The following list outlines the primary set of fonts common to all versions of Windows and their Mac substitutes, referred to sometimes as "browser safe fonts".
Of course the fonts you can use for your website design are directly dependent on the fonts that are available on your visitor’s machine. If they do not have the font installed, then the visitor will not see the design exactly as you intended it.

In these pages you will find articles, tutorials, explanations and tips to help you during the design process of your website.
These articles will help you understand the important factors that relate to the initial design and the ongoing maintenance of a successful website.

Important website design factors that must be considered during the design phase of your website include:
> Search engine visibility
> Accessibility
> Usability
> Branding
> Ease of maintenance

If your customers can’t book your products with instant confirmation, you may lose out to your competitors who can. Response times to booking requests within 24 hours are now just not good enough.

We believe that a tourism operator needs a simple tool to manage their reservations. Tourism Operators today also need to ensure that their inventory of rooms, tours or cars are exposed in as many appropriate online channels as possible to maximise bookings opportunities. You need an easy to use system so the technology helps instead of stresses!

One of New Zealand's leading Reservation Management and Online Booking Distribution systems is called ResBook, a system which is all about maximising bookings and managing reservations.

As the oldest and largest provider of online real time reservation management systems in New Zealand and the South Pacific ResBook have developed a simple system that manages your reservations and connects you with direct travellers, booking agents and online distribution channels. 

Availability’s system; ResBook enables you to;

• Display your Availability throughout your website with customisable booking forms
• Instant confirmation or On Request bookings
• Secure online payment processing
• Dynamic pricing calendar
• Free access to hundreds of agents
• Integrate your inventory with Wotif, Expedia, Air New Zealand and hundreds of channels – at no additional cost for the integration.

For more information see www.availability.co.nz or call 09 5 222 333

There are a number of alternative systems in the New Zealand marketplace, one of which is Seekom.  Seekom allows accommodation, rental car and tour/activity suppliers to easily setup and maintain rates and inventory allocation, from one easy point to your sales network. The one centralised booking solution allows you to maintain just one central booking schedule allowing you and your sales network to sell your product or service with instant confirmation.

Link to your booking page from your own website and from your profile pages featured on accommodation portal sites such as www.kiwiaccommodation.com

The Seekom booking solution allows you to setup and your users to specify
> Date of arrival
> Date of Checkout
> Number of nights
> Number of adults
> Number of children
> Number of rooms
> Deposit amount
among other options

Users can then pay their deposit by credit card to confirm the booking.

More information

Feb 2010

Screen resolutions have changed very quickly over the last few years. These statistics from W3Schools suggest that today most users are browsing the web with a display of 1024x768 pixels or more resolution, with a color depth of at least 65K colors.

W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies, so these statistics might not be realistic for the average user or for users in your industry. Most likely the average user will have display screens with a lower resolution.

But the statistics, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends in screen resolution.

Statistics source: www.w3schools.com

Smart mobile phone screen resolution

The above statistics do not show the use of mobile phone web browsing. Smart phones such as the Iphone and faster, cheaper mobile internet connections have made browsing the web on a mobile phone much more popular. We should be expecting a large increase in users browsing websites on their mobile phone in the next year. Most smart phones have an average display resolution of 480 x 320 pixels
You can see how your website might appear on an iphone using an Iphone emulator

So while desktop monitors grow larger in resolution, more and more users are turning to mobile devices with small displays designed to fit in a pocket.
This creates a website design challenge. When planning your website design you will need to consider which screen resolution you should optimise your design for.

If you think a large majority of your target customers might be browsing your website with a mobile phone, you should consider optimising your website for these users. There are a number of ways that you can do this:

1. Create and maintain a separate website specifically designed for mobile phone users optmised for a screen resolution of 480 x 320 Cons: expensive to setup and maintain
2. Design your website specifically for mobile phones, optimised for a screen resolution of 480 x 320, which will also work on a desktop monitor. Not the best use of screen realestate for wide monitors
3. Design your website as a fluid width single column design so the content fits any screen resolution. Cons: You will need to make images small and you will have little control over the design. Also makes reading difficult on larger monitors with a large number of words per line.

However one needs to consider just how many websites there are on the web and with this in mind it is very unlikely that these websites will change to suit smaller mobile devices. It is more likely that the hardware technology will evolve to allow users to browse websites at a higher resolution.
For example smart phones like the Iphone make it easy for the user to zoom in and out and scroll up and down, left and right. This makes it reasonable easy to browse a website that has been designed for a higher screen resolution.

Other technology that mobile hardware companies are experimenting with to make mobile screens larger include, flexible screens that unfold or roll out, double displays that slide or fold out, projector displays that project onto a flat surface.

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Original article: Published 2007

Screen Resolution

More and more computers are using a screen size of 1024x768 pixels or more though many users still have only 800x600 display screens.

 

1024x768 Vs 800x 600

Zeald recommend that websites are designed to fit an 800 x 600 pixel browser for a number of reasons:

1. A significant number - 7 - 10% is still a significant number of customers to make it extremely difficult to browse the website, effectively making it un-usable for them. Consider the real world analogy of a shop, would you close the door to 8 potential customers out of 100 because their technology was not up-to-date? One should also keep in mind, that while the use of 800 pixel res monitors are subsiding....smaller held held devices are on the increase and these work best with a smaller screen res.
2. A web Standard - fixed width 800 pixel wide website designs are the most common format on the web. They are a web standard. IE if you browse the web, you will find 9 out of 10 websites are designed for this resolution....possibly more. This means that when you are browsing the web, most people are familiar with this dimension websites, they are setup for this dimension. When they stumble upon the wider format, it may be somewhat disconcerting, things are not in the same place, it may appear confusing, and difficult to use. A good example I like to use is the Adobe website. A website designed for graphic designers and website designers, who you would expect would all be using the very latest widest fanciest monitors in the world. - designed to fit an 800 pixel wide monitor?
3. Reduced browser areas for user preferences - Because people are most familiar with navigating the 800 dimension websites, while they may use a larger resolution monitor, they may have their website browsers reduced in size to fit two or three websites side by side, or layered so they can see pages loading behind, or next to the application that they are currently working on. They may also have navigation bars set to display down the left hand column of their browser, such as bookmarks or history. The "Screen resolution stats" are not able to determine these user preferences, so no one knows just how many people do this. I know a number of people at Zeald do it.
4. When websites are designed to fit this width, the content area is increased and so the text flows across with many more words per line than is recommended for optimum readability. 7 - 10 words per line. Often this will be increased to 20 - 30 with a 1024 pixel width design....even with 3 columns.

The 100% width setting

is an alternate option however we do not recommend this for the following reasons:

1. banner graphics cannot be designed to fit the full width because the width is variable and image dimensions are 'hard coded'
2. Text set to display 100% on a 'wide screen' exceeds the 7-10 word readability limit. Usability studies show that blocks of text become difficult to read when displayed in long horizontal strings that exceed 7-10 words.

Color Depth

Most computers use 24 or 32 bits hardware to display 16,777,216 different colors:
Older computers and laptops often use 16 bits display hardware. This gives a maximum of 65,536 different colors.

Handheld computers and very old computers often use 8 bits color hardware. This gives a maximum of 256 colors.
 

Web Safe Colors

A few years ago, when most computers supported only 256 different colors, a list of 216 Web Safe Colors was suggested as a Web standard.
This 216 cross platform web safe color palette was originally created to ensure that all computers in particular macintosh and PC computers, would display all colors correctly when running a 256 color palette.
Unless your website is targeting hand helds or very old computers it is probably not important to design for a 256 display, since more and more computers are equipped with the ability to display millions of different colors.

Optimising your website for the search engines is only one option for generating traffic for your website. Another option is to advertise on a search engine.

When advertising on a search engine, you pay for an advertisement to appear when a person searches for a particular keyword or phrase, relevant to your website. There are three common models search engines use for charging for advertisements- in fact; these models are common across all forms of online advertising:
 

• Pay-Per-Impression (CPM)

 

• Pay-Per-Click (CPC)

 

• Pay-Per-Acquisition (CPA)

 

Advertising Types

There are two common types of search engine advertising:
 

• Fixed Placement Advertising

   

• Pay For Placement Advertising (PFP)

PFP advertising can change day-to-day as advertisers change their bid amounts, and as new advertisers start bidding. Almost all PFP advertising utilises a Pay-Per-Click method of charging. The advertiser pays each time a person clicks their advertisement.

PFP advertising is great for small businesses as you can trial it with very little advertising budget. You can often secure visitors to your website for just a few cents. Its only downside is that it can require substantial time and effort to manage it successfully.

The rest of this section focuses on PFP advertising, as this is the form of advertising that will be most applicable to the majority of our readers.

 

PFP Advertising Providers

In the PFP advertising world there are two main providers:
 

• Google

   

• Overture
  Overture is the biggest supplier of PFP advertising. Similar to Google Adwords, Overture allows you to bid on keywords that when searched show an advertisement on the right-hand side of the page under the tile – ‘Sponsored Results’.

 

There are also a number of smaller PFP providers:

• FindWhat (http://www.findwhat.com)
• LookSmart (http://www.looksmart.com)
• Kanoodle (http://www.kanoodle.com)
• Enhance Interactive (http://www.enhance.com)
• Mamma Media Solutions (http://www.mammamediasolutions.com).

 

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“Is Your Website Producing Amazing RESULTS?”

If you answer is anything less than a resounding yes, then you need to learn about how Zeald can help. Because results that are anything less than ‘amazing’ means you are selling yourself short!
 

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© Zeald 2005 – All Rights Reserved

The number of visitors coming to your website is directly related to your website promotion and marketing.

The first thing that you should ask yourself if you have a low number of website visitors is– “How much money do I spend, and do I have budgeted, to be spent on website promotion and marketing each month?” If your answer to this is ‘nothing’ then you need to urgently reconsider your commitment to your website!

If you do not promote and market your business then what happens? No new business right?! And eventually no business at all, i.e., the business goes belly up! Well, the same thing happens with a website– no promotion and marketing then no results. And no results generally means that eventually, your website will go belly-up.

You must have at least some budget dedicated to the marketing and promotion of your website. $100 a month? Surely any company that is serious about their website can find a spare $100 to use on website promotion? What about $250, $2,500 or $10,000 a month? The more money that you can allocate to website promotion and marketing, the better.

If you have a successful physical business then chances are that you spend a healthy amount of money each month on the promotion and advertising of your business. Don’t expect miracles from your website. Give it a healthy budget too and the results will follow.

If you have a budget in the $1,000 - $10,000 range, then you should seriously consider employing a professional website marketing and promotions company. Talk to your Zeald Internet consultant for more information.

If you have a very small budget– in the hundreds of dollars a month range, then you are going to have to take a DIY approach. You will need to read the ‘Promote’ module of your E-Business Bible very carefully.

 

Low or No Budget Promotion Strategies

So how do you promote a website if you have little or no budget? This is a good question. You need to be prepared to work hard! The short list of things we would suggest are:

• Submit your website to the free submission search engines (free)

• Collect customers’ email addresses and send a monthly newsletter or promotion to them every month (free)

• Create some ‘punchy’ classified advertisements for your website– submit them to free classified advertising sites, as listed in the ‘Classified & Banner Advertising’ section of the E-business Bible (free)

• Set up a “Yellow Pages” link from the online Yellow Pages (yellowpages.co.nz) to your website ($25 p/mth)

• Consider advertising your website using the Google Adwords & Overture search engine advertising systems (maximum budget varies and can be set)

• Consider running an advertisement in an ezine that is targeted directly at your target market. (rates will vary depending on ezine)

• Consider signing-up to the NZAds (www.nzads.co.nz) banner exchange network, and start running banner ads on your website (free).

Like with everything, you will need to track and measure each of your different advertising or promotional campaign initiatives very carefully. If it isn’t working, tweak it, or drop it, and give something else a go. If it is working, then try dropping something that is barely working, and use the extra budget to do more of what is working.

Website advertising and promotion can be tricky. Remember the Support Team is there to help you. Don’t hesitate to talk to them for more recommendations and ideas.

The average sale is the amount of money a visitor spends each time they come to your website. Average sale is a metric that will only be applicable if you are running an ecommerce website.

If you are running an Profile or Catalogue website then your average sale will be affected by what you or your sales people do once they receive an enquiry from your website.

To increase your average sale you need to encourage your customers to spend more money each time they visit. This is called merchandising. There are a huge number of merchandising techniques. Let’s look at some of the more common online ones:

• Cross-sells
  Cross-selling is a powerful technique for increasing the size of your customer’s order. Cross-selling involves “suggesting” related products or services to a visitor when they are viewing or buying a product or service from your website.
  
  For example, if your visitor is buying a hammer then you might want to display a number of different types of nails.
  
  The most common way of doing this on a website is by displaying cross-sell items in the right column or below the item when a visitor is viewing an item, their shopping cart or checking out.

• Up-sells
  Up-selling is when you “suggest” a more ‘advanced’ or ‘expensive product’ to the one that is currently being viewed or considered. For example, if your visitor is buying a chrome tap then you might try and up-sell your visitor by displaying a gold-plated version of the tap as another option.
  
  This is usually done in a similar way to the cross-sell– you display the up-sell item in the right column or below the current item as the visitor views it, or at their shopping cart or check-out screens.

• Specials
  Placing a number of items on ‘special’ and featuring them on your home page, or on a separate ‘specials’ page can be an extremely effective way of increasing your average sale. A ‘sharp’ special can be just what is needed to get your visitor to hit that add to cart button. Remember, The first item in the shopping cart is always the hardest.

• Wish-lists
  A “wish-list” feature allows your visitor to build up a list of items that they would ‘like’ to purchase at a later date. When your visitor returns to your site they are able to look back over their wish list and make a decision to purchase. If a customer has decided to make an order, many times they will add some extra items from their wish list in addition to the items that they are ordering.
  
  For even better results you could provide a feature where your visitors can email their wish list to a friend or family member (as a gift-guide), which has the added bonus of bringing a new visitor to your website.

• Quantity pricing
  ‘Quantity’ or ‘volume pricing’ is where you offer a cheaper price or a bigger discount as an incentive for a bigger order. For example, if you buy one pack of nails it will cost $12.45, but if you buy five packs of nails then they’ll only cost $8.50 per pack. You are actively providing an incentive for your visitors to buy in bulk and thus spend more money ‘up front’.

• Gift vouchers
  Gift vouchers can be a great way to attract extra visitors to your site and encourage your visitors to purchase more. Offer your visitors the opportunity to purchase gift certificates and have them emailed to a friend.

• Buy one, get one free
  Run a special ‘buy one, get one free’ promotion or a ‘buy two, get one free’ - use whatever will convince your visitors to buy.
  
  This strategy works especially well with ‘end-of-season’ or ‘clearance items’ that you need to shift.

• Free shipping on orders over $xyz
  We have seen this strategy work very well with a number of our customers. Free shipping on all orders over $50! This encourages your visitors to top up their orders to ensure that they get the ‘free shipping’.

• Free gift
  Buy X and receive a free gift. This can be a great technique if you have a product that fulfills a customer need, but is just not converting. Ideally, you want to use a gift that has a high-perceived value but costs you very little. A small ‘free gift’ can sometimes be just enough to overcome the last little bit of buyer reluctance.

• Best sellers
  If something is a ‘hot seller’ or ‘popular item’ and you are barely promoting it, then chances are, a little bit more promotion could mean a large increase in results. Great merchandisers will often focus on their best selling items, not their worst.

• New items
  Consider having a section that introduces new items that have ‘just arrived’. This can be great for those early adopters who love to try out anything that’s new and always be on the leading edge.

• Package deals
  Try combining a number of items into a package deal. Offer a special discount if the customer buys certain items as a ‘package’. Think of fast food meal deals where they package up a burger, fries and a coke. Do you have a number of your products or services that you could package up? What will be attractive to your customers?

Read the preceding article about Website Success Metrics

Conversion Rate is the first website success metric that you should look to improve. Why? If your conversion rate is poor then you can burn an awful lot of money on website promotion and advertising without seeing any result.

Improving conversion rates can be an extremely tricky task. There are so many factors that can influence conversion. This is where you could really do with the help from your E-Business Consultant They will be able to analyse your website, determine its weaknesses and provide you with some great strategies for improving your conversion rate.

There are a huge number of things that influence the conversion rate of a website. Let’s take a look at a few of the basics.

 

Customer Need

You need to know, without a doubt, what your customer’s need, problem or goal is. Everything about your website and the things that you are selling on your website should be focused on those needs, problems or goals.
Your understanding here will often directly affect the…

 

Strength of your Product(s) or Service(s)

The strength of your product or service forms the foundation for your entire website.

How good is your product or service (especially compared to your competition), and do lots of people want it or need it? Think about this honestly. If the answer is no– then this can be one of the biggest negatives on your conversion rate.

Think long and hard how you can strengthen your product or service? How can you differentiate it from your competition? How can you make it deliver more of what your target customer wants or needs? Often, an in-depth analysis of your target customers’ problems, goals or needs will give you a good insight into what they want. Then you just need to give them more of it!

Consider running a survey. We know that it can take a lot of time and effort but surveys can give you a real ‘grass-roots’ look at what your customer truly wants. Never second-guess what you customers really want as it is so easy to get it wrong. Let us share a little story about this with you…

In the early days of Zeald we were struggling to really sell our website solution. As one of our ‘marketing strategies’, we decided to set up a stand at a local business expo (North Shore Business Expo).

For our stand, we decided to run a simple survey. To record the results from our survey, we built a massive bar graph on the back wall, with results added every time someone completed our survey.

We asked just one question- “Why do businesses go online?”

We then provided five possible answers, which respondents could select from:
 

• increased business opportunity

• increased customer loyalty

• improved business efficiency

• cost savings

• increased competitive advantage.

We got each of the respondents to put a number beside each of the answers between1 to 5 to indicate whether the answer was an important reason for them to start doing business online (with 1 being ‘most important’ and 5 being ‘least important’. Every person who completed our survey went into a draw for a free website from Zeald.

Guess what we found? - The majority of people put a ‘1’ beside ‘Increased business opportunity’.

What did this teach us? - Our target customers were interested, more than anything else, in extra business. They wanted results! They wanted sales, enquiries or leads! They wanted a website that wins business!

What an incredibly powerful result! From this point onward we changed everything about our company. Everything about our product and our service became focused on delivering results for our customers. Our whole solution became 100 times better because of this one simple survey. It helped us to truly understand our customer needs, problems and goals.

We also developed software that makes it easier to conduct a survey- the Zeald Email Marketing tool, which plugs into your ZES solution. It allows you to email your entire customer database and run a survey. It then collates all the results for you and presents them as a report. You can’t get any easier than that!

Talk to your E-Business Consultant to find out about the Zeald Email Marketing tool. With an automated tool like this, it is worthwhile running surveys on regular basis just to keep in touch with changes in your customers’ thinking or preferences.

For great conversion you need…

Great product(s) or service(s) that fulfill your ‘target customer’s’ needs, problems or goals.

 

Trust and Credibility

Do you remember the six steps to visitor conversion? Here they are again:
 

1. Do I trust you?
2. Do I believe you?
3. Do you understand my needs?
4. What’s in it for me (WIIFM)?
5. What do you want from me?
6. Is it worth it?

Before anyone will buy from you they need to trust you and believe that what you are saying is true. If you can’t guide your visitor through these first two steps then you have no hope of getting your visitor to enquire about or buy your product or service.

Think about when you buy from an organisation or off someone– you will go through the same process; you will not buy unless you trust them, and you believe that what they are telling you is true.


So how do you do this on a website?

Well – it’s not easy, but there’s a whole bunch of things that will help your website build trust and credibility with your visitor. Let’s go through some of the most important ones below:

 

• Fast-loading website
  Your website needs to load fast. Studies have shown that if visitors have to wait for more than 8-10 seconds for a page to load then you run a serious risk of losing them.
   
  Your website should work and have the appearance of a smooth, powerful, and well-oiled machine. People should be thinking, “what a great website!”
   
  As a rule of thumb, every single one of your web pages should load in 8 seconds or less, on a 56k modem. See our e-book– “The Website Health Check” to learn about running tests to check the speed of your web pages.

 

• User-friendly layout & clear navigation
  Your website needs to be user-friendly. Everything needs to be as simple and as obvious as possible. Your website should provide your visitors with all the common things that you expect to find on most websites. When laying out the information and common components on a website the goal is not to be unique and quirky– this will just confuse your visitors.
   
  “But, what about personality? Surely we don’t want our website to be bland and just like every other website?”
   
  Convey your personality using your branding, photographs and content (words and text). Don’t try to “play around” with the structure and layout of the website unless you are prepared to sacrifice your conversion.
   

• Professional website design
  Your website should look professional. It should look good. It should be pleasing to the eye.
   
  If it looks cheap then this will destroy trust immediately. Always use a graphic designer experienced in the design of websites to design your website. Don’t try and do it yourself and don’t get your cousins son to do it.
   
  Think about the physical world. First impressions are so important. It is exactly the same on the web. You want to convey a professional and trustworthy image.
   
  The web is littered with business websites that look shocking. Often these businesses have a great physical business with very strong branding yet for some reason they decided to “skimp” with their website. These sites are obviously produced by the owner, the cousin’s son or a cheap and nasty website company. And then you hear their complaints– “Oh our website is a complete waste of time– it doesn’t produce any results.” Would you feel comfortable giving your credit card details or confidential information to a website that looks cheap and nasty? Certainly not, we’re sure!

 

• Testimonials
  Testimonials are great for establishing trust and credibility. The more the merrier! Keep your testimonials in their original form– don’t fix grammatical errors. Provide contact details for the people giving the testimonial. Often it is a great idea to feature a testimonial in the right-hand side of your home page. Whatever you do– NEVER fake a testimonial– you will destroy your credibility!

 

• Case studies
  Case studies are an in-depth study of the success a customer had as an “experience” with your business. They will often go through the complete client experience with your organization, from start to finish. Case studies are awesome trust and credibility builders and are even more powerful than a testimonial. And they are especially suited to complex products and solutions.

 

• Awards & certifications
  Has your business won an award or achieved some sort of certification? These elements can be fantastic for building trust and credibility. Try to choose awards or certifications that will mean something to your target customer.

 

• Partners
  Associating yourself with a well-respected partner or affiliate is a great way of building something called “borrowed credibility”. You are effectively ‘tapping into’ the credibility of your partner. People will think– “If they are partnered with them then they must be credible”.
   
  Be careful though– the same can happen in reverse. If your partner has a bad reputation in your industry or region then it could by nature of association, provide you with negative credibility.

 

• References or client list
  Providing a list of ‘clients that a visitor is welcome to call’ is a powerful trust-builder. Providing an open invitation to call one of your customers for a personal reference is a big plus, as your serious prospects can speak with your customer at length about their experiences with your organisation. And you’re not there to colour their view.

 

• Guarantee
  A guarantee is one of the strongest trust and credibility building elements that you can possibly have. If at all possible, make your guarantee big, bold and even a little brash! Many organisations have reported that the stronger they made their guarantee the fewer claims they received against it. And the increased sales or enquiries resulting from a stronger guarantee (or the increase in conversion rate) far outweighed the one or two extra claims that they received.
   
  A strong guarantee shows that you have a 100% belief in your product(s) or service(s). And remember, worst case scenario– you can always tone it down, or remove it at a later date, if you wish.

 

• Terms & conditions
  Many websites don’t display a ‘Terms & Conditions’ (T&C’s) or a ‘Terms of Trade’. Just by displaying a set of T&C’s you will increase your website’s credibility.
   
  This is vital if you are building an ecommerce website. Any professional and serious ecommerce website will display their T&C’s. Make sure your T&C’s are written in plain English and are as simple as possible.

 

• Privacy policy
  Same things apply to ‘Privacy Policies’ as to ‘Terms & Conditions’. With the huge increase in SPAM and many other invasions of the individual’s privacy, a clear, ‘no ifs or buts’ privacy policy is mandatory for any website.

 

• Security policy
  Security policies outline the security measures that are in place to ensure the security of all personal information stored by you. Your security policy should outline, in plain English, the ‘industry standard’ levels of security that are employed throughout your website.

 

• Evidence of a physical presence
  This one is a biggie. Websites can be very impersonal so the more you can demonstrate that there is a real business with real people behind the website the better. Use photos of your business and staff. Your visitor will feel a whole lot more comfortable knowing that your business doesn’t have the potential to just vanish into cyberspace.

 

• Website copy
  The number one thing that a visitor will do when they come to your website is read. Good website copy will, in the early stages, focus on building trust and credibility with them. If your website copy does not do this then read through the ‘Load’ module of the E-business Bible and rework your text to ensure it builds a high degree of trust and credibility with your targets.
   

• Professionalism
  The ‘all round professionalism’ of your website will have a huge impact on the degree of comfort that your online visitor feels when dealing with you online. Look at your website from a holistic point of view– does it have a professional look and feel to it? Would you feel safe using it?

 
 

Sales Copy

Let’s say you have established a strong base of trust and excellent credibility on your website. And you have great product(s) or service(s) that you’re targeting directly at your target customers’ needs. Is there anything else that can affect your conversion rates?

You bet!

Don’t forget the six steps to visitor conversion:

1. Do I trust you?
2. Do I believe you?
3. Do you understand my needs?
4. What’s in it for me (WIIFM)?
5. What do you want from me?
6. Is it worth it?

 
We have only dealt with the first two steps. What about the final four steps?

Your sales copy will influence your conversion rate just about more than any other factor. The number one thing that every visitor does is read.

Good sales copy is absolutely vital.  It can really pay to have an objective and constructive review of your sales copy from an online professional.

Make sure you ‘study’ the articles on Loading your website. They provide a clear step-by-step guide to drafting great website sales copy. If you are not good at writing– definitely get some help from a professional. You’ll be amazed by what even a phone interview with a writer can do to help your sales copy shine.


In this article we have gone over the basic ‘influencing factors’ in a website’s conversion rate.

Conversion rates are a complex subject and depend on many different factors. Talk with your Zeald E-Business Consultant anytime for an in-depth analysis of your conversion rate.

This article is all about testing and improving your website results. Within your normal business you will always be looking for ways to make everything work better. You need to do the same with your website. The tune process can be summed up with three words – ‘Test’, 'Measure' and 'Tune'.

One of the reasons the Internet is a direct marketer’s dream, is just about everything can be measured automatically! If you’ve been in business for any length of time you will know how hard it can be to measure your results (and it takes a heap of time and effort). Website marketing is quite different– you barely have to lift a finger, it just happens!

Most people just don’t get how incredibly powerful this is!

If you understand what needs to be measured, then you can measure it, read the measurements and make adjustments to your website to improve your overall result. This is unbelievably powerful!

So, what do you need to measure?

Well that is a subject in our book– “Website Fundamentals – How to Generate Amazing Results Online! ”. But to save you sourcing the relevant section right now, the crucial parts follow…

Success Metrics

Within any business there are a number of simple success metrics that determine the performance of the business.

In the physical world, success metrics are– leads, conversion rate, average sale and margin. Let’s take a closer look at each of these:

• Leads
  A lead is a potential customer that has enquired about your product or service. The leads success metric represents the number of people that have enquired about your products or services over a particular period of time.

• Conversion Rate
  The conversion rate is the percentage of people that purchased products or services from you. A 20% conversion rate means that for every 10 leads you made two sales.

• Average Sale
  The average sale represents how much people usually spend with you. Each time customers buy from you, do they spend, on average $20, $200, or $2000?

• Margin
  The margin is the percentage of every sale that is profit– after all the costs are taken out. A 20% margin on a $1,000 sale means your profit was $200.

The most important thing to understand about success metrics is this –

If you can increase ANY ONE of the success metrics then your business will make more money!

It’s that simple.

If you want to run a successful business you need to know and understand success metrics and therefore how they influence your business. The same applies if you want to run a successful website– you need to understand success metrics on the Web and how they affect your website.

The key success metrics for a website that sells products, with transactions automatically completed online (an ecommerce website), are ‘visitors’, ‘conversion rate’ and ‘average sale’.

‘Visitors’ is a new success metric, which is a more accurate description of receiving a prospect on an e-commerce website. The ‘visitors’ success metric refers to the amount of ‘traffic’, or visitors, your website receives.

As with most businesses, the ‘margin’ is still determined by the physical aspects of the business (and includes the cost of running the website, so it is an expense that affects your margin).

The key success metrics for a website that is focused on generating enquiries (an Profile website) are ‘visitors’ and ‘conversion rate’.

An Profile website is designed to generate leads. Everything after the generation of the lead on the Profile website is still processed in the physical world.

An example of a company using an Profile website would be a service-oriented business, or a business with large custom-made products that are less suitable for making purchases and payments via an Ecommerce website.

So on the Internet, success metrics can be summarised as follows:

 

Website Success Metrics Summary
ecommerce Website	Profile Website
Visitors	Visitors
Conversion Rate	Conversion Rate
Average Sale

Learn How to Improve your Website Conversion Rate

Learn How to Increase your Number of Website Visitors

Learn How to Increase your Average Sale Amount

Writing a great classified ad is completely different to writing great sales copy for your website. The primary objective of a classified ad is completely different! Generally the primary objective of your website copy is to persuade your visitor to buy or enquire about your product. The objective of your classified ad is to get the reader to click-through to your website or pick up the phone and call you.

The type of customer that you are going to come across using a classified ad will also be different. When a customer comes to your website they are already interested in what you are offering– they are pre-qualified. A customer that you will find in an ezine or on a website that has classified ads is unqualified.

 

The Structure of a Classified Advert

The structure for a classified ad is as follows:

• Headline

• Opening Hook

• Call to Action

The headline is the most important part of the whole ad. It needs to immediately attract the reader’s attention. It needs to YELL above the ‘din’ and cut through all the noise. Think about your target customer. What is your target customer’s need, problem or goal? Write a headline around that. Yell out their problem!

Whenever possible use your reader’s name– some ezines give you the ability to personalise your advertisement by automatically inserting the person’s name into each separate copy of the ezine.

Review ‘headline’ writing in the ‘load’ module from the E-business Bible for a detailed look at writing good headlines.

The opening hook should expand on your headline. Elaborate further on your strongest benefits and look to set the reader up for the call to action.

Remember, your primary objective with a classified ad is to get the reader to click through to your website, or pick up the phone and call you. Outline exactly what you want your reader to do. Make it as easy as possible.

Example:

 

Your business website should make sales, or generate enquiries for your products or services. Is Yours? If not, it will be due to one of three simple reasons.

Because a website that delivers results is no fluke!

Visit our website or call 0508 WEBSITE to find out why.

 

Formatting a Classified Advert

Once again, review the ‘content’ module from the E-business Bible for a detailed look at formatting your ads. Consider putting your headline inside quotes. Make sure you bold your headline and capitalise the first letter of every word. Sometimes putting your advertisement inside a table and using some alternative colours can really help it stand out from the rest of the copy on the page.

 

Measuring & Monitoring the Results of a Classified Advert

As always– make sure you measure and monitor everything. Set each of your classified ads up as separate campaigns in the Zeald Website Management Software, so that you can track and measure the results. Experiment with different headlines and different opening hooks.

Make sure you vary your classified ads and keep them fresh– especially the advertisements that are in ezines. You will see your response rates drop-off significantly, after a number of repeated listings.

There are many other online advertising opportunities, besides Google Adwords, for you to tap-into, for driving visitors to your website. Think about the following areas:
 

Specialty Search Engines

Specialty search engines focus themselves on specific niche areas. They can be an excellent source of targeted website traffic. Some examples are:

• Shopping

  -  Yahoo Shopping (http://shopping.yahoo.com)

  -  BizRate (www.bizrate.com)

  -  PriceGrabber (www.pricegrabber.com)

  -  PriceSpy (www.pricespy.co.nz)

 

• Local Search

  -  SearchNZ (www.searchnz.co.nz)

  -  NZS (www.nzs.com)

 

Top Ranking Websites

Find websites that are ranking highly for the keywords that you are targeting, and are not in competition with you. You may be able to approach these website owners to see if they offer Pay-Per-Impression, Pay-Per-Click, or Pay-Per-Acquisition advertising opportunities.

 

Commercial Directories

We have already covered some of the free directories earlier; but there are a number of major online commercial, local directories that receive substantial traffic. They are:

 

• Yellow Pages (www.yellowpages.co.nz)

• UBD (www.ubd.co.nz)

• Iris (www.iris.co.nz)

Each of these commercial directories charges a fee to have your company listed as part of their directory.

 

Yellow Pages

The online Yellow Pages (www.yellowpages.co.nz) offer you a number of different listings to complement your basic online and paper-based Yellow Pages directory listings:

 

• Website Link

    $20+GST p/month

    $15+GST p/month – Priority 1 Upgrade.

 

• Shop Site Link

    $25+GST p/month

    $15+GST p/month – Priority 1 Upgrade.

The Yellow Pages also offers banner advertising on a Pay-Per-Impression model. Talk to your local Yellow Pages representative to discuss their options.

 

UBD

UBD is one of New Zealand’s largest and most popular business directories. There is both a print based and online version of the directory. Both versions allow you to list your website address and the online version also links directly through to your website.

There are three basic options for listing on the UBD website.

 

• Basic Listing – (Company name, address, phone, fax, e-mail, website) - $465 + GST per annum

• Logo Listing – (Company name, address, phone, fax, email, website, company logo) - $635 + GST per annum

• Logo & Text Listing – (Company name, address, phone, fax, email, website, company logo, 40 words of text) - $885 + GST per annum

UBD also has more advanced advertising options. Talk to your local UBD representative to discuss further options.

 

Iris

Iris is a directory for consumers. The Iris directory is run by UBD. 

There are three basic options for listing on the Iris website.

• Basic Listing – (Company name, address, phone, fax, e-mail, website) - $285 + GST per annum

• Logo Listing – (Company name, address, phone, fax, email, website, company logo) - $365 + GST per annum

• Logo & Text Listing – (Company name, address, phone, fax, email, website, company logo 40 words of text) - $485 + GST per annum

Iris also has more advanced advertising options. Talk to your local UBD representative to discuss further options for advertising on Iris.

As with every part of your website – always monitor and test your search engine listings.

Most of the different PFP providers supply tools to help you monitor and measure your advertising results. 

The Zeald Website Manager also has a campaign management module that allows you to track and measure all your PFP advertising campaigns. Talk to your Zeald E-Business Consultant or the Support Team for information on activating this add-on.

The key metrics that you will need to monitor when advertising on the search engines, using paid placements programs are different depending on what type of website you have. The key metrics for an ecommerce website are:

• Impressions – the number of times your advertisement has been ‘served’ to viewers

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – how often visitors click on your ad

• Clicks/Visitors – the amount of clicks that you have received

• Conversion Rate (Visitors) – the percentage of visitors that placed an order

• Orders – the number of orders placed

• Average Sale – the average value of each order

• Revenue – the total amount of revenue generated

• Gross Margin – the percentage of revenue that is your profit

• Gross Profit – the total amount of profit that you have made

• Cost Per Click (CPC) – the cost per click on your advertisement

• Total Cost – the total cost of your campaign

• ROI - the return on your advertising investment (gross profit divided by the total cost).

 

The key metrics for an Promotion or Catalogue website are:

• Impressions – the number of times your advertisement has been ‘served’ to viewers

• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – how often visitors click on your ad

• Clicks/Visitors – the amount of clicks that you have received

• Conversion Rate (Visitors) – the percentage of visitors that made an enquiry

• Enquiries – the number of enquiries made

• Conversion Rate (Enquiries) – the percentage of enquiries that resulted in an order

• Orders – the number of orders placed

• Average Sale – the average value of each order

• Revenue – the total amount of revenue generated

• Gross Margin – the percentage of revenue that is your profit

• Gross Profit – the total amount of profit that you have made

• Cost Per Click (CPC) – the cost per click on your advertisement

• Total Cost – the total cost of your campaign

• ROI - the return on your advertising investment (gross profit divided by the total cost).

Writing search engine advertising is not very different to writing sales copy for your website. If you haven’t already– go back and review the articles on ‘Headlines’ and ‘Opening Hooks’. When writing your titles and descriptions for your advertisements make sure you follow the principles outlined in these articles. You should always be thinking– “Will this title and description clearly attract my target visitors, and repel visitors who are not genuinely interested in my products and services?” For example:

Order meat online today

Order New Zealand’s finest meat online and have it delivered direct to your doorstep.

www.meatcuisine.co.nz

To substantially increase your click-through rate, mention the keywords that you are targeting in your title or description.

Don’t always send users through to the home page of your website. If your ad is targeted at a certain product or service, direct the customer directly to that section of your website.

Analyse your competitor’s advertisements. If they are positioned higher than yours, especially on Google, then there is a good chance that they are achieving a higher click-through rate. Look at what they may be doing to gain a higher click-through rate.

 

Submitting your Listing

Now it’s time to submit your listings and start your PFP advertising.

The first thing that you will need to do is set up an account with a PFP advertising provider. Our recommendation for beginners is to set up an account with Google Adwords first. You can move to Overture and some of the other PFP providers at a later date. Google Adwords has a simple system and it costs only US$5 to create an account.

Go to Google Adwords website (http://adwords.google.com).

The Google Adwords website provides detailed instructions for setting up an account, and running and managing Adwords listings.

Don’t forget– ‘walk before you run!’

Start with a small advertising campaign on Google and once you are familiar with that and you’re achieving results, move forward.

Please Note: This section talks extensively about website and business ‘metrics’. If you do not understand metrics like ‘visitors’, ‘conversion rate’, ’average sale’, ‘revenue’, ‘margin’ and ‘profit’, then you need to read our free booklet titled– 'Website Fundamentals - How to Generate Amazing Results Online' before working through the remainder of this document. This section extensively utilises information we provide in the booklet, ‘Website Fundamentals - How to Generate Amazing Results Online’.

One of the first things you need to do before venturing into the world of search engine advertising is to establish your advertising budget. In order to successfully establish an advertising budget you need to work out exactly how much you can afford to spend on attracting visitors to your website. How much can you pay for each visitor or each click while you’re making money? This is called your Maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) or ‘Bid Cap’.

Calculating the max CPC/bid cap will vary depending on whether your website sells products or services directly online (ecommerce) or merely looks to generate an enquiry (E-Profile).

To work out your max CPC/bid cap for an ecommerce website, perform the following calculation:

Average Sale	$100
X	X
Margin	30%
=	=
Gross Profit	$30
X	X
Conversion Rate (Visitors)	5%
=	=
Max CPC / Bid Cap	$1.50

To work the max CPC/bid cap on an Profile website, you perform a slightly more complicated calculation:
 

Average Sale	$100
X	X
Margin	30%
=	=
Gross Profit	$30
X	X
Conversion Rate (Enquiries)	25%
X	X
Conversion Rate (Visitors)	5%
=	=
Max CPC / Bid Cap	$0.375

This shows your absolute max CPC/bid cap. We strongly suggest that you set a bid cap a little below what is shown by these calculations, as they do not take into account the fixed overheads of your business.

Your max CPC/bid cap is sometimes not an easy thing to work out– especially if you are venturing into the online world for the first time. This is because it is hard to know exactly what ‘visitor conversion rate’ your website will achieve if you haven’t had several months of testing and measuring it.

If your website is really new, we suggest you work with a visitor conversion rate of 3%. Website conversion rates across the world are currently averaging between 2-3%. Hopefully, as you measure your website over a number of months, you will find that your conversion rate is much higher than the standard.

Now that you know your max CPC/bid cap, you need to work out your total search engine budget. Most search engine advertising providers will allow you to set an advertising budget, so that in the event you receive many more clicks than you anticipated, you will not end up with a hefty bill.

If you have worked-out your calculations correctly, and you pay for advertising at a rate significantly below your bid cap, you should see a significant return on the money that you have invested.

The final thing you need to decide is exactly how much search engine advertising you can afford to bankroll. “What!?”, we hear you say, “I thought you just said that providing we do our calculations well, we will make returns on search engine advertising– so what’s the risk?”

This is true, but like all advertising projects you need to be aware that there will be a period of time before you see a return on that advertising investment. You need to understand your sales cycle and product or delivery cycle.
 
Let’s take a look at an example:
 
You pay $50 a day, everyday, for search engine advertising. Based on your calculations you know that the advertising is going to generate approximately $100 worth of profit everyday. Now imagine that it takes you on average of 10 weeks for you to deliver the product or service that you provide to your customer, and receive payment. This means that you will need to pay $3500 ($50 X 70 days) before you will start to see the profits resulting from your advertising. You need to be able to bankroll $3500 worth of advertising before you will see the results of that advertising making a positive affect on your bank balance.

So let’s imagine that we have $2000 that we can dedicate to search engine advertising, and that it takes us four weeks to deliver the product or service to our customer, and receive payment. This means that our search engine, advertising budget is $66.70 per day ($2000 / 30).

This can be a little confusing when you are looking at these concepts for the first time. Don’t worry … soon you will be able to do all this in your sleep!
If you need some help, talk with the Support Team.

Remember– the key figures you need to know before starting a search engine, advertising campaign are:

• Max CPC / bid cap

• Daily search engine advertising budget.

Optimising your website for the search engines is only one option for generating traffic for your website. Another option is to advertise on a search engine.

When advertising on a search engine, you pay for an advertisement to appear when a person searches for a particular keyword or phrase, relevant to your website. There are three common models search engines use for charging for advertisements- in fact; these models are common across all forms of online advertising:

 

• Pay-Per-Impression (CPM)

   
  In the Pay-Per-Impression model you are charged every time one of your advertisements is ‘served up’ to a viewer. With this model you are usually charged per 1000 impressions. The amount you are charged per 1000 impressions is called your Cost Per Impression or CPM. This model is the hardest to control, as you don’t know how many people will click on your advertisements, and then purchase products or services, or even make enquiries (although you will able to forecast this accurately after you have some historical results).

 

• Pay-Per-Click (CPC)

   
  With this model, you are charged for each click your ad listing receives. The amount you pay per click is called your Cost Per Click or CPC. Pay-per-click advertising is a lot more attractive than pay-per-impression advertising as you can manage your costs a lot easier- you only pay for visitors that have clicked-through to your website.

 

• Pay-Per-Acquisition (CPA)

   
  Pay-per-acquisition advertising is the best of the lot! In this model you pay only when someone purchases something from your website. You pay ‘a commission’ for a new customer! The amount you pay is called your Cost-Per-Acquisition or CPA.
   
   

Advertising Types

There are two common types of search engine advertising:

• Fixed Placement Advertising

   
  Fixed placement advertising is exactly how it sounds. It is an advertisement that is locked into a specific position on a search engine’s results page. Generally, the position of the advertisement doesn’t change. Many search engines reserve a portion of space at the top or side of their page for fixed placement ads.
   
  The advantage of fixed place advertising is that you can lock-in your advertising rates and lock out your competitors from the top positions. Unfortunately, this type of advertising with the search engines is often very expensive and is usually in the realm of larger organisations with substantial advertising budgets.

 

• Pay For Placement Advertising (PFP)

   
  Pay for placement (PFP) advertising works like this - people bid for placement in the advertising slots provided by the search engines, on their results page. The highest bid wins the number one slot, second highest bid the second slot, and so on.
   
  PFP advertising can change day-to-day as advertisers change their bid amounts, and as new advertisers start bidding. Almost all PFP advertising utilises a Pay-Per-Click method of charging. The advertiser pays each time a person clicks their advertisement.
   
  PFP advertising is great for small businesses as you can trial it with very little advertising budget. You can often secure visitors to your website for just a few cents. Its only downside is that it can require substantial time and effort to manage it successfully.

The rest of this section focuses on PFP advertising, as this is the form of advertising that will be most applicable to the majority of our readers.

 

PFP Advertising Providers

In the PFP advertising world there are two main providers:

• Google

   
  Google runs a PFP system called Google Adwords. Google Adwords allows you to bid on keywords. When these key words are searched, an appropriate advertisement will appear on the right-hand side of the page, under the title– ‘Sponsored Links’.
   
  Google Adwords allows you to target your advertisements to the New Zealand region without including the region in the keyword. What this means is that you don’t have to include the geographical region in the keyword that you are targeting, i.e., ‘New Zealand Meat’. Instead, you can just tell Google to only ‘serve’ advertisements to New Zealand-based searchers.
   
  Any advertisements that you set up using Google Adwords will be displayed in these search engines: Google, Ask Jeeves, Teoma, Netscape Search and AOL Search.

 

• Overture

   
  Overture is the biggest supplier of PFP advertising. Similar to Google Adwords, Overture allows you to bid on keywords that when searched show an advertisement on the right-hand side of the page under the tile – ‘Sponsored Results’.
   
  Overture only allows you to target your advertisements to the Australasian region. The only way to target specifically to the New Zealand region is to include the region in the keyword. We are expecting Overture to upgrade their systems to include the New Zealand-only feature in the very near future.
   
  Overture advertisements are displayed in these search engines: AllTheWeb, AltaVista, MSN Search and Yahoo.

 

There are also a number of smaller PFP providers:

 

• FindWhat (http://www.findwhat.com)

• LookSmart (http://www.looksmart.com)

• Kanoodle (http://www.kanoodle.com)

• Enhance Interactive (http://www.enhance.com)

• Mamma Media Solutions (http://www.mammamediasolutions.com).