Where Is The Sales?

Note: This is no offense on a particular client, but we want all online marketers understand some real facts.

As we provide unmatched SEO services, our customer retention rate is above 96% . We are working hard in finding the issues from our side to make this rate cross 98% by this year end. So our team started working on finding our flaws this year. As a part of this clean up, the emails of the client’s which we lost (stating that our service was not satisfactory) were forwarded to me so that I can come with a solution for them. I sorted these emails category wise so that it will be easier to find common errors that our guys have made. It didn’t take much time as there where only a few emails. I decided to start with the E-commerce website promotion campaign emails as that is one of our huge markets. The first email was regarding the in-effectiveness of our e-commerce SEO campaign.

The client has an Online store that sells various products which fall under a same category. As the client knew at least something about SEO, he ordered the E-commerce SEO service at first, just for one particular product section of the e-commerce store (not promoting the site all together). The SEO campaign was done for 3 months and within this period; he got huge sales and great traffic to that particular section. The client was happy and obviously he ordered the same package for another product section of the e-commerce store. The client was not happy this time as he had no sales for this product section as he had for the other one.

His email stated that, “I purchased this same e-commerce package for promoting one of our product section in the e-commerce store last year. It was a huge success and I got sales more that what I have imagined! But this time, when I ordered the same service for another product section, you guys seem to have taken it easy and there is not even a single sale. I have lost trust in you guys. It is almost 2 months and with one more month remaining for the completion of the project, I have no faith that I will get sales at all. Please move forward with the project only if you can guarantee me that you can get me sales”. - Phrases changed for client privacy

I had the analytics access to this ecommerce store. Checking the e-commerce analytics, I was able to see that the overall traffic to this website has increased to about 24 % over the past month. I also ran a check for keyword positioning and amazing, the site appears in first page of Google for the particular keyword (Keyword not revealed due to client privacy). I was also able to see that the paid traffic (adwords etc) has gone down by 25%. It means that our e-commerce website promotion campaign has boosted the traffic of the site by 50%. What is understood here is that surfers visit this e-commerce store but they find something wrong with the product or the store.

Upon checking other e-commerce stores selling the same products, the mystery unfolded. This client was selling the new product for very high rates when compared to the others. Moreover, his products page had nothing other than the product images and prices (no description, testimonials or customer remarks). Obviously none will be interested in buying these products from him priced higher than the market rates with nothing to support the high pricing.

I passed these findings to him and now he understood why there was no sales (the product page which he promoted first was well detailed and there where many research reports and all which supported the high pricing). Now he told that he will add the specialties of his products explaining which it is highly priced.

Remember that we can send customers to e-commerce stores. It is their free will to make a purchase from you. We don’t mess with people’s free will. So here are a few points to do before choosing an e-commerce promotion campaign:

Very high price tags can drive customers away forever (There are many choices available today so customers are not restricted to buy things from the E-commerce stores that appear in the first page of Google Results)

Add enough description about the products so that the visitors of your store can understand what the product exactly is.

If your product is so special and hence the high pricing, detail the specialty to the visitors by displaying it in the sales page.

If you don’t do these atleast, you won’t get any sales no mater how you promote the e-commerce store.

Alright I thought I can clear up these mails by Today and go to office fresh tomorrow with a clear solution to increase customer retention. Unfortunately, now I understand that our customer retention will increase only if all our clients understand the real facts about SEO. As already said, it is there FREE WILL and we can’t mess with that.

Into Another great weekend!!!