Thread: Business is getting tougher

Thank you all for your comments, it really help to see some different points of view.

I guess Will is right, the economic downturn play a big part.

Google sent me a $100 Adwords coupon, perhaps I should try PPC again.

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

Thank you all for your comments, it really help to see some different points of view.

I guess Will is right, the economic downturn play a big part.

Google sent me a $100 Adwords coupon, perhaps I should try PPC again.

Try to find keywords that are low volume and are cheap.

well if we have perfect marketing strategy even we can sell our products to the end user at any point of time irrespective of the market conditions.

Originally Posted by Pran

well if we have perfect marketing strategy even we can sell our products to the end user at any point of time irrespective of the market conditions.

Marketing strategy is important. A good place to start is the marketing mix 1)Product 2) Price 3) Place (Distribution) 4) Promotion - sales promotions

With ecommerce the price and promotion are two important factors:

Price - Pricing strategy
Promotion - sales promotions

I was thinking like this a while ago, that prices were the most important, now I don't.

If you are too low, you will crash sooner or later, if you are too high customers will not follow. I think the best for our business is above the middle. That gives room to advertise, pay some copywriters for great articles, and offering discount and free shipping.

The bad news are when a product was a good seller, the ranking pages are not outranked and customers don't like it anymore. You never know why and when it will happen.
That's the risky part of selling products.

The best pricing strategy is to stay reasonable and not too greedy.

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

I was thinking like this a while ago, that prices were the most important, now I don't.

If you are too low, you will crash sooner or later, if you are too high customers will not follow. I think the best for our business is above the middle. That gives room to advertise, pay some copywriters for great articles, and offering discount and free shipping.

The bad news are when a product was a good seller, the ranking pages are not outranked and customers don't like it anymore. You never know why and when it will happen.
That's the risky part of selling products.

The best pricing strategy is to stay reasonable and not too greedy.

I wouldn't recommend lowering your prices. The bottom line is that you will cannibalize your current sales. On the pricing aspect, it's a good idea to take a look on some higher volume items and compare them to the competition. The funny thing is that some consumers are price sensitive on some products. But on the impulse items the pricing is of less importance.

The sales promotion on the other hand is something to consider. You can offer a coupon code or add something onto the shopping cart. I've seen shopping carts where when you are ready to pay, they offer a discount on an additional item.

For a while we offered coupons for the next order, but too few people used them. We also used different promotions, but wasn't successful.

The only thing that works, is a clear promotion on the index top page, which we have right now. Customers want to be rewarded right away, which bring extra sales. Other than that, I give some extra products to my repeat customers depending of my stock.

Do you email your customer base with special offers and promotions, or with notices about new free content on your web site?

Originally Posted by Will.Spencer

Do you email your customer base with special offers and promotions, or with notices about new free content on your web site?

No Will, I tried that long time ago and was banned from a major ISP. I just realize that I will never bother my customers again with email promotion.

If my customers want to buy some products, they know where they can find it.

As far as free content notice, it seems like most customers know what they want, but few read our articles. From my statistics many people find us from search engines page products and 15- 20% come from my articles.

It is very difficult to know because my visitors can read my articles and come back later directly to the page products, or send our site address to friends and relatives.

Some visitors just read our articles, this is why we recently place an adsenses slot in each live article to get extra income to increase the frequency of the new articles.

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

No Will, I tried that long time ago and was banned from a major ISP. I just realize that I will never bother my customers again with email promotion.

You may want to consider getting an email marketing software to handle the promotion. The email marketing is useful to send out newsletters, promotions and catalogs.

A lot of companies have an opt in with email confirmation. I beleieve that there are hosts to handle this as well. So you won't need to run the campaign from your ISP.