J.Teji

When it comes to online marketing tactics my philosophy has always been content is king. And this isn’t just because people have been beating that drum for the last 10 years either. We can see especially this year with googles algorithm changes where the most coveted SERPs are favouring better content that provides a genuinely useful user experience. Gone are the days of churning out predominantly useless blogs of 600 words just to show to google you’re committed to content production.

Despite this there are some good online marketing tactics that you can start using today, that will make your content better at attracting organic traffic but also at converting that traffic into sales. Here are my 9 favourite online marketing tactics. If you’re not using them, you should be.

Here’s one of my favourite tricks that customers on some of my websites have used a countless number of times and that is the hidden Easter egg coupon. So, the idea behind this is, when people go to your checkout and they’re met with a box that says enter your coupon code, if they don’t have a coupon code they can often get a bit turned off and decide they don’t want to buy. Sometimes these people (you know who you are) abandon their cart completely or else they go off to search around on google to find a coupon. I bet you’ve probably done the same thing right. Well since you know your customers are already googling the name of your website and the search term coupon, you can just go right ahead and create a page on your site, tej.ie/coupons (I don’t have any on this site before you go looking). Then make sure the page looks genuinely exciting, you want to get the user pumped up that they have found it. You know the drill, confetti cannons, balloons, fireworks, the whole 9 yards. Just make it a small 5% discount coupon. I’ve found that it can increase conversions really well.

When you’re going to use links to affiliate products whether its on amazon or anywhere else, rather than having some big obnoxious buy it now button, or a big spammy looking ad image (you know exactly what I’m talking about). I tend to use a text link that says something like, “click here to check out the current pricing on amazon”. When you do that it just comes across way less salesy, and ultimately less spammy, and guess what? people are actually more likely to click the link just to check the price. And once they check the price, they get the cookie and if they do go ahead and make a purchase of any kind then well done you earnt the commission for it.

One of the simplest online marketing tactics that you can use to really increase your online conversion rate is by doing something with the abandoned carts left at your checkout. Someone thought they would buy something and then at the very last minute, for whatever reason they have just gone and exited out of your site and did not return to complete the purchase. So, what I typically use for any checkouts, particularly ones that are for info products is SendOwl. It’s really worked well for any of the sites that have decided to go with it. SendOwl is a truly amazing tool with lots of functionality, one thing that it does is if somebody puts an info product in their cart and then says, naaah I‘m not feeling this anymore, I’ve changed my mind and they go to leave, which about 15% of online consumers tend to do. I don’t know why but some shoppers just love to put things in their cart and then they go and get distracted or whatever makes them decide to leave.

In this case one thing that really helps is to have an option for abandoned carts. Usually how this works is that you have gotten their email at the start of the sign-up process and then when they abandon the cart you can go ahead and send them an email. I tend to try and avoid doing it this way if possible as I don’t want to take their email at the beginning of the checkout process. I want that to be as quick and painless as possible. So, what if like me, you don’t have their email yet. Well in that case, what I would recommend doing if you are using SendOwl, the way it works is if they have something in their car and they press back to leave, they will automatically be displayed a pop up that says something like “hey would it change your mind if I gave you 20% off”. You would be amazed at how effective this truly is at increasing your conversions on online stores. Another option for abandoned carts is, if they abandon their cart, as soon as they’ve put anything in the cart you tag them with the facebook or google tracking pixel. This then allows you to show them retargeted ads, as you know that they have left but we’re interested. There are plenty of other ways to deal with abandoned carts. If you’re interested in finding out more about this topic leave a comment below or email me directly.

With the just in time webinar, you’re going to send your users from your YouTube channel to your webinar. You are going to say something like “hey we’re doing a series of webinars, go check it out at my website.com/webinar”, when they get over there, they’re going to see a countdown timer that says, “next webinar starts in 5 minutes”. And what that does is create a sense of urgency and this will really give you a much higher number of people engaging with your webinars. When you tell people, you’re going to do a webinar, you might get a good response for sign-ups but lots of these people will forget or be busy with their lives and their many many children and ultimately just won’t show up. Most people will be willing to wait five minutes to view the content there and then, whereas getting those people to return at a later stage can often be substantially more difficult and give you a much smaller conversion rate.

You can get a free trial of the webinar software here

The next of my favourite online marketing tactics is smarter email marketing. This is something that used to be really expensive or just downright impossible for anyone who wasn’t a digital marketing guru. But now you can do it much less expensively. Let’s say you have a site in the fishing industry. Well, there are all different kinds of people who fish. We have people who are in to fly fishing, we have ppl who are interested in saltwater fishing and then we have people who could be interested in bass fishing and just generally all kinds of people. So, when I release an ice fishing course, if I send an email out to everyone, about 75% of them are just going to get annoyed by my email. It doesn’t apply to them, it’s not specific to their interests, they could live beside the sea, where the water never freezes. You need to get the right offer to the right people if you want to get the sale.

The smarter way to do this is to make your website the intermediary. On your website you are going to have all the different categories, you can have one for ice fishing, another one for saltwater fishing and lastly one for bass fishing etc… (You get the drift). And we have all these people coming to the website and many of them will sign up to your email list. Now when they sign up to your email address you get their IP address and then you can see all the different pages and categories that IP address has interacted with.
If you have a good email marketing system it can do all this for you. When someone signs up for your email list and they’ve been to an ice fishing page, they get tagged in your email system as an ice fisher, this allows you to send them only ice fishing offers. And then when you have a new bass fishing course it goes out to just the people who are interested in Bass fishing. Previously the only tool I am aware of that used to be able to do this was Infusion Soft. But this was a bit overkill and very expensive. Now there is a load of different companies that make this so much easier. The one I would recommend most is Active Campaign for any of your email marketing going forward. Also checkout kbell.ie for a call answering service.

When you have an item for sale on your website, your conversion rate will increase dramatically if you have a timer/countdown or are showing the user a special limited time offer. The problem is that you would have set a certain sale time for all users regardless of when they visit your site. Well, what if you could have that countdown timer for each individual user, but actually have the timer end for each of these individual users, rather than just restarting when the page is refreshed. So that way you’re not lying to people as it is on an individual person basis. Each person would only have 24 hours to complete a purchase. Well, that’s what Deadline Funnel does for you. It’s software that has a sales page that as soon as somebody clicks the link, their timer starts for them and so as people enter your sales process, they get the opportunity to buy for a limited amount of time at that sales price. But everybody only gets that same opportunity for the first 24 hours or whatever you want to set it to. This literally rockets up your conversion rates and it is a legitimate tactic that is not in any way misleading your customers.

You can alternatively use a WordPress plugin such as Finale Lite – Sales Countdown Timer & Discount for WooCommerce. I have not used this particular plugin as of yet but I will be looking into it in-depth in the coming weeks and may do an entire post on this topic. This is one of the best online marketing tactics for increasing conversions.

The next of the online marketing tactics is the upsell. Now the upsell is when you have a product, people are already there, they’re purchasing it and then you make them an offer on another product that you also sell. This tends to work extremely well when the next product you offer, is substantially less than the product they are already in the process of buying. It really needs to be about less than half. Like if they’re spending 50 euros on something and you offer them an additional product for 7 euro, what’s another 7 euro added on. Especially if it’s a related product that they are likely to want anyway. This doesn’t tend to make a lot of sense if you have a really dedicated customer base or community, the kind of people that are probably going to buy all your products anyway, but for the real transactional business, it makes a lot of sense to try and get that extra sale regardless.

You can use SendOwl for this too. As well as lots of other solutions. The main reason to use it for this is that they allow you to process the card after everything is already done, the customer has already made the order and then afterwards it says “Hey would you like to add this for another 7 dollars”, and your customer is like “yes of course” and they just click yes and its done. The important part of this process is that they didn’t have to add in their payment details again. The reason this is better is that if you try to upsell before your customer has entered their card details, it can actually make some people completely back out from the initial purchase. Again, this has proven to work really well, and is rather effective at boosting sales and just getting a little bit more spend from the customers you aren’t likely to see again.

One of the best online marketing tactics that continues to work over an over is to make good use of that first initial email to somebody as soon as they sign up for your email list. That first email is often wasted. Usually, people just have their autoresponders or their first email that just says, “your subscription is confirmed – we promise we won’t spam the shit out of you”. Instead, I tend to write something else into the subject line – “Subscription confirmed here’s that coupon I promised”. Obviously somewhere on the website, it says that they’re going to get a coupon, but most people don’t even know about it and aren’t expecting it.

So, they go ahead and subscribe to the website and that first email will help get them to the website shop where they can buy your product or whatever. And they’re sitting there feeling like ooooh I have a coupon. A good trick for digital products is to set it up that there is only ever one coupon, so in that email you could tell them that, “Hey here’s the coupon I promised, it will give you 25% off my products and this is literally the only coupon you will ever find for my products”. This can be pretty effective, it’s definitely worth giving it a try.

This tactic is hands down an awesome way to boost your ranking for a certain article, providing that when you talk about that article or the same concepts from within that article in a different content type such as a podcast or a YouTube video. What you’ll do instead of creating a bitly link or a short link to send people to that article on your website, you’re going to get them to google the exact name of that article. What this is going to do is it’s going to send Google a signal that people are actually googling this topic and then these people are selecting your website first. And providing your user experience is good they aren’t then bouncing straight away. That is going to boost your rankings way up!

And that’s everything! All 9 tactics that have been used extensively. They have been shown to boost traffic to many different types of websites offering a range of different types of products and will genuinely help to convert way more sales than just having great content. Just always remember that there is no replacement for the best tactic of all, quality content and a killer content marketing strategy.