Duke Creative, LLC » Success Stories

Conversations Drive Commerce

Jason Young — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:13:42 +0000

IN TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN WORLD, traditional sales tactics are gradually becoming a thing of the past. Most small business owners relying on the outdated promotion strategies of door knocking, cold calling, and direct mailing are finding these methods to be fruitless. As the world at large continues to make the move from physical to virtual networking, today’s business owner must seek new venues to connect to potential consumers.

One of the most essential and successful of all sales approaches involves little investment: conversation.

Business owners engage in dialogue with current and prospective customers out of an awareness that conversation drives commerce. In other words, every sale begins with a discussion. In modern terms, finding your audience online and connecting with them repeatedly in conversation through social media can drive your sales to new heights. Your ideal customers may congregate regularly through several of these online social media platforms such as forums, blogs, Facebook or Twitter.

What is your business doing to start conversations?

Are you only using one or two tactics? How effective are your current methods? Has your cold calling market frozen over?

Social media outlets allow you to connect on a more personal level with your current and potential customers. Not only will you acquaint consumers with your brand, your unique selling proposition, and your news, but you will also have the opportunity to listen in on what your customers are saying about you and your competitors. Consumer trend research of this type would have cost your business thousands of dollars only a few years ago. Now all that you require to put this knowledge to work for you is a little time, some free technology, and skilled individuals willing to manage the technology for you. In fact, if your business lacks the time or manpower in-house to keep up with the daily flow of online conversation, this job may be outsourced to others who will keep you continually updated as to what is important to your customers and ultimately to your business.

Whatever strategy you may wish to implement in order to increase sales, be sure to start with a baseline look at your business. How many visits does your website currently receive? How many of those visits convert into sales? What is the average value of a sale? These metrics (and others like them) will be invaluable as you decide on the allocation of your business’s marketing expenses over the next year.

In the business world, knowledge is power. At this very moment, key business prospects may be discussing your business, your products, and your competitors through online social media, providing powerful insight which could drive your sales to new heights. What is it worth to you to join in their conversations?

Stop missing out on the conversation. Contact Duke today to find out how we can develop a comprehensive web strategy for your business.

More Traffic From Google

Jason Young — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:03:02 +0000

Once your website is beginning to rank well in Google, you want to increase the number of people that click on your website. How do you do this? There are two very simple bits of information that should be optimized and embedded in your website code that can help you get more clicks from Google users.

1. Your website’s title tag.

(If you look in the HTML of your website, this will be near the top and will be between the tags. This is VERY important because this is what Google will show in blue (as shown above). This is the text that people will see and need to click on in order to get to your website from Google. It’s important to make your title tag very compelling and clickable. It should include the keywords you wish to rank with and should be readable by a human (not just Google). If you need more traffic from Google, this could be the most important bit of code on your whole website. Keep your titles around 65 characters or so for best results.

2. Your website’s meta description.

(Again, in your HTML code, this bit of data will be here: ) This text should also include keywords and should be more information that would compel a person to click your link and visit your website. Keep your meta description under or around 160 characters for best results.

While these two elements alone will not necessarily help your rank HIGHER, they will increase your clickability when optimized. Keep this in mind and check your website to make sure that each page has it’s own unique title tag and meta description based on the content that is on that particular page.

Grow Your Subscriber List

Jason Young — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 05:41:58 +0000

Duke Creative was hired by Vickers Tactical, Inc to increase their newsletter readership. We employed several methods to increase membership and the open rate, in conjunction with a successful re-launch of VickersTactical.com. Within 4 months 5 months, the newsletter database had doubled tripled in size and the signup rate began to skyrocket. Along with that, the open rate percentage tripled as well. It helps that Mr. Vickers is well respected in his industry and is on the leading edge of real world experience and education in his field. His content is accurate, informative and to the point. His writing style fits his audience perfectly. With all of these factors combined, a textbook example of how to jumpstart an e-newsletter campaign was created.

Here are three things that made the biggest difference for Vickers Tactical. Try them out on your website and let me know how it goes.

3 Quick Tips for Growing Your Subscriber Lists

Make the signup form easy to find from any page on your website. If visitors can’t find your newsletter signup form, they won’t sign up. It’s as simple as that. As for Vickers Tactical, we placed the newsletter signup form in the sidebar of every page. It’s hard to miss and the results confirm this.
Let the subscriber know how often to expect email from you. Letting your potential subscribers know that you send emails on a monthly or quarterly basis will increase signup from those that are concerned about being spammed on a weekly or daily basis. Newsletters are for larger, less frequent updates. If you want to give your readers more frequent updates, use Facebook and Twitter, not your newsletter.
Offer compelling content that your website visitors will want to subscribe to. You won’t get many subscribers if it looks as if your intention is to make a sale. However, you will have more subscribers if you actually offer quality information, news and tips focused on topics that your customer demographic is interested in. Make it clear that your newsletter is focused on tips, news, industry updates, etc. Don’t make your potential readers guess at what they’re signing up for.

Contact DUKE for more ways to increase your subscriber lists and increase sales in the process. Please use the form on the right side of this web page.

Increase Sales Today

Jason Young — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:19:52 +0000

Most website owners would be surprised to know that some very minor changes to their website could make a drastic impact on their sales/conversion rates. Duke was enlisted by an online clothing manufacturer to increase their conversion rate. Duke made several minor suggestions to improve their conversion rate from within their existing shopping cart system. This, along with other factors, contributed to a 40% increase in the number of sales, month over month. While we can’t take all the credit (having excellent products and a reputation for quality helps!), we know that these minor adjustments led to several more purchases per week.

Simple Steps to Increase Your Website Sales Today

Make it easy to buy from you. Your shopping cart should consist of three pages once you are on a product page: the product page with the “add to cart” button, the “checkout” page, and the “order confirmation/thank you” page. Anything beyond that is not necessary and could be a contributing factor to shopping cart abandonment.
Put your phone number, address and customer support information on the checkout page. While you may not notice an increase in actual calls for help completing purchases, you at least give shoppers the option to contact you if they have questions, special needs, or circumstances.
Place your product warranty or satisfaction guarantee prominently on the product and checkout pages. Most people won’t return your product, but everyone likes to know that they could if they wanted to.
Place your Options and Add to Cart buttons “Above the Fold.” Don’t make your visitors have to scroll down the page to add the items to their cart. Put it up high, near the product pictures (you have great pictures don’t you?). This makes it easier to find and easier to click.