What is 'Out of the Ordinary' in Marketing?
Posted On: 2009-08-06
If you're involved in online marketing ... and let's face it here, if you're selling any form of adult product online then you're into online marketing ... you should definitely be reading just about everything you can find by the Eisenberg brothers. These guys are definitely among the leaders in online marketing and what they can do with a site to improve sales is amazing.
One of the very few blogs I read these days is by Bryan Eisenberg and you can find it at grokdotcom.com. It's full of great information for marketers at all levels and one of the regular monthly posts that you will find there is a list of the top 10 online retailers by conversion rate.
I like to compare those published figures with the conversion rates for our clients who run online shops and it's interesting to see that the conversion rates that our clients are scoring each month aren't too shabby when compared to those figures.
This month though the post with those conversion figures was even more interesting ... not because of anything Bryan Eisenberg said but because of what someone who commented on the post said.
'Though the sites are nice, since they were the Top 10, I was expecting to see something out of the ordinary.'
It seems that the person who made that comment was expecting to see something that absolutely took his breath away when he visited those sites. No doubt he was looking for inspiration and finding nothing that was 'out of the ordinary' seemed to have disappointed him.
Perhaps he was expecting to see sweeping graphics and awesome Flash presentations coupled with plenty of fancy Ajax applications and so he missed seeing the careful attention to detail that puts those sites into the list of the top 10 online retail sites. And there's a lesson for us here in adult too.
The main reason that those sites make the top 10 list is not because they're full of fancy graphics or awesome Flash ... it's because they connect with the people who want to buy their products. They scratch where the potential buyers are itching and they scratch in places where the buyers don't even know they're itching.
These sites make the buying process very easy and they clearly address the buyers' doubts about issues such as refunds, delivery, credit card privacy and more. To do all that you don't need fancy designs and lots of flash or Ajax, you just need to think beyond the end of your nose and provide the answers, to the questions buyers would want to ask, before they've even thought about asking them.
You also need to incorporate believable copy in the text on your pages. Many people suggest that buying a membership in an adult site is an impulse buy ... people do it without giving it much thought ... but even if that's true it doesn't mean that they're going to fall for marketing that's over the top. These days surfers are becoming more and more cynical about what is so obviously just marketing hype and if you want to make sales here ... or anywhere else for that matter ... you're going to have to rely more on facts than on hype.
Finding the right ratio of facts to hype and weaving it into an effective marketing message in an industry like ours is going to be an interesting challenge but the days of depending entirely on hype are fading fast so it's a challenge that you're going to have to take up if you want to succeed here.
As if last month wasn't bad enough for disruptions we've decided to fill this month with disruptions too and we're going to be moving house. We're only moving a couple of blocks but it still means that we're going to have to pack everything up and then unpack it at the other end.
Of course it's not much fun but we are uncovering things that we had forgotten we had ... I even found some domain name registration papers for domains I had forgotten we owned. If you have business related files tucked away that you haven't looked at in a while then perhaps it's time you did dig them all out and have a peek ... you never know what you might find.
Don't forget to check your online files too ... you might even find some old sites out there that you had forgotten about that are pulling in some decent traffic from the search engines. I'm seeing a lot of talk in some places around the Net of a messy Google update that has brought a number of old sites back to the top of the results pages so it could be worth having a look.