How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales on Friday the 13th: SalesMemes 13
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Smug Marketer Sam in this week’s Friday the 13th edition of #SalesMemes: the best and worst ideas to increase sales.
To prevent these kinds of mistakes, learn which factors are important when choosing a domain name.
Choosing the Right Domain Name
Choosing the best domain name for your website is an important decision, as your domain name can attract or repel business: both for its impact on Search Engine Optimization and on the impression it makes on potential customers. A good domain name is the digital equivalent of a potential business contact approaching you looking put together, smiling with hand extended, instead of disheveled, confused, and dropping papers and notebooks. So what are some ways to make sure your initial approach is more Harvey Specter and less Saul Goodman?
1. Be Unique
This is an obvious one, but it’s an important place to start. Of course your domain name has to be technically unique, or you won’t be able to register it but it should also be unique in the sense that it won’t be easily confused with an existing, established website. In 2013, when Netflix announced that it was spinning off its DVD-by-mail service under the name Quickster, not only was it ill-conceived from a business standpoint, it was also a very poor choice of domain name, as there was already a web-based film-rental website called Flixster.com. Not only were they alienating their existing customer base, but a poorly chosen domain name would probably have ended up driving customers to one of their competitors. Fortunately Quickster.com was scrapped before launch, and Netflix.com is still the place to rent obscure French art films by mail, while binge-watching The A-Team through their streaming services. We can all sleep soundly tonight.
2. Gotta have .com
The number of top-level domains (.com, .net, .org, etc.) continues to grow, but when most web users type in the address for a site, they invariably use the .com extension. This means that no matter how perfect a domain name might be, if it’s only available in .net or .biz, or – let’s be honest – anything but .com, look for another one. Remember that you only have one chance at a first impression. Trying to find your website and getting a generic, advertisement-laden parking page is like a customer thinking they’re going to meet you, and instead meeting a guy twirling an arrow-shaped sign advertising discount electronics. Not having a .com domain is setting potential customers up to meet sign-twirling guy.
It’s also a good idea, if you can get the .com, to purchase .mobi, .net, .co, and .biz, and, depending on your business there may be others worth picking up as well. After all, if you don’t, your competitors might as a way to sow confusion or outright steal prospects who are looking for you.
3. Let it help you rank better
Your web address is a very important factor in search engine rankings, so whenever possible, use your most important keywords in it. This is often easier if you’re first starting out and naming your business because you can create a name that leverages your keywords (that’s why our business name is Sales Renewal). For an existing business there’s an obvious desire to use your business name as your domain name, and often, but not always, that’s the right thing to do (this stuff gets complicated). Regardless of which way you go on a keyword vs. brand-oriented domain name, the good news is that you can use the redirection trick we discuss next to get the best of both worlds.
4. To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate?
If your domain name is comprised of more than one word, you have to answer the difficult question of whether to smoosh all those words together, or to hyphenate them. Each has its pros and cons. The un-hyphenated version is much easier to speak aloud and to type (instructing people to go to “my new website dot com” as opposed to “my dash new dash website dot com”), but is much harder to read, as Smug Marketer Sam nicely illustrates in today’s SalesMemes. Do you read bringslaughter.com as BringsLaughter.com or BringSlaughter.com? Your response may be reported to your local mental health authorities.
If humans sometimes have a difficult time properly dividing the words of your web address, you can be sure that search engines will have the same troubles. Since properly parsing your domain name will contribute to your search engine rankings, that’s a factor worth considering as well.
We believe your best option is to purchase both, and set up a permanent redirect from the un-hyphenated version to the hyphenated version. It combines the ease of communicating and typing the un-hyphenated URL with the ability for both humans and search engines to most easily read/parse the hyphenated version.
If you can only get the hyphenated version of a domain name… don’t.
5. Wee Cann’t Speel Withowt Spellchek
There are some words that most people – even those with a high level of education and/or intelligence – have trouble spelling. If you run a cocktail bar called The Fuchsia Daiquiri, I weep for you. If your business is related to one of these difficult-to-spell words, either go with the pure keyword approach – if, for example, you live in Asheville, North Carolina, instead of registering FuchsiaDaiquiri.com, you might want to go for the domain name AshevilleCocktailBar.com – or be sure to purchase all the common misspellings so people don’t meet that sign-twirler again.
On a similar note, if your domain includes words with alternate valid spellings (especially if you’re hoping to attract a diverse range of customers), be sure to purchase those domains as well. For example, if you purchase TheColorGray.com, you’ll also want to pick up TheColorGrey.com, TheColourGrey.com, and TheColourGray.com.
There are a lot of lists of useful tools that might help you with choosing a domain name (like this one and that one). If you’d like some expert advice choosing a domain name to grow your sales, contact us and we’ll make sure Smug Marketer Sam doesn’t answer the phone.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Choosing the best domain name for your website is an important decision, as your domain name can attract or repel business: both for its impact on Search Engine Optimization and on the impression it makes on potential customers.
Best Practices, Design Elements Enhance Government Website
Government agencies usually get a bad rap when it comes to communication. Government websites are more often described as “boring” or “hard to read” than they are credited as “useful” or “easy to navigate.
But an update for the Consumer Product Safety Council, or CSPC, got it right. The design keeps things simple while it offers multiple options:consumers can choose to get recall notices via email or Twitter, see photos of recalled products on Flickr, watch educational videos on YouTube, and even offer opinions on the agency’s recently redesigned website.
We like it. It’s clean, it works, and the CSPC’s blog even features infographics. We admit we’d like to see a positive spin, but when your job is to highlight dangers inherent in commonly used products, that may be bit much to expect.
Obviously, CPSC isn’t a business; its goal is public information – not sales. However, the site clearly illustrates some website design best practices in action:
- Keep it simple (ease of navigation is the goal of “pretty” design)
- Know your audience and write to them, and
- Make your message available in different ways
If you were redesigning your website, what would you do differently? Would you add landing pages to address customers and prospects at specific stages of the buying cycle?
Sales Renewal works with businesses as well as non-profit and government organizations. About half of our clients come to us for a new website or are in the midst of redesigning a website when they contact us. Others are simply looking for additional features to enhance a site (such as ecommerce solutions) or they recognize it’s time for a mobile site. If you’d like to see your site with fresh eyes, contact us.
~ image credit http://www.cpsc.gov ~
Sales Renewal’s insight:
What? No red tape? We recognize a government website that clearly illustrates some website design best practices in action.
How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 10
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Welcome to our weekly, humorous series of the best and worst ideas to increase sales: SalesMemes. In this inaugural installment, meet Bad Execution Bob.
Check our Growth Spurts blog every Friday to see the latest. (Have memes to suggest?)
To learn ways to grow your sales that actually work, visit www.salesrenewal.com.
JointSourcing in Action # 2: Sales Renewal’s Synergies & Cross Fertilization Kicks Up Client Sales
The Concord Flower Shop is doing very well in Concord MA, thank you very much.
Sales Renewal has been helping The Concord Flower Shop grow its sales since 2009, and thanks to its ongoing optimizing of the e-commerce site, it now captures a large share of the business of prospects searching for florists who deliver to Concord MA.
Having succeeded in Helen’s primary service area, Sales Renewal turned its attention to about a dozen nearby towns where the business also delivers. Sales Renewal chose to begin with the neighboring town of Acton, and-without charging for its research and time-created a new page for the ConcordFlowerShop.com website, specifically designed to attract natural search traffic and convert it to Acton-based flower sales (i.e., purchases from buyers who live in Acton, as well as from buyers who want flowers delivered there though they live, and are presumably searching from, somewhere else):
- To garner maximum traffic, Sales Renewal used best-practice search engine techniques to optimize the page for the carefully targeted keywords.
- To convert that traffic into as many buyers as possible, Sales Renewal used best-practice advertising techniques to set up the page along the lines of an advertising landing page.
Combining the two disciplines, Sales Renewal calls this type of web page design a Natural Search Landing Page.
Sales Renewal is perhaps unique in that, rather than being a specialist in just one narrow discipline, it operates as a Sales and Marketing General Contractor. In that role, its in-house experts regularly work with and oversee outsourced specialists, all cross-fertilizing each other’s thinking and planning on how to improve each client’s sales results.
In addition, Sales Renewal’s unique JointSourcingTM Solution sets it up to share the risks and rewards of its clients, so the company is heavily incentivized by its contributions to the client’s advertising expenditures and the commissions it earns on the client’s sales. As a result, Sales Renewal continually strives to produce long-term sales increases in cost-effective ways.
The new Natural Search Landing Page for flower business in the town of Acton went live in June, 2013.
After six months of activity, Sales Renewal’s analysts crunched the numbers and were happy to discover that The Concord Flower Shop‘s Acton-based business:
- Grew significantly faster than the company’s overall online sales.
- Ranked first in year-over-year sales growth, compared with its business in every other nearby town.
- Grew more than twice as fast as its business in the number two most-improved town.
Of course, no one can definitively prove the new Natural Search Landing Page caused these great results: because the page was totally new, there is no “before” to compare with the “after”. However, the circumstantial evidence is strong and persuasive.
Having proven the concept, Sales Renewal is now extremely busy putting up other carefully crafted Natural Search Landing Pages for The Concord Flower Shop and our other clients. We’ll report on those results as they become available.
JointSourcing Produces Win-Wins
The development and implementation of the technique that kicked up sales in the town of Acton for The Concord Flower Shop was a direct result of Sales Renewal’s unique and powerful JointSourcing Solution.
No conventional marketing service vendor – whether working in advertising, PR, social media, search engine optimization, content marketing, or anything else – would consider experimenting with a new marketing approach without securing payment for its billable time. Firms operating under conventional contracts have no incentive to invest the hours needed to conceptualize, develop, and fine tune brand new approaches to building business online. But JointSourcing automatically aligns Sales Renewal’s economic interests with those of each client.
The result is a series of win-wins that result from Sales Renewal’s innovative, cross-pollinated thinking and a willingness to take risks at its own expense.
JointSourcing continually drives Sales Renewal to consider new and better alternatives to existing online paradigms and best practices. When the chances of success look favorable, the people at Sales Renewal gladly break new ground and experiment with new techniques that offer the potential to help their clients succeed.
What Is JointSourcing?
JointSourcing is a unique business solution that effectively makes Sales Renewal a partner in a client’s sales and marketing success. As a partner, Sales Renewal charges significantly lower professional fees, and earns commissions on each JointSourcing client’s revenue. As part of the deal, Sales Renewal also pays a percentage of each client’s big ticket sales and marketing expenses, such as advertising and direct mail campaigns.
By design, JointSourcing automatically aligns Sales Renewal’s economic interests with those of its clients.
The natural result is a lighter burden on the client – with no need to select and oversee specialists, help in prioritizing and paying for sales and marketing expenses, and reduced demand for nuanced judgments and decision-making – combined with improved sales and marketing effectiveness.
Simply put, JointSourcing allows any company to “outsource” its sales and marketing functions to Sales Renewal, instantly adding a new layer of marketing intelligence a client organization can rarely equal. The company literally functions as a “general contractor” for all the client’s sales and marketing efforts, continually assembling and managing the specific team of “best-of-breed’ in-house and outsourced experts that each client needs to grow at the best possible pace for their budget.
JointSourcing puts Sales Renewal in position to oversee and control all the client’s sales and marketing service vendors, to replace poor performers with better ones, and to upgrade performance across the client’s entire marketing effort.
Under JointSourcing, the key members of the client company team have enhanced freedom and opportunity to remain focused on what they do best, while Sales Renewal takes full responsibility for developing the most successful sales and marketing strategies possible, cost-effectively driving up the client’s sales volume and profitability.