Marketing Lessons From an Online Shop

Posted On: 2011-01-06

Yesterday I had a very interesting 30 minute meeting with a client that stretched on for over two hours. It was one of those meetings where I introduce a client to their new online shop and give them a brief overview of how the backend works.

It's always brief because most people don't really learn how their online shop works until they've had a few hours to play with it themselves and there's just so much they can pick up when they're not actually sitting at the keyboard. That's what I had planned for this meeting but it went much longer because this was a client who really understood marketing and she wanted to make sure that her shop hit the ground running.

She was interested in knowing how to reduce the number of categories in the store because she knew that too many options just confused potential customers. In her line of business there are quite a few options before you even get down to the point where you're looking at individual products and all of her competitors gave site visitors heaps of options to choose from as soon as they landed on their sites.

That wasn't what my client wanted at all ... sure the number of products she is going to sell on the site is huge. In fact it numbers in the thousands and she doesn't mind showing her site visitors all those individual products ... but she didn't want to confuse her visitors with too many options as soon as they arrived on the site.

So we sat there and I showed her how to move products around from one category to another and how to reduce the number of categories from about ten to something less than five. She was keeping it simple.

Then we looked at the product descriptions and Steve walked her through the need to keep the descriptions short ... but relevant. She understood that and she also understood the need for a call to action at the end of each product description.

She didn't need to be told that without a call to action her chances of making a sale were greatly diminished and that people tend to wander away from a product page if they aren't directed to "buy now", "grab your bargain here", "click here to ...".

Now there are some people who think that such rampant commercialism is crass and vulgar... we recently had another client who didn't want to include a "buy now" button in his site at all even though he wanted people to buy what he was selling. He finally relented but then we couldn't produce a button in a size that he thought was suitable so we finally sent him off to find some other designer who was more interested in aesthetics than making money.

Fortunately the client we were talking with yesterday had no problems with being crass and vulgar. She wants to make sales so she had no problems with directing people to take the next step down the buying funnel.

We also wanted to talk to her about personalizing her online store because potential buyers will respond more positively if they know that they're dealing with real people ... even if they may not be able to see those people. That may sound a little strange when we're talking about an online shop but she understood perfectly.

Personalizing a shopping cart script isn't so easy but she already had some strategies planned to make sure that people who visited the shop online and who placed orders could clearly see that they were dealing with real people

Then we got onto the subject of advertising and she was interested in doing some Adwords advertising and surprisingly, we didn't have to tell her about intent ... you know, that thing people have when they enter a keyword or keyword phrase into the search engines.

She already knew that what most people might think of as being her primary search term wasn't as important as most people might think because most of the people who searched for that term probably weren't all that interested in buying what she was selling. Instead she was prepared to drill down and target other terms that were obviously used by people who wanted to buy.

And right there are some very valuable lessons that we all need to learn whether we're selling left-threaded tap nuts or memberships in hardcore porn sites.

We need to:

  • Keep things simple ... we want to make sales to add to the confusion that already abounds on the Net.
  • Keep our sales pitch short and simple too and don't be afraid to tell people to "click here" or "buy now"
  • Make your sites personal ... talk to the surfer ... interact with them and encourage them to relate to you. The more you do that the better your chances are of making a sale.
  • Make sure that you target the people who really want to buy what you're selling. Don't waste your time trying to attract tire-kickers and those who aren't really interested in what you're selling. But do work hard at attracting the people who are interested in what you're selling because they're the ones who will put money in your pocket.


Of course how you do all those things is really up to you ... just as they are for our client. She knows who her customers are and what their preferences might be and she knows how to target them.

Once you know who your customers are you'll be able to target them more effectively too.