With the explosion of social media, mainly Twitter and Facebook, we as business owners need to consider them as traffic sources. People are finding your websites from various different methods, and sometimes it's not always so easy to track.
Well one simple way to track an online order is to just ask the customer!
And you can do that on your order form.
See the screen shot below of my order form with Twitter and Facebook added, you might want to do something similar yourself:
Yes you too can add a drop down box to your order form and ask your customers how they found you!
A while back Google came out with their own shopping cart system, competing with PayPal. This was nice because it gave customers more options, and was helpful for the small business owner who is just getting started and does not want to get their own merchant account.
It's low cost to get started (2% of your sales + $0.20 per transaction) , and they have a program that if you spend money with them in your Adwords account, you get a credit/rebate.
This is all fine and dandy, EXCEPT when it comes to the buying process.
You see on the "Thank You" page, the customer sees this message that WARNS them about YOU the merchant!
It's a check box to the customer that says " Keep my email addres confidential. Google will forward all email from [Company Name] to you" See image below
Google Checkout Order Page
So basically Google does not trust YOU the merchant to be ethical, and it wants to 'protect' the customer by keeping the email address. I do not like this distrust of online business owners, and this fact will keep me from using Google Checkout in my business.
If you should decide to use Google Checkout, then just be aware of this fact.
If you are new to Social Media, or even if you have been using it for a while, you will want to watch this video from my friend, Perry Belcher. I saw him post this on Twitter, and I was so inspired by it, that I decided to make a blog post about it.
It's just a camera, Perry and a whiteboard, explaining what Social Media is, and how you should be using it. He boils it down in simple terms, and reveals how you can use it in your business and personal life.
Although I've been using Social Media for a long time now, I've never heard it explained in quite these terms. It really clarifies Social Media, and gives you a big picture 'reason why'.
It's the day after Thanksgiving, and that's the biggest holiday shopping day of the year. And today they are buying.
So you want to reach your customers and give them an incentive to buy. And one good way to do that is to offer them a coupon. Offering a coupon is a good way to motivate people to buy from you. An online coupon is usually a code, like 'Holiday' or 'specialdiscount' or anything that would make sense to your market. The customer takes this one word code and puts it into a box on the order form.
I got a short video in my club area that shows you how to set up coupons for your prospects and customers.
Do you have your coupons ready for your customers?
