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Stop Selling Like It’s 1995
Is your online store more like an old-fashioned emporium than Amazon.com? Try these innovative techniques to enhance the shopping experience while using web analytics to track your sales performance.
By Gary Rottman

If your association has an online store, you probably realize that the more effort you put into selling your publications there, the more likely your potential customers are to discover their value. Simply using a small picture of a publication cover does two things for you:

1. Makes you seem stuck in 1995.
2. Gives the impression that since you haven’t learned how to make the shopping experience innovative, you probably aren’t capable of producing innovative publications, either.

If that’s the reputation you want, you can stop reading now and continue to use your tiny picture. But if it’s not how you’d like your members to view your products, I’ve put together a few tips to help you examine how you’re marketing your publications and identify new ways to increase revenue.

Note: These are not tips on how to improve your publications. I trust that you already know what your members want and are creating targeted, valuable products. Instead, I’ll offer advice on how to better market your publications and entice potential customers to pull out their credit cards.

Enhance the shopping experience

People shop online because they are looking for the best deal, don’t have time to go to the store; or want to buy something that’s not easily accessible to them. However, even with all the advances in online shopping, people still prefer going to an actual store. They want to see and hold the product they’re about to purchase. They want to weigh its value against the money they’re about to spend.

You may not be able to let members finger the texture of your publications’ paper. But you can give them a feel for the product’s value so they’ll make a purchase.

There are many ways to bring your publications to life and increase sales. Consider Amazon.com—one of the largest booksellers on the Internet. Amazon gives potential customers a quality experience before they purchase. The experience includes:

• Detailed page views of a book’s cover, table of contents, first few pages, and index
• Detailed summary with quotes
• Suggestions for other books that might be of interest
• Reader reviews and ratings

If setting up these features in your own store seems a bit daunting, start with the most straightforward: the detailed page views and a thorough, enticingly written summary of each publication. Then study all your offerings and provide links to related books, products, and even conferences and webinars.

Coming up with reader reviews can be somewhat more labor-intensive. Begin by posing questions to your audience via social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Then collect the responses and post them alongside the summary of each publication.

You can generate more buzz by taking advantage of other social media techniques. The following methods will provide key product information whether potential buyers prefer to read about your offerings, listen to a podcast, watch a video, or receive recommendations from like-minded professionals.

• Create videos of association members talking candidly about the publication’s highlights and what they valued about it. Then post these testimonials on YouTube or other social media sites.
• On the day your publication launches, conduct a webinar hosted by either key staff members or board members. Discuss how and why this publication was created; summarize key points, value, and purchase information; and then be sure to close with a strong call to action. Afterward, turn the webinar into a podcast and post it on your website for future visitors to discover.

Find out how engaging your store is

Before determining how to best promote your publication sales, it would be useful to know how you’re currently performing. Many tools are available for analyzing the publications part of your website, but I recommend Google Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics/ Besides being free, the service is comprehensive and easy to use.

After a quick primer at Google Analytics (or whatever tool you use), you will become familiar with terms such as pageviews, bounce rate, time on site, and new visitors. You can interpret the new knowledge, trends, and data you gain to meet your goals, including identifying who is coming to your site, how they’re getting there, and what they do once they arrive.

This information provides you with a wealth of opportunity. For example, you can develop great cross-promotional relationships with websites that are directing traffic to your site. Also, you can identify which keywords are bringing users to your site and build a strategy around those keywords.

But the big picture is that a web analytics can provide clues about (1) what visitors expect to see when they visit your website and (2) whether you satisfy their curiosity or fail to meet expectations. For any website that sells products, this information is vital.

• To increase the performance of your publications page, use the information you derive through web analytics to:
• Tailor popular landing pages to entice visitors to stay on your site longer
• Identify pages that need a stronger call to action to turn potential customers into buyers
• Easily track average-order total and number of products sold to help you establish goals
• Track how long customers are on site before they place an order

Check out my blog post, “A Lesson in Using Google Analytics to Optimize Web Performance,” to see how my firm used web analytics stats to improve the performance of one of our site’s most popular pages. By adopting the same principles, you can learn to translate information about high-trafficked parts of your store into happier shoppers—and better publications sales.