Promoting your site

As I mentioned before, most of the people who visit your store will still find the idea of buying online a little strange. You have to reassure them. The most powerful confidence builder is a top-quality site: high production values go to work directly on the visitor's subconscious. But it's also important to reassure visitors explicitly.

For example, if you are determined to provide great customer service, tell your visitors so, right on your site. Guarantee that they will be satisfied with what they buy from you, or you will refund their money with no questions asked.

Your site should offer secure online ordering, and you should say so to visitors. But If you try ordering online yourself, you'll find the biggest concern that you have is not security. I bet what you'll find yourself thinking is, who are these guys? Did they actually get my order? Are they going to send me the products? When?

When someone places an order from a Yahoo! store, we always generate a confirmation page thanking them for their order, and telling them their order number. That is a good first start, but you as the merchant should also send them an email thanking them for their order and telling them when it will arrive.

And make sure that you ship orders quickly. Web users want fast results. They don't want to hear that they should expect to wait 4-6 weeks for delivery. This is not 1910. Tell them they will get their order in 3 days.

And make sure they do. The consumers ordering on the Web now are like the scouts of an oncoming army. They will determine your reputation for service for years to come. If you do a great job, they will tell all their friends about you.

Ordering online is still an unusual thing to do, so people who do it are proud of how adventurous they are. Have you ever listened to someone talk about ordering online? "It was no big deal," they say, swelling visibly. "I just went to their Web site, found what I wanted, and gave them my credit card number. Three days later the stuff arrived. No problem."

People love to be able to tell such stories to their friends. It's the most valuable kind of free advertising for you. So make sure that your customers have good stories to tell. If you do a bad job, your customers will also tell all their friends, and you will be in big trouble. Word spreads very quickly on the Internet.

Especially this year, treat your Web customers as if each one were as important as ten customers. Because if you treat them well, each one will turn into ten customers.

Do you want to hear what your customers have to say about your Web site or your products? You should. Tell them that you want to hear from them, and put a prominent email link and/or phone number in your site. Try including a link that will let visitors send email directly to the president of your company. Few will bother to send mail, but everyone who sees it will be impressed by your attention to customer service.

When a customer does send you mail, respond promptly! Customers who have taken the trouble to send you email are like gold. Talk about qualified prospects. So treat them like gold. If you can, make it a corporate policy to respond to email within an hour or two at most. You have to reply eventually, so why not do it right away? Customers will be delighted to see that you care about them.

One thing not to do, if you want traffic from search engines, is use software that generates your pages dynamically. Search engines don't index dynamically generated pages. As Internet World points out, a dynamically generated site is "all but invisible to search engines." 


Most online stores can also profit by getting links from related sites. The best way to get other sites to link to you is to give them a percentage of the sales generated by that link. Industry leaders like Amazon.Com have used this technique with great results. (Yahoo! Store has built-in tools to help you create and manage revenue-sharing links.)

Which sites should you get links from? Put yourself in your customer's position. If you are selling Star Trek merchandise, go to Yahoo! and search for "star trek". The sites you get sent to are the same ones your customers will get sent to, so those are where you want to start asking for links.

Another way to get traffic is to buy banner ads that lead to your site. For example, you can buy banner ads on search engines that are tied to particular keywords. When you search for "books" in many search engines, you will see a banner ad for Amazon.Com.

Be careful when you buy banner ads. Banner ads are expensive, and even if they bring lots of visitors to your site, there is no guarantee that these visitors will place orders. Our data suggests that few online purchases are impulse purchases. Most buyers show by the keywords they use that they meant to buy before they even reached the site where they placed the order.

So if you buy a banner ad that just brings thousands of random people to your site, few of them will place orders. I know of one online store that bought a banner ad on Playboy's Web site. I can't disclose the name, but let's say they were selling modems. Most of their buyers were men, and they knew that thousands of men visited Playboy's site, so where better to put an ad? And in fact, they did get thousands of visits from this banner. But not one order. Why? Because those people were not thinking about buying modems. The mere fact that they were at the Playboy Web site showed that.

How do you do that? Tracking tools. Good tracking tools can tell you where all your visitors come from, and how much visitors from each source spend. Yahoo! Store's tracking tools can even tell you which search keywords your visitors used in search engines, and how much money people searching for each phrase spent.


(Yahoo! Store's tracking tools are currently the best in the business. They've earned rave reviews from press and analysts.)

For example, if you are selling Star Wars products, you will get a lot of hits from search engines. You may find that you get ten times as many hits from people searching for "darth vader" as for "darth vader figurine". But I would bet that the people searching for "darth vader figurine" spend more money at your site. So what keyword do you buy from search engines? If you want sales, buy "figurine", not "darth vader".

Finally, if you have a catalog business or retail stores, don't forget to promote your site to your existing customers. If you have a catalog, include your URL in it. Your Web site is the perfect place to sell limited quantities of closeout items that would not be worth including in your print catalog. I know one company that includes messages throughout their print catalog telling customers that closeouts are available on their Web site at special prices. They say there is a noticeable jump in orders each time their catalog goes out.