Making Money in Tougher Economic Times
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You don’t control the market, you don’t control the economy and you don’t control what people will or will not want. The only thing you control is what you do. How you identify opportunities in your market or how you react in tougher economic times is in your hands. The economy will probably not get better in 2009. Some companies are directly impacted while others are getting ready for the worse. Now, what can you do? |
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Much has been said of Kellogg’s growth through the Great Depression to become the market leader. Their idea was simple; other companies were cutting marketing budgets so they increased theirs. The reality is quite surprising; more people get rich in recessions than in easier economic climates. But, this does not mean that you should invest just anywhere.
What should you do?
Dr. Peter J. Meyers of User Effect has a very interesting article on the 2 Levers of E-commerce. He talks about 2 ways to increase revenue: 1) generate more traffic and 2) generate more conversion.
Good user experience will always lead to increased traffic through word of mouth. Search Engine Marketing can also help by sending more targetted traffic to your site but, our service, conversion funnel analysis is one of the easiest ways to improve conversion rates. Here’s what we do to help our clients:
1. Evaluate the existing funnel
First thing first, we need to know what’s wrong with your transactional flow or what can be improved. Are visitors worried about privacy or security on your site? Are they having problems getting through the transactional flow?
We test your conversion funnel with your potential customers to identify usability issues keeping your conversion rate down. We gather feedback on ease-of-use, look-and-feel, price, content or anything else users will tell us. We add our usability experts feedback leveraging previous tests, experiences and years of proven industry standards to create requirements for the redesign phase.
2. Redesign
Studies have proven that decision-making is heavily influenced by emotion. But, emotion alone will no create sustainable increases in sales. Credibility, appeal to reason, thrust, comparative arguments, pricing are some of the aspects also influent in the sale process.
Redesigns need to be clear, simple, efficient and on-brand. Visitors should not have to think in order to complete the transactional flow. Not everyone will buy but, nothing should be holding back the people that will.
3. Test, test, test
Design is an iterative process. Designs always need to be fine-tuned. Analytics and Multivariate or A/B testing tools like Google’s Website Optimizer help us streamline the transactional flow with live traffic.
We break down the new conversion funnel into elements. We test variations of these elements in tone, content, color schemes, button types, interaction, positioning, etc until the conversion rate is as high as it can be.
Getting Started
As you can see, nothing is left to chance. With uncertainty comes the need to invest wisely where return is almost guaranteed. Contact us if you think this could help your business.
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Very interesting story about Kelloggs & that more people get rich in a recessions.
It’s a good reminder to me that I knew I should have tried to buy some stocks when the market was crashing, I would have already made some money on them. It is often difficult to have the right mentality when everyone else is panicking.
Exactly, getting that mentality means challenging the status quo. Great risk, great reward sometimes but it’s not for everyone.
The two sides of a coin… When bad things happen, good things happen, too. It’s always best to keep your wits with you at all times so that you’ll be able to grab an opportunity the moment you see it. We must not lose hope.