners

Easy Six Steps To Boost Top Products & Make Winners Bigger Winners

1. Pull data from any web analytics platform (although Google Analytics is a little tougher to get this data). You'll want to start with a list of most viewed (not ordered or revenue) items in last 90-180 days and with those products you'll need to know # of times added to the cart (per item), # of times removed from the cart (per item), # of units sold and # of unique purchases/orders. Pull this down to Excel and average out the top 80% of revenue items. Average all 3 metrics (% added to cart, % remove from cart and % order).

2. Highlight in yellow all metrics that fall below the benchmark average. Highlight in gree all metrics that fall 10% above the benchmark average.

3. Here are the likely causes for each factor that you will to focus on a resolve.

4. % Added to Cart - if this is below benchmark average, you likely have issues with 1 of the following - the image, the content or the price. The most likely are image and price. Check competition for image and price comparisons and test either one or the other. If you test both, you'll need to know you're working towards and aggregate improvement knowing that you are improving the image and lowering the price so the risks are low to negatively impact this metric.

5. % Removed from Cart - It's very likely a cause of A. Shipping costs were too high, B. Found another item, C. Received new information like backordered or minimum quantities or something, D. Promo code didn't work for item. Check all of these areas against your competitors and adjust. If you improve with low risk (lowering shipping or taking barriers away), just test to be sure you're keeping gross margin $ in line.

6. % of units sold and orders. If either of these are down, it's a likely cause that someone found the item somewhere else or just decided not to buy. If this unit is low in conjunction with % added, then you've made changes that could improve this metric. If this metric is low in conjunction with % removed, then you've again made changes. However if this is metric is low while the other two metrics are average or above (in green), then you may very well have an issue in your checkout and it's not necessarily with this item (although it could be if your promo code entry is in checkout). You'll need to analyze your checkout pages one by one to find issues and correct with A/B testing unless they are fixing errors.

As always, I'm available at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail. Have a great week.

How To Increase Gross Margins w/o Killing The Revenue

How To Increase Your Gross Margins without killing your Revenues

If you want to increase gross margins by increasing price (you can work costs down too), you need to be careful with how you manage these price increases.

If it's been awhile since you made price increases and you have flexibility in how you price items (some manufacturers demand MAP so find out first if you under MAP requirements or not), you can take the following steps to increase your margins without a lot of price elasticity testing and complexity.

1. Grade your products. Grade your items an A, B, C, D and F using these three factors - Demand (Units Sold), Gross Margin $, Revenue $ from the units sold. The top 70% will receive an A, next 15% receive a B, next 7% receive a C, next 5% receive a D and the last 3% receive an F.

Give As for each metic 5 points, Bs 4 points, Cs 3 points, Ds 2 points and Fs 0 points.

Weight Demand as 60% of your total weighting, Gross Margins as 25% of your total weighting and Revenues at 15%. Each product should now have a total points. Sort by highest to lowest points and apply the Grade with the same percentages as above again to this newly sorted list.

2. You might choose to rid of your Ds and Fs or turn them into drop ships (if they aren't already) to reduce the inventory costs. If you choose to get rid of them, drop prices by around 10-15% every 2 weeks to 1 month to rid of this inventory quickly. If you turn them into drop ships, take a look at the competitive landscape and be sure you are not overpriced on any of these items.

3. Cs are just middle of the road. Drop prices by 5-10% to see if you can spark some sales into these.

4. Take your Bs and decrease prices by 2-5% to see if you can increase sales. Also take a look at Bs images, content and competitive landscape to improve the opportunity of selling these.

5. Now on to your As. Be careful with this group. It can make the most impact. Understand the competitive landscape and if you can modify prices on any of these. If you can, increase prices slightly (start with 3-5%). This is where you will get higher gross margin $.

Practice this procedure first and then put this in place every 90-180 days. Track As on a weekly basis to look for demand decreases and/or gross margin $ increases, Bs/Cs on a monthly basis and put your Ds/Fs into a Clearance category to get rid of that group of items.

You can always reach me at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail. Have a good one!

Top 6 Data Sets That Matter Most In Developing a Successful Marketing Plan

Top Six Data Sets That Matter Most in Developing a Strong Marketing Plan for 2012.

1. Know What Your Customers Want. If you have done a survey in the last 6 months, you need to get one going now. Use Survey Monkey or Zoomerang. It's too cheap. Ask customers what they want, what drives their purchases, why they purchased from you and how likely they are to refer you to their friends and family. Ask them if they'd be willing to do a 1:1 call and call 20 customers who responded and ask them deeper questions. Take the aggregated data from the survey and the anecdotal data from the survey and combine with the next 4 ways to execute on the right tactics.

2. Analyze what makes up 80% of your sales in both products and categories. Analyze what keywords bring you the most traffic, what products are most viewed and what pages are most viewed. Finally analyze what phrases/terms are most searched inside your site. Combine this data into a 1 sheet Marketing Tactic Plan with #1.

3. Analyze the Cart and Checkout Exit (not abandonment) Rates. Meaning for the customers on the Cart page, how many exited from that page. Same with the Checkout page. If you have the data, analyze what entry field the customer stopped at on the Checkout page.

4. Pull together the Revenue, Gross Profits, Advertising, Gross Gross Profits (Gross Profits less Advertising) for last 3-5 years into your Marketing Tactic Plan.

5. Pull in the company's vision, mission statement and strategies for the year. Anything that allows you to tighten the marketing tactics to fit within a vision or a specific strategy.

6. Have someone pull the top 3-5 competitors and notate the competitors pricing strategy, product selection (# of products and type of categories), free shipping offers, other offers, return policy, homepage merchandising, overal SEO exposure and any cool functionality or loyalty programs.

7. Pull % of traffic, revenue and (if you can) gross profits by marketing channels to include SEM, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Offline (seperate if you need to), Direct, etc.

Five Steps To Get To Your Best Marketing Plan

1. Pull this information together in a 1 pager document (2 if needed) and review with a large team of people that span many departments in the company as well as outsiders if you can. Start with the highest level data including Company Vision/Strategies and Last 3-5 years of Revenues, Gross Profits and Gross Gross Profits.

2. Let them interpret the data and ask questions and provide thoughts. Document everything - tape record the meeting if you can. Put the people into 3-4 groups and let them develop some ideas for the marketing team. The ideas must be proven to support customers, company and the data provided.

3. Each group takes a leader to present the ideas and puts them up on a wall with each idea on a sticky note.

4. Go through each idea and grade it either 1. High Impact/Low Cost (also meaning time), High Impact/High Cost, Low Impact/High Cost, Low Impact/Low Cost.

Prioritize in the following ways:
High Impact/Low Cost
High Impact/High Cost
Low Impact/Low Cost
Low Impact/High Cost

5. Develop a Who/What/When on the Plan and get started. Follow up with a meeting each month on updates. Don't be afraid of a little healthy conflict if the plans aren't going as planned. Exposing issues allows for creative healthy solutions with the right people in the room.

Contact me anytime at heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail if you need further assistance on executing on your marketing plans.

Impacting Conversion in 2012. Key Drivers

Want to make impact on conversions in 2012. Focus on the basics. Merchandise the right products on the right pages. Look for the top visited pages and see where your customers are going from those pages. Are they turning back around, are they moving forward to products or categories or are they trying something new like a new category or a new search? You want customers to move forward, not laterally and not backwards. If you have more customers going back or moving to another category, follow that large group in your web analytics platform and see what they do. Go back to where those customers started and revise that page. Add new products, new categories or a search option from that page. For example, I've found one of my clients has a site and 3 pages are the most visited. Two pages made a lot of sense from a customer interest standpoint but the exit rates were high and most customers beyond exiting, went back. This is very frustrating for a customer. We followed groups of these customers, took our knowledge of the product, ask customers questions in surveys and started trying some merchandising in emails that allowed us to take the index value from the bottom 10% to the top 10% increasing revenues year over year by 300%. A word of advice. Keep the number of pages you're focused on to 1-2 pages at any given time. If you have a site that doesn't follow the 80/20 rule and customers visit many pages rather than grouping into 3-5 pages, then take a look at the commonalties of those pages and see if you can make sweeping improvements (low risk changes) to layout, structure, merchandising logic, etc. Good luck in 2012.
Questions. I'm the heartlandgirl21 on yahoo mail.

How To Prioritize Traffic, Conversions, AOV in supporting Revenue Goals

As I was considering 2012 goals for a client of mine, I thought about what's most important for this client - traffic, conversion, or AOV. I have to put something first, then second, then third. Trying to go after everything usually means you've diluted yourself to going after nothing. So how did I choose?

Well the client's ad spend budgets are minimal and their traffic is pretty good. They have well deserved SEO rankings in top three positions across several terms, high and low volumes. I've optimized their SEM to budgeted ROI and most advertising channels need well above what the client has to spend in terms in ROI (10:1). Most ROI channels are around 4 or 5 to 1. Email is absolutely a nice traffic generator to continue to produce and I've spent a lot of time in that area and will continue to do so. I'm also going to continue to work that infamous social channel for more direct marketing type results.

Conversions are low but the industry standard is also low. However, I see lots of lost opportunity in products, pricing and packaging and I believe conversions could be a big focus for this client. Again, the basic principles of marketing - those lovely 4 Ps, Product, Price, Promotion, Place are what I consistently go back to and believe make the most impact. So many of my clients have forgotten to quickly review competitor's product mixes, packaging ideas, pricing, and promotions. It's not for you to copycat, but it is smart to know where your competitors stand. And more often than not, you'll find some quick wins and be able to take one of their ideas and make it better.

AOV is always a tough one for me. I can always come up with the ideas to increase AOV. Excellent upsells, crossells, better packages and higher prices but in the end, this is a tough one. I've found that relationships of upsells and crossells in these dynamic, algorithmic ways are not overall impacting. Rather, the core items that everyone buys (upsell these in the cart and checkout) and bundling items are your best bets. Still this client has a strong AOV and we've done a lot of packaging work this year.

So I'm moving on to conversions as my first priority, AOV my second priority and traffic my third priority. It's not an exact science and it may change as I find answers to the execution of projects but from 20 years of direct marketing experience, I have a pretty good foundation of knowledge to draw from and utilize that foundation to serve my clients best.

Just remember, Ecommerce101 is a process of focusing on the basics. Always spend time on Products, Pricing, Promotions and Place to be sure you maximize your foundation and revenues effectively and efficiently month over month. You'll find the most impact in these areas above and beyond Blue ocean in most cases.

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It's important to analyze your business financially but in addition, you must be able to set those financial goals against strategies and tactics that show a clear and attainable path to your goals. This is a missing piece in most small ecommerce businesses.

The DiMotta Method combines the financial analysis and goal-setting with the employee, marketing and strategic aspects of the business. With The DiMotta Method, a small business owner in essence 'rents' a VP of Ecommerce level individual for 1 to 2 months to guide their team to (1) full P&L and website analysis, (2) a full strategic and marketing plan and (3) a team with higher productivity and execution rates.

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If you believe The DiMotta Method is the fit for your businesses or if you'd like to inquire about this method further, please contact us anytime.