A Research Diva's Journal

Impulse Purchases Rare Online

2005-01-14T08:54:00.000-08:00

Vast Majority of Search-Influenced Buying Occurs Either Offline or in Subsequent Internet User Sessions
-- From a study by comScore Networks, Dec 13, 2004

Only 15% of purchases occurred in the same session as the initial search.
85% occurred in a non-search session.
A full 40% occurred from 5 to 12 weeks after the initial search.

Add to this that the initial search was most often for either a general term (such as "videos") or a known megastore, and small online businesses are left in a bind. How can small ebusinesses hope to show up in a highly competitive generic search, and how can they encourage searches for their specific business name?

Good, Old Fashioned Networking

Be found! Be known! A Google search for beaded jewelry has about 1,530,000 results. A search for beaded jewelry, Bremerton has 1,040 - very manageable from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standpoint. If a searcher remembered that the jeweler's name was Suzy, a search for beaded jewelry, Bremerton, Suzy would get down to a near bulls-eye of only 14.

If I was Suzy I'd take every advantage to be known, fascinating and personable while happening to point out my specialty, my online presence, and my physical location.

Share the love whenever appropriate. Do it with every handshake, be it in person or online. I'd give demonstrations, talks about beading in history, and let it be known that more of interest is available on my site. I'd do whatever I could to become Suzy, that cool bead lady from Bremerton, and I'd never, ever, forget to bring business cards that include my URL.

Be Bookmark-Worthy

I repeat: only 15% of online purchases occur in the same session as the initial search. The other 85% of purchases occur in later sessions, sometimes weeks later.

Once you get 'em in the door, romance their socks off. Show your stuff. A little tasteful eye candy wouldn't hurt. Brush up design elements. Add a favicon. Be memorable and make visitors want to come back.

Be browsable, classy, beautiful and deep.
Offer a little more than can be absorbed at one sitting.
Help visitors trust you. Be convenient, reliable and interesting.
Demonstrate responsiveness.

Check and respond to email at least once a day. Anticipate a customer's curiosities and insecurities offer closeups, washing instructions or technical specs, as warranted by your niche. Offer gift certificates, guarantees, exchanges, refunds... do whatever would seem reasonable and attractive if you were the target customer.

Take Heart

The same set of studies points out that online spending increased about 26% over last year, while both Nielsen and Maritz reported that shoppers planned to spend about the same amount overall.

If initial estimates are correct, this could indicate a move towards doing a greater portion of total shopping online. That would involve a lot of searchers who will eventually know and love and look for Suzy.

Reachable Goals 101.5: Confessions

2005-01-13T14:17:00.000-08:00

Balance versus Activity

1700 years ago Diogenes Laërtius wrote that what's difficult is "...To know one's self," and what was easy is "to advise another."

Do I advise clients to publish an unfinished-looking site? NEVER.

Am I more likely to get on with my site if I publish it unfinished? Yes.

But that's sooooo unprofessional!

Guess what? As of the end of October I published my own unfinished AbleReach web site revamp. I felt like laughing. Web Content Consultant, my eye! Yet that is exactly what I do, and pretty darn well, I might add.

As of late October my behind-the-scenes structure included about 100 unlinked, open spaces for future content, and four, count-em "4" of my own finished pages. As I was joking to a friend, that's four pages down and 30 to go before the main site will look finished. Then come the expansions and updates, the php includes, the css divs and ids that will replace all those individual classes I was so proud of when I first learned to write them. I wrote the code I knew best because that was the fastest way to get going.

Can getting off the block be more important than getting off on the right foot? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on how wrong the foot.

Why did I do it? This time, the emotional jump-start was more important than surface-level perfection. The morning after publishing my unfinished template I woke up with a gleam in my eye and laughter in my heart. Six weeks later I am still jazzed. Oh, this irony! I feel free. I've exposed my soft underbelly for all to see, come out of the closet, poked a little fun at myself, lit a fire under myself, put myself in the shoes of my clients... and, gee wiz, I so hoped anyone who checked in by early in 2005 would see only sparkling and complete content.

Today, January 13, 2005, life behind the scenes has picked up considerably. My folders of research and drafts are bulging beautifully. My own sites are still "in development." If I finish two pages a day I'll be where I want to be in about three years. In three years I'll have my eye on 2010. I'm a lifelong learner, an ongoing project kind of a gal.

In the meantime, there are reachable, simple, short-term goals that really do make a difference. I wanted to teach: I have taught. I wanted to learn some Linux: I am learning the leanest of smidges as time allows. I wanted to make more progress with face-to-face networking: love it, am doing it, plan more of it.

I want to make more progress my own site: lo and behold, the good red road is ahead. Better get cracking.

p.s.
Do as I say, not as I do, but if you do do as I do (groan,) do have a sense of humor about it. Above all, enjoy life and keep moving forward. Life is too short for anything else.

Link of the day: The Procrastination Research Group

Have fun!

Seek Simple Solutions

2005-01-12T09:05:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I had a chat with Bill Hoke, a wonderful business consultant with a long history in my county. We talked briefly about simplifying business relationships from the customer's point of view. When I got home I Googled for Mr. Hoke's writings and found that he and I share a very important philosophy - avoiding complicated solutions for simple problems.

Most of us will map out a big dream and then expect all parts of it to march forward at once. Life just isn't like that. Success just isn't like that.

The most efficient way to put on socks is one foot at a time. The same is true for business development.

What is the simplest, most manageable way to take a step forward? Analyze, simplify, check priorities, simplify, then act. Stressed or stuck? Did you forget to simplify?

On that theme, I'll be changing the way I run this blog. Posts will be small and frequent - more of a thought for the day or a resource review than a mini-dissertation requiring heavy-duty digestion. I will not post major articles to the blog, though if a blog post inspires a major article I will edit the post to add a link to the article.

This means that those of you who have subscribed to this blog via Bloglet may get multiple announcements of new posts. I promise to keep it simple. No more than one or two revisions per post. ;-)

I also promise to keep it regular and responsive. Any requests will go into the idea mill. Google and I have an ongoing relationship, and I have a thing for researching and networking.

Professional Email Addresses Explained

2004-11-16T19:45:00.000-08:00

Do not use free email addresses for business purposes.

No yahoo, no Hotmail, no Gmail, & etc. Why? Using a free email for business says that you will ask for other people's trust without standing up and investing in your own traceable presence.

Emails that can be had anonymously are red flags for:

fly-by-night companies
spammers
credit card fraud

Businesses should not use email addresses from an ISP.

ISP means Internet Service Provider. No ISP email address means no AOL email, no Prodigy email, no emails through Earthlink or MSN, & etc. ISP email is fine and dandy for personal use, but it's not the same as having a business email. Why?

Every time you change your ISP your email address will change, resulting in the loss of any possible sales leads who have been interested enough to hold on to an old business card.
Every time you use a you@isp.com email, you promote the brand recognition of your ISP. Branding includes name recognition. To remember your brand or business name, people need to see it over and over again. Why give that advantage to your ISP?

Businesses should use professional email addresses.

These are two great advantages of professional email addresses:

As long as you have your domain you can always have the same email address. I've seen this done with startup businesses on an absolute shoestring – no Internet access at home, emails answered daily at the local library through webmail, and professional business policies upheld very inexpensively through consistently professional habits.
Any posts you make to public forums online are an opportunity to represent yourself and be known as a professional. I've seen Google pull up obscure forum pages in response to a search for an otherwise un-indexed domain name. More on this will be covered in later articles.

What is a professional email address?

you@yourdomain.com, pure and simple.

How do I get a me@mydomain email address?

First, are you ready? Make a commitment to check and answer email every day, at least five days a week. Slow response time signals lack of professionalism. Ignoring a business email will reduce the trust of even the most enthusiastic potential customer.

The host I use offers domains for $6 a year. Add about $12 a year for email services and the total cost for a you@yourdomain.com email can be as low as $18 per year. Hosting a web site is usually a separate charge. Caution! Free automated "sitebuilder" websites can be had very inexpensively, but don't jump the gun. In most cases, sitebuilder's disadvantages outweigh their advantages. I'll write about professional-level starter websites soon.

Make sure that the domain is registered in your own name. Some services register domains in the name of their own service. Whoever is listed as the owner has rights to the domain.
Register under your real name and contact number, because visibility ads accountability. A Post Office Box is fine.

How should I choose a domain name?

In an ideal world, your domain name and business name would be the same, and your business name would contain a word that says specifically what you do. No “Jane Doe Products,” or “John Doe Enterprises.”

In actuality, you may have been “AAA Widget Enterprises of South Carolina” for years, and want the domain name www.aaawenterprisessc.com, which could very well be owned by another enterprising AAA. You may need to do some window shopping and creative thinking. Check for hyphenated versions. Test your ideas on friends. Be aware that some names will spell strange things when squished together - www.tombsgarage.com could be Tombs Garage or Tom B's Garage.

There are several ways to research domain name availability. When I want to see if a name is available I usually go to www.godaddy.com and use their handy search function. I register client domains through my website host because they're less expensive and I like having everything all in one place. My host gets a bulk rate from their domain name registrar and then passes some of the savings on to customers.

How should I choose my email address?

Are you a big company or a one-person shop? Jane Doe's ideal email address may be jane@janedoegifts.com in a small shop, but not for a large organization that could have more than one Jane. Other standards are janed@janedoegifts.com, jd@domain.com, jdoe@whateverdomain.com, or an address that is also a job description like buyer@janedoegifts.

Some professionals advise against predictable addresses like info@yourdomain.com, because spammers will send test emails to obvious addresses, once they see that the domain is registered. Some advise the opposite: include a predictable email so that a person who knows your domain but has forgotten your email address can easily get in touch. A good contact information page can give the best of both worlds.

My personal preferences is for emails that have a personal touch, such as a nickname or a personal name. This time around I've tried several predictable names like info@ablereach.com; they do seem to gather more spam.

How do I get the most from my professional email address?

Self-Promotion Counts!

Put your professional email address on all your information: every flier, every email signature and every business card.
If you have content on your domain, add your website address below your business name on every product label.
Be consistent. Put your email address in the same place, in the same typeface, with the same information before and afterwards whenever possible. Consistency helps clients feel comfortable and informed.
Consistent customer service includes concise, informative, prompt responses to all emails.
Consistency helps your domain name be noticed at a glance.

The more often people see your professional email address, the more likely they are to remember your domain name. Use it, use it, use it.

Yes! Use that professional email address!

Use you@yourdomain.com when writing to anyone who is or could be a supplier, customer, networking contact or a provider of sales leads.

Friends may be curious and proud and are therefore potential networkers or customers.
An aunt who loves to tell the rest of the family what you're up to could be a networking contact or provider of sales leads.
A chamber of commerce, a charity to which you may be donating, or a forum with any connection to your business or potential customers are examples of networking contacts.

Be Memorable! Use an email signature line.

Use a signature line that declares who you are what you do.
A “sig line” should be less than six, 60-character lines long.
Some groups request that sigs be limited to two to four lines.
Most people only scan the first two or three lines.
Put who you are and what you do right up on top.

Before you have more than a placeholder site, try something like this:

Your Name or Business Name, possibly including your job title
Tagline that says what your business does and where it is
you@yourdomain.com

Add Information

Add to sparingly to your sig line when you get a website with content, a business phone number with a live body to pick up, or a physical storefront.

For someone with a brick-and-mortar storefront:

Jane Doe
Owner, Widget Collectibles
Showroom in East Gothum, Utah. Shipping Worldwide.
www.widget-collectibles.com
jdoe@widget-collectibles.com
(111) 222-3333, 10-6 Monday through Saturday

Jane Doe, President, Gothum Widget Museum
Featuring the Gothum Widget Museum Store
www.widgetmuseum.com
janed@widgetmuseum.com
(111) 222-3333, 10-6 Monday through Saturday
123 Super Street; Gothum, Utah 12345; USA

John Doe, Owner of The John Doe Artmobile
Bring Art to Children's Parties and Events in Western WA, USA
www.johndoe-artmobile.com
john@johndoe-artmobile.com
cell phone (111) 222-3333, answering service 1-800-000-0000

Professional Email Pointers

Test all links. Add http:// before your www if needed.
Be consistent, for both human memories and search engine indexing.
Write your email address and domain name the same way every single time. The standard is all lower case: you@yourdomain.com for emails or www.yourdomain.com for a URL.
Write your business name the same way every time, just as it would appear on letterhead. For example: Business Name, JCPenney or T.J. Maxx. Note the details of how Penney's and T.J. Maxx handle periods and spaces.
Communicate, communicate, communicate. Be generous with information. Being a reliable, professional resource will bring in more referrals and business than a short term sales pitch.

Privacy Policies: The Nuts and Bolts

2004-10-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

Privacy Policies: LAW

More and more laws will require that websites post privacy policies. The Federal Trade Commission has information about U.S. laws. From their home page put - online privacy policy - in the search field and you'll see thousands of results, peppered with legal tangles that could have been avoided. The FTC's Privacy Initiatives provide a wealth of legal references, and their own privacy policy is an excellent example for further study.

You can get ideas for your own privacy policy by reading high quality examples like the FTC's, or you can use the Direct Marketing Association's privacy practices generator. The DMA's questions are more thorough and detailed than the needs of most small organizations. Edit the output for simplicity, and test your results on friends and family.

Privacy Policies: YOUR CUSTOMERS

If the law isn't inspiring you to put up a polished privacy policy ASAP, here are some highly motivating facts. The statistics are from a 2004 eMarketer article that assessed research from the Annenberg Public Privacy Policy Center and the Customer Respect Group. The interpretation is mine.

Only 7.6% of respondents say that they either don't bother to read privacy policies, don't care about them, or put in false information.
22.4% say that if a site DOESN'T HAVE a privacy policy they don't provide information.
26.6% say that if they DON'T LIKE the privacy policy they don't provide information.

What does "don't like" mean? Consider that less than 50% of at-home net users think privacy policies are easy to understand.

Privacy Policies: BENEFITS

Each visitor to your site is a prospective sales lead. If you have a poor or nonexistent privacy policy you lose at least 49% of the leads who've thought to check your privacy policy before giving you information. A customer cannot buy from you without giving you information.
Anyone who checks your privacy policy wants to know if they can trust you. This puts them in a special category: sales leads who are deciding if they want to trust you. In the brick-and-mortar world you could feed that trust by employing polite, well-informed salespeople who could answer questions. Online, your customers don't know what to expect unless you tell them and show you mean it.
Overall, 29% say that they look to see if a site is secure (SSL, or a https URL) before providing information. If you pay for SSL, show your customers you take their privacy seriously by TELLING them you use SSL to protect their information and at what point they'll be referred to your secure pages.

My expectation is that the SSL issue would strongly influence anyone who sticks around long enough to try to register for a newsletter or make an order. That 29% who checks to see if a site is secure would probably leave if they felt the site's owner is asking for too much information without showing concern for a client's privacy.

Privacy: GUIDELINES

Pay attention to the facts. This isn't rocket science, folks. It's the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would like others to do unto you.

Online businesses should not ask for identifying information unless the input form is hosted on a secure site.
Any shopping cart that requires you to register outside of a secure page is poorly written.
Every page that asks for any sort of information should have an obvious link to a privacy policy.
If you have a non-SSL form on your site, don't ask for too many details.

Go ahead and ask customer service related questions. However, unsecured, potentially identifying demographic information should be optional and unrelated to questions that the cautious client would relate to identity theft: no income level and no specific physical address.

Your customer's respect and trust is much more important than knowing their phone number ASAP.

Reachable Goals 101: Are You Overwhelmed?

2004-10-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

Heads Up!

The Web is BIG
Ideas are BIGGER
Learning even a few new things each day is a Big Job

To research online is to wander into a smorgasbord of material that you will never learn completely. Letting yourself wander ahead is human nature, and it's fun.

However, don't let the combination of adventuring and massive amounts of information distract you from creating reachable goals in the here and now. The object is not mastery. Instead, consider evolutionary, step-by-step goals.

I highly recommend making a word processor file for your master goal list. Be specific. For example, "Find a good online tutorial about optimizing gifs," or, "Start a list of FAQ for my website." Stow the other fifty pages of goals in a folder named "whole-lotta-goals" or somesuch. Start five new files, and write a the name of one specific goal at the top of each file. Date, print, then post these five pages on the wall near your workspace.

Printing the five pages makes them into five finite projects. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, look up at those five pages and ask yourself if you are also dreaming of or dreading what's waiting in the rest of your world.

But I Want To Do It All!

Of course you do!

My natural instinct is to start with the whole enchilada and attempt to achieve nirvana by putting in very long hours. This has more to do with inspiration than achievement.

Inspiration assumes a person can leap huge amounts of material in a single bound, if they could only get a really good headwind and try hard enough. I love that feeling. However, eventually exhaustion hits and I am reminded that inspiration lives in a universe apart from common sense realities like the passage of time and the need for sleep and movement not involving keyboard or mouse.

Successful People Have Reachable Goals

Really, they do! Big ideas, reachable goals.

When I come to my senses I try to think like Henry Ford. He believed that nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

I put the big picture goal in front of myself and slice it up into little goals. The little goals have to be reachable, and I have to be willing to give myself credit for reaching them, even if some may come a half-step at a time. That gives me peace while keeping my eye on the prize.

Set aside an hour or two every day when nobody else is around. Do all you can within that time, one step at a time. Learning is an ongoing evolution. Commit and enjoy. Do not worry about if you are going to do it all or get it “right.”

Today's Really Big Link: Astronomy Picture of the Day

E. Able: Research Diva

2004-10-24T09:03:00.000-07:00

I love to analyze, understand and invent. Show me a puzzle and I'll keep turning it over until I have a practical working model of how it works and what it's good for. Give me a nudge and information will come bubbling your way, be it the real-world practicalities of knowing and using your values, the science of weather changes, how to make a crack-free white chocolate cheesecake, or what kind of payment options result in the best sales conversion rates.

The best part about being a compulsive researcher is translating techno tidbits into easy-access information that can inspire and encourage others. Motivation fascinates me, and I am honored when I am a part of inspiring others.

Link of the day: Google's Information for Webmasters ;-)