5 Rules of Marketing For Online Stores

1. Quicke-Commerce Marketing 5 Rules Of Marketing For Online Stores Azamat Ulbashev Internet Entrepreneur and Online Marketing Expert A CapitalBlog.ru eBook Web: www.capitalblog.ru/en E-mail: ulbashev@capitalblog.ru

2. This eBook is about marketing for small and mid-size online stores. View 5 marketing techniques on how to increase conversion rate. The most important thingabout marketing is that no rule or secret can make your online store more profitable. In today’s competitive market successful strategy is always a combination of various tactics, rules, designs and products, and even location and time matter. From over 8 years of business experience, I can tell that luck is the another ingredient for success in business.In online business luck often plays a bigger role than in offline. To improve chances - think like Venture Capitalist, or scientist: the more efforts you spend, the better chance for you to find the winning combination. Try to change design or product, prices or ads, but remember that all changes must be reasonable. Only Continued Efforts lead to conceptual changes and improvements. Everyday, every minute and every second think about your customers and their problems. How to understand them? How to help them? How to satisfy your customers? If these Rules do not answer all your questions, and if you need more tips, you are welcome to visit my web-site or contact me any time or even hire me. Yours, Azamat Ulbashev P.S.: Please feel free to post this eBook on your blog, web-site, email etc. Copyright (c) 2010 CapitalBlog.ru/enAllRightsReserved 2 This eBook courtesy of Azamat Ulbashev, Online Marketing Expert Rules, Secrets etc eMarketing Efforts Are More Important Than Ever

3. Buyers personas Understanding what your customers want is a key factor to your success. What is buyers personas? It’s a short and concise profile of each “type” of your client. Actually, everything in your marketing strategy will be related to buyers personas. How do you create it? I prefer to make simple Excel sheet. In columns I describe buyers personas and in rows – put questions and information that I need to cover. What are their needs? What are their ages? What problems they need to solve? What words they use to describe those problems? What media do they look for? How do you evaluate whether you you attract the right people? It’s all about the conversion rate. Examples of buyers personas for online toys store. A toy store solves various problems for different types of people. I have chosen only one personas, but it can be more. Parents can find solutions for practical and emotional problems. Ex.: Kate and Tom are parents to two boys of 5 and 10. They are both office employees, have an income above average. They spend over 2 hours per day on the Internet. Copyright (c) 2010 CapitalBlog.ru/en All Rights Reserved 3 This eBook courtesy of Azamat Ulbashev, Online Marketing Expert 1. Know Your Customers Find As Much Information As Possible

4. If you get your customers to love your company and products you will be rich. But none of us loves hard-selling. What we really like is finding solutions to our problems at appropriate cost. Entrepreneurs need profit. Customers need products and services. Your first task as an online store owner is to understand the problems that people face. Provide solution for physical or emotional types of problems, or even better - for both types. What kind of obstacles your customers face? Find the most painful problem that you can solve for your customers. And they will come and buy your products. People hate hard-selling. We like the products that provide solutions. Being customer-oriented has other positive aspects: you can easily scale your business. Scalability can lead to the most important thing: you can exceed customers’ expectation. How do you do that? Be people oriented. Start thinking not from products, but from customers’ point of view. Put yourself in customers’ place. What needs you can satisfy with your product or service? Be as specific as possible. Write down each problem that you can find and imagine. After that, write down solutions to each problem. Don’t think about your possibilities now. Just write. Find which products and services can provide the needed solutions. Copyright (c) 2010 CapitalBlog.ru/en All Rights Reserved 4 This eBook courtesy of Azamat Ulbashev, Online Marketing Expert 2. Sell Solution, Not Product Provide Specific Solutions to Solve Problems

5. Give visitors a chance to interact with you. As many of us are different, put different tools to do so. The tools may vary based on sub-goals and types but, in general, they help customers provide feedback and get answers to their questions. Blog Blog marketing has become very popular over the last 5 years. Establishing a blog helps you show that there are real blood and flesh people behind the online store. You can post your thoughts about the industry, the new trends in your niche, as well as hot products. Write in informal, personal style. Put the real author’s name. Livechat If you sell complex products and services, Livechat will help your customers receive more detailed information. Sales people can convince customers to make sales. Contact form This is a must-have for every serious business store. Put the link to contact form on a visible place. Ratings and reviews With our rush and crazy rhythm of life, ratings and reviews help users make correct decisions fast. We buy what others buy and what they recommend. Implementing a 5-star rating and simple comments opportunity can increase your conversion rate dramatically. Copyright (c) 2010 CapitalBlog.ru/enAllRightsReserved 5 This eBook courtesy of Azamat Ulbashev, Online Marketing Expert 3. Talk To Your Customers Live Chats, Ratings, Reviews and Blogs

6. Why do you need to look back at your competitors? As your resources are limited, you have to search and analyze their marketing efforts and estimate results. It is, probably, the most difficult rule, but following it you will save a lot of time and money. List your competitors, collect as much information on each of them, Analyze their traffic, keywords, referral analytics etc: compete.com, quantacost.com, alexa.com Big competitors Many business books are written about big companies’ success stories (Google, Apple, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft …). Although, those companies are great and their marketing departments work extremely well, I encourage you not to Copy & Paste their ideas blindly. Learn from them wisely, adopt some of their ideas and drop what is not suitable for your business. Build your brand It doesn’t matter how small or how big your company is. Your brand differentiates you from the crowd. It makes your staff feel more confident about themselves, while the customers will feel more confident about purchasing with your store. Think Global, Act Local Look at your competitors on different markets, in different countries. Investigate them from the marketing point of view. Think about your customers in the global market. Copyright (c) 2010 CapitalBlog.ru/en All Rights Reserved 6 This eBook courtesy of Azamat Ulbashev, Online Marketing Expert 4. Know You Competitors Use Their Experience To Reach Your Goals

7. Hire top web-design companyin your area and let them do the whole job. If it is not possible, then hire average and control them carefully. In the last case, your design has to be simple, fast and nice. Each contact point of your shop has to be extremely fast and good looking. Your Home Pagemust clearly and quickly (in 1-2 seconds) define your store’s specialization, price level, and professional level. Include specific keywords on your Hope Page. Put Sufficient Information about each product to help customers make purchase decisions. Don’t overwhelm them with information. Keep balance. Testimonials and Case studies Strong testimonials will improve customers’ confidence in the fact that you provide valuable products or services. Testimonials are especially very useful for services. “Buy” Button Make Call to action buttons (like Buy, Order etc) visible and attractive. Some research shows that red Buy buttons lead to better conversion rates. Own Banners Your own banner ads on your online store can give customers more information about your products. Photos and Pictures Post only extra-quality photos. Optimize them to download faster. We are very sensitive to images: great pictures show great product. And this brings you great profit. Navigation and Links So many sites, so many types of links. But for online store use standard, simple, intuitive navigation bars. Menu layout has to help customers. Don’t test their patience by making them search for a clickable link. Check your links – they have to work properly. SEO and Customer behavior Measure and analyze customer behavior through various techniques. For example, CrazyEgg tool, can show a heat map that shows you visitors’ clicks. Add Google Analytics, or any other tracking tools. Use information collected from the analysis to improve design, links, content of your store. Work on SEO very hard. Spend time and money to find the right keywords, to make your pages SE-friendly. Copyright (c) 2010 CapitalBlog.ru/en All Rights Reserved 7 This eBook courtesy of Azamat Ulbashev, Online Marketing Expert 5. Improve Usability Work On Each Contact Point With You Customer

8. I’ve decided to add these two rules, because sometimes fundamental things are forgotten. Marketing Strategy Create a marketing strategy and plan. I prefer to create a brief marketing strategy on two or three pages. A detailed one should take more space, and you will use it for investors, for your CEO and other people that you have to convince. But, trust me, for internal use two pages are more then enough. Include the following sections: Goals of the company in general, Marketing objectives, What kind of resources you need to achieve those goals, Through what channels, What kind of techniques you are going to use, Set budget for each resource. Payment Security Payment security is a very important factor. Increase your conversion rate by adding your online store SSL certificate. There are lots of companies, e.g.: VerySign, Truste Copyright (c) 2010 CapitalBlog.ru/en All Rights Reserved 8 This eBook courtesy of Azamat Ulbashev, Online Marketing Expert Afterword And Two MUST Rules About the Author Azamat is an Internet Entrepreneur and former Executive in various offline businesses. He is a founder of several Internet companies, the latest: MedRx.ru – the healthcare social network; Double Stores – 7 niche online stores: TopTravelBags.com DoubleVitamin.com BabySkin360.com TopSmartToys.com BedBathAndKids.com CrossPatterns.com DoubleSkinCare.com Azamat Ulbashev is available for consulting at E-mail: ulbashev@capitalblog.ru http://www.capitalblog.ru/en