10 Tips for Adapting Your Web Site for International Customers

Experts project that the population of cybernauts—not the David Bowie cover band, but rather global Internet users—will soar beyond the 2 billion mark in 2014. Nearly half of those Web users are expected to reside in Asia. What do these stats mean for your e-retail business?
One thing's for sure—an English-only Web site won't deliver the results your international brand deserves. Your potential customers are searching, browsing, purchasing, and rating products online in their native languages—and they wouldn't have it any other way. Studies show that buyers shy away from making purchases in other languages, especially when the currency is not their own. So if you'd like shoppers to find your online store and buy your products in the international digital space, the very best way is with a Web site made just for them—in their language and according to their local customs.
What does it take to adapt your current Web site for international customers? Let's start with 10 practical tips to get you speaking the language of e-commerce translation and move you down the road to multilingual retail.

Pinterest - The Value Of Pinterest to Hotel Sales & Marketing

Is Pinterest just latest ‘shiny new toy’ or will it have staying power?
In February Pinterest drove more traffic to websites than Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn (LNKD), and YouTube combined. (HotelMarketing.com, 3/26/12). Couple that statistic with the fact that 93% of its users are females, and you have a powerful tool for the leisure and social market. It only took 9 months for Pinterest to go from 50,000 users to 17 million – it took Facebook 16 months. (commsource)
Pinterest formerly told its users to not use the site for self promotion and pin stuff they found on other sites.

Seven Tips for Improving Online Technology Solution Sales

Attracting customers online is essential for any business, but it’s especially important if you are selling technology products or services through your website. Here are some specific ways you can engage prospects on your site and start generating more revenue.
1. Know What Your Customers Really Want
Most people don’t want to spend thousands of dollars or more on technology products. They want to solve a problem. They want to find something that helps them get a job done so they can feel better—less stressed, more productive, more empowered.
That’s why it’s crucial to focus on how your offering benefits customers—and how customers will feel after your product helps them. Speak to this in all of your marketing efforts, and especially on your website. You’ll generate more interest than simply talking about how your product works.

Tips to Increase Web Sales

Higher Conversion Rate = Increase in Web Sales = Higher Profits...

Generating higher online sales involves - Getting targeted traffic to your site and Converting website visitors into actual buyers. Driving traffic to your site can be managed by using numerous web site promotion tools. But after getting a visitor into your online store, your storefront is your only tool to trap and motivate a visitor to purchase your merchandises. In other words, your website is your "only sales executive" on the web.

5 Web Development Tips for Increasing Online Sales

Some merchants might not realize it, but the design of their online storefronts-from the landing page to the shopping cart-has a direct effect on sales. Even the smallest of design elements can improve or harm conversion rates, and this tutorial will tell you five things you can do as a web developer to increase online sales.
Think about it from a shopper's perspective. It seems pretty clear that you want your shopping process to be as intuitive as possible-but a lot of online storefronts don't practice what they preach. Sometimes, web stores get too artsy with their designs. Others use flash animations that can slow down the shopper's browser. Still others use color schemes that send the wrong signals to shoppers.
Performing A/B testing on your online storefront is an important part of making sure your site appeals to customers and makes shopping as intuitive as possible. There is a range of ways that different design elements can affect online users, and testing helps put those ways in perspective. With more than ten years of experience designing online storefronts, we've seen enough to know what the "dos and don'ts" of web store design look like.
Here are five tips on how you can turn more visitors into customers and seriously improve conversion rates using some simple design techniques.

5 Powerful Tips to Boost Your Sales online via Twitter

Twitter has become the tool for many business owners, not only when it comes to promoting their businesses, but also boosting their online sales. However, getting to the point where you can claim with confidence that you are doing everything right relating to marketing your business on Twitter can be a very difficult task. Moreover, boosting your sales on the site is even harder to accomplish. So, this article will provide you with some useful information in regard to boosting your sales. Read on to see what the experts in the field of Twitter marketing have suggested.

The Free Shipping Formula for Online Retailers

There is something decidedly special about offering free shipping. Whether it’s because everyone loves free stuff or paying for shipping is extra painful, I can safely say: sales volume will increase when you offer Free shipping.
Free Shipping taps into the dark corridor that encases our credit card and whispers “buy me.” It rationalizes buying something online that we might just as easily buy at the store down the street. It justifies our retail itch and transforms maybe-buyers into full-fledged conversions. Sounds great right?
Maybe.
From the consumer’s perspective, free shipping is a huge pull factor but when does it make sense for you to offer it? Will the sales increase justify the $5.99 you fork over to pay for free shipping? In this post, I’ll review the decision making process and outline the factors you’ll need to consider when deciding whether or not to offer Free Shipping.

The Best Products to Sell Online

Running an online retail business can be difficult if you are not sure what kinds of products to sell. There are certain kinds of products that sell well on the Internet, and then there is a set of criteria you can use to determine what products may be best for your website.

eBooks

• Ebooks are books that are distributed electronically. They can be downloaded to a computer in a few minutes, and they are rapidly becoming the distribution method of choice for many book publishers. An eBook is an entire book put into a computer file, and then when customers purchase the eBook, it is either emailed to them or they are given a link from which they can make their download. It eliminates the need to create and warehouse thousands of copies of a book, and with new eBook reading computers being created it also allows readers to carry their entire library around with them in one convenient small computer. Selling eBooks may put you in direct competition with some of the larger book retailers on the Internet. This can be a problem because those larger Internet retailers are known for selling eBooks, and your smaller organization does not get the same marketing coverage as the larger retailers. However, you may be able to compete on price as you can offer lower prices than the major retailers on eBooks and still make a good profit.

Five Ways to Turn Your Website into a Sales Machine

Your online presence is a vital part of any sales strategy. But is your website the sales powerhouse it should be?
Replicating the effectiveness of the face-to-face sales process online -- and getting customers to go from clicking to buying -- can be difficult. The good news is that there are a few simple tricks and tweaks that can improve your site's revenue-generating capabilities.

How to Create Your Own Product Online

In this article I will share the key steps you need to take to create your own online product. An online information product is one of the easiest and cheapest products to make and sell. Typically information products sold on the internet take one of the following formats: ebook, audio or video. The choice of which format to use depends on the nature of the information you are presenting, the needs and preferences of your market and also your own preferences. The steps I'm going to share work with all three types.

How to incorporate Google Analytics data into your social media strategy

Google Analytics is undoubtedly the best free web analytics software available for blogs, website owners, e-tailers, and any other kind of website. It helps tracks sales, conversions, sign ups, lead generation data, demographic data, geographical statistics, and much more! If you’re a business owner, it’s likely that your website already has the Google Analytics tracking code in place. If not, you need to get it now. 

An analytics tool is integral for determining essential metrics that help analyze the success of your business. Demographic data will help you get clarity on your target audience and fine tune your website content, products, and services to cater to this audience set. Similarly, by observing the geographical location of your website, it is possible to provide information that helps users in a particular location make informed buying decisions.

Coming Soon: Ad Offers in Your Facebook News Feed

Get ready for advertising in your Facebook news feed. The company has launched Facebook Offers, which aims to bring Groupon-like deals to users of the social networking site. Facebook will roll out the functionality to page owners gradually over the next few months.
An example of what a Facebook Offer might look like.Facebook Offers is part of a broader strategy to make ads look less conspicuous. The company believes that by making an ad look more like a post, users will be more likely to click. Facebook employed a similar strategy with “Sponsored Stories.” Those ads use content posted by your friends about a product or company to make them appear as an endorsement.
Again, it’s all about making you click.

How Your Online Surrogate Should Sell

Your online presence is your surrogate salesperson. She lives there, and she is always working, even when you are sleeping. When your dream clients are looking for you, they find your web presence, your online surrogate.

To make certain your online surrogate salesperson is doing her job, here are some rules to follow.

Why Your Business Needs to Pay Attention to Consumer Feedback

Knowing what customers find important and how they want to interact with a brand is important to any business's success. A new study encourages brands to take note of what consumers think is necessary in order to improve a product or service and then make the changes that will satisfy shoppers.
Here are five suggestions from the “Conversation Index” released by Bazaarvoice, a Texas-based company best known for its ratings and reviews software. The tips are garnered from the millions of pieces of user-generated content from online reviews:

Ειδικές στρατηγικές marketing τουριστικών προορισμών

Οι τουριστικοί προορισμοί θα πρέπει να έχουν ως κινητήριο μοχλό για την ανάπτυξή τους συγκεκριμένες στρατηγικές marketing, οι οποίες και θα καθορίσουν την υλοποίηση των στόχων τους. Στη σύγχρονη τουριστική αγορά η αντίληψη των πωλήσεων του παρελθόντος δεν αρκεί. Οι προς ανάπτυξη τουριστικοί προορισμοί -αλλά και οι ήδη υπάρχοντες- θα πρέπει να καλλιεργήσουν την επικοινωνία με τους παλαιούς πελάτες αλλά και με τους μελλοντικούς ενδιαφερόμενους, και φυσικά όχι μόνο πελάτες αλλά και προμηθευτές και άλλους συνεργαζόμενους φορείς.

In-Video Shopping: Η (δια-δραστική) επανάσταση στο ηλεκτρονικό εμπόριο

Εδώ και αρκετό καιρό, η αγορά του ηλεκτρονικού επιχειρείν αναζητεί λύσεις για το πώς θα μπορέσει να αντιμετωπίσει δύο προκλήσεις του διαδικτύου: πρώτα την εύρεση δυνατοτήτων χρηματοποίησης των βίντεο κλιπ και γενικότερα του περιεχομένου των βίντεο και ύστερα την αναζήτηση τέτοιων τρόπων, ώστε η online διαφήμιση να γίνει για το χρήστη πιο ελκυστική, πιο βιώσιμη και ως εκ τούτου πιο αποδοτική.

Double Sales without Increasing Advertising

FACT: '50% of Visitors are LOST because visitors can't easily find content' - Gartner Group
FACT: '40% of Repeat Visitors are LOST from negative experience' - Zona Research
FACT: '85% of Visitors ABANDON a new site due to poor design' - cPulse
FACT: 70% of people who are ready, willing and able to buy online - don't complete the sale. 
Just imagine, if you can improve your web site's conversion rate, you have the potential to increase your sales by over 233%. And you can do it without spending any more on advertising, or bringing any more traffic to your site.

Use Social Media for Better Customer Service

If you think social media is just for sales, you'd better think again. Your customer service department needs to be active in social media, too. Here's why.   
Social media marketing is more than just spreading a marketing message through social networking tools like Twitter or Facebook. It is about brand management and defense on those same social tools, and turning that defense into marketing opportunities. In many cases, social media marketing will often transcend the typical marketing communication messages and campaigns, because it comes from sources other than the marketing department.
The customer service department is an unlikely place for social media marketing to happen, but because of the public nature of social networks, it can be a great place for brand defense and word of mouth marketing to happen, all because the customer service department is on the ball and handling customer complaints.
Here is an example of how social media marketing usually works.

Your Homemade Website Isn't Cutting It Anymore

Americans spent $200 billion online in 2011. The opportunity for retailers is huge--but you're not going to grab it with a DIY website.
A report this week from Forrester Research confirmed what just about everybody in business already knew: Americans are buying online and they are buying a lot.

The study reported that Americans spent more than $200 billion online in 2011 and projected that total would rise to $327 billion in 2016. The 2016 figure represents 9 percent of all retail sales (up from 7 percent in 2011).
Among the report’s interesting findings:

• 53 percent of Americans made an online purchase in 2011.
• 58 percent are expected to make an online purchase in 2016.
• People believe they get the best deals when shopping online.
• Tablet devices like the iPad have spurred online impulse buying.

How to Get More Value from Your Site

When we put up a website, blog or even an article, in most cases we do so hoping for the visitor to do a particular thing, take a specific action. Those actions are called conversions. We are converting the visitor into something else, a subscriber, a customer, and so on.
As you know from daily life, getting people to do what you want them to can be tricky. We have our own agendas, we see the world differently, there is also self interest, which can work for or against you.
That is why many bloggers and webmasters take the easy route. They don’t even try to get any real conversions, they are happy to sit at the bottom of the web metric food chain.
The value pyramid looks something like this, but obviously will differ from case to case: