Re: Promoting a consumer oriented e-commerce site

From: Alex Tillman <alex_at_webtillman.com>
Date: Fri 15 Feb 2002 08:58:33 -0600

Thanks for those of you who already responded to my
original email(s). Some of you asked for more details
of my situation, so, while I don_t want to pinpoint my
company, I_ll fill in some of the blanks.

The company deals within a segment of the consumer
electronic market, and is your basic run-of-the-mill
e-commerce site. (I used widgets in the example
before, because it might as well be. There are six or
seven major competitive sites in our segment, and
price, service and selection are nearly
indistinguishable between us. Of course if you talk to
any of us, we_ll each say that we are _better_ than
the others_ but you_d be hard pressed to tell us
apart, really.) Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
policies by the product manufacturers keep us all in
line with discounting, and we all offer free shipping
over x$, _great customer service_ etc. So, from a
strict marketing point of view, none of us really has
a truly discernable advantage. (The competitive sites,
however, are generally much more content rich _
articles, how-to classes etc., which is something we
are working on.)

That leaves two areas that will determine who will
ultimately succeed. First is site design (and
conversion rate, which I believe is a direct
byproduct). That area is a big fat gaping wound for us
right now, however, we just hired someone to focus
solely on the redesign, so I_m confident we_ll move in
the right direction on that front. The second is site
promotion. I spent about four months doing SEO on our
site (redesigning as necessary to get better
placement) and using overture to get paid listings,
both of which have been very successful and have
doubled our unique visitors. (By the way, once I
started the SEO campaign, I got the Webtrends product,
which I now see is our list sponsor, to track our
traffic and I give it a huge _thumbs up_. The reports
are great for figuring out exactly how well your
listings are pulling and for calculating precise ROI
and conversion rates. And no_ I have no vested
interest in Webtrends or any other software product,
just offering my $.02 as a satisfied customer.)

So now, I have been given the ultimatum of doubling
our sales by June using an online advertising budget
of a whopping $1,500 a month to accomplish this
Herculean task. According to Alexa rankings, we are
getting about 1/10th the traffic of our competitors
(before the SEO project), and our conversion rate is
far below the 1-2% range I often hear quoted as an
industry average for a consumer e-commerce site. (We
also have a Yahoo store as well that offers the exact
same products as our main site, at the exact same
price. The Yahoo store, however, boast a conversion
rate of about 2%, indicating to me that the poor
design of our site must be hampering the conversion
rate.) Therefore, I have to rapidly boost our traffic,
and increase our conversion rates, all without using
banner ad networks. The conversion rate issue will be
attacked with site redesign. That leaves a large-scale
promotional push on a shoestring budget.

So that brings us back to my last post.

Bottom line: I have a minimal budget, a reasonably
optimized search listing/paid listing strategy in
place, can_t/won_t use banner networks, and have to
figure out how to drive twice the traffic (about
another 40-50K unique visitors a month) to my fairly
generic consumer electronic subcategory e-commerce
site. Any ideas?



Received on Fri Feb 15 2002 - 08:58:33 CST