Actinic ecommerce

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Ecommerce marketing.

Start with your existing marketing.

You should put your Web site address on your existing brochures, advertising and business cards. Wherever you promote your company name, you should also promote your Web address.

Use newsgroups.

There are lots of places where people hold discussions online. Some of these forums will be talking about your specialty. For instance, if you sell yachting gear, there are plenty of specialist boating forums. Provided that you participate responsibly, you can get the chance to talk about your company, products and offerings. This has the added benefits that it can be enjoyable and is likely to provide lots of useful tips for you, too.

Use targeting.

There are lots of opportunities to advertise online - banner advertisements, email mailing lists (where people have opted-in to the email list), directories and so on. Before parting with your cash, you should use the same judgment that you would use when deciding whether to advertise in conventional media. Who will be looking at this medium and are they my target market? Getting your message in front of large numbers isn't the issue, they must be interested and potential customers for your products.

Ask the question, 'what's working?'

It's a sad fact that when it comes to marketing, the anoraks are in the driving seat. That's right, although being creative is crucial, measuring the results and putting the next round of money where you got the most results last time is the way to success. So measure everything you do, and try to find out where all your leads and customers come from. Use questions on your Web site to ask buyers how they heard about your site.

Find sites that are complementary to yours and offer mutual links.

If you can, find specialist sites that cater for your particular niche and get them to either link or put you in their search results. In return, put a link back to them. This can offer added value to your visitors as well as boosting your traffic - it's a win-win situation.

Use the great interest in the internet for PR.

One of our customers has recently got national coverage because they have an interesting story. If you can get the press interested, it's worth a fortune in marketing.

Try and get a web address that makes sense.

It's worth spending some time thinking about your Web site address (URL). Ideally it will be easy to remember, stand out from the crowd and communicate your message. This will take some time and probably a lot of investigation, as many good URL's have already been taken.

Use multiple URL's.

If you can think of different but interesting Web addresses, they can all point to your one site. Having more than one Web site address gives you lots of extra options. You can register multiple times with search engines, you can emphasise different aspects of your products, and so on.

Provide some additional value at your website.

Can you come up with offers at your site, which will attract visitors? Actinic provides free advice on search engine registration, a 'Commerce Consultant' which assesses the suitability of your business for trading online and other useful material. Hopefully some of you will visit as a result - www.actinic.co.uk - and try to do something similar at your site.

Seventy five percent of users don't go beyond the second page of search engine results. That means if your site isn't in the top 40 results, you probably won't be noticed. So make sure at least one page on your site - preferably your home page - is set up as described here, to give yourself the best possible chance of getting noticed.

Get as many links as possible to your site.

as this will affect your ranking in some major search engines.

Don't put text in small or the same colour as the background.

- you will be penalised by several search engines.

Don't use frames.

Several major search engines won't link through them. However well your pages are optimised, they won't get ranked if the search engines can only find the frame set page.

Manually submit your website to the search engines listed below.

(note some require payment). You can obtain software that will help you with this.

AltaVista
AOL
Excite / Webcrawler
Google
GoTo
HotBot
Infoseek
lnktomi
Looksmart
Lycos
MSN
Netcenter (Netscape)
Northern Light
Open Directory (dmoz.com)
Yahoo

Several of these share the same underlying database. Selling successfully to people who browse on the Internet has many of the elements of ordinary sales and marketing but there are some subtle differences. For a start, the demographics of people who shop on the web can be quite different from those who stick to bricks and mortar retailing, unless you happen to be selling hi-tech equipment or gadgets.

The medium has an effect - the Internet is good for products where you can make a judgment based upon sight or sound, but poor where smell, taste or touch matter. If you need more than sight or sound then you will have to build trust - customers will need to have confidence that fruit will be ripe, clothes will fit and so on. You can build trust by establishing a reputation, or by reducing the risk to the buyer by offering no-quibble guarantees. The key to sales is offering what the customer wants, at a price they are happy to pay. In your e-store, the buyer cannot easily ask questions of you, so you need to provide all the information they require to make a decision.

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