Copyright © 2003 Richard Seltzer All rights reserved. To
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welcome.
But this time I couldn't hold back.
I have an online store (http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat) where I sell plain-text books on CD ROM -- as many as a thousand books on a single CD. About 2500 people a day visit my main content site where I have lots of free information to attract them by way of search engines. About 1 in 25 of those visitors then go to my store. And only one in a hundred of my store visitors buys my CDs.
I've been putting all my energy into creating new CDs, which leads to customers buying more items, giving me more revenue per sale; and also into attracting more traffic through more and better content at my main site. But to grow my business quickly and substantially, I need to increase the conversion rate -- getting more store visitors to buy. Instead of just 1%, it would be reasonable to expect 2%, 3%, or even 5% of those store visitors to buy. But what can I do to make that happen?
Most people have never read a book on a CD. That's why the conversion
rate is so low and also why most buyers today are blind -- the blind often
use text-to-voice conversion on their computers to read plain text books.
What to sighted people is bizarre and unusual, to the blind is commonplace.
And once people have tried these CDs, they love them and come back for
more. More than half the people who buy form my store come back to buy
again and again. But those who are unfamiliar with the concept -- except
for a very small number of pioneer early adopters -- just window shop.
They are tempted and interested by the concept of buying a library for
the price of a book, but they are reluctant to spend money on something
so strange and, to them, untested.
I need a way to interact with those prospective customers -- the ones who have been tempted enough to enter my store. I need to be able to answer their questions, remove their doubts, and build a trusting relationship with them, quickly, effectively, and in realtime.
Back when my main business was consulting, I benefited from HumanClick software that alerted me when visitors were looking at selected Web pages of mine and that let me prompt them to initiate a chat session with me. That software was free until the company was bought by another company and became Live Person. The product and service are still great. I use Live Person as a customer whenever I need answers from the folks who run eBay. But it's too expensive for me to use for my own business.
A year ago, as I was starting to focus on my book CD business, Sitechattter, a HumanClick look-alike, appeared, as a service that cost $10 per month. I tried it for a few months, but it didn't bring me a single sale. It had several weaknesses. I didn't get any indication of when people were looking at my pages, and I had no way to prompt or tempt visitors to click on the icon that would initiate a chat with me.
A few days ago, I got a message from Sitechattter saying that they have added important new features. Now I can see when someone is looking at one of my Web pages, and see what page that person looked at last, which means that if they were using a search engine I can see what query led them to my business (since the query is part of the referring URL). More important, now I can initiate a chat session with a visitor, rather than waiting for visitors to start the conversation. And at no additional cost I can add Sitechattter to more than one Web site -- both my store and my main content site. The cost is now $30 per month -- more than I pay my Web host. But selling one additional CD per month would just about pay for that.
So now I've added Sitechattter to dozens of pages and I'm bombarding (and possibly annoying) visitors with my offers of live help and advice. At this point I'm confident in the workability of the software What's likely to matter now depends on me -- when should I initiate chats and how should I introduce myself to increase the likelihood that potential customers will answer and that the ensuing dialogue will lead to sales? It's likely to take weeks before I know whether this new application is going to boost my business many fold, or whether the ring alerting me of new visitors will interrupt me again and again, fruitlessly, and the stress of being "on call" will make me wish I'd never heard of this new opportunity.
Or at least that's waht I thought a few minutes ago. Before I had a chance to spellcheck this article, I got into a Sitechatter discussion with a distributor in Puerto Rico. Sounds very promising...
The full text of Richard Seltzer's books The Social Web,
Take
Charge of Your Web Site, Shop Online the Lazy Way, and
The
Way of the Web, plus more than a hundred related articles are available
on CD ROM My
Internet: a
Personal
View of Internet Business Opportunities.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business success.
Reviews.
a
library for the price of a book.
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
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