Marketing

Do you still obediently place keyword ads on Google or other search engines in the hope of attracting a lot of new customers? Do your new business opportunities hinge on clicks through to your page? Search Engine Marketing is a big focus for many companies around Europe, but if you read the results of an eye-tracking study from the US, you might well start to doubt whether this strategy actually works.

Product texts make a major contribution to success in distance selling, whether in a catalogue, advertising letter or online shop. However, some online retailers pay little attention to them. The internationally renowned mail-order retailing expert, Martin Groß-Albenhausen, explains what you need to do to ensure that your product texts generate sales.

Online retailers, who attract negative attention with long delivery times, not only risk damaging their image but may also become vulnerable to legal action due to non-compliance with delivery times. Yet it only takes a few logistics basics to get your warehouse into gear.

The most important basics are listed here.

Many shop operators have come to accept returns as a “necessary evil”. However, it can actually be worthwhile to combat a high return rate proactively. Because there are new services and features coming onto the market all the time aimed at alleviating the problem.

You should be aware of these strategies.

Why is the provider of search engine and web technology considering offering a logistics service? Because that’s exactly how its biggest competitor is winning among online sellers. Google is taking action in the battle to win over online sellers and online shoppers.

Why Google wants to become a logistics provider.

Richard Rosens “Velocity” concept for advertisements is surely known to quite a few online sellers. For those who do not know this: customer-specific transaction patterns are filtered out within defined periods in the “Velocity approach”. For your online store this means:

How many obstacles do you place between the customer and the order button?

Since Otto president Hans-Otto Schrader linked the Home Affaire catalogue on the iPad to Steve Jobs’s statement “This is magic” almost a year ago, a whole sector has been losing its way. An iPad cannot replace the catalogue. The two media are much too incompatible to do so.

Read why here.

Testimonials were yesterday – nowadays it is all about customer reviews. That is not to say that testimonials no longer work or that there is no call for them. They still exist in the form of celebrities and whenever customer reviews are strategically placed, and that does not just mean on the product.

That even works in catalogues.

“Sofa-commerce” – that is what Swiss e-commerce consultant Thomas Lang calls the tablet PC-based business model. In the USA, studies show that tablet PCs are becoming increasingly interesting for online sellers, as is demonstrated by the rapid growth of this new computer generation.

You have to be prepared for that.

Mail order, regardless of online or offline, is a number-driven business. Dealing with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is of course really nothing new. However, there are also typical warning signs that are often overlooked by online sellers.