Jason Solarek is Creative Director of the Solarek Studio, a Manhattan-based marketing company that builds websites for the tabletop industry, including DeVine Corporation, Scully & Scully, and William-Wayne & Co.
Contact Jason at: jason@solarek.com.
Driving Traffic to Your Website
June / July 2007 Tableware Today
Come on a field trip with me: Go to DeVineCorp.net and click on the brand "Anna Weatherley." Please look in the left-hand column below the patterns and you'll see "Ads by Google." If you clicked on one of these ads, your click would cost the retailer $4 and you haven't even put a fingerprint on the china yet. (Note: clicking web advertisements without the intent to purchase is known as click fraud, and I discourage it out of out of consideration for the advertisers.) Why are these retailers paying $4 to direct you to their website? They are trying to drive traffic to their website. Herein lies the $4 link: there are a wide range of options besides search engines to drive traffic to your website. Google AdWords appear on millions of web pages (such as DeVineCorp.net) but AdWords is just one promotion strategy. This article offers you three suggestions to drive traffic to your website:
Google AdWords Estimated Cost Per Keyword
The payoff will be immediate. People are most likely to buy when friends recommend an item, or in this case, when a friend says "buy this for the most special day in my life, please!" On a micro-economic level, it works like this: you are creating a closed market-the best type in which to sell. There is no competition from other players. Have you ever heard of a Pottery Barn registry item being purchased at Crate and Barrel? Once a bride registers with you, invite her to send out an e-mail to her list of friends promoting her registry-and therefore your website. This is the best advertising since it's free and directly drives sales. As such, you should sign up any and all brides you can at your store. Motivate them to sign up by offering a discount (such as free shipping). Now, for the honeymoon: convert those customers that bought through the registry into repeat buyers by putting them on your e-mail or snail mail list. Your registry therefore brings in immediate sales and new sales leads. Cost to setup: $5,000
With the exception of bridal registries, retailers have to compete in the free market and be conscious of other retailers' prices. To compete with the online gray market (websites that sell at below retail), offer free shipping. This allows you to technically sell at retail but actually sell at a discount. You should also offer to match any website's price. This will allow you to only discount when needed, instead of losing money unnecessarily on every order which is what would happen if you continually used the gray market's prices. Lastly, be sure to report the gray market sellers to your distributor. Cost to setup: Free
Advertising is the riskiest promotion tool to boost your sales, which I why I left it to the end. Per the introduction, you could be in Paris Jewelers' Jimmy Choos and pay $4 and yet not receive a sale. But, probability says that you'll make a sale on one of out of every ten online visitors. If the average Anna Weatherley order is $100, and half of the sale goes to the distributor, you did a little better then break even. If you sell more than $100 for the order, or you sell more than one out of ten click throughs, you profit. To use Google AdWords, visit Google, set up a Google AdWords account, and enter the search words you would like your product to appear alongside. Please see the chart included here for the average price advertisers pay for the keywords that relate to DeVine Corp.'s brands. There are a few critiques about AdWords. First, if someone clicks your ad, regardless of whether that person buys your item, you pay for that click. Secondly, many advertisers complain that AdWords prices have been pushed up by more people bidding for them. For instance, words that were once $.10 per click are now $1 per click. Furthermore, people often look first at non-advertising content on a page, so they aren't that likely to click on your advertisement-especially if they are using Google's search engine (why not simply click on the first 'true' result?). Overall, with AdWords you may risk losing your budget and time. A better option is to first invest your money and time into a well-built website that appears high in search engines. After all, search engines are how the vast majority of buyers will find you. Please see my article on how to appear on Google's first page (Tableware Today February/March 2007, online at: solarek.com/tablewaretoday). Cost to setup: Free, not including price per click.
For questions or inquiries about the above article, please call Jason Solarek at 212-254-9654 or write jason@solarek.com.
To inquire about having Jason Solarek as a speaker and/or workshop specialist for your company, please call Jason Solarek at 212-254-9654 or write jason@solarek.com.