(Special mini-episode of the Frank Online Marketing Show)

Adam Froman, CEO of the national research panel, Asking Canadians, and Toronto-based strategy and design firm, Delvinia, is convinced that Canada is ideally positioned to teach the rest of the world how to do market research right in the digital era.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him when he was in Edmonton recently to talk to the Marketing Research & Intelligence Association (MRIA). Here are some clips from our interview.

(Special mini-episode of the Frank Online Marketing Show)

Adam Froman, CEO of the national research panel, Asking Canadians, and Toronto-based strategy and design firm, Delvinia, is convinced that Canada is ideally positioned to teach the rest of the world how to do market research right in the digital era.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him when he was in Edmonton recently to talk to the Marketing Research & Intelligence Association (MRIA). Here are some clips from our interview.

Episode 4 – Shop.ca CEO, Drew Green, & the Pros & Cons of Selling Through Online Marketplaces

 

Should your business sell through an online marketplace?

 Pros:

* Greater visibility. They’ll be spending more on site promotion than you could.

* Consumer confidence. People may not know of your company, but will have heard of the big-name marketplaces.

* No need to have your own site. But you should anyway, just in case things don’t last with the marketplace.

* Better shipping rates. Their clout can get you bulk shipper discounts.

* Payment processing. Saves you this hassle.

* Some handle inventory & shipping for you. Amazon does this, but you pay for it.

Cons:

* Builds their brand, not yours.

* Intense price competition. You may not be the only one selling a specific product.

* Costs. You have to pay the marketplace various fees. Will you still make a profit?

* Rules. They’ll have rules you have to follow, and those rules may change.

* Products. Not all marketplaces stock all types of products. Yours might not qualify.

* What if they disappear? As we know, sometimes even big companies go under. How will you recover if that happens?

If you are interested, Amazon.ca posts detailed information about selling in its marketplace on its site. It will give you a good idea of what questions to ask if you are talking to one of Shop.ca’s 1100 sales reps!

Episode 3 of the Frank Online Marketing Show: Interview with Rent Frock

Repeat co-founder Lisa Delorme & a discussion of ways to lower barriers to getting people to try what you are offering.

Takeaways

When you sell online, getting people to make that first purchase is usually the hardest part, so you want to do everything you possibly can to lower the barriers. Examples:

* Models who are a wide variety of sizes

* Skype-based fitting consultations

* Try before you buy (See also this post about trying before you buy)

* No questions asked money-back guarantees

If you are aiming at a high-end market, creating a sense of exclusivity can help your sales. Rent Frock Repeat calls its customers “members” and they don’t get to see the dresses until they become members. This increased their conversion rates from 5% to 28%!

Terms of the day: bounce rate and conversion rate. 

* Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors who come to your site and leave immediately — i.e. without going to another page or taking an action you want them to take. Your goal is to keep your bounce rates low.

* Conversion rate is the percentage of site visitors who take an action you want them to take. This could be signing up for your e-mail list, calling you, ordering a product, etc. You want your conversion rate to be high.

UPDATE: Listener Diane Castro, from Texas, wrote in two questions that she would have liked me to ask, so here are her questions and Lisa Delorme’s answers:

Q:Their business would require a fair amount of start-up capital. How did they get their start-up capital–personal savings, small-business loans, crowd sourcing?

A: We did use our own money for the start up as well as a loan from the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Q: How do they use social media in their business? Do they rely on Facebook and Twitter to keep customers informed on the pop-up shops?

A: We also use Social Media quite a bit and are highly engaged with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.  As a matter of fact, other than PR that is our only form of marketing.

Feel free to send me any questions you have, and I’ll do my best to get them answered for you!

Takeaways from Olia Libicz Pavlin interview

* You can help sell consumers on the value of paying for shipping by pointing out (nicely) the cost of the their time. This is especially helpful if what you are selling would be hard to find elsewhere.

* Think carefully about your keywords in setting up online advertising campaigns, and remember to use negative keywords to exclude searches you don’t want to show up in. For example. Cool Toys For Tots might want to exclude the word “sex”, so they don’t show up when someone is searching for sex toys.

* Remember that Google isn’t the only search engine out there. Nearly 20% of searches are done on other engines. Bing, for example, is now over 8% and Yahoo almost 7% (Source: http://www.statowl.com/search_engine_market_share.php)

* Customers want to know their shipping costs in advance. For most locations you can link directly to your shipper’s site to automatically calculate shipping costs.. For remote locations Olia created a “custom shipping” button.

* Keep it personal. Don’t pretend to be a huge company when you are not. If you’ve got a tiny business, be proud of it and take advantage of the personal connection that lets you have with your customers.

Adwords value calculations

In this episode I run through calculations about how a seemingly great keyword (like Toys) can seem surprisingly cheap to advertise for, and how even with a good conversion rate you can lose a ton of money with it. As promised in the show, here are the calculations I used.

* “Toys” advertised in Canada only: costs just $0.34/click; gets 2,240,000 searches per month

* 2% click-through-rate (CTR) – 44,800 clicks/month @ $.34 = $15,232/mo ad cost

* 2% conversion rate (sales from the clicks) = 896 items/month

* $10 profit per item on average = $8,960 “profit” before ad cost

* Ad cost of $15,232 – $8,960 = $6,272 LOSS on this campaign!

Takeaways from Jeff Booth Interview

1. Find a pain point and setting out to solve that pain. Don’t take the easy way out with something that’s only moderately better than the status quo.

2. Think through the effect of what you are doing on the entire supply chain, including how your suppliers might be pressured by their suppliers or your competitors.

4. The combination of push and pull marketing. They can feed on each other to multiply the effect of your marketing efforts

5. Great content will give you fabulous search engine rankings. It’s better than trying to game the system.

Today’s “How To”

This episode discusses “How to” come up with the right value proposition for your market.

Whether you are starting a new, online business or planning to use the web to expand or develop your existing one, you need to figure out the “why”.

• Why would somebody come to your website?

• Why would they give you their contact information?

• Why would they buy from you?

• Why would they tell others about you?

Let’s go to builddirect.com and see how they’ve done it.

One of the first things you see when you go to their site, high up and centered on the page are two boxes.

If you are looking for flooring, those both provide a pretty compelling reason to explore this site.

* They give you a clear benefit (save 80%).

* They minimize your risk (money back guarantee including return shipping, which would be a pretty big deal if you are talking about returning something as heavy as flooring)

If you look a little further down on the page they give more reasons to try them out:

*  Again they minimize risk by pointing out that they are “completely free”and they remove a hurdle by pointing out that you won’t have to give them any credit card information.

* They talk about the new products, with more coming in daily.

*  They tell you what’s hot, so you can feel confident that what you buy won’t destroy your house’s resale value.

* They have customer testimonials, with real names, locations and dates right there on the home page. In marketing lingo we call this “social proof”

That’s all fine and dandy for a big player like BuildDirect, you may say, but what about me? Well, first of all, remember that they didn’t start out big. Even if you can’t guarantee that folks will save 80% with your company, you probably can get some good customer testimonials, and there’s got to be SOMETHING you are doing better than others. If not, why are you still in business?

Get creative

Brainstorm. Think about what might attract a new customer to you, whether in-store on online. Who is that customer? What are they looking for? What do they need? What are they having trouble finding? What will make them happy?

Be as specific as possible when you imagine your possible new customers and design add-ons or motivational tools that will be right for each type of customer. Those add-ons can take advantage of your expertise and product knowledge. That provides a lot of value to me, the customer, and very little cost to you, the retailer. And that’s why small companies still exist, and always will. That’s why we still have bookstores, despite Amazon. Why some small electronics stores can compete with BestBuy and Costco. And why there are still even small, independent travel agents succeeding out there!

Are you having problems figuring out the “Why” for your business?

Tell me about it below. Let’s see if together we can brainstorm some ideas to help you profit o...