Supercharging your WooCommerce Reviews

My latest post at Practical eCommerce is up. This one is all about making your reviews awesome.

It is no secret that product reviews can help merchants increase sales. Reviews are proof that others found a product valuable, or not.

WooCommerce provides the structured data to display rating stars in search results. But product reviews, properly utilized, can do much more. They can greatly increase conversions. In this post, I’ll address four WooCommerce extensions that supercharge product reviews.

Read the rest at Practical eCommerce

Will My WordPress Membership Site look like the Photoshop Design?

After this tweet people asked me for more information on my thoughts.

Let’s start by looking at all the things that Photoshop, or any pixel design system doesn’t have to worry about.

  • the HTML markup of the site
  • the functionality that is present with the current tools on the site
  • readability of the actual font on the web in various browsers

That’s just a shortlist. Once you dig in to a site build there are so many more things to dive into. Even showing your developer some other site that did it doesn’t mean you can do it.

Maybe that site makes 40k a month and pays a full-time developer to build it all custom. They also don’t have to deal with the HTML markup of the tools that are in use on the site. They get to make it whatever they want.

So no, if you have a custom design your site may not look exactly like it. That’s why you hire a good developer that can build a theme for your WordPress Membership Site who will take into account all the little things that have to change.

They’ll make the decisions you need to have made so that the site is very close to the design. But don’t waste their time pixel peeping and measuring. If something is grossly out of whack, let your developer know.

Otherwise trust them. If you don’t trust them, you didn’t do your due diligence to find someone that you can trust and that’s on you.

More Automation Tips for WooCommerce

Here is my latest post at PracticalEcommerce:

There is so much to manage with an ecommerce store. You need to maintain adequate stock. You have customer issues, server and hosting issues, and software bugs.

A store owner should focus on the big picture items, not managing every detail. In this post, I’ll address six WooCommerce plugins that can automate details of your store management.

Read the whole post

Automating Customer Recognition

I wrote a new post for PracticalEcommerce on automating customer recognition:

Consumers who interact with ecommerce companies have many milestones. They spend their first $100. They purchase their 10th product. They spend the 1 millionth dollar with a store.

Consumers can also refer others. The first referral and the 10th and the 50th are all milestones. A customer who has earned $500 in referral fees has reached a milestone.

How do you recognize these milestones? What can you do to show appreciation?

Read the rest at Practical Ecommerce.

Abandoned Cart Recovery on Practical Ecommerce

New post at Practical Ecommerce on abandoned cart emails, why you should do them and how to get them setup.

In “Optimizing Checkout Flow in WooCommerce,” my previous article, I offered tips on reducing abandoned carts by streamlining the checkout process. To be clear, however, you could spend years optimizing your checkout process and not eliminate abandoned carts.

There are options to bring shoppers back to your store once they’ve moved on to other things. One of the best ways is to send emails to shoppers about the products they’ve left in their carts.

Read the rest at Practical Ecommerce

Optimizing Checkout Flow

Abandoned shopping carts are a hurdle for online merchants.

Abandonment rates range from 60 to 80 percent, depending on the study. Some of this is “window shopping” on the part of visitors. Some of it is due to the complexity of your checkout process.

Thus optimizing your checkout will likely increase sales. In this post, I’ll review methods to streamline and simplify a checkout process. I’ll cite examples from the WooCommerce platform. But the broader points apply to all merchants, on all platforms.

Read my latest post at Practical eCommerce

3 Plugins every Membership Site Needs

There is a lot to keep track of when you’re starting a membership site.

What is the right way to reach your potential members?

Is your pricing right?

Will your members stay around?

What other tools do you need that you don’t know about yet?

Today we’re going to look at three plugins that all membership sites need as soon as they get started. No skimping and saying you’ll get to it later. If you don’t plan the time now, you won’t get to it.

1. Drip

Drip is an email automation service. It’s not only email marketing like you see elsewhere, it’s automation.

It can do stuff like tag a customer that visited a page and then send them an email to advertise the product if they didn’t purchase within 2 days.

It can email prospects that abandoned their carts.

And so much more.

If you want to have the ability to knock your marketing out of the park, you need to get Drip on your membership site.

2. Optin Monster

Yes Drip comes with some forms you can use to get subscribers to your email list, but OptinMonster is so much more powerful.

With OptinMonster you can set different calls to action on different posts and feed them all to Drip. You can have a popup that shows on click in a single post and then if someone is leaving the page, show them a different call to action.

All of my clients use this to make managing their email calls to action easy.

3. Facebook Conversion Pixel

Maybe you’re not going to dive in to Facebook and it’s marketing potential today. Maybe it won’t be next week. But you’ll want to do it. That’s why you put the Facebook Conversion Pixel on your site right away.

By adding it the day you get started, you start getting data on the people visiting your site right away. Later when you start getting serious about your marketing you can use this data to build an effectively targeted campaign.

When you start a membership site make sure you use these three plugins and services to build the site you’ve dreamed of.

PS: If you need help getting your marketing right, we should talk.

photo by: fallentomato

Developing your member personas so you can target your marketing

In my last post I talked about the importance of building your marketing to speak to all levels of your prospective customers. You can’t only focus on the experts and those that know you well. You need to spend time nurturing those that are getting to know you.

This task of speaking to all your prospective members is easier once you’re already established. You can pick people you’ve met right out of your community and use their traits in your persona’s. If you’re developing a new membership site, it’s a much harder endeavor.

You don’t have members that you can draw on for inspiration. Instead you need to build up these persona’s from scratch.

Here is the research strategy I use with my clients when we are looking deeper in to their market to develop their marketing strategy.

Develop your keywords

Before you can dive in to the research phase you need to know what you’re looking for. You’ll need a few keywords to use in your content research.

For this site I’ve used:

  • WordPress Membership site
  • Membership site
  • WordPress Membership
  • and a few others

I walked through each of the terms using the research template below. Now I wasn’t new to the WordPress Membership site market so it didn’t take me long to work through each term. In many cases I didn’t even need to click through the search results because I knew what the site was about.

The newer you are to your market the longer this should take.

Blogs

It all starts with blogs. Yes there are many other social networks and media channels that can bring in prospects, but blogs are king. Blogs are text that’s easily read by search engines. This is going to help you now because you’re going to use Google to investigate other sites in your niche.

Start by going go Google and typing blog: $keyword where $keyword is one of your search keywords.

Make note of the names of the site. Check the comments and make note of the names of the people that have something good to contribute.

Forums

Next we’re going to dig in to the forums for your industry. Again, go to Google and search forum: $keword. Make note of the sites that come up.

Visit the forums that come up and make note of the names of the participants. Make note of the brands that are mentioned.

If the forum has a search function use it to search for ‘help’ or ‘question’. Doing this can help you see what problems your customers suffer from.

YouTube

YouTube is the second biggest search engine. While the medium lends itself to less text, you can still glean lots of information by watching the top videos in your market.

Use each of your keywords in the search field. Watch the videos and make note of the people that are doing them. It’s likely you’ll start to see some overlap here between the blogs and those that produce video.

Also note the brands and products that are mentioned.

Take a minute to look at the comments to see if the viewers are asking any questions. Make note of these questions because they are problems that your possible clients are having.

Podcasts

Next up let’s dig in to podcasts. Use the following search with your keywords to find podcasts in your field.

"$keyword (incontent:podcast OR intitle: podcast OR inurl:podcast or inurl: episode)"

As with the other search’s, make note of the names you see. What brands are mentioned? Who makes comments on the episodes?

As you see repeats across your research, add stars beside the ones that keep coming up.

Influencers

If you’ve don’t the rest of this well then you’ve likely amassed a list of influencer’s. It’s time to dig a bit deeper in to them. Start by using their name to see if they have a site. If you they do and they dominate the results for their name (and they likely will) then add -influencersite.com to your searches to exclude their sites.

With this research in hand you’re ready to dive in deeper to your marketing. You know the podcasts you should be trying to get on. You should have seen the same brands and sites come up a number of times. Target these as the relationships you want to build.

You’ll also have a great handle on the users in your industry. You can use this to develop the persona’s that you need to be marketing to.

Every time I tweak my content marketing or business positioning I work through the process above to make sure that I’m targeting my prospects properly.

PS: If you need help digging in to your market we should talk.

photo by: edwicks_toybox

Plan your content so you talk to all your prospects

Every piece of content that comes out of your business should be aimed at a specific person in your target audience. Writing content with no target person in mind will lead to unfocused content. Unfocused content is not compelling. Content that’s not compelling won’t bring readers.

In addition to targeting a single person for each piece of content, you need to make sure that you spread your marketing efforts across all the experience levels of your prospects. It does you little good to only talk to the people who have followed your work ‘forever’. Nor is it effective to always target those that have been recently introduced to your work.

I’ve been building membership sites for years, but not all of my clients have. When I mention churn, a number of my prospects don’t know what I’m talking about. The longer I’ve been building websites the more I’m tempted to use insider terms that my clients don’t understand.

Don’t fall victim to this trap. Maybe you have been running your Crossfit Box for years and all your marketing efforts unintentionally assume that the person you’re talking to knows what a Power Clean is. Most of the people looking for a place to workout with a group that they can connect with won’t know what that is and using insider language will make them feel like they can never be an insider.

Your marketing should make them feel like they can be insiders and that working with you is the best way to get what they want.

How to make sure you speak to all your prospects

The first step to making sure that you speak to every level of prospect is to define who they are. That means sitting down and developing ‘personas’ for your business. A persona is nothing more than a name you use to describe a certain type of prospect. Maybe ‘Ben’ is the beginner that you talk to.

Your persona’s should cover three areas in your business. First, you should have that beginner. Second you need to develop a persona for your intermediate prospect. They know a bit about your field, but aren’t experts yet. Finally, you develop the expert persona. This final one knows lots about the same things you do, but they look to you as a leader in the field.

With these three persona’s developed it’s time to look at your content. Assuming you’re writing once a week you should work to have 1 blog post a month geared towards beginners. Two should be directed to your intermediate persona and the final 1 post should address the concerns that your expert has.

This break down of persona’s should go for all your marketing efforts. Go to conferences where you’ll meet colleagues, but don’t only go to those. Make sure you head out to meet the beginners in your field.

Most sites slowly start to neglect the beginners. This is a death knell for your sales funnel because beginners are looking for someone to walk along with them. If that’s not you, then when they’re ready to purchase as intermediate or experts, they’re following someone else that talked to the beginners.

If you need help developing your marketing plan we should talk.

photo by: cross_stitch_ninja

A simple marketing plan for your new site

Most site owners have a dream where they get their site revamped and then everyone comes to see their beautiful new site. Clients love it and make purchases. Readers interact and love the site.

You feel this is the way things should happen because you put so much work in to building your site. You’re invested in it, in a way that none of your prospects are.

You can’t build the site and then hope people will come visit it. You need to have a plan to market the site. Without a solid marketing plan your hard work will provide little fruit.

Here is the marketing plan I get my clients to follow so they can see the results they want.

Blogging

Your marketing should start with your blog. Blogging is text that is searchable by anyone on the web. Yes videos are great and it can be a part of your blogging strategy, but search engines can’t index the content of your video.

The best way to start with a blogging strategy is to write down the big problems that your prospects have. Every time you encounter a client and they tell you about the problem they’re having, write it down as a blog post idea.

At a minimum you should be posting once a week on your site. If that seems like a lot to start then go for twice a month and work up to once a week.

I know that some people aren’t writers, if that’s you then your best bet is to hire a writer. Most writers will do an interview with you about your site and the problems you solve for clients. Out of that they’ll develop blog posts for you to review and then put up on your site.

Once you get some content going, the next big hurdle is management. Here the key is that you need one person that you pay to manage the content. There is one local store that has many possible writers but every time I submit content it takes weeks to get anyone to look at it. This isn’t because they have so much content. It’s because no one is really in charge of the content. Also, whenever anything else comes up in the business the blog gets pushed to the background.

Unless you give someone the time to manage your content properly, it won’t happen.

Email

Along with your blog, it’s time to have an email list. It doesn’t need to be fancy to start. Add a simple opt-in form and then send out your blog post to your list.

Email is so powerful because you have direct access to the inboxes of your prospects. Where they have to choose to visit your site, email is sent to their inbox. For most people that means they get a notification and check their email.

A strong email campaign results in a good increase in sales for most sites.

As you have more time to market your business you can get in to tracking users and pitching them special campaigns as they get ready to purchase. You can provide short email courses and then pitch a product. Or you can detect when people have put items in their cart and then left the site without purchasing those products. Send them a follow up email to remind them about the purchase.

Events

Finally, don’t forget that there is a world that isn’t in front of your screen. It’s easy to sit behind your computer safe and sound writing or podcasting. While these are great things in your marketing plan they’re low trust. In general the closer you can get to shaking someone’s hand the more likely they are to trust you.

That means getting out to a local networking event allows you to shake hands with lots of potential partners and prospects. If you live in a very rural area, target the bigger cities within an hour drive or look for a few further afield events you can attend. Maybe a trade conference.

The biggest mistake that most site owners make when the attend events is that they stay narrowly in their niche only talking to their colleagues. While there can be huge benefit from talking to your colleagues in the form of partnerships, it means you’re not talking to your customers.

If you’re going to attend 4 events then make at least 2 of them events where you get to interact with your target market directly. Better yet make 3 of 4 events focused on your prospects and 1 focused on meeting more colleagues.

If you can start with this basic marketing plan and stick to it for the long term, you’re going to build that successful site you want. It may start slow, but most people will quit. If you stick with the plan sooner than you think you’ll be the ‘old hand’ reaping the rewards of the marketing effort you put in.

If you need help executing this marketing plan, we should talk. I can help you build a site your members will love and help you speak their language.

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