What is a Sale?
While it may appear blatantly obvious, the sale can be many things besides an exchange of money. Your sale may be for the user to click to the next page of your website, click a certain link, fill out a form, subscribe to your newsletter, enter a contest, etc. It does not have to be a cash sale to have great value to you. Everything except cash sales do require more work, but it is easy to automate newsletters, autoresponders, follow ups, etc. Don't always think that you must have a cash sale from every visitor to be successful.
It is All a Numbers Game
Marketing is a statistical numbers game. It involves knowing how much your are spending for each visitor, tracking which programs work, and stopping those programs that do not work. When you are tracking your conversion rate you'll have to know how much you paid for those last 100 visitors and then decide if you want to spend that much money again. Without this careful tracking, it is easy to spend too much money on programs that are not beneficial. Huge advertising campaigns may have hundreds of thousands of dollars to test multiple and concurrent marketing strategies. With careful monitoring, and a little bit of marketing term knowledge, you'll be able to decide on a monthly basis if your marketing money is working for you or not.
What Results Can I Measure and Expect?
Every web site, television, radio, newspaper, or public relations marketing campaign will be entirely different. We have found that most websites that do not follow up on each unique visitor get about 1 in 200 conversion rates. That means that it may take 200 visitors to make one sale. Some websites do worse, but the average for targeted search engine traffic is about 1 in 200, although it is not difficult to get 1 in 100. You should continuously look at your website if you are not getting 1 in 100 sales and push towards this goal or better.
How Long Before I Make 1 Sale a Day?
Everyone's results will vary, but it may take up to a year or even more to make 1 sale per day. It is likely that you will not make money back from your efforts sooner than 6 months, and possibly longer depending on how you spend your advertising dollars.
If you work at marketing your web site on a daily basis, it will succeed.
www.ninja-weapons.com is about 3 and a half years old. For the first 6 months, no sales were made. In the 7th month 3 or 4 sales were made and traffic was at about 100 visitors per day. Now the site has a consistent traffic flow of almost 40,000 unique visitors per month and does very well on sales. It took almost 4 years to get to that point though, so be persistent, traffic will continue to rise the more you do.
A Note About Conversion Rates
Websites that do follow up on each customer, have astoundingly higher rates. The highest we have heard of is 1 sale for every 3 visitors, but special tools were used to coax the visitors to give them permission to be recontacted. Do not expect results this high! It is very possible to get to 1 out of a 100, or even 1 out of 50 visitors though, but realize that it will only happen if you follow through, sending emails, phone calls, etc. There are automated tools for this, but it is extra work either way.
Naturally, the harder you pursue a sale, the more chance you'll have of making it. It is perfectly acceptable to get 1 out of 100 visitors to make a purchase, as getting 100 people a day to look at your website is pathetically simple. We'll show you how.
The basics of making a sale and customer service are:
- Answer Emails Daily
- Resolve Problems to Win Customers
- Remarket to Previous Customers
- Keep New Things Constantly on Your Site
- Give Customers a Reason to Use You
How do I Track My Results of Marketing?
Each type of marketing has its own method of tracking. Many methods are common sense. For example, you could have newspaper ads ask for Jim or Betty depending on the paper, then manually count which name is asked for more. Emails can be embedded with pictures to let you know if people open them. Promotional codes or coupons can easily track just about anything. You can use different links on your homepage and then look through your access logs to see which page gets the most traffic. It is impossible to list every method, but rest assured that whatever advertising you do, there is a way to track it. Tracking it is the only way to know if it is worth spending money on that form of advertising again.
Definitions of Marketing Terms
While you do not need to memorize these marketing terms, you should at least know where to find them in case you need to know them. Many of the services that we recommend assume that you know what these marketing terms mean. To avoid confusion, and to understand where your money is being spent in the programs we recommend, please review these marketing definitions.
- CTR - Click Through Ratio: If your ad is shown 100 times, how many times is it clicked?
- CPC - Cost Per Click: How much are you paying for the actual click?
- CPM - Cost Per Thousand: How much do you pay for every thousand views of your ad ( if it is clicked or not ).
- ROI - Return On Investment: You spent 200 dollars on advertising, and made 400. ROI is a ratio of spending to making.
- EPV - Earnings Per Visitor: For every visitor that comes to your page, how much money do you make off them, average.
- EPC - Earnings Per Click: For every click how much money do you make off of it?
- Conversion Rate - For every visitor that comes, what percentage of them actually buy. Normal is 2-40 out of 1000 visitors ( websites only! )