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My company runs hundreds of e-commerce stores for promotional products and wearables, and I’d like to share with you the big, dirty secret of online sales in this industry: A huge portion of online transactions don’t actually get completed online. How can it be an online transaction if it doesn’t get completed online? That’s simple: If it starts online, it’s most likely counted as an online transaction. But if it doesn’t finish online – if the final amount isn’t calculated and paid for right then and there – what is it, really?

We call it a hybrid transaction, and it’s part of a big, gray netherworld of e-commerce that lives somewhere between the instant gratification of buying a Blu-Ray from Amazon and the laborious process of buying and configuring a car online. It often doesn’t sort out neatly and, for a lot of distributors new to selling online, this is a big problem. Too many businesses enter the e-commerce world hoping that the vagaries of selling face-to-face will simply go away and sales will magically get done right just by moving them online.

They don’t, and they won’t. Selling promotional products and wearables online is just as complex and maddening as selling them in the real world, but with an added twist: Your customers have been conditioned by the Amazons of the world to expect it to be fast and easy. When it isn’t, they tend to do what they do with any other website that frustrates them – they walk away. This phenomenon, known in web jargon as “abandonment“, is inevitably the primary problem for anyone selling online.

Bye Bye

Abandonment is easy for a consumer. Relatively few of your prospects hang up in your face on a daily basis, and even fewer start an anonymous sales inquiry process with you and then just disappear into the ether, never to be heard from again. In either case, you often know who they are, and at the very least you can follow up with them and ask them what went wrong.

Not so with online customers; you usually don’t know their identity, and they come and go at their leisure, sometimes starting a process one day and finishing it weeks later. Sure, there are some tools out there (some of them free; many of them quite expensive) that provide more detailed insight into visitor behavior, but with privacy rules growing ever tighter and the “creep” factor a constant risk, you have to adjust to a different reality – a reality with higher expectations for you and lower risks for your customer. In some ways, it’s the worst of both worlds.

Don’t despair – over the next few posts, I’m going to show you the best practices for dealing with the complex reality of online sales. This won’t be about getting customers to your site; I’ve covered that before in my columns on SEO. This is about what you do with them once they get there – using every means you have at your disposal to get your hooks into a customer before they give up and leave.

Some will leave, of course, and if you sell anything, you know that to be the case with any channel. You won’t always have the most competitive price, the strongest message, or the best offers. To succeed, you’re going to have to recalibrate some of your ideas about what constitutes success online, and open your mind to new kinds of sales cycles. If you’re willing to think differently about online sales, you’ll be rewarded with more sales, better loyalty and less of that cursed abandonment.

Background

Before we dive into strategy, let’s get a few definitions out of the way. For our purposes, any sale that materially occurs online is an online sale. The technical term for what we’re doing here is “attribution”, and attribution is actually a complex topic for anyone who sells online – you might run a print ad directing users to your website to get a special offer, and then a user buys the product on the site. Is that an online sale or a sale that started offline? What if the user went to the site but then the payment was taken over the phone after some details were worked out via email?

See what I mean? Because websites are ubiquitous (and have replaced phone books for finding most businesses) it can be hard to isolate a sale as being web-only. Certain types of products and transactions lend themselves to web-only attribution; for instance, a company store sale of a single t-shirt or an inexpensive custom pen order. But for many other types of transactions, the breakdown isn’t nearly as clean.

To keep things simple, we’ll be talking about anyone who comes to your website, at any time, and winds up buying the thing they looked at. They might buy it right then or a week later. They might check out through your cart or they might finish the order through phone, chat or email. No matter – they are an online customer for our purposes.

If you believe the numbers that PPAI provides, some 20% of all sales in this industry are online. That’s a huge number – almost four billion dollars worth – and is far above the average for most U.S. businesses. It’s somewhere between the most aggressively e-commerce-focused sectors, like books (almost half of all book sales are online) and brick-and-mortar retail giants that also sell online (Norstrom, for instance, pegs its online sales at about ten percent).

Whatever it is, it’s big (even if it’s half of what PPAI estimates) and I’m sure you’d like to get a chunk of it. But selling promotional products and wearables online can be challenging. Why? Here are a few reasons:

First, product data is a mess. Industry suppliers are still behind the curve in their ability to deliver high-quality product data to distributors. That means you’re either doing a lot of “massaging” (if you have the staff) or you’re using a more generic solution that already has all the data built in (in which case you’re probably suffering on the acquisition side because of poor search performance).

Second, configuring products online is tricky. Simple products and inventoried items are often no problem, which is why low-end orders and company store orders are commonly completed online. But the same customer that happily plugs in a credit card for an $85 pen order is going to hesitate before putting in that same credit card for $1200 worth of golf shirts. They’re just not the same thing, and our experience is that once you get around the $400-500 mark for an order, a customer wants to get a real person involved. You can’t blame them – a $1200 screw-up is a completely different ball of wax from an $85 screw-up.

Challenges, of course, create opportunities, and that’s what we’ll be focusing on for the next few posts. Once you accept the hard realities of selling these products online, the strategies and tactics to keep customers in your sales cycle become much clearer. Stick around; next time we’ll dig into one of the most important tools in your arsenal, calls-to-action, also known as CTAs.

– Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

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Courtesy: XKCD.com

For decades now, the internet as we know it has grown more and more complex – websites add bells and whistles to attract users and keep them around, creating a virtual arms race of features. It’s a huge mess for web developers (trying to make sure everything works in every web browser) and has a pretty significant downside for users as well; as the web matures and everyone learns how to navigate it, we all just want to find what we need. Frivolous eye candy often gets in the way.

Thankfully, this is beginning to change. Sites are cutting down on their window dressing, ripping out Flash presentations and generally adopting a cleaner, simpler look and feel. And the technology behind websites is coalescing around standard ways of building things – still very complex, to be sure, but with far less variation than before.

Like warring government departments that each have a different form to accomplish the exact same thing, web development has for years been a clash of competing standards, browsers and plugins, with each party advocating for their own solution. Microsoft won an early edge in the browser wars and pushed proprietary technology that could only be used in Internet Explorer. If you wanted to run this payroll program or that CRM site, you had to use Windows and Internet Explorer. This was Microsoft’s way of locking developers into their toolkit – develop only for Explorer, and we’ll give you access to technology you would otherwise have to develop yourself.

You can’t really blame Microsoft for this; this was simply their way of doing business with their operating systems and applications, so it made sense for them to take the same philosophy to the web. If you have the dominant browser, why not force everyone to adopt your technology to build web sites? You give the browser away for free (and bolt it into the operating system) but sell everything else needed to support it: operating systems, applications, development tools, and so on. It worked well, and Internet Explorer came to dominate the browser landscape.

And then something happened: mobile. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the emergence of usable, popular mobile computing devices (beginning with the iPhone) caused the single largest upheaval in computer technology since the advent of the internet itself. Sure, there are other factors – Google set its eyes on Microsoft many years ago, and it was perhaps inevitable that alternative browsers would regain a foothold eventually.

But mobile was an end-around that fooled nearly everyone and took off for the end zone. Mobile web traffic didn’t account for much the first few years, but tablets (another mobile device) changed that. Depending on whom you ask, mobile devices now account for 20-40% of worldwide web traffic – huge numbers either way.

Keep it Simple

So what does this have to do with simplicity? Web developers (and site owners) must account for big monitors, small laptops, a half-dozen tablet formats, and scores of smartphone screen sizes. Nothing is dominant – no device, technology, size or format is popular enough to get in the driver’s seat and dictate the way things should be done. The audience is so fragmented that a lowest common denominator approach seems to be the only way to reach all of them.

And that is, in effect, what is happening. Web developers are increasingly adopting standards for getting things done and, perhaps just as important, simplifying their presentation of information so that a site functions similarly across all devices. A fancy interactive doodad that looks awesome on your PC monitor isn’t nearly as impressive when a big chunk of your audience can’t see it. And because so many users now interact with websites using touch (instead of a mouse), all those nifty tricks that developers used when your mouse “hovered” over something get thrown out the window.

To be sure, this isn’t happening everywhere. Giants like Amazon have the budgets to develop web site versions (and even apps) for just about every type of device, and there are still companies pushing their own agenda and technology in hopes that it will dominate the web. Indeed, Google, for all its talk of open standards, often walks away from the ones it doesn’t like.

But the vast majority of website operators are beginning to embrace the obvious: The only way to be everything to everyone is to keep things simple enough that they work everywhere.

Nuts and Bolts

What does this really mean to you, the average website owner? After all, “simplicity” is a vague term that could describe a broad range of characteristics. Here, then, is a list of ways to simplify your site and make it work in more places:

1. Flash remediation: This one’s easy – Flash doesn’t work on many mobile devices, and Adobe has largely abandoned it. You should too. If you can’t live without Flash-y animations and doodads, replace them with HTML5 versions, which work on most modern devices. A great program for creating Flash-style animations is standards-compliant HTML5 is Tumult’s “Hype”. Other options include Adobe’s Edge Animate and Google’s recently announced Web Designer.
2. Modernize: If your site was built, say, 6-8 years ago and you haven’t touched it in a long time, have a web developer take a look at it and determine if they can bring you up to modern CSS & HTML (don’t worry, they’ll know what that means). Just bringing your “foundation” up to date will result in better functionality across many different types of devices.
3. Dump complex menus: Fancy “flyout” menus (the ones that expand to show you a big list of sub-options when you move your mouse over them) might look neat on your computer, but they often don’t work at all on other devices, or work poorly. If you must use them, ask your web developer to turn them off on mobile devices, because their behavior can be unpredictable. More importantly, remember that we live in a Google world – users look for things using search features. Don’t put too much time into building eye-pleasing ways for users to navigate your site; chances are, they are going to search for what they need and ignore anything that gets in the way.
4. Simplify your layout: The web isn’t like print; you can’t count on what you put together looking the way you expect it to look. The best way to ensure that a user sees what you expect them to see is to keep the layout as simple as possible – navigation, a couple columns of content, and a footer (the bottom of the page). Simple, straightforward layout is the best way to future-proof your site. The next step is making that layout responsive, but that’s a topic for another column.
5. Content is king: We’ve all heard it, especially when it comes to SEO, but content is king in layout as well. Look at the most popular retail sites online: images are big and bold, product is front and center. If anything, modern web design isn’t as much about the “design” of site elements (buttons, navigation, etc.) as it is about building things around the content. For a long time, web design was new and interesting and a place where designers flexed their muscles and showed off their chops. Now it’s about getting the information or product in front of the visitor as quickly and simply as possible.
6. Remove friction: In fact, most current web technology and design advances are all about removing friction from various processes. Want to share something? Hit a single button. Like something? Again, a single, quick button. Users know what they want to do, and the best thing you can do as a site owner is make sure you’re not getting in their way.

– Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

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If you’ve followed along for the last six months, I’ve covered the basics of running one or more chunks of your business in the cloud, from sales presentations to accounting to customer relationship management. Maybe you’ve looked at a few of these services but haven’t yet made the leap to any of them. That’s fine. This month, I’m going to wrap up the series with an overview of smaller, more digestible services that might reasonably lure just about any business owner to the cloud.

These little nuggets of cloud goodness might be the best way to step gingerly into the world of things that exist beyond your hard drive. They’re simple services that are easy to set up, inexpensive or free to operate, and present relatively little risk of interrupting the way you do business. Trying them out shouldn’t cause you much consternation or pain. Just toss them if they don’t work for you.

The Google Bonanza

Google is still the king of free cloud goodness, and while their entire ecosystem of services (most of which, to be clear, use your personal information in some way to sell you advertisements) can be overwhelming – any company that has a menu bar that says “More” and then another one under that that reads “Even More” might need to cut back a little – they offer a couple of cloud nuggets that might be of good use to a business owner:

• Calendars: Google’s shared calendar has what you’d expect in a cloud-based service – simple sharing with other users, either directly (so multiple users can edit the calendar) or indirectly (allowing users to subscribe to calendars). The former is an excellent tool for coordinating schedules, but if you can’t get everyone in your office to agree on anything, the latter is a fine tool for letting everyone else know what you’re doing. Just tell them to subscribe to your calendar – all you have to do is send them the link.

For business owners, Google’s calendar includes a sweet “embed” feature that allows you to take a calendar and put it in a website. If you do events, trade shows or anything of the sort, an embedded Google calendar is a neat shortcut to getting current information on your website. Just grab the embed code using “Embed this Calendar” (available in Calendar Settings) and drop it into a page or widget area on your website. Your embedded calendar stays up to date, all the time.

• Drive: Google recently consolidated its office suite (word processing, presentations, spreadsheets) under the umbrella of Google Drive, which also includes Dropbox-like file storage. Drive works similarly to Dropbox on your computer; it looks like another folder or drive, and anything you put there is available in short order on the other devices you share with, like your phone or tablet.

If you’re already running Gmail or Google calendar, then Drive is a no-brainer – it’s right there in the same menu, and Google has actually set up Drive to share your overall storage allocation with Gmail. And if you’re just looking for an alternative to Dropbox, Drive is a relative bargain, as the free space is bigger and the upgrades are cheaper.

Moving Projects Online

If you do any kind of project management – most businesses have projects and processes that can benefit from formal project management – you should consider moving your project management into the cloud. Like customer relationship management, overseeing projects is something that positively screams for online sharing and collaboration. A project without good communication isn’t really a project; it’s a mess. What online collaboration tools lack in complex schedule and resource management, they make up for in simplicity and ease of communication. You’ll gleefully forget the days of Microsoft Project after you try a few of these:

• Basecamp: Probably one of the most popular project management tools around, Basecamp strips project management down to tasks, calendars, documents and conversations. You lose the complex milestone and dependency management of dedicated tools, but now everyone can participate and see where they are. That means less “management” and more work done. Alternatives: Podio, Zoho, Asana.

• Yammer: If you can suspend your (very reasonable) disbelief for a moment and imagine a social networking-style model that is actually useful for business, you’ve got an idea of what Yammer and similar services offer. Essentially a live feed of what your company is doing, Yammer is a powerful tool for companies with employees that wear many hats. You’re always letting your colleagues know what you’re working on, and they may offer up help or ask you questions about it. It’s a sort of always-on water cooler conversation, but while you’re working. It may be distracting for some companies, but for others (especially geographically dispersed teams) these tools can be a godsend.

In fact, if you use a cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) service, you’ll find that many of them are incorporating Yammer-like features into their system so that managers and salespeople can quickly see what their colleagues are working on. Salesforce offers their Chatter service (a service very similar to Yammer) for free as part of their package. Alternatives to Yammer or Chatter: Hipchat, Podio, Campfire.

Keeping Safe

Finally, for the business owner that wants peace of mind, there are a slew of cloud services to help you keep your stuff safe. From device location to offsite backups, here are a few services worth considering to aid your restful nights:

• Find my Phone: Apple was the first out of the gate with a popular device location service, and now it’s expanded to any device you have registered with their cloud service (iCloud). You can locate your iPhone, iPad, laptop or desktop Mac from any other device using this service. If you or one of your employees lose a phone or tablet, you can remotely lock the device, send a message to the device, or even securely erase it if it falls into the wrong hands. Smartphones and tablets are rapidly taking over the business world, but they’re also prime targets for theft. Remote location services can help cut your losses when one of your devices winds up in the wind. Alternatives: Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry all offer similar services.

• Evernote: Most (sane) business owners agree: paper filing is a drag. While there are numerous cloud-based services out there for storing notes and miscellaneous information, Evernote is the full-featured king of the mountain when it comes to eliminating paper from your life. With its built-in optical character recognition and PDF storage, Evernote is the place you can keep all those wayward receipts, sales orders and quotes. They’re searchable and synced across all your devices. Need to pull up that expense receipt you scanned a year ago? Just search for it and it’s there. With complementary services like Shoeboxed, you can actually ship your paperwork off in the mail and have it all accessible in Evernote within a few days.

• Cloud Backup: It’s been a year or two since I talked about online backup, and the services have only gotten better – not to mention cheaper. The cost of cloud storage is so low now that backing up your critical files offsite is a no-brainer. Every business owner knows you need to keep backups, and offsite backups are the only way to truly protect against disaster. Take your pick: Carbonite, Mozy, Crashplan – they’re all reliable, inexpensive and they get your critical data backed up offsite. Don’t wait for something bad to happen. Do it now.

– Brent Buford

A version of this article also appeared in Identity Marketing magazine.

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Categories: Articles