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3 Golden Rules Of Online Marketing From QuBit CEO Graham Cooke

Online retail marketing is tricky business these days; customers are expensive, picky and difficult to retain. Graham Cooke, CEO of QuBit, a tech company specializing in the collection and analysis of website data, and former Google senior product manager, says if you’re an online marketer, there are three areas to focus on that have changed the Web marketing game, and will change your online marketing success.

 

 

Speed matters

Speed is a huge factor in the success of your website, and even today many websites are underperforming in this area. A slow website, according to Graham, is pretty much the kiss of death. The scariest part?

 

A slow website will cost you:

  • Every second it takes for your website to download decreases conversion by 2-7%.
  • Page views are reduced by 1-2%.
  • Speed is a big part of Google’s ranking process—a slow website=suffering search results.

 

So what does Graham suggest web marketers do to ensure their site is up to speed?

  1. Make sure your site is technically optimized and hosting and bandwidth providers don’t have users downloading large video and/or image files.
  2. Use a tag management system- one page can have up to 20 or 30 tags, and this will slow loading speed. A tag management system can improve performance.

 

Marketing teams and technical teams need to work together to ensure that the right tools are in place and technologies are utilized so sites load faster, customers search easier and your online marketing succeeds.

 

Look through the customer’s eyes

Instead of taking a web-centric view, i.e. just tracking individual visits to your website, Graham suggests taking a customer-centric view of your analytics by following your customer throughout their buying cycle.

 

What does that mean, exactly?

  • More than half of online customers make more than one point of contact before purchasing, which results in 25% of sale cycles taking more than a month to make.
  • There are hundreds of influences for your customer–from Facebook links to online ads, to in-store visits—it’s important to follow your customer’s journey to understand why or why not they made a purchase.

 

Bottom line? Graham says think more broadly about what your customers are doing to understand their online experience.

 

Make it personal

After gaining a better insight to your customer’s purchasing journey, the next step, according to Graham, is making the experience as personal as possible. This doesn’t mean just recommendations, this means knowing your customer and building a truly personal and unique experience for them.

 

 

How does an online marketer do this?

  • Combining personal design, stock, messaging and layout on your website.
  • Some website are moving in this direction, but most are still making site-wide changes, which, according to research by Jim Manzi, results in only 10% of these sites actually driving business.
  • Marketers need to serve the right content, at the right time in order to guarantee changes will turn into results

 

Personalization is not easy: in order to effectively create a personal experience, Graham says do it on the fly based on the data you already have from your customers.

 

So, all you online marketers– make sure you optimize your site’s speed, take a customer point-of-view and make it personal, and watch your sales soar.

 

Photo Credits

QubitProducts.com

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