10 Minutes To E-commerce Success

Interview Excerpt Below: Grant: Okay, excellent. Now for the big money question of the day, since you are the owner of an agency, what is the one thing that you would do for eCommerce companies that makes the biggest difference in their profits, just limit it to one thing today. Kent: Yeah, man that's hard, hard, hard. Grant: I know. Kent: I will go back to my time at Goodguys.com. The very first thing I did was focus on site speed. I noticed that the site was graphically heavy, but keep in mind, this is 2000, right before I started Anvil actually. They basically had a highly graphical website that was very slow to load, like thirty-second download speed, and I figured before I did any optimization or any other forms of marketing selling people that I had to clean up, expedite the sites to improve conversion rates, and that made a big difference. Interestingly, you look today, 2017 and beyond, Google has determined that's a ranking factor, right? Site speed is so important they give y

After various offline (aka real-world) entrepreneurial ventures, Dave  Hermansen got started in eCommerce in 2003. At that time, there was very little information available on the web about how to build and market an online store. With nothing more than a $50 e-book he purchased on how to build a Yahoo store, Dave largely learned eCommerce through trial and error. Over the years, he would participate in several Internet Marketing and SEO programs/courses, though he still credits most of his "education" to his hands-on experience through the 60+ stores he's built and operated.  Today, Dave is one of the web's most notable Internet marketers, particularly in the realm of eCommerce and drop shipping. He is well-known for his work with Store Coach and for his continued, prolonged success with over 60 profitable eCommerce stores for a decade and counting. Working alongside his brothers, Dave has helped thousands of eager students - newbies and experienced veterans alike - t

Interview Excerpt Below: Grant: Okay, excellent. And here's the big question of the day. What's the one thing that you do for eCommerce companies that makes the biggest difference in their profits? If you could just narrow it down to one thing. John: One thing. Getting to know your customers really well, you know. That's probably the biggest thing because the more you drill down into the customers' behavior, how they purchase, how they think and adjusting your offerings because the idea is to create the optimum offer to maximize your conversions and sales. The more time you spend in looking at your data in relations to how customers buy when they buy, what price points actually work.

I can sit here and talk about Pinterest for a million hours, for days and days on end. But essentially, you want to optimize your profile, your board with the right keywords. You want to make sure that your pins are aesthetically pleasing, they look good. You pin them to the right boards. You join group boards so that you can reach more audiences. You link back to all of the right blog posts or landing pages so that you could get people to opt into your newsletter, or your website, or content upgrades, or whatever it is you're trying to promote. It's fantastic.

Interview Excerpt Below: "Michael: There was an interesting study done by Harvard Business School and Bain & Company a number of years ago that shows that an increase in retention of just 5% can have an impact of 25 to 90% increase on profits, and that's because it's just becoming more and more expensive to acquire a customer. It's rare in a lot of cases today with e-commerce that companies are even profitable on the first transaction with a customer. They really have to understand lifetime value and focus on the retention side of their business to be able to be profitable and by focusing on retention and improving their customer lifetime value, their average order value, their conversion rate, all of a sudden it also opens up so many new possibilities in terms of new marketing channels that were previously unaffordable because the cost to acquire that customer exceeded the value of that customer. If you can tip the scale in the other direction, all of a sudden you can aggressively scale your marketi

Interview Excerpt Below: "Damien: Okay, well, there is something we've been using more recently, with a couple of our e-commerce clients, which has been working in great, and that is running a competition. So, you can either do it when the company's established. Or we're actually using, right now, as a pre-launch strategy with a particular e-commerce client. But the way it works is that you get the client to create or offer some kind of free prize, and so, it might be you. In our example, this one client is giving a $500 toolkit ... Grant: Okay Damien: And it contains, yeah, $500 worth of tools, basically. So, it's cheap for them, because they're getting it wholesale, but the retail value to the customer is fairly high. The bigger the prize, the better, so, if you can get a couple thousand dollars' worth of prize, that's great, as well. And then, what we do is, we use some software. There's lots of software out there to create a viral contest. So, I won't name all the brands, but if you just look for viral co

Danielle is the co-founder & CEO of Scrunch, a data-driven Influencer Marketing platform helping to connect brands, publishers and agencies to the right Influencers for their campaign.   Interview Excerpt Below: "Danielle: Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest reason why people want to work with us is because of the data that we have. There's influencer marketing and it's so easy to become an influencer these days. You could set up an Instagram account, build a following, so brands or e-commerce owners find it really difficult to pinpoint which influencer is right for them because there are millions of them out there now. What we do is we make it super easy to sift through those influencers and find the right ones for you. Instead of it being a really laborious time-intensive job to filter through millions and millions of influencers, we give them access to say, "I sell this kind of product and ship to this location. I've got this kind of budget to spend," and we'll shortlist down in second

Host Grant Segall and CRO expert, Simar Gujral discuss the importance of optimizing your checkout procedure to maximize sales revenue. Simar also shares a couple of hacks to setup software to monitor the progress of your visitors as they go through the checkout procedure.