Are You Turning Customers Away?

Many websites generate revenue by pushing traffic through online marketing such as pay per click campaigns, purchasing text links, and still to this day banner exchanges. Waiting in anticipation for visitors to take the bait and turn into a customer. When marketing is cheap, and visitor's attention spans are bountiful, although not the greatest this method works. However, this trend can't continue as online marketing costs rise, and the attentions spans of the people you are trying to target become limited. Instead of upping the marketing spend, and trying to push even more traffic to your website, you need to start paying attention to why your website isn't generating revenue. Sending people to your site, just to have them leave makes absolutely no sense.

Upping your marketing budget to achieve the results you want, is pure gluttony. Sadly it is one of the main reasons the economy is the way it is today. In many situations when something is cheap, anything wasted is hardly given a second thought. If you want more, you spend more and this cycle repeats itself endlessly. What happens when the marketing changes, competition rises and economy dwindles? You eventually reach a point where you can no longer throw money away, hoping on a prayer that you will generate the same reults. If your visitors are spending less, spending more will not improve anything.

The online business is a fickle one, and is continually changing. Your website and marketing work hand in hand, they are not two separate entities. Now more than ever it is time to shift your focus from pushing traffic to looking at the core aspects of your website. Each and every visitor to your website is a potential customer. Most are looking to buy or use your products, but are becoming more and more frustrated with badly planned processes that make it difficult for them accomplish this.
Today one of the most important parts of a website is user experience, making sure that they can easily understand the structure of your website as well processes as painlessly as possible. All too often, websites are placed online in a rush. Processes such as registration, and check-outs are not thoroughly tested and thought out. Sadly these processes are often an afterthought. Many shopping carts have abandonment rates as high as 95%, these are people happy to hand over their money to you, yet due to frustration they leave! This one aspect alone can literally determine your success or failure online.

Many shopping carts have abandonment rates as high as 95%, these are people happy to hand over their money to you, yet due to frustration they leave!

From our experience though, potential customers don't want to register before buying, they do not want to have to go through the whole buying process just to find out how much shipping is. This is especially true if your client base is international. Some websites have even prevented people buying due to badly designed forms requiring 5 digit zip codes, if you cater outside the US that's just inexcusable but it does happen!Fine tuning each and every process on your website is going to help you retain potential purchases, and lower your marketing costs. Looking at it from this perspective and building your website from the bottom up, is it not clear how much more successful your site will be? Regardless of how much, or little you spending on traffic and marketing pushing people away from your website will effect it negatively in the long run. And everyone knows it is far cheaper to keeping existing clients happy than sourcing new ones.