Dynamic Business

Delivery
The ability to deliver product is also a concern to customers especially if your physical address is a significant difference from where they purchased the product online. Most of these fears can be put to rest by simply partnering with a reliable delivery company and then clearly telling the customers of your deliver information and any associated guarantees you are prepared to make.

Quality
Unfortunately many customers still hold the belief that online merchandise consists of off-cuts, factory seconds or inferior quality stock. Addressing this fear can be as simple as reassuring customers of the product warranties together with a solid reinforcing statement as to the quality of the provided stock.

Privacy
In addition to concerns of how credit card information will be used, many users have concerns over how their basic details (name, address email) will be used. By providing continual clear links to your privacy policy as well as adding statements such as ‘Privacy is important to us’ on all data collection pages, reassures users making them comfortable in handing over their personal info.

No one visiting
Above the line businesses run advertising campaigns and if the ads are effective people will generally buy the product. Online is pretty much the same except it has the added benefit of a different form of media – search.

While there is validity in online advertising such as banners for filling the role of more traditional media (top of mind, awareness) the low click through rates for such activity have scared a lot of customers away from this medium.

It should be noted that there are many ways to pay for banner advertising including performance. Performance campaigns are ones in which payments for banner advertising is based on whether a user actually clicks on the banner (Cost per click CPC) and in some cases can extend to payment but only if a user subsequently performs a defined action on your site (Cost per acquisition CPA).

In relation to search, there are two key areas SEM and SEO. SEM is search engine marketing and is simply a method of paying for position on search results within the sponsored areas. Payment is based on a CPC basis however the quality of the destination pages (how relevant the result page is to the search term) and the click through rate for your advertisement can significantly reduce the CPC and dramatically increase the effectiveness of your spend.

SEO is search engine optimisation which focuses on improving your ranking in natural (non-sponsored) searches. For many businesses using search terms are particularly hard to win but if you take the time to engage a digital agency with full SEO capabilities , they will be able to analyse what people are searching for and how to best grab the most users for the least cost. It should be noted that SEO activities are the most costly as they need ongoing attention. The flip side is that SEO’s have the most benefit. If your business is online winning the Google war then you are well on your way to driving traffic to your site.

—James Ward is CEO of Freestyle Media (www.freestylemedia.com.au), which specialises in driving traffic to websites and converts online customers into purchasers of products and services.

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